CX Challenges Haven’t Changed in the Last Five Years!

Nick Macfarlane, Account Director CX UK & I at QuestionPro, says that understanding customer journeys and taking actionable steps are the core elements of providing good customer experience. The customer experience leader also has an exciting vision for the role of generative AI in customer journey mapping…

Here’s the thing, CX challenges haven’t really changed in the last five years or so, if at all! CX professionals are still struggling to show the value of the work they do and gain executive buy-in, says Nick Macfarlane, Account Director CX UK & I at QuestionPro. It comes from an inability to really listen to customers and understand what actions to take. 

In his role at QuestionPro, Nick serves as the CX Account Director in the UK. Leveraging his 20 years of client-side CX experience at brands such as Sky, Vodafone, and Cazoo, he is leading the company’s efforts to penetrate the CX market in the UK for the first time. 

CXM Today talks to Macfarlane about addressing the challenges, choosing the best solution for their tech stack, and how he would measure customer satisfaction regarding the resolution or actions taken in response to customer feedback. He also shares his vision about generative AI capabilities in line with CX. 

Full interview:

What are some CX challenges that you have recently observed and how would you address them?

In my view the main CX challenges haven’t really changed in the last five years or so, if at all! So much that CX professionals are still struggling to show the value of the work they do and gain executive buy-in. I think a lot of this comes from an inability to really listen to customers and understand what actions to take. So to address it I’d be looking to properly map and understand my customer journeys and overlay any feedback we are getting on to them to identify pain points.

This then allows you to “design” where you will listen further and gain the rich insight you need to know what actions to take. To do that it’s worth ensuring you have a mixture of targeted surveys and always on unstructured listening. Then it’s a case of being able to tell the story in a way that it resonates with the right people. 

The QuestionPro vision of fully integrated journey mapping, VoC and Action Tracking will really help with this as it will bring the journeys to life in a kind of always on CX Storyboard! But as always, it’s a case of understanding your audience, knowing what their priorities, problems and pain points are, and showing how you can address them. 

How should CX leaders choose the best solution for their tech stack?

Firstly, it’s about understanding how your CX program will work, and how it will all fit together. There is generally so much data in businesses these days and your CX solution having access to it to provide a full view of the customer is key. So the first thing to look for when choosing a solution is connectivity to pre-existing systems. Then it’s a case of can it bring together the three main elements of CX – Journey Mapping, Feedback Collection and Action Tracking.

Once you’ve got a view on this it will come down to whether the insight you’ll get allows you to tell the stories you want across different business areas and finally, do you think you can work with the company you are buying from. Vendors having dedicated CX experts with real client side experience here is a definite plus and something I am delighted to bring to QuestionPro.

How would you measure customer satisfaction regarding the resolution or actions taken in response to their feedback?

Again the starting point is understanding your customer journeys. It’s all well and good chasing headline or vanity metrics like CSAT or NPS and sure a rise in these will likely show you are making things better. But if you know you are trying to improve a certain aspect of a journey why not create a custom metric for it. Something like an effort score or goal achievement metric can be really useful here. It’s also key to have established a benchmark and be able to compare over time. So the earlier you map your journeys the better!

At times, particularly when you are just getting started on your CX efforts, just setting a simple target for a number of improvement actions can really galvanise the team and as they will all likely improve the status quo, the results will look after themselves.

How do brands measure success when it comes to CX technology investments?   

They will normally look for some sort of ROI dynamic of money spent vs savings / benefits realised. But sometimes the tool just becoming widely used across the organisation is enough.

Are you (or not) excited about Gen AI capabilities? Does it have a role to play in strengthening CX? 

Very excited! But I think, initially, more by GenAI’s ability to do data analysis at speed and at scale. It can add so much to what we as CX Pros do. I have a vision whereby I map a customer journey, Gen AI builds the conversational AI model based off what’s written in the journey, the results of that I’m thinking sentiment, effort, emotions, likelihood to drop out are overlaid automatically on the journey and finally Gen AI suggests improvement actions. One stop Journey Map to Improvement plan in a matter of minutes. 

Additionally, I was speaking to a fellow CX pro about the idea of a “Digital Twin” of your customer base. You could test things out and measure impact. Imagine that!