To people in the trenches every day, the impact a positive customer experience has on the bottom line is clear. But proving that business case to executives and other teams is a common challenge for CX teams.
Diane O’Hara, SVP of Customer Advocacy and Insights at CVS Health, represents the consumer at the table of a Fortune 4 company by collecting customer data, analyzing operational data, and working with business units to find the biggest opportunities to deliver a top-tier customer experience.
O’Hara admits that earlier in her career, she viewed customer experience as a soft area. But then she dug into the data and realized the business impacts of creating a customer-centric company. Now she’s on a mission to leverage data to deliver excellent and convenient experiences and show the incredible business impact of customer experience.
Showcasing that impact all comes back to data. O’Hara says effective customer experience is all about driving action across the organization. Prioritizing customer experience is a decision that leaders make every day. And to make a good decision, you need the right data.
O’Hara started by creating a framework to create consistency across the many business arms of CVS regarding how they listen to and interact with customers and analyze the data. Having the ability to collect and analyze feedback in a systemized way is essential. To leverage data, brands need to be able to put feedback through various channels and connect it to other data to paint the full picture of the customer experience.
From there, O’Hara says the insights and feedback must be used across the organization, especially at the front lines. Employees who interact with customers daily have incredible feedback and insights to identify policies that may need to change and to celebrate great things. Spreading data across the company to ensure everyone has access to data and contributes their insights helps O’Hara and her team prioritize issues to find solutions and create great customer experiences.
O’Hara helps shape CVS’s customer-centric culture by making customer experience relevant to business conversations. Understanding CX means using your heart and mind: the heart requires making customers real to executives and sharing their stories, and the mind requires showing the positive business impact of customer experience. O’Hara says tying CX improvements to metrics that matter is crucial.
O’Hara also uses emotional appeal to connect employees to customers. Internally, she regularly shares stories and videos of customer feedback so employees can see the impact of their work. That buy-in helps employees create cohesive processes for a consistent experience, no matter how the customer interacts with CVS.
Showcasing the business case of customer experience requires continual effort. But connecting and sharing data and the human side of customers showcases the value of CX and can create a customer-centric mindset across the organization.
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Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist and the bestselling author of The Customer of the Future. For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here.