No matter how innovative or truly useful your product or service is, one thing will always separate successful companies from the rest: Customer experience (CX).

Your core business offering is your foundation. An important one, too, because even the best marketing and sales teams can’t save a sub-par product.

By investing in CX, however, you can quickly accelerate your success and unlock proven advantages for staying ahead of the competition:

• Customers who receive value-enhanced services are more likely to stay customers and recommend your organization to others
• Companies that are top-performers in CX create a 5.4x greater return for shareholders than CX laggards
• Nearly one in five customers will keep shopping with brands they trust regardless of price (and trust is built by providing great experiences)

Having been champions of CX since its early days—back when it was grouped with customer service or simply “being nice” to customers—we love to see how the concept has evolved from a misunderstood buzzword to a critical business function driving measurable results.

Despite the incredible power of CX, however, many organizations lack the resources or in-house expertise to establish their CX essentials and create replicable cycles to ensure the program’s success. It’s an all-too-common challenge that stops many organizations from reaching their potential… or even surviving as a business.

For those who need CX support, there is a key resource available: Customer experience consultants. After all, these business partners spend ALL of their time thinking about the impact customer experience can have.

Let’s examine what CX consultants do—which can include solo practitioners with a niche focus or teams of experts that address every CX need, like Experience Investigators—and how they can help organizations of any size drive measurable business outcomes.

The Complexities of Modern CX

Tracking the customer experience was a little easier before the internet.

Brick-and-mortar stores ruled the land and in-store shopping was the only shopping. Then came order by mail and eventually order by phone; new channels but still easy to manage. It reminds me of how we went from 3 or 4 television channels to the several hundred options for media today!

Now, our customers have literally dozens of places and ways they may interact with our organizations. As a non-exhaustive glance:

• Websites
• Mobile apps
• Social media channels (x20)
• Review sites
• Chatbots
• Virtual reality

(And they still call on the phone and visit physical locations!)

Keeping up with all these channels and opportunities is no easy feat. It requires a strategy and solid foundation to systematically improve the customer experience.

Without a centralized strategic vision and approach, customers are the ones who suffer with inconsistent experiences. These lead to higher service costs, poor employee experiences, and fewer purchases overall!

Related Content: Is Customer Experience Worth It? And How Much Should You Invest?

Luckily, we have access to powerful tools and artificial intelligence that eliminate incredible amounts of repetitive tasks. They can quickly crunch numbers, too, and empower us with insights like how customers find us and what they most likely to want.

With the right expertise to guide the implementation of these tools, organizations can quickly make sense of the landscape and map their customer journeys, identify the most important moments in those journeys, and keep pace with the emerging channels that will soon become essentials. (Even those we don’t yet know about!)

The Limitations of In-House CX Efforts

We see organizations face a common set of challenges before they engage us to shape their CX efforts.

We checked in with more than a dozen business leaders to understand their most pressing CX challenges. You can hear everything we learned and access resources to help in this free quick start guide to CX leadership.

For the quick highlights, three points resonated across the business leaders we heard from:

• They often have a hard time knowing whether they are achieving their CX goals. Many say their goals aren’t defined.
• They spend an estimated quarter of their time on data collection, which takes up more than an entire day each week.
• They feel like they lack the influence they need to drive meaningful change across the organization. They may have deep connections with specific teams or buy-in from individual leaders, but they need the full team’s support to truly thrive.

Adding to these challenges, teams frequently lack dedicated resources to support CX initiatives. These tight budgets leave little room for error or experimentation.

And making the case for CX can be challenging, because organizational leaders may have difficulty avoiding their internal biases about what can or cannot work and deserves investment.

Do any of those sound familiar?

What CX Business Partners Bring to the Table

External experts bring fresh perspectives and lend cross-industry experience to quickly identify what’s working and what needs improvement. As the saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Organizations rely on consultants across their teams: Fractional marketing leaders, public relations agencies, business strategy consultants… there are external experts to fulfill any business need.

CX consultants, in particular, help organizations develop the foundational elements they need to sustain their CX success. Consultants can also inform specific campaigns and oversee execution if the organization lacks the internal resources needed to get everything done.

A few ways that CX consultants can help include:

• Goals. Connect the dots from customer experience to business results, embedding CX within each department’s strategies and goals.
• Measurement. Establish benchmarks and set up listening posts to gather direct customer feedback and monitor key performance indicators.
• Foundation. Define the Customer Experience Mission and Customer Experience Success Statement, which will unify the organization with a clear understanding of what the customer experience should be.
• Employee education. Lead hands-on workshops and 1-on-1 training to help employees and organizational leaders learn more about customer experience principles and how their work supports the business objectives.
• Journey mapping. Identify the distinct journeys customer personas take and propose targeted strategies to address customer needs at specific moments in those journeys.

Many solo consultants will focus on just one of these areas, or CX consulting teams like Experience Investigators can support full end-to-end program support. It can all start with a simple question: What are your biggest business and customer experience challenges today?

When to Partner with a CX Consultant

Any organization can benefit from partnering with a CX consultant, regardless of whether the organization is completely new to building a CX strategy or looking to fine-tune an already successful program.

Consultants can fill in as CX leaders to set the strategy for the internal team to execute, or work alongside existing CX leadership to guide them in their day-to-day.

The key is to understand what your organization is seeking from the activation and the clear pains you’re looking to solve. A few signs it may be time to bring in a CX consultant are:

• You know CX is important, and you’ve talked about it a lot! You might be at the stage thinking, Now what? You need help defining your experience differentiation and what strategy you need to get there.
• You’re unsure what your customers need and prefer during their journey. A consultant can help you understand your audience personas and the critical moments in their journeys.
• You want your brand to stand out for its exceptional customer experience. Consultants can provide an objective analysis of your opportunities based on the competition. They’ll help you choose the highest-impact activities to start with, too!
• You need to improve operational efficiency through CX optimization. External experts can assess your internal processes and implement a new system for greater speed and better results. Because consultants help dozens of organizations each year, they’ve seen every possible setup and know how to choose the right structure for your needs.
• Your leadership feels misaligned on the value and opportunities of CX. Leaders may need to hear from external experts to fully accept and buy into the value of customer experience. Let consultants break down those internal barriers.
• You feel too reactive in your customer experience strategy. Consultants can help you build an exceptional base journey and create an actionable plan to enhance the journey based on the most valuable opportunities.

Finding the Right CX Consulting Partner

One of the best ways to find a CX consultant or consulting firm is to ask your peers and network if their organization has any recommendations. It’s also helpful to search online for customer experience topics and see which websites pop up—but be sure to look for tangible experience and proven results.

Professional associations like the CXPA can also connect you with prospective consultants if you are a member.

After you gather your shortlist, there are a few categories for assessing a potential CX consulting partner to understand if they’re the right fit for your organization:

• Industry experience and expertise.
• Proven track record of successful projects.
• Alignment with company values and culture.

Ask questions during the vetting process to learn more about these areas and whether the consultant is the right fit for your team.

Of course, you shouldn’t expect to receive free strategy advice from your questions. However, you can ask topically about your organization’s situation and deeply about the consultant’s referenceable client work.

There are a few questions you can ask:

• □ Can you tell me about results you’ve achieved for an organization in a similar situation as ours?
• □ What are your ideal first steps if we were to partner with your firm?
• □ How do you typically work with clients to identify their CX opportunities?
• □ Do you use any specific tools to improve CX processes?
• □ Are there customer testimonials or case studies you can share?

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Our team of expert Experience Investigators have worked with organizations for decades to move their CX programs forward. We’ve helped teams big and small in targeted, tangible ways that help them achieve their goals—and often open the door to more CX investment.

If you’re looking for a CX consultant, we’d love to help. Reach out to us here and tell us what challenges you’re facing.

No worries if you’re not ready to bring on an outside business partner right now! Check out my LinkedIn Learning courses and sign up for The Weekly Win email newsletter to receive weekly tips and resources.

I’m also here to answer your questions. Leave me a voice message at askjeannie.vip explaining a CX challenge you’re facing, and I can provide an in-depth answer on an upcoming episode of the Experience Action podcast.