Increasingly, enterprise companies with high growth targets are prioritizing strategies to improve customer experience (CX). Data from analysts suggests that improving CX is the fastest path to growth and that companies investing in CX are seeing on average 10% increase in revenue.
It’s not hard to see why: From the sheer volume of website traffic, enterprise companies have the most to gain by optimizing CX. If a top performing optimization that is served to 1.3 million unique visitors can achieve a 7.7% lift, this translates into $553,800 in additional monthly revenue. Over 12 months, this equates to $6,645,600 in additional sales which highlights the business case for improving CX.
Despite the obvious benefits to the bottom line, few enterprise companies are making the gains they’d like to on their website traffic. In our experience working with enterprise clients, we’ve identified 5 ways CX efforts are sabotaged. This is rarely intentional, rather it’s a result of enterprise structures, policies, and procedures. Each of these factors show why efforts to improve CX require a new mindset and approach.
1. Siloed enterprise company optimization goals
Currently, improving CX is usually a priority for just one or two departments within an enterprise. Commonly, a divisional leader will be given a key performance indicator (KPI) such as reducing cart abandonment or increasing the average order value (AOV). Because that’s what they’re being measured on, it becomes a point of focus, with optimization strategies and metrics aligned to only achieving that specific KPI.
The problem with a KPI focused approach is that it doesn’t factor what else could be influencing the customer journey. It neglects to consider how these strategies might impact overall CX or whether they align with what other departments are trying to achieve. The fundamental problem is that it is not customer-centric.
For example: The growth team might be tasked with increasing sales. Their primary focus may be on increasing AOV through upselling or cross selling. But the challenge is that today’s customer journey is not linear. There are many ways visitors might land on a page and hundreds of customer journey paths they might take. Excluding other elements from the optimization could negatively impact CX and by default also sales. Visitors may be enticed to add items to their cart, only to abandon the cart at checkout.
2. Limited data access
Enterprise companies value their data immensely and prefer to leverage it only as they see fit. As humans we also like to simplify things and reduce the scope of what to focus on. But with the many factors that influence CX, this approach quickly makes optimization efforts more challenging and less effective.
Focusing only on some data, or failing to share relevant data with other departments or partners can impact the strategy or even the performance of an optimization. It may omit information essential to understanding consumer behavior. AI-driven optimization in particular thrives on large amounts of data, especially when it builds on existing knowledge. Having access to the right data is essential to maximize the return on investment (ROI) of CX optimization. Instead of achieving a 10% increase in sales, brands may only realize a 2% increase and then fail to see the value of CX optimization efforts.
3. Lack of agility
CX is highly dynamic and with customers demanding increased personalization, enterprises need to be able to understand and respond quickly to changing customer needs. If enterprises are stuck behind organizational policies and procedures, this can become very difficult to do.
Having a collaborative, agile approach benefits CX optimization but realistically it’s a rare find in large enterprise companies. Divisions are too focused on achieving their specific KPIs and are hesitant to be flexible in policies because they fear it’ll negatively impact what they’re trying to achieve.
4. Start/stop approach
The KPI approach generally means that managers want to set out to achieve a metric and then be able to tick it off as done. This may be one of the reasons that A/B testing tools remain a firm favorite for testing ideas despite their many limitations.
There’s a definitive beginning and end to the testing process. But CX is constantly evolving and the task of optimizing is never done—because customer behavior, needs and preferences are always changing.
Testing built on a start/stop approach simply doesn’t lend itself to effective CX improvement. Enterprise companies may get an answer at the end of a test but its relevance may be questionable because of the time it takes to get there. Continuous optimization that takes the approach of always learning from customer responses to ideas delivers more personalized experiences and significantly improves CX and optimization ROI.
5. Weariness of new experimentation technologies
Traditional testing tools are so ingrained in enterprise culture that introducing new experimentation technologies is a challenge. Every department has its concerns.
- Optimization teams feel it may make their contributions redundant.
- IT worries about data privacy and systems integration.
- Marketing worries about the risk and impact to their strategies.
In reality, none of these concerns are well founded. Experimentation technologies such as AI-driven optimization serve to enable marketing, optimization, and IT teams to become more efficient at what they do. They make better use of data and provide more useful insights to inform marketing and optimization strategies and make them more effective. Plus it automates the most challenging part of optimization, identifying top performing ideas through continuous learning from visitor behavior.
Creating better connections with customers and delivering more personalized digital experiences is the new competitive advantage. Enterprise companies that delay in optimizing CX are opening the door for competitors to engage and win over their customers. With low levels of customer loyalty and increasing expectations, the biggest opportunities for growth exist for enterprises that are proactive about CX and that put customer centricity ahead of corporate policies and processes.
