Top 5 stories from CX Dive

Bain. & Co., Kantar and Qualtrics want to establish new global standards for businesses that will help companies link CX efforts to brand growth. 

Released in July, the proposed standards consolidate assessment tools from all three companies, including Bain & Co.'s NPS, to create a framework that moves beyond a simple metric for measuring customer satisfaction. 

The goal is to create a definitive foundation for benchmarking CX.

“CX is the single most important driver of business growth,” Rob Huijboom, global head of customer experience at Kantar, told CX Dive. “If that's the case, then where the heck are the standards? How can it be possible to do this in a professional way without having those standards?”

Bain, Kantar and Qualtrics are soliciting feedback on the standards through Aug. 31. They expect to finalize and launch the standards on Oct. 1. The framework is divided into three areas:

• Culture, which measures how brands align with their company purpose and values across the enterprise. This includes employee experience, which has a direct impact on the customer experience. 
• Capability, which examines how businesses process different sources of information, from customer feedback to transaction data, and use these insights throughout the organization.
• Execution, which looks at how CX investments have an impact on business values like growth. This includes whether customers are understood in terms of their value to the brand, and how well CX is understood throughout the organization.

The root of the problem

Businesses only began to view customer experience as a differentiator in the early 2000s, and leaders still lack a comprehensive framework to guide related investments.

Misconceptions about what CX is and what it can offer are common across multiple industries, according to Stan Swinton, EVP at Bain and Company and and the principal author of the standards. Customer experience is more than metrics — it’s a foundational element of a successful business. 

“I think most CX programs are being relegated in the executive suite and the boardroom to the arbiters of an NPS or CSAT score, when really what they need to be are the arbiters of customer value creation, acquisition and retention, and growth,” Swinton told CX Dive.

CX culture holds a prominent place in the new standards, which could help CX gain a foothold across the entire business. The framework prioritizes connecting mission statements like customer obsession with behavior across the organization, from the highest executive to the people working with customers on the front line.

This includes making sure leaders are trained on the company’s purpose and regularly spend time working with customers and employees.

“We couldn't imagine a set of standards without culture at the heart of it, but culture isn't just communications or the CEO’s office,” Swinton said. “It is everybody in the organization with a clear mission translated into clear values and behaviors and the decisions that follow off the back of that.”

The capability standards aim to guide CX leaders who want to connect disparate data points with relevant investments. Companies have plenty of information, but using that data to pinpoint investments that will generate a return on investment is easier said than done.

Execution is the most important part of the framework, according to Swinton. The connection between CX and business execution is often ignored, but it’s the place where customer sentiment translates into value creation — and proper execution is how CX leaders get a seat at the executive table. 

“Without [execution], none of your insights have any impact whatsoever,” Swinton said. “It's like an X-ray that you never even bothered to look at.”

When Karen Lynch took over as CVS Health CEO in 2021, one of her aspirations was to make the company one of the most consumer-centric organizations in healthcare.

CVS Health has taken large steps in that direction. Three years after it launched a customer experience initiative to put the consumer at the center of healthcare, CVS Health has closed the loop for over 5 million customer interactions. The company also saw its likelihood to recommend scores rise among three-quarters of consumers it closed the loop with, the company told CX Dive.

The transformation, led by Deloitte Digital, focused on increasing structured and unstructured customer feedback to better personalize care and identify problem areas. It also worked to close the loop on customer inquiries to improve customer satisfaction.

“There are 18-plus million pieces of feedback, 75,000 people using the system all the time, many different channels and different lines of businesses, [and] regulations across different types of businesses,” Tim Greulich, customer experience management practice leader at Deloitte Digital, said.

CVS Health's network is vast — the company owns CVS Pharmacy, pharmacy benefits manager CVS Caremark, health insurance provider Aetna, and Oak Street Health, a healthcare network of primary care centers, as well as other businesses.

“We have customers that walk into our retail store that shop our front store, we have pharmacy consumers, we have patients in MinuteClinic, Oak Street Health, specialty pharmacy, we actually have B2B consumers on Aetna,” Srikant Narasimhan, VP of enterprise customer experience at CVS Health, told CX Dive. “We think about all of those people as our consumers. There's a lot of similarities and experiences you need to deliver across those constituencies. But there's also differences.”

This means the customer experience challenges CVS Health faces are immense, according to Judy Weader, a principal analyst at Forrester.

“There's a big difference between just being a retail part of the ecosystem and actually shifting to, ‘We're going to do delivery, we're going to be an insurer, we're going to do pharmacy benefits management, we're going to do all of it,’” Weader told CX Dive.

That kind of vertical integration increases the company’s ability to control a big portion of the healthcare infrastructure, Weader said. A customer could potentially interact with CVS Health throughout their entire customer journey through all of its services and products.

Garnering feedback

CVS took on a four-pronged approach to deliver customer centricity, Narasimhan said:

• Measure sentiment in a consistent and meaningful way. 
• Intervene for service recovery and close the loop. 
• Solve pervasive issues.
• Imbue employee culture with a mindset of “helping with heart.”

Improving CVS Health’s ability to measure and analyze customer sentiment requires a large technological knowhow. Narashimhan brought on Deloitte Digital to help turn his vision into a reality.

Today, the company gets 17 million pieces of solicited feedback from consumers annually through its customer experience management platform Medallia. The company implemented over 130 survey programs across digital, transaction and relationship touchpoints across its different businesses.

“You've seen people in the organization hungry for this information once they understood the impact that it could have from the frontline all the way through the executive channels,” Greulich said.

The company decided to coalesce its structured feedback efforts around net promoter score.

“You want to pick something that you can rally the organization around, and you want to talk about things in a common way,” Narasimhan said.

“NPS felt like it holds you to a higher standard, because you're asking someone … ‘Would you recommend someone that you love and care about, a friend or family member, to go through the experience you just went through?’” Narasimhan said.

CVS Health says it was able to make “sizable progress” in its NPS journey. Though it did not share its score, the company said its data shows “promoters spend more, attrite less and are more adherent to therapies.” Consumers who engaged digitally with CVS Health had a 10-point higher NPS score in comparison to those who did not engage with CVS Health digitally.

Deloitte is also working with CVS Health to mine data from call transcripts, including sentiment analysis, and digital session data. This unstructured data helps CVS Health get a 360-degree view of the consumer, Narasimhan said.

Closing the loop

A 360-degree of the customer, of course, doesn’t mean much if there’s no action taken based on those insights. The company has focused on closing the loop on customer issues to improve customer satisfaction.

CVS Health treats survey participation as an engagement opportunity — particularly when a customer has complaints.

“If you provide CVS a set of information, there's an action that comes from that,” Narasimhan said. “If you told us that you had a bad experience, you gave us a 3 or something, and you left a comment, that would get routed to a frontline agent.”

The agent or manager would connect with the unhappy customer, discuss what happened and try to right the situation.

In looking at session data, CVS Health can also try to intercept a customer who is spending a lot of time on the site by offering them the opportunity to speak with a live agent via chat.

CVS Health has created “a safety net” for customer service calls. If a customer is on the phone with an agent for more than a certain amount of time, the supervisor checks in with the agent to see if they need help resolving the issue.

Predicting customer needs

Predictive modeling has helped personalize service, which is particularly useful for high-frequency callers, a set of people that call CVS Health for 10 months straight before their calls start to drop off.

“They're either new to the healthcare system, they're early in their tenure in terms of their career, or they're new to a condition and they're trying to learn how to actually manage it,” Narasimhan said. “And it takes them about 10 months of calling us to figure it out.”

CVS Health has been trying to shorten that time.

“Can we actually get them to somebody who can help them?” Narasimhan said. “It's advantageous to us because they're not calling us all the time, it's advantageous to them because they can self-service their condition.”

Of course, not every issue can be solved via customer service. For operational issues — like drug shortages, prior authorizations issues and inadequate physician search tools — the CX team has worked to hold the rest of the organization accountable to solving them.

Last summer, CVS Health began tying executive bonuses to meeting customer experience targets, CX Dive’s sister publication CFO Dive reported.

Connecting customer experience “to compensation gave us a seat at the table and made people start paying attention, like ‘Hey, if you don’t actually address this, you’re not going to get paid,’” Narasimhan said at the time.

As Brian Niccol takes over as Starbucks CEO, he will encounter a company wrestling with declining traffic and long mobile order wait times. His expertise in rebuilding customer trust and satisfaction could help fuel a turnaround.

It's a scenario he's seen before. When he took over as Chipotle's CEO in 2018, customer trust had taken a nosedive following repeat food safety incidents, which ultimately led to a $25 million criminal fine.

However, Niccol successfully spearheaded Chipotle’s second wind, culminating in significant sales and traffic gains during the restaurant chain’s latest quarter.

Starbucks isn’t in crisis mode, but its performance has been below expectations in recent quarters. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz urged the company to “focus on being experiential, not transactional” in a May LinkedIn post, and Niccol’s history at Chipotle positions him to answer that call when he joins the company in September.

“Niccol has an instinctive understanding of how fast foodservice operates and this is very helpful when working through problems at Starbucks,” Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail, told CX Dive in an email. “A lot of foodservice success comes down to having very strong operating disciplines and procedures.”

Convenience is king, friction is killer

Speed of service is one of Starbucks’ most visible challenges. A “mid-teens percent” of mobile orders went uncompleted in 2024, and even one misstep can lead to a lost customer.

Convenience is extremely important in modern foodservice, according to customer experience expert and author Shep Hyken. Once a brand introduces friction into the equation, credibility takes a hit, and sales could soon follow suit.

“If I place a mobile order and you fail me once, shame on you,” Hyken said. “If I let you do it to me again, shame on me — but I'm probably not giving you a third or fourth chance.”

While Chipotle doesn’t have the same volume of mobile orders as Starbucks, Niccol’s experience in this area will be helpful for remedying the delays, according to Saunders. 

Niccol spearheaded the rollout of Chipotlanes, dedicated mobile order drive-thru lanes that let customers order ahead for immediate pickup at a designated time. More recently, he oversaw changes to automation and training aimed at reducing wait times at Chipotle.

One key goal will be helping stores manage mobile demand without harming the walk-in experience. Starbucks is already tackling order turnaround time through the Siren Craft System, a series of operational changes designed to help workers make drinks faster.

Better experiences drive better value

A more convenient experience could go hand-in-hand with a better value perception — another challenge several experts pointed out as something Niccol could fix.

The value problem won’t be fixed by price drops or promotions, according to Dipanjan Chatterjee, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. Starbucks’ core demographic of middle- to high-income customers are increasingly confident in the economy, which is a sign that they aren’t afraid to spend a little more for the right product. 

“If Niccol works his magic at Starbucks, then it will be not to lower prices but to make the brand much more desirable at relatively higher price points,” Chatterjee told CX Dive in an email.

Starbucks needs to upgrade the cafe experience and its food offerings in pursuit of a better value proposition, according to Saunders. Improving wait times could play a part in this effort, as could getting food quality on par with Starbucks’ drink lineup.

However, revamping Starbucks’ value proposition is a long road.

The brand is facing more competition than ever, and customer expectations have evolved rapidly in recent years, Hyken said. Niccol, and all of Starbucks’ leadership, need to determine how Starbucks can stand out from the crowd.

“What Starbucks needs to do is say, ‘Hey, what got us here in the first place?” Hyken said. “‘What made our reputation? What made us be able to charge more than anyone else?’ Then translate that into the modern version of retail.”

Brands today understand the value of personalization, but with the deprecation of third-party data, providing personalized experiences for customers is becoming all the more challenging.

Google’s move to phase out tracking cookies in Chrome, along with Apple’s tracking prevention in Safari and growing privacy regulations in many jurisdictions, means businesses must lean into their own sources of customer intelligence — through first-party data and increasingly zero-party data.

For many brands, this new data collection process is already underway. Kellanova, formerly Kellogg’s, is adapting to the decline of cookies by capturing zero-party data, according to Nicole Vinson, VP of global digital, media and omni-shopper experience at Kellanova.

Kellanova isn’t alone. In fact, 9 in 10 businesses said they would be capturing zero-party information in 2023, according to a 2022 Forrester survey of 200 digital marketing decision-makers, commissioned by SheerID.

While data deprecation has led to a reevaluation of data strategies, many businesses still underestimate the benefits of zero-party data, the survey found, putting them at risk of not fully utilizing this rich source of customer insights.

Understanding the value of different customer data sources

Zero-party data is information a customer voluntarily shares with a brand, such as through quizzes, competitions and polls, usually with the promise of an offer or reward. First-party data includes transactional and engagement data collected through websites, apps, social media and other digital assets, demographic information and customer feedback.

Both zero-party and first-party are valuable data sources, representing different stages of a brand’s relationship with its customers, according to Rob Myers, senior product manager at marketing technology company NextRoll. Since zero-party data is provided directly by the customer, it more accurately represents the customer, while first-party data captures only what the brand can observe.

First-party data can be used in a similar fashion to zero-party data but lacks the same fidelity and accuracy. “Something like site browsing behavior can be used to anticipate future needs and site offers, but [it] might be hard to hone in on actual preferences when devices are shared between individuals,” Myers said.

With rich customer intelligence held by retail partner databases and other sources, zero- and first-party data is critical for consumer packaged goods brands. A case in point is Kellanova, where customer data plays a central role in understanding consumer behavior and personalizing marketing efforts.

“It really is the heartbeat of our consumers,” Vinson said.

"It's how we enable stronger insights and better innovation for connected, personalized, frictionless, relevant experiences,” Vinson said.

She agrees that adapting to the decline of cookies and compliance with privacy regulations makes it imperative to have a strong data foundation while ensuring consumer trust through robust data privacy and governance practices.

“For us, zero-party data is really consented data in which a consumer explicitly or proactively shares with one of our brands with the intention of informing their interactions and engagements,” she said.

The importance of a zero-party data strategy

Across the board, brands are facing a large-scale data deprecation through the demise of cookies, privacy laws and consumers’ own privacy-protecting behaviors, the survey found. This makes an effective data strategy crucial.

In the survey, 99% of respondents said they are actively responding to data deprecation, which impacts the entire customer journey and makes achieving marketing goals more challenging. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said the broad acquisition of customer data was more challenging and about 7 in 10 found cross-selling and up-selling as well as customer acquisition more difficult, the survey found.

For brands, the situation makes collecting customer data all the more important. However, many consumers are unmotivated to share the information required to build out a strong customer profile to support personalization.

“The biggest challenge I’ve seen is the low rate of visitors providing zero-party data to brands,” Myers said.

“The best brands only capture zero-party data from around 5% of site visitors. This means that there is a great opportunity to capture more zero-party data for the remaining 95% of site visitors,” he told CX Dive.

To overcome this, Myers said brands need a zero-party data strategy that revolves around forging a strong, active relationship with loyal customers who are more likely to offer their data. “The relationship should be authentic and build real value for both parties,” he said.

This means moving beyond simply offering a first purchase discount or access to a loyalty program.

“I’d challenge brands to expand from these commonplace examples and think about what kind of value they can build for their customers by asking for brand-specific data,” Myers said.

Myers advises companies to foster their relationship with customers and use the information wisely to provide them with a better experience and the brand with better results.

“Try to think of ways to move past the transactional relationship of providing a discount or loyalty points for data,” he said. “Brands that can build a real relationship providing true value are going to see the best results using zero-party data.”

At Kellonova, the brand has responded to the heightened emphasis on data privacy, consent and preference management by putting in place the people, processes, tools and technology necessary for a refreshed comprehensive data strategy.

The goal, Vinson said, is to have “a better understanding of our consumers than we have had before.” This includes reviewing the range of sources of data and data clean rooms — a technology service to view aggregated customer data — ensuring the required level of granularity and accuracy of data.

It also includes regulatory compliance. The brand has formed a data privacy council that involves multiple departments, including IT, legal and marketing, to forge a multidisciplinary approach to data management and privacy.

“We want to ensure trust and integrity in what we're doing with that information,” Vinson said.

 

A customer-centric culture aligns teams, departments and the organization as a whole around the customer. It’s also crucial for a thriving business, driving loyalty and growth.

A 2023 Forrester survey found that 100% of customer-obsessed companies prioritize teaching employees how to play their part. The analyst firm called on leaders to develop a unified customer obsession in which teams are clear about their role in driving the business forward through a customer-first approach.

Placing customers at the center of everything they do is paramount for insurance company Aflac, whether it’s simple transactional interactions or more complex claim assistance. 

The company has had to listen to customers and adapt to shifting dynamics since its founding in 1955, with the universal nature of customer service expectations becoming the defining feature of customer interactions today, according to Keith Farley, SVP of individual benefits and the former director of innovation and customer experience at Aflac.

Most businesses, including Aflac, face a significant challenge: Customer experience is no longer category- or brand-specific — it’s a level of expectation that’s transferred from one business to another.

This means an experience someone has with Amazon or Uber informs the experience they expect from other brands.

“The expectation someone has from one brand becomes the expectation they have for all brands,” Farley said. “We’re no longer compared to other insurance companies. Instead, we’re now compared to the experience someone has with these other companies.”

Defining customer centricity for the business

If the business doesn’t comprehend the customer experience expectations people are bringing to their brand, it can spell trouble. To ensure Aflac is staying in touch with its customers, Farley and the team align with one central principle — “know me, the customer.”

“It’s ‘know who I am, when I last called, what policies I have and where I am in my life,’” Farley said. “People want to feel that companies know them and care — that’s personalization.”

This means building a customer-centric culture defined by a strong degree of empathy for the customer. Aflac, for example, launched a phone service for customers who receive a cancer diagnosis, staffed by a specialized team who help guide customers at a time when they’re frightened or confused.

“It’s been well received and shows the team it was a positive initiative,” Farley said.

While there are certain processes and protocols to follow in a regulated industry, the complexity of service Aflac offers extends beyond transactions. It requires an understanding of when customers are comfortable with automation and bots and where they appreciate a personal connection, such as finding out about coverage after a cancer diagnosis.

It’s also keeping the customer experience at the forefront of their work. Aflac regularly listens to customers about their experiences with Aflac.

“We open a lot of meetings with customer testimonials to remind everyone that's our purpose,” Farley said.

Customer centricity to drive growth

Customer centricity helps drive loyalty, improve efficiency, and creates products and services that will suit customers — all with the goal of helping create a profitable business.

Forrester’s 2023 report found that customer-obsessed companies report 1.6 times better customer retention than other businesses, 1.6 times faster revenue growth and 1.7 times faster profit growth.

That growth requires buy-in from the entire company. By encouraging customer interactions across many teams, companies can foster a customer-centric culture and ensure they don’t lose sight of the customer.

At Zendesk, supporting a customer-centric culture means giving staff first-hand customer engagement practice. The customer service and CRM software firm has programs in which staff participate in regular customer support calls.

“Particularly with product and design teams, it's a minimum that each team member has at least one direct interaction with a customer every week so you're not just relying on secondhand information,” said Jason Maynard, CTO of North America and Asia-Pacific at Zendesk.

He also believes it’s vital to have cross-functional teams to connect the wider organization with customer interactions and share insights beyond customer service teams.

Maynard encourages businesses to draw on a variety of data sources guided by metrics that can show performance and areas for improvement. And someone who can drive action based on the insights needs to own it.

“Having someone who owns all the customer touchpoints and extracts the insights from different channels should help leadership prioritize where things need to be improved,” he said.

When it comes to customer experience metrics at Aflac, the age of the company means there’s a wealth of data to draw on that helps with tracking how well it’s performing with customers.

To make improvements, it requires identifying the metric you want to improve — whether it be net promoter score or customer satisfaction score — and then aligning teams around that goal.

“There also needs to be incentives for teams to align to those measurements,” Farley said.

Even so, the insights are only useful if they support customer centricity and ultimately drive growth.

“You can't just do CX because it's the right thing to do. You need to do it because CX can drive profitability,” he said.

The two are intertwined, however, Farley said, pointing to studies that show what’s good for the customer can be good for the company’s bottom line.