This week is National Customer Service Week, dedicated to exploring themes ranging from the evolving needs of customers, to delivering service with respect, employee engagement, as well as productivity, growth and innovation.
Having once been a peripheral part of business strategy to playing a central role today, here, Chief Delivery Officer, Carla Hall, takes a look at the modern customer service and considers where lots of business still trip up.
Customer experience needs to act like a grown up
There’s currently quite a lot of conversation, backed by some compelling data, showing that while businesses are investing in customer experience (CX) they’re often not experiencing meaningful return. In fact, Forrester’s 2025 Global Customer Experience Index Rankings, indicates that there’s an overall decline in CX quality globally, with most brands failing to see commercial benefits.
They wrote: “Customer experience (CX) hit an all-time low in North America, while EMEA made some gains and APAC struggled. Globally, 21% of brands declined, 6% improved, and 73% were statistically unchanged.”
While there are lots of reasons attributed to that decline, from loss of focus on the end customer, to employee burnout and failed technology investments, I think one of the things that gets lost in the conversation is the way we approach CX itself. To get a better perspective, I think it’s important to look at the lifespan of customer experience to date.
Not that long ago, CX was a brand new idea within businesses – it was the proverbial toddler in the room, attracting awe and excitement while it tried to find its feet. Then, as it became more established it began to have more of a voice and it was given the benefit of the doubt so it could learn, evolve, and prove itself.
Today, CX has been around for decades, so it needs to act like it. It has shown that it has intrinsic value to businesses, and as a fully fledged function it has to earn its seat at the table. It cannot rely on the altruistic notion of doing the right thing by customers. When it’s competing for a slice of the budget against a backdrop of social and economic pressures, CX has to prove itself within businesses, just as much as the likes of other functions and departments.
The link between customer value and business value
So, what does it mean to ask CX to prove itself? At CGA, we believe the proof is in the data, but what’s often missing is the right data.
We know that the way you attract and retain customers is the way to drive value for businesses, but the crucial point is that you have to be able to evidence that link. People talk a lot about spend, share of wallet, retention, and so forth. None of these things are new, but what we find is that most businesses struggle to make the connection between these metrics, customer behaviour and investment in CX.
This link has to be data-led – it’s not enough for thoughts and ideas to be a matter of opinion or speculation. That’s not entirely straightforward because there is an emotional component to customer experience as well. If you consider facets of National Customer Service Week for example, like service with respect, there clearly is a balance between having strong data and recognising the emotional connection with customers.
However, having good business data is the lynchpin in the whole strategy. We get a lot of clients who have plenty of anecdotal information to support their thinking, but to be truly credible, it has to be evidence-based.
Why aren’t more companies using business data to measure CX?
The stark reality is that most companies don’t actually have the business data that’s needed to drive a strong, evidence-based CX strategy. They have plenty of customer data, through surveys and reviews, but they struggle to connect this to business data. In many ways, the challenges that businesses are experiencing are not a problem with CX itself, but the business information available to measure the performance of CX.
What type of business data does CX need?
It seems peculiar to say that businesses don’t have enough data because in today’s world we are overwhelmed with information. We often talk about data overload at CGA because businesses and their teams are flooded with all these numbers, but it’s more a question of having the right information rather than mountains of it.
For example, businesses might measure Net Promoter Score (NPS), and it’s reasonable to ask whether a rise in the NPS will result in an increase in customer spend. However, when you dig into it, brands might not have the existing customer spend tracked over time, or a record of purchase history to be able to evidence any change in spend.
We can often see correlations between overall customer sentiment and profit, but not the actual causality, because causal effect is hard to track. That’s the business data gap.
Correlation you can have confidence in
To have the information you need to be confident in correlations so need to look at what data is being gathered, when and how. As I said, businesses are under a lot of pressure with the volume of data they’re exposed to, but part of the challenge is that there often isn’t a data strategy driving what they need and how they use it.
If you’re trying to prove an investment decision for CX, or anything else, it’s going to be really difficult if you can’t draw on the data to evidence it. We can do surveys and track customer behaviour, and that has an important role to play. However, on their own, they’re only one piece of the puzzle because what people say and what they do isn’t always the same, and context also plays its part. To make the link between CX investment and customer behaviour you need to be able to correlate your customer and business metrics and in most cases, business data such as finance or operational metrics simply isn’t granular enough. Or, in many cases is reported from an operational efficiency perspective and is therefore hard to align with CX metrics.
The CGA approach to CX
We spend a lot of time at CGA making sure our clients are asking the right questions to help bridge those gaps, crucially:
Does your customer data detail the right things?
How does the business data stack up?
If you can’t marry those two things then you won’t be able to measure the impact of what you’re doing.
Therefore, when we start working with a new client, we typically begin with customer research: are you asking the right questions? How are you asking them? We’re also starting to use more AI tools to make that process less time consuming for customers.
Critically, we also look at business objectives and what data is available. There’s almost always lots of operational and financial data but it typically can’t be broken down to information that tells more of a story.
That’s the challenge that we are here to solve – using customer insights to drive commercial value. That’s what meaningful, modern customer service looks like to us.
CGA are Navigators of Experience, helping brands achieve greater customer loyalty and retention through empathy, engagement, and customer centric transformation.
CGA are Navigators of Experience, helping brands achieve greater customer loyalty and retention through empathy, engagement, and customer centric transformation.
by ForgetWP®