CX Transformation: How to Build Customer-Centric Experiences

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Excellent customer experiences are the cornerstone of successful modern businesses. Research shows that 73% of buyers prioritize CX when making purchasing decisions, proving that how a company engages with its customers can be as important as the products or services it offers.

Yet, delivering exceptional customer experiences requires more than just good intentions. It demands a structured approach to CX transformation, encompassing everything from understanding your customers’ needs to reimagining processes and implementing new technologies. In this guide, we’ll explore the essential frameworks for CX transformation, the different types of CX initiatives, and industry-leading examples that demonstrate what success looks like.

Whether you’re aiming to measure the ROI of CX improvements or learn how leading organizations revolutionize their customer strategies, this guide will equip you with the insights and tools needed to turn CX transformation into your competitive edge.

5 C’s of Customer Experience

As you consider your customer experience transformation, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the underlying principles that fuel an excellent customer experience. The 5 C’s of the customer experience framework are a great place to start. Let’s dive in.

Clear visibility

Everyone on your team who interacts with customers must have a clear and straightforward view of what they need and how to continue the customer journey. This enables everyone on the team to empathize with customers and provide the guidance they need at any given time. When everyone on the team knows, the customer’s experience is smoother.

Communication

In CX, streamlined and simple communication with regular updates is key. This requires your team to examine the customer journey at large and ensure adequate, clear communication throughout.

For example, your customer communication plan may include a regular cadence for check-ins and status updates with someone on your team. When there is a predictable schedule and there are regular updates, your customers have a better experience because they are consistently in the know and have regular intervals at which they can quickly solve issues that may arise.

Competence

Your team must have the knowledge and skills needed to support your customers throughout their journey and provide an exceptional customer experience.

Internal education, like training, and consistently engaging with the product are great ways to ensure this. However, many teams fall short with competence because they don’t have an adequate ‘competency’ stack, which includes self-service and digital assistance for customers and employees alike.

Collaboration

Your team likely includes experts of all kinds: customer experience specialists, account managers, technical leads, support agents, and more. Providing an excellent customer experience depends largely on your ability to collaborate as a team in order to best serve your customers.

For example, suppose your customer is experiencing a technical issue and communicates it to an account manager during a regular check-in. In that case, you want to avoid a frustrating email chain where the customer is bounced from person to person. In this case, the account manager should know how to articulate the problem to the technical person on the team so that if they need to assist the customer, they come in elegantly with an understanding of the problem and some potential solutions.

Completion

When your customers have an issue or are engaged in a process that involves your team, whether it’s answering a simple support question or getting help with the implementation process, avoiding loose ends is a key element of a great experience. Regardless of how big or small, every single interaction with your team should be taken to a point of completion.

For example, if a customer contacts you about a bug that needs to be fixed, telling them that you’ll look into it followed by radio silence will feel like an unresolved issue to them. In this case, you might choose to update the customer throughout the time period when your team is fixing the issue and again when the process is over.

Why Is CX Transformation Important?

CX transformation is a process and an operations plan that enables your team to ensure that they are meeting desired CX standards. Overall, CX transformation is a way to align your organization with your customers’ needs and expectations. When you do that, your customers are more satisfied and loyal to your platform, and your KPIs prove it.

Why is engaging in this transformation process important for your organization? While an omnichannel, excellent CX provides trickle-down effects across the organization, here are a few of the most obvious benefits:

  • Increases customer loyalty and retention: A great customer experience makes it much more likely that your customers will stick around. As you begin to implement a CX transformation process, you’ll likely see the fruits of your efforts quickly in metrics like user retention and customer lifetime value (LTV).
  • Drives revenue growth through improved satisfaction: Engaging in a transformation process will help drive your key revenue metrics and support the business overall. Research has shown that companies that focus on CX experience an 80% increase in revenue compared to those that don’t.
  • Differentiates brands in competitive markets: If your platform is in a saturated market with other platforms with similar value propositions, an excellent customer experience can make all the difference. If customers feel that your team is better at support and communication, they’re more likely to choose your platform just to have a great customer experience. 49% of customers who have switched to a competitor in the last year said that the main reason was poor CX.
  • Enhances personalized and seamless customer journeys: Throughout the CX transformation process, your team will analyze the different types of customers who use your platform and customize their experience based on their needs. Ultimately, this process means that each customer has a more tailored experience, which results in both delight for the customer and upticks in KPIs like onboarding completion rate and user retention. For example, 88% of online shoppers say personalized shopping experiences positively influence their decision to become repeat buyers.
  • Aligns organizational strategy with evolving customer expectations: No market is static, and this is particularly true because customers’ needs and expectations change over time. A CX transformation process will help you adjust your current customer touchpoints to reflect the current market conditions. This will make your customers happier and help increase loyalty to your platform.

Pillars of a CX Transformation Framework

While there are many different types of CX transformation, they all include similar elements that make up the foundation for your CX transformation framework. The core elements of a CX transformation framework include:

  • Vision & Strategy: A successful transformation process relies on your team’s ability to align every decision and goal with your customers’ needs and expectations. Every macro or micro decision should involve revisiting what you know about your customers and aligning the outcome precisely. A customer-centric mindset dramatically increases the chances of a positive customer experience.
  • Employees & Talent: Regardless of who initiates your CX transformation process, your entire team has to be on board for the process to truly influence the customer experience. Every team with customer touchpoints must work collaboratively and in tandem, rather than each team operating individually. This requires a unified, “one”-CX vision across your organization’s departments.
  • Operations: Whether you’re talking about user onboarding, customer support, product roadmap vision, marketing communications – all must reinforce your team’s shared CX goals and give your customers consistent outcomes. As you move through your CX transformation process, you’ll need to ensure that every process suits your goals and your customers’ needs in the same way, every time.
  • Technology: It’s almost impossible to provide a great experience to customers without a scalable tech infrastructure that supports real-time data sharing and a unified customer view.
  • Measurement & Continuous Optimization: Your CX strategy must work towards shared business outcomes across departments that can be tracked. This provides north-star KPIs to track, benchmark, analyze, and improve on.

Types of Customer Experience Transformation

CX transformation can be implemented in a variety of ways. In this section, we’ll go through the different types of customer experience transformation and what they’re best suited for.

1. Digital CX transformation

A digital-led CX transformation involves leveraging new technologies to provide better online, digital customer interactions.

Examples include:

  • Omnichannel customer communication and support experiences through website chatbots, mobile apps, email, and social media.
  • Focusing on website improvements to create more personalized experiences, fix navigational issues, and improve UX.
  • AI-driven recommendations for more tailored buying experiences.

2. Data-driven CX transformation

Data-driven CX transformation focuses on capturing key customer insights through product analytics, user event tracking, and feedback.

Examples include:

  • Investing in customer data platforms and analytics teams to consolidate data into a single dashboard to analyze data sets and extract insights to influence decisions.
  • Using predictive models to anticipate customer behaviors and decisions, as well as personalize experiences.

3. Cultural CX transformation

Cultural CX transformation hones in on fostering a customer-centric culture from leadership down to the customer facing employees at your organization. This includes thing like:

  • Providing better employee training across all teams that focuses on customer needs.
  • Organizational-wide KPIs and OKRs that align to CX metrics.
  • Fostering a customer feedback loop culture.

4. Product-led CX transformation

Product-led CX transformation uses customer insights from analytics and feedback to improve product offerings. This includes things like:

5. Service-led CX transformation

Service-led CX focuses on transforming the customer experience post-buying, specifically on improving support-related channels and issues. This includes things like:

6. Operational CX transformation

Operational CX transformation focuses on the behind-the-scenes aspects that directly impact the quality of customer experiences. This includes:

  • Providing hands-on training to support agents to better prepare themselves for real-life scenarios and better resolve customer issues..
  • Streamlining order fulfillment processes to improve delivery times.
  • Automating call center or support desk workflows to reduce time-to-resolution.

Examples of CX Transformation by Industry

Customer experience looks different in different industries, and so do their CX transformation projects. In this section, we’ll examine six industries (retail, banking, healthcare, insurance, government, and B2B SaaS) and examine an example of transformation and its impact for each sector.

1. Retail industry

In the retail industry, CX transformation is pivotal in meeting evolving consumer expectations both for online e-commerce experiences as well as in-person brick-and-mortar experiences. A study by PwC found that 73% of online consumers consider CX an important factor in their purchasing decisions.

Key CX transformation examples for retail companies include:

  • Personalized Shopping Experiences: Utilizing customer data to offer tailored product recommendations.
  • AI Shopping Assistance: Implementing chatbots and virtual assistants to guide shoppers.
  • Virtual Showrooms and Dressing Rooms: Providing immersive online shopping experiences.
  • Auto-Shipping and Repeat Orders: Offering subscription services for frequently purchased items.
  • Self-Checkout Systems: Enhancing in-store efficiency and reducing wait times.
  • Loyalty Mobile Apps: Rewarding customers and encouraging repeat business.
  • Streamlined Store Layouts: Designing intuitive spaces for easy navigation.

Starbucks revolutionized its customer experience with its Mobile Order & Pay feature in its mobile app, allowing customers to order via mobile devices and skip the lines. This innovation addressed a major pain point—long wait times—and improved customer satisfaction by simplifying the ordering process.

2. Banking & financial services

In the banking sector, CX transformation focuses on building trust and providing seamless digital interactions.

Key banking and financial service CX transformation projects include:

  • Mobile Banking Apps: Offering comprehensive services accessible anywhere.
  • Personalized Financial Advice: Utilizing data analytics to provide tailored recommendations.
  • AI-Powered Chatbots: Assisting customers with inquiries and transactions.
  • Enhanced Security Measures: Implementing biometric authentication for secure access.
  • Proactive Fraud Alerts: Notifying customers promptly about suspicious activities.
  • Seamless Onboarding Processes: Simplifying account setup with digital tools.
  • Omnichannel Support: Ensuring consistent service across all platforms.

ICICI Bank, one of India’s leading private sector banks, partnered with Whatfix to revolutionize its digital banking experience. Faced with the challenge of engaging and educating a diverse customer base on its ever-expanding suite of digital products, ICICI Bank leveraged Whatfix’s in-app guidance to deliver contextual, personalized walkthroughs directly within its banking platforms.

This approach simplified onboarding, enabled customers to complete complex banking tasks independently, and reduced reliance on customer support. By integrating Whatfix, ICICI Bank enhanced digital adoption, deepened customer engagement, and elevated satisfaction, driving greater loyalty and long-term success.

3. Healthcare

In healthcare, CX transformation enhances patient engagement and care quality. Different than other consumer-centric sectors, healthcare must balance its CX transformation projects with more empathy and must overcome compliance-related challenges for patient data security.

Examples of CX transformation projects in healthcare include:

  • Telemedicine Services: Providing virtual consultations for convenience.
  • Personalized Treatment Plans: Using patient data to tailor care approaches.
  • Patient Portals: Allowing access to medical records and test results online.
  • Automated Appointment Reminders: Reducing no-shows and improving scheduling.
  • AI Diagnostics: Assisting in early detection and treatment planning.
  • Wearable Health Devices: Monitoring patient health in real-time.
  • Enhanced Facility Navigation: Implementing digital wayfinding tools within hospitals.

Amgen applied AI and machine learning to high-quality data about providers, products, and payers, enabling them to reach more patients with potentially life-saving therapies. This patient-centric approach to analytics helps notify care providers and present preventive treatment to patients before health incidents occur.

4. Insurance

The insurance industry is transforming CX to build customer trust and streamline services. According to a report by Grand View Research, the global customer experience management market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.8% from 2024 through 2030, indicating a significant focus on CX improvements in sectors like insurance.

Key insurance CX transformation initiatives include:

  • Digital Claim Processing: Accelerating settlements through online platforms.
  • Mobile Apps & Digital Insurance Cards: Popular insurance companies now offer moble apps for policyholders to view claims, store their insurance cards, view policy changes, get support, and more
  • Usage-Based Insurance Models: Offering personalized premiums based on behavior.
  • AI Risk Assessment: Enhancing underwriting accuracy with predictive analytics.
  • Chatbot Support: Providing instant assistance for policy inquiries.
  • Mobile Policy Management: Allowing customers to manage policies via apps.
  • Proactive Customer Engagement: Reaching out with relevant information and updates.
  • Telematics Integration: Using data from devices to inform policy decisions.

Lemonade Insurance utilizes AI and chatbots to streamline the insurance process, providing quick policy approvals and claim settlements. This approach has led to high customer satisfaction and rapid growth in the market.

5. Government

Government agencies are embracing CX transformation to improve public services and engagement. Often known for its poor customer service, modern digital tools are empowering federal agencies and local governments to provide better services to citizens.

Examples of CX transformation in the public sector include:

  • E-Government Portals: Providing citizens with a centralized platform for accessing services online.
  • Digital Identity Verification: Simplifying the authentication process for secure access to government services.
  • AI-Powered Virtual Assistants: Assisting citizens with inquiries and guiding them through processes.
  • Mobile Applications: Offering on-the-go access to public services and information.
  • Automated Document Processing: Streamlining workflows like license renewals and permits.
  • Proactive Communication: Sending timely updates and reminders for deadlines or policy changes.
  • Citizen Feedback Systems: Gathering insights to improve service delivery and satisfaction.

Estonia is often regarded as a global leader in digital government. Through its “e-Estonia” initiative, the country has implemented an advanced e-government system that allows citizens to access nearly all public services online, including voting, healthcare, and tax filing. This transformation has significantly reduced bureaucratic inefficiencies and improved citizen satisfaction.

6. B2B SaaS

In the B2B SaaS industry, CX transformation is key to improving client retention, reducing churn, and driving customer success. According to McKinsey, companies focusing on improving CX can see a 10-15% revenue increase while reducing costs by 15-20%. Often a leader in CX, here are a few examples of how B2B SaaS companies are improving their CX:

Key CX transformation strategies for B2B SaaS companies:

  • Personalized Onboarding: Creating tailored, product-led onboarding flows for new customers that help them realize value quickly.
  • In-App Guidance: Providing real-time support and tutorials within the software to help accelerate adoption, drive advanced feature usage, and provide self-help support.
  • Proactive Customer Success Teams: Monitoring customer usage and reaching out to prevent churn.
  • Self-Service Portals: Enabling customers to access knowledge bases and resolve issues independently.
  • Usage Analytics Dashboards: Giving customers visibility into their own performance metrics.
  • AI-Driven Insights: Offering data-driven recommendations to optimize software utilization.
  • Integrations with Other Tools: Enhancing workflows by connecting with third-party platforms.

Global leader in cybersecurity Sophos partnered with Whatfix to enhance customer technical onboarding and admin support for its Sophos Firewall solution. Customers often faced challenges navigating the firewall’s advanced features, leading to slower adoption and underutilization. Sophos used Whatfix DAP to create in-app guidance to address this, providing users with contextual, step-by-step walkthroughs directly within the interface. It also integrated its knowledge and help repriorities into its Firewall app via Self Help to enable admins with in-app support.

This transformation empowered customers to self-learn, complete tasks efficiently, and unlock the full potential of the Sophos Firewall without relying on extensive external support. By reducing friction and improving product accessibility, Sophos not only elevated customer satisfaction but also strengthened loyalty and long-term engagement.

Measuring the Success of Your CX Transformation

Before you initiate the changes you’d like to make during your CX transformation, you and your team need to define how you’ll measure success so that you can iterate as you work toward your ultimate goals.

In this section, we’ll walk you through some key metrics and measurement methodologies so you can do just that.

1. Key KPIs and metrics

KPIs and metrics an important part of measuring success and are particularly useful because they’re objective and concrete. Here is a list of some metrics you may find helpful during CX transformation.

  • NPS (Net Promoter Score): This metric asks users a single question, usually related to how likely they are to recommend a product to a friend. This translates to a metric that measures the likelihood of customer referrals, which is super useful for understanding if your CX transformation is positively influencing the customer experience overall.
  • CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score): The CSAT asks users about their level of satisfaction after they encounter certain touch points or complete certain actions. You can use this score to see how your transformation efforts impact overall customer satisfaction.
  • CES (Customer Effort Score): The CES enables you to track how easy it is for customers to resolve issues as they arise. Suppose your CX transformation involves efforts like improving support or your knowledge base. In that case, this metric will help you understand whether your initiatives are improving the overall customer experience when a customer needs help.
  • Churn Rate: Your churn rate monitors your retention rate over time. It’s looking at how likely users are to leave your platform for good at various time intervals, such as a week, a month, and a year. A successful CX transformation process will likely reduce your churn, and it’s important to track as you make changes.

Most of these metrics are calculated, or partially calculated, by proactively asking users for feedback. It’s important to implement a tool that allows you to collect customer feedback throughout the user journey. You can use a no-code tool like the Whatfix DAP to ask users to do things like rate their satisfaction or their likelihood to recommend your platform to a friend. Doing this enables you to measure your transformation success in real time.

2. Data analytics & reporting

An important aspect of knowing the effectiveness of your customer experience efforts is the close monitoring of user behavior with detailed, real-time analytics. As you implement CX changes, your customers’ behavior will help you learn and take action so that you can continue to improve your results quickly.

Here’s what to keep in mind as you create a plan for utilizing analytics and reporting throughout your CX transformation:

  • Use real-time dashboards for timely decision-making: Once you decide where your initial interactions take place, you should set up a tool that shows you key user behavior analytics in real time, such as Whatfix Product Analytics, which allows you to do so without the help of a developer. For example, if you’re implementing a new and improved knowledge base, you can use real-time dashboards to monitor how many people access your knowledge base and what the outcome is. This will help you understand the impact of the initiative and whether you need to iterate further.
  • Use advanced analytics or machine learning to discover actionable insights: Monitoring analytics is important, but the overall value of analytics depends on uncovering actionable insights. Your user behavior data should ultimately end up giving you a list of concrete tasks to do in order to continuously improve the user experience. You can use machine learning or advanced analytics techniques to help you determine next steps based on the available data.

3. Continuous improvement

CX transformation, like product development, is ongoing. There will always be ways to tweak, or even overhaul, certain aspects of the user experience for the benefit of both your organization and your customers.

Here are two ways to make sure that you and your team are on top of opportunities to continuously improve the customer experience:

  • Encourage monthly or quarterly CX audits: The exact format will depend on your organizational culture, but the concept of regular check-ins is extremely helpful for all teams engaged in CX transformation. At these audits, you can review your success metrics, brainstorm, and even make decisions about upcoming iterations.
  • Implement feedback loops to ensure changes directly address customer needs: While user behavior data will tell you a lot about whether your CX efforts are having an impact, getting customer feedback is a crucial ingredient as well. Use a digital adoption platform to ask your customers for feedback at regular intervals, and make sure that your team reacts to what you learn.

The Role of Technology in CX Transformation

A comprehensive tech stack makes CX transformation easier and more effective. Though your team may not need everything all at once, we’ll go through the technology that’s often employed during transformation processes so that you and your team can decide what you need.

1. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and CRM

CDPs and CRMs are tools that help break down data silos with unified customer profiles. In practice, this means that each customer has a single customer view (SCV) that includes all of their attributes and behaviors. Within the platform, you can segment customers by certain criteria – for example, customers who come from an organization of a specific size.

With this information, you can implement real-time personalization throughout the entire customer journey, across multiple channels. For example, if your enterprise clients who have teams of 300 or more employees have a specific need for information during their onboarding process, you can serve it to them via multiple channels without serving it to your smaller customers who don’t need the information.

This results in a tailored experience for your entire customer base and therefore, a more elegant customer experience.

2. AI and machine learning

While AI and machine learning may feel like buzzwords at the moment, they’re being talked about for good reason – and they can truly impact your CX transformation for the better.

Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, your team can both offer service to your users and get better at predicting their behavior so that their experience can align better with their needs.

Here are some examples of how your team can use AI and machine learning in your CX transformation strategy:

  • AI chatbots for customer support: Chatbots are no longer rudimentary. Many products have implemented chatbots that give on-demand, accurate support to users when they have an issue. Even if your chatbot is only your first line of defense when it comes to customer support, it has the potential to improve your CX by getting users help faster, and decreasing the time and resources spent on support agents.
  • Predictive analytics based on AI-driven insights: Based on information like user behavior analytics and chatbot insights, you can actually generate AI driven insights that predict your users’ future behavior. This information can be used to personalize a customer’s experience based on their needs – even before they indicate them intentionally.
  • Internal, custom AI assistants to ensure consistency with customer interactions: Your team can create custom ChatGPT scripts that everyone can consult when dealing with customers. For example, if you create documentation around customer touchpoints, best practices, and common customer issues along with their solutions, team members can ‘ask’ the assistant questions in real-time.

Based on the documentation, the assistant can give everyone on your team quick and consistent answers, which overall improves the quality and uniformity of care that you provide to your customers.

Make sure that you and your team explore AI-driven tools and machine learning opportunities when you’re planning the particulars of your CX transformation. Ultimately, customers and organizations stand to benefit from these exciting, relatively new technologies.

3. Digital Adoption Platforms

The vast majority of CX transformation processes involve the usage of a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) – and for good reason. A DAP allows you to:

  • Drive the adoption of new features and technologies with tools like in-app pop-ups and product walkthroughs
  • Assist users in the moment of need with an up-to-date knowledge base or other on-platform guidance
  • Nudge users to take specific actions and provide real-time guidance with in-app pop-ups and other mechanisms
  • Allow users to submit feedback while they’re on platform with tools like surveys that are timed intentionally when they’re most relevant

A DAP is a dynamic platform that gives your team the ability to consistently iterate on the guidance and awareness that you bring to users based on their behavior.

It’s win-win because users experience less friction when doing their necessary tasks, and you’re likely to see the results of DAP usage in metrics like onboarding completion rate, retention, new feature adoption, and conversion.

Be sure to choose a DAP that your non-technical teams can use independently. Tools like the Whatfix DAP are no-code solutions, which means that once they’re implemented, you can do things like launch surveys, create pop-ups, design and deliver product walkthroughs, and update your knowledge base without the help of a developer.

4. Automation and self-service

When your customer-facing teams are bogged down by administrative, routine tasks, they have less time to focus on more strategic endeavors. Your CX transformation process should involve implementing the automation of tasks for your employees and self-service mechanisms for your customers so that this is less likely to happen.

Internal automation and self-service for customers during CX transformation can include all sorts of things that require different tooling, but here are some examples:

  • Email automation tools and lifecycle management tools offer automated, ongoing email campaigns that give users the information they need throughout their journey without needing to speak with an account manager
  • DAPs offer customer satisfaction surveys that are repeated after users perform specific actions on the platform or have used the platform for a certain period of time
  • DAPs and other knowledge base tools offer the ability to host an up-to-date, meticulously maintained knowledge base that users can consult on-demand when they need help with something on your platform

By strategizing around automation and self-service for customers along with the right tooling, you free up your team to continuously iterate on the customer experience in a more strategic, less rote way. This increases what your team can achieve overall and ultimately, leads to a better customer experience as a result.

5. Data Analytics

The vast majority of improvements to the customer experience will require nuanced data points to guide your team.

Using a sophisticated, but easy-to-use product analytics platform throughout your CX transformation and beyond allows you to:

  • Identify trends in usage that your team can react to accordingly with various customer touch points
  • Personalize the experiences of users based on their behavior, giving users the feeling that your platform suits them precisely
  • Identify points of friction so that you can make UX improvements or offer guidance to users
  • Understand feature adoption and react to it when it isn’t ideal by offering information and reinforcing value propositions to users exactly when they need it

Just as with DAPs, your team will most likely benefit from a product analytics platform that allows you to extract and visualize data without the help of a developer or even a data analyst. Solutions like Whatfix Product Analytics can be used by anyone on the team, ensuring that everyone who needs to know about your customers can do it quickly and independently.

6 Steps to Start Your CX Transformation Process

Now that we’ve gone through the crucial principles, tools, and variation options when it comes to your transformation process – it’s time to get started.

In this section, we’ll go through the 6 steps that your team needs to go through in order to be well on your way to successful CX transformation.

Step 1: Assess current state

It’s likely that your team already has customers and customer touchpoints. Before you can decide what your CX transformation process will look like, you’ll need to take stock of where you are in terms of the customer experience.

Here are some actions that you can take to assess the status quo of your CX:

  • Conduct customer journey mapping exercises to identify friction points: Using a product analytics platform, your team can visualize the user journey based on actual user behavior. You should take note of where users seem to experience friction so that you can look for ways to improve the experience during your transformation process.
  • Review user feedback data: Put together and analyze customer surveys, online reviews of your platform, and support tickets. Using this data, you can understand what is affecting the customer experience positively and negatively, which gives your team some direction for choosing what to work on during CX transformation.
  • Consider interviewing users: In addition to all of the data that you’re sorting through at this stage, conducting user interviews with some key customer segments can help you explore the customer experience in-depth and generate some interesting insights about the current state of your CX.

Once your team has a good idea as to the pros and cons of your current customer experience, you’re ready to move on to the next step.

Step 2: Define clear goals & metrics

Before you start taking action to improve the customer experience, your team needs to align on exactly what success will look like and how you will measure it. In this stage, you will:

  • Align on a basic vision for your customer experience
  • Align transformation objectives with overarching business goals. For example, improving your NPS, CSAT, and retention metrics
  • Set measurable KPIs for each stage of the transformation: if you want to see certain metrics improve, by how much and in what period of time?

Once you’ve defined success, you’re ready to start improving the customer experience.

Step 3: Secure leadership buy-in

In all likelihood, a concentrated effort to improve the CX will require significant resources like employee time and additional tooling. So, CX transformation requires the support of your organization’s leadership before you start making big changes.

To win support from your leadership team, you should:

  • Present a compelling business case with ROI estimates and market benchmarks. You may want to organize a kick-off presentation where you show exactly how you expect this process to benefit key KPIs and give leadership the opportunity to ask questions.
  • Find executive sponsors to champion the transformation at every level. Think about which members of your leadership team are most likely to benefit from each stage of your transformation process and enlist their help in getting buy-in from management.

When you have leadership on your side, you’re unlikely to face problems like lack of resources that hinder the progress of your CX transformation.

Step 4: Invest in the right technology

You’ve already gone through a comprehensive overview of what tools can be useful for CX transformation, and now is the time to make some decisions. During this stage, you’ll need to:

  • Evaluate CX platforms, analytics solutions, and AI-driven support tools according to features, ease of use, and budgetary considerations.
  • Focus on tools that integrate with existing ecosystems to reduce complexity. Even better, find features within tools that you already use that can be utilized further.

It helps to have an ‘owner’ of this process. Someone on your team should document what you learn about tool options, collect the necessary information, and bring the team together to make decisions when needed. Otherwise, you can end up in endless debates and spend too long in this stage of the transformation process.

Step 5: Implement & iterate

You have goals, you have tools, and you’re well on your way! At this stage, you’re ready to start testing the ideas that your team has generated when it comes to improving the experience of your customers.

While you’re implementing and iterating on new initiatives, be sure to:

  • Start with pilot programs or MVPs to test new customer-focused initiatives. Rather than releasing big changes to all of your users at once, use beta programs and A/B testing to see how users react to changes and how iterations affect your key KPIs. Once you see that something is beneficial in a data-driven way, you can release changes for more or all of your users.
  • Continuously gather feedback, refine processes, and scale successful solutions. In this stage, it’s important to have the mindset that all of your processes and product iterations will continue to evolve based on what you learn from data and customer feedback.

Keep in mind that your team could be in this step for a long time. Depending on how ambitious your transformation goals and KPIs are, it can take some time to achieve what you set out to achieve. This is completely normal and totally okay – stay here until you reach your goals.

Step 6: Foster a customer-centric culture

The customer experience needs constant care and attention to stay optimal. The best way to make sure that you’re giving it due focus is to create a company culture that puts customers at the forefront of your team’s concerns and priorities.

Here are some suggestions for creating a customer-centric culture at your organization:

  • Provide ongoing training and incentives for employees to prioritize CX: What are the core skills needed to provide a good customer experience for each internal team? Make sure that employees have what they need to master and practice these skills.
  • Celebrate quick wins and publicize success stories internally: If your team hears CX wins getting airtime and sees them being celebrated, they’ll internalize the message that improving the experience should be among their priorities.

CX transformation is about concrete action items and creating organizational change that communicates the crucial importance of the customer experience.

Common CX Transformation Challenges

As you move through the various stages of CX transformation, it’s likely that you and your team will encounter some issues. In this section, we’ll go through some of the common CX transformation challenges so that you can be prepared to recognize, and overcome, these issues as they arise.

1. Resistance to change within the organization

In general, employees take comfort in the status quo. They feel masterful as they move through familiar routines. During CX transformation, change to processes is inevitable and it’s not always welcome by everyone on the team.

You may notice, for example, that there are specific team members who simply don’t implement the recommended changes, or do so inconsistently. Occasionally, there might be entire teams or employees in significant numbers that speak out against the changes.

If you notice this resistance to change, the most important thing for you to do is to recognize it as an important part of change management. It’s normal and expected for some people to resist change. You may also want to consider:

  • Systematically listening to, and problem solving around, the concerns brought up by the employees who are resisting the changes
  • Reinforcing the vision and the why behind every change in various company communication channels
  • Accounting for the fact that not all changes will be immediate, and tracking compliance such that you expect to see improvement over time rather than immediate perfection

2. Siloed data and disconnected systems

In order to provide an excellent customer experience, all teams need to be looking at the same data, using tools that speak to each other, and working toward the same goals. However, for most organizations, this is an iterative process that happens over time.

For example, it could be that the sales team is utilizing a CRM and the data that’s integrated there, whereas your product team is relying on a product analytics tool that analyzes and presents groups of customers in an entirely different way. This can result in inconsistencies when it comes to customer care and communication.

As you move toward an integrated approach, you’ll want to:

  • Ensure that representatives from all key teams are involved in choosing tools and defining processes so that the needs of every team are taken into account, making employees much more likely to comply with the resulting changes
  • Swiftly identify inconsistencies and strategize with your team so that you can tackle them one by one, ultimately reaching a point of consistency over time

3. Lack of a clear vision or measurable goals

At the heart of most challenges that you can encounter during CX transformation is the lack of widespread understanding of what the team is trying to achieve, and/or the failure to measure progress toward those goals.

The only surefire way to get everyone at your organization on board with strategic and practical change is to paint a picture of success – your vision – and to show the team’s progress as you go in a precise, measurable way.

In the next section, we’ll talk more about how to pin down your vision of success in order to motivate your internal team and solidify your commitment to your customers.

4. Difficulty integrating new technologies

Even when employees are excited about your transformational vision, they sometimes struggle with using new tools that are generally introduced during CX transformation. It’s possible that some people have been using the same tools for years and are having trouble shifting gears, or that they hold self-limiting beliefs like “I’m not a data person” that interfere with their ability to learn how to use the new tooling.

Regardless of the reason, in order to minimize the struggle that your individual team members have with new tools, be sure to:

  • Provide adequate end-user training on new tools and their usage before you make the shift officially
  • Make it clear to the team where and when they can seek help if they are unsure about something in relation to a new tool
  • Normalize the struggle – tell your team that you expect that there will be hiccups and that you’re here to help
  • Integrate new tools in stages rather than having a situation where employees come to work on Monday morning and all of their tooling is different

5. Inconsistent customer experiences across channels

Though a big part of what you’re trying to achieve with CX transformation is consistency when it comes to customer care, it’s inevitable that there will be some obstacles at the outset.

It could be that your team is struggling to adopt new tools, or to work together rather than in silos. When that happens, customers sometimes experience inconsistencies with communication and user experience overall.

In order to identify areas for improvement, be sure to:

  • Pay attention to inbound communication from customers via support and sales. Often, customers will alert you to issues and inconsistencies.
  • Monitor user behavior data closely and notice differences in behavior or results with different customer segments

As long as you prioritize the identification of inconsistencies in the customer experience, you’ll be about to react quickly throughout the transformation process.

CX Transformation Best Practices

In this section, we’ll detail the most important practices to keep in mind as you move through the CX transformation process.

1. Define a clear CX vision aligned with your brand promise

Your vision is the backbone of the entire transformation process. It will both help you bring your team toward systemic change and reassure your customers of your commitment to their experience.

Here are some important tips for defining a vision that aligns with your brand promise:

  • Pinpoint the exact level of service you aim to provide by tying it directly to your organization’s mission and core values. What did your company set out to achieve on behalf of your customers in the first place? This will guide you when it comes time to define the level of customer care for your CX vision.
  • Identify specific customer behaviors you want to influence throughout the customer journey. For example, increased repeat purchases or smoother support resolutions could be indicators of a better customer experience overall. By identifying very specific behaviors, you help your organization as a whole know how you’re improving the CX throughout the transformation process.
  • Keep customer-centricity at the heart of your plan, emphasizing empathy and real-world outcomes over abstract data. Your data is crucial for monitoring progress and identifying CX iteration opportunities, but it’s important that your vision isn’t simply a series of metrics. Your vision should also detail how you’ll show empathy for your customer, and how their lives and workflows will improve as a result of these company-wide efforts.

2. Reimagine organizational structures for CX success

If you’re going to radically improve the customer experience, it’s going to require more than customer facing changes. Your organizational structure is likely to need some updates as well, and it makes sense to begin thinking about what that may mean toward the beginning of the transformation process.

Here are some guiding principles as you begin to consider the organizational implications of CX transformation:

  • Transition away from isolated, status-quo processes by creating a dedicated, cross-functional CX team. With a professionally diverse team completely dedicated to the customer experience as a whole, you’re more likely to drive organizational changes in a way that works for all teams and roles.
  • Ensure that these team members have the technical prowess, innovation mindset, and decision-making authority to reshape products and services. Your CX team needs to be comfortable thinking and acting outside of the box. CX transformation, as the name suggests, is transformative and the team should feel empowered to make the changes needed.
  • Centralize accountability for the end-to-end customer journey, minimizing departmental barriers. Sometimes, organizational changes leave things unclear in terms of who owns what, and who is accountable for which aspects of the customer experience. As you implement shifts in the organization, be sure to make ownership clear and accountability easy to understand.

3. Develop the capabilities and technology for sustainable CX evolution

You already know that new tools are usually a feature of CX transformation and sometimes, so are new skills.

Here are a few tips to ensure that your  team is equipped to handle their adjusted responsibilities:

  • Provide consistent, role-based training to equip every employee with the skills needed for excellent customer support. Your sales representatives, support agents, and community managers will have different interactions with customers and your new tooling. Make sure that your training is specific to each team member’s role to avoid confusion or errors in the customer experience.
  • Integrate technological solutions to unify channel data and deliver a single view of the customer. The best way to ensure that each team is operating in tandem and knows what to do next is to make sure that everyone has a shared customer view. CRMs and analytics platforms are particularly useful for this.
  • Harness advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning tools for proactive problem-solving and continuous CX refinement. A great way to make sure that your team can operate efficiently and consistently is to utilize advanced technology. Tip: Designate a point person on your team who is familiar with AI and machine learning as the owner of these internal innovations.

4. Put customer feedback at the core of your transformation

Though it’s your team that will initiate and execute strategic and practical changes, the ultimate goal of CX transformation is to improve the customer experience. For that reason, it’s important to utilize customer feedback to plan for, and iterate on, your CX transformation.

Here are some tips for putting customer feedback at the center of your CX transformation:

  • Capture, analyze, and act on both quantitative and qualitative insights—even if some comments challenge internal assumptions. It’s okay to use internal knowledge and hypotheses to generate ideas for your transformation, but a successful process checks its assumptions with customer feedback. Even if your team thinks that something is a great idea, customer feedback to the contrary, whether it’s data or qualitative insights, should give the team pause.
  • Distinguish between recurring pain points that need urgent resolutions and isolated feedback that might not warrant sweeping change. When sorting through customer feedback, it’ll quickly become obvious that you can’t address everything all at once. Make sure your team prioritizes the feedback that reflects issues relevant to large portions of your user base, either in numbers or account significance. You don’t want to waste time reacting to things that won’t have enough overall impact.
  • Keep the momentum by continually iterating processes, guided by an unwavering focus on evolving customer needs. Customer needs evolve rather quickly, especially since your product and its market are always changing. CX transformation is an iterative process and your iterations will be more successful if you’re staying on top of customer needs and making process alterations as necessary.

5. Adopt a continuous, customer-centric mindset

If only a few people at your organization are obsessed with your customer experience, you’re unlikely to achieve your transformation goals.

Here are a few ways to encourage a customer-centric mindset company-wide:

  • Encourage every individual in the organization to ask daily, “How can we elevate our customers’ experience today?” You may want to literally ask your team members this question, or put it on posters around the office. By making this question ubiquitous, you reinforce the importance of work and decision making that prioritizes CX.
  • Promote a culture of continuous experimentation, adapting quickly to shifting consumer behaviors and market conditions. Let your team know that testing different solutions is the best way to optimize any aspect of the customer experience, and encourage new experiments as market conditions and user behaviors seem to change.
  • Sustain improvements and reinforce their impact by celebrating small wins tied directly to customer satisfaction and loyalty. Whether it’s your CSAT score or quotes from happy customers in your brand’s community, be sure to share the positivity company-wide. Every kind word or uptick in customer satisfaction motivates the team to keep the iterations and improvements coming.

How Digital Adoption Platforms Accelerate CX Transformation

You may remember from earlier in this guide that Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) are one of primary tools used to facilitate a successful CX transformation.

DAPs are so central to improving the customer experience that in this section, we’re going to  take a deeper look at how you can utilize a DAP, such as the Whatfix DAP, to positively influence the customer experience.

1. Bridging the user skills gap

Somewhat ironically, great customer care involves decreasing your customers’ dependence on your team. A great customer experience means that most, if not all, of what your customers need to do on your platform is easy and intuitive. However, particularly for SaaS platforms, this requires helping users build some skills.

Using your DAP, you can guide users through new tools and workflows in real time by using mechanisms like product walkthroughs and in-app pop-ups for more detail about features that require some knowledge. Rather than waiting for users to get confused, you can provide this guidance at just the right time with a DAP.

Your DAP also helps you provide quick and thorough onboarding for employees and customers. DAPs allow you to create onboarding experiences that are fast and nuanced, which reduces both employee and customer frustration and support costs that come with users feeling lost or confused.

2. Data-driven insights for continuous improvement

As you roll out changes related to your CX transformation strategy, you know that you’ll likely need to keep iterating in order to fully optimize various elements of the customer experience. Your DAP allows you to look for signs that you have iteration opportunities based on user behavior.

The in-app analytics in your DAP allow you to segment your users intelligently based on properties that you choose, and you can look at how those customers fare in every key flow. When you notice things like user drop-off in a particular flow, for example, you know that you have an opportunity to improve the customer experience.

Some of these points of friction may lead you to UX improvements, but they can also alert you to other needs related to the customer experience. For example, you may want to use your DAP to give more guidance, or to alert the support team to issues that need more customer care. Regardless of what your plan of action is, your DAP allows you to adjust processes and implement product iterations that are based on actual usage data rather than assumptions.

3. Fostering omnichannel consistency

As we’ve mentioned previously, consistency across channels is a key ingredient in a successful customer experience transformation.

Your DAP is helpful for standardizing training and best practices, both internally and with your customers. Here are a few examples:

  • Give your team a single customer view and source of truth: Your DAP shows how different groups of customers fare in different product flows, giving everyone at your organization the same insights about areas of friction to work on.
  • Create product walkthroughs and other in-app guidance that can be utilized internally and externally: These DAP features can teach your employees and customers alike how to use features and accomplish tasks on your platform. This standardization of training means that your team, regardless of role, is equipped to understand and react to the customer experience.
  • Create a knowledge base that is an internal and external source of truth: Using a tool like Self Help in the Whatfix DAP, you can create and maintain documentation about all of your features and flows. Both your team and your customers can get consistent insights about everything on your platform.

4. Accelerating change management

Getting your entire team up to speed on changes as they’re implemented is a common challenge when it comes to CX transformation. Your DAP allows you to create and share guided walkthroughs and contextual guidance on all aspects of your platform, which overall reduces resistance to the adoption of new platforms.

No less important, your DAP offers real-time support during digital roll-outs, making sure that your team is equipped to deal with any issues in the moment.

Future Trends in Customer Experience Transformation

CX transformation is an ever-evolving topic, and there are some exciting trends taking root. Let’s take a look at some of the current trends when it comes to improving customer experience at large.

1. AI & Automation

Like many industries, customer experience in general is undergoing significant change as artificial intelligence is inevitably changing the landscape. Conversational AI (such as chatbots), predictive analytics, and hyper-personalization are all helping companies increase the accuracy and efficiency of getting users the care that they need.

Experts have also identified potential in the realm of real-time sentiment analysis and proactive, AI-driven outreach, both of which could understand, anticipate, and react to user struggles in real time.

2. Experience-as-a-Service

Customers are beginning to view an optimal experience as a service worth paying for in of itself. This manifests in a shift toward subscription-based models that offer ongoing, personalized value. Sometimes this value is in the form of additional guidance from someone like an account manager, or preference in the support queue.

At the core of experience-as-a-service is a focus on continuous product and service improvements based on usage data and customer feedback.

3. Sustainable CX

As awareness around environmental issues and talk around human impact on the climate increases globally, customers show an increasing desire for eco-friendly products and services.

For that reason, many companies are choosing to align their brand purpose with environmental and social responsibility, and communicate this to their customers.

CX Transformation Clicks Better With Whatfix

Deep, nuanced product analytics and a quality DAP are probably on your mind as you gear up for CX transformation, and many organizations like yours rely on Whatfix Product Analytics and the Whatfix DAP to fuel a successful transformation process.

Here are a few ways in which Whatfix can help you succeed with CX transformation:

  • Use Whatfix to provide contextual, in-app guidance that supports customers at their exact moment of need, chosen based on data. This contributes to a better customer experience because it helps minimize user confusion and frustration.
  • Further accelerate your transformation process with a robust set of features that don’t require code in order to implement: interactive workflows, self-help widgets, real-time analytics, and more.
  • Ensure that you reap the benefits of faster onboarding and reduced support costs by leveraging Whatfix’s on-demand, scalable training capabilities for both your internal team and your customer base.
  • Allow your whole team to get motivated by using Whatfix to showcase the measurable impact on customer satisfaction and user proficiency, including decreased churn,  increased product adoption, and higher customer satisfaction.

Whatfix, as a platform, is a strategic partner that can help you and your team realize all of your CX transformation goals through tailored digital adoption solutions.

Schedule a demo with the Whatfix team today!

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Software Clicks Better With Whatfix
Enable users with in-app guidance and support employees in the flow of work to maximize business outcomes. Accelerate time-to-value and improve CX with interactive walkthroughs and self-help support. Create replica sandbox environments of enterprise software to provide hands-on user training. Analyze software usage, benchmark process time-to-completion, and identify areas of user friction, empowering you to make data-driven improvements to application experiences. From CIOs, CHROs, Service Teams, Product Managers, and more - software clicks better with Whatfix.
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