So there's a lot of mistakes that we see people making, our clients making, with customer experience these days. One of them is to try to be all things to all people; they don't start with good personas. Another is oftentimes they mix up what segments, and personas are. I like to point out that segments are what the customer means to you, the brand, while personas are what you, the brand, mean to the customer. And so it's really flipping the perspective. So if you try to be all things to all people or you don't have really good personas, you really vast late you can't map a customer journey. You can't understand, wants and needs because it's just too broad. Another issue is only focusing on that marketing funnel of the buy cycle, not thinking of the entire end to end journey.

Another common issue is that oftentimes organizations are not focused on understanding the customer. They think they know the customer. They think they know what the problem is. If you walk into any organization and you say, What are the five problems we need to solve? Everyone's probably got a list and maybe those are the right, Five problems. Maybe they aren't. You don't know without data, so will often help our clients right from the start. Do you have a voice of customer platform? Are you doing good user research? Are you bringing operational data into this? Not just survey data but combining it. All of those are really important issues.

Another very important issue that we see customer experience leaders struggling with is that they don't do the work that is required to make customer experience matter to leaders. And what I mean by that is that once the CX program launches, typically, the senior leaders say all the right things. They understand that they want to be customer centric. They recognized that they really want to be outside in, and they'll obviously pay great lip service to the power of having satisfied customers. But as budgets start mount, or as CX programs begin to offer challenges to the status quo, that support evaporates. And so it becomes really essential right from the start to not just orient yourself to the customer satisfaction increases, but to demonstrate why it matters to the company. There's a term I like to use its customer first company also, so there's lots of ways to be company first that don't necessarily benefit the customer. But if your customer first and you do it in a smart way and you're building stronger relationships, then it can only help the company. And so what we really coach are our clients on is to understand their data, to tie the satisfaction scores back to operational and transactional data, and to be able to tell leaders why it matters in the language of net promoter score. Do promoters spend more? Do they buy more frequently? Do they have a higher lifetime value? Do they get retained more or churned less? Do they send more referrals? Do they give us higher ratings? All of these tie things that the business cares about to increased customer satisfaction.