In the middle of July, Kantar, Bain and Company and Qualtrics hosted a press conference to announce they’d set up a Working Group to develop a set of Global CX Standards. By creating a common language for CX, the three firms are seeking to boost the credibility of customer experience practice in the c-suite and improve customer experience outcomes across all industries.
Despite research from Kantar indicating that brands which deliver meaningful experiences are 2.5 times more likely to increase their market share, many businesses are struggling to get their CX programmes out of the starting blocks.
According to Forrester, just 25% of CX leaders say their programme delivers improvements in customer experience. Arguably, more damning is that just one in eight CX leaders said their work impacted the overall business performance.
“The stats say that regardless of what we’re spending, customer experience is getting worse,” said Ian Golding, CCXP, global customer experience specialist and CEO of Customer Experience Consultancy.
Over the years CX practice has “fallen into disrepute”, added Golding, after too many six-figure projects have delivered indifferent results.
But the team behind the working group is determined to set things right, starting with its Global CX Standards. According to the CX Working Group spokesperson, standards are vital for a “shared and consistent understanding” of what constitutes best practice.
“A lack of a comprehensive approach can result in CX investments not achieving the expected scale of impact,” the spokesperson added.
The standards put forward by Kantar, Bain and Qualtrics are an attempt to provide organisations with proven strategies for improving customer experiences. “The standards provide a framework for understanding where to make improvements across the breadth and depth of the business,” said the spokesperson.
Since Kantar, Bain and Company and Qualtrics put the initial draft standard out for industry consultation it has been downloaded over 1,700 times, and received over 70 comments. The draft that was published in October includes edits to half of the original standards and three new ‘standards’.
How successful Kantar, Bain and Qualtrics will be in creating a global standard, depends on how other CX practitioners use its framework. Some cynical CX consultants have described the initiative as a commercial model, pure and simple.
The CX Standards Working Group said its initial focus is delivering a framework for existing clients, rather than creating a single standard for the whole industry.
The spokesperson for the CX Working Group couldn’t rule out licensing the standards to other practitioners in the future. Despite that, Kantar, Bain and Qualtrics all believe the standards will create opportunities for smaller CX consultants.
In the same way independent software developers create apps that leverage a developer environment, the group envisions smaller CX practitioners building on top of the CX framework, to deliver better customer outcomes for clients.
Independent consultants already associated with either Bain, Qualtrics or Kantar are already supporting the framework. “The fact that we are facilitating an independent network of consultants and advisors in CX is a very good thing,” said Stanford ‘Stan’ Swinton, executive vice president, NPSx, Bain and Company.
Some independent consultants have praised the trio of corporates for seeing an opportunity in the market and going for it – after all they’re in business to make money.
Kantar, Bain and Qualtrics have seen a “missing piece of the puzzle around how CX is being practised in the marketplace and they are trying to come up with a way to address that”, said Brian Lunde, a US-based CCXP and SVP of client engagement, with CMI Research.
“It’s great they’ve sparked this conversation, now the question is ‘how does the profession respond?’,” he added.
Many in the industry appear divided on what to do next.
But most agree that the need for industry standards is becoming more pressing. “The Forrester Report earlier this year laid out the problem — despite what we’re spending, overall customer satisfaction has gone down. That says it all, in terms of getting CEOs to buy into CX,” said Liliana Petrova, CEO and founder of The Petrova Experience, a US-based CX consultancy.
“There needs to be executive commitment and budgets to match, and that level of engagement and budgets haven’t materialised,” she added.
With many firms struggling to return their businesses to pre-pandemic levels of performance, expensive, long term, CX strategies have fallen out of favour, with c-suite executives and shareholders focused on short term gain.
“The last four years have completely derailed the way organisations around the world are thinking. We are so economically challenged right now, that short term financial return is the only thing businesses are interested in,” explained Golding.
Mounting financial pressure means that “there is a need to be much clearer as to exactly what capabilities are required, and exactly how to execute them”, to achieve successful CX outcomes, said Golding.
According to Petrova, standards would move CX practice beyond being a ‘nice to have’, and earn it a seat in the boardroom. “Standards would give CEOs confidence to go into a boardroom and say ‘we need to meet this level of customer experience’. But there is a sense of urgency here, we don’t have years to get standards in place.”
For standards to become established they need to be widely accepted and used, and that could be where the Kantar, Bain and Qualtric triumvirate comes unstuck. Most independent customer experience consultants CXM spoke with were concerned by the idea of industry standards being outlined, managed and owned by commercial organisations.
“For me, it comes down to legitimacy,” said Petrova. “Not just for the standards, but for the industry as a whole. If we want to be seen as serious, then we can’t let the standards process be run by a vendor.”
As one consultant put it, ‘it would be like the pharmaceutical companies telling the FDA what drugs to approve.’
There was broad support, however, for an independent body, similar to the Project Management Institute or Six Sigma Institute, to set standards, govern use of terms and manage the evolution of standards over time.
That raises the question of where such an organisation will emerge from. The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) is seen by many CCXPs as the natural place to start. The trade body has already delivered an open source, community driven standards project – the CX Book of Knowledge.
The book leverages the CXPA’s CX Framework, which was based on a job task analysis study. “The framework isn’t based on what CXPA thinks you should do, but what surveyed CX professionals report they actually do, to drive CX success,” said Greg Melia, CEO, CXPA.
The project involved authors, CX professionals and consultants working together to ensure “both perspectives were represented without undue influence from either”, he added.
There is clearly enthusiasm among CCXPs for the body to step up and outline organisational CX standards. “What I would love to see is a not-for-profit body, like the CXPA [setting standards] at the organisational level,” said Golding.
Whether the CXPA is capable of evolving into a CX standards body, and how long that might take is open to debate. For it to take on a larger standards role would be a seismic shift, that would require a significant broadening of its mission statement.
“CXPA is all about encouraging and developing expertise among people that have identified themselves with this field,” explained Brian Lunde.
Those hoping that CXPA may be able to transform into a broad standards body “might be underestimating what would be required,” he added.
CXPA isn’t committed to transforming into a ‘industry standards’ body. At the end of 2023, the CXPA published a blog outlining its future roadmap. A core component of the plan is lobbying c-suite executives about the value of customer experience strategy.
“CXPA has recognised the problem: that there are still lots and lots of business leaders who really aren’t convinced of the necessity of investment in CX,” added Lunde.
At the time of going to press, CXPA was “still committed” to the goals outlined in December, namely, to ensure recognition and understanding of customer experience as a respected professional role.
Melia said the trade body had reached out to the CX Working Group, but no other information was available. According to Stan Swinton, from Bain & Co, there have been conversations with the CXPA and other organisations about “how they could help us build and inform the standards.”
Whether standards emerge from CXPA, another body, or the CX Standards Working Group, the recent announcement has sparked a growing desire for consensus within the industry, around standards. Perhaps greater consensus is the key to unlocking the door to the c-suite.
“With consensus, the community speaks in one voice, without it the c-suite may not know what to do with conflicting messages,” said Melia.
There is a degree of consensus, in that at least the industry is debating CX standards. Now, for the hard part, how to get widely accepted standards agreed and out the door.