Blogs

Webinar title: Building a CX  Business Case for Your CFO

You need to create a business case for your CX team and present it in a few weeks' time to your CFO and other key stakeholders.

On the one hand, you know that your CX team has earned back its investment many times over in the form of increased customer satisfaction, customer advocacy, and lifetime value.

On the other hand, you’re struggling to aggregate all of the right data and present it in a way that speaks to two of your C-suite's main concerns: saving money and increasing revenue.

Without months to calculate a dollar value for each CX win, you’re worried that your team’s future – and customers’ relationships with your business – could be on the chopping block.

Fortunately, proving CX’s value to an organization is far easier than it sounds. CX teams already have the resources they need, including data, tech tools, and personnel. 

In this webinar from InMoment, Stacy Bolger, VP of Global Employee Experience, talks about how CX teams can prove their worth to the C-suite. In the paragraphs below, we’ll cover some of Stacy’s top insights and tips.

What I loved:

I appreciated that InMoment’s webinar provided so many feasible and high-return approaches for CX teams looking to demonstrate their ROI.

One of my top takeaways was that CX teams don’t need to prove their department’s worth on their own.

Instead, they should partner and collaborate with financial pros early on. Doing so can help them to create business cases for projects and better understand the C-suite's priorities, questions, and objections.

Stacy noted that in a previous role, she didn’t create stories, presentations, or other key items without working alongside her organizations' financial team. This partnership helped her to create business cases and illustrate the potential impact of CX initiatives.

Besides partnering with financial experts, Stacey also recommended speaking to other employees in your organization.

Their input can supplement your data to reveal internal processes that may be hindering customers’ experiences. Their feedback can also help you spot opportunities to lower costs, increase retention, and strengthen customers’ loyalty.

My second takeaway was that customer insights can no longer afford to be seen as nice-to-haves in business.

Customers’ desires and expectations are changing from minute to minute, and even the most data-rich white paper can’t keep up with these changes – but customer data can.

Customer data can inform every initiative your business launches and help you spot opportunities to improve experiences, encourage loyalty, and increase profits.

Thirdly, it was freeing to hear that customer experience programs can take time to demonstrate their value. In fact, it’s not uncommon for more established teams to struggle to demonstrate their contributions and ROI as time goes on.

For example, newer organizations may need months to demonstrate their ROI since they’ll need time to create task forces, implement programs, and identify high-impact opportunities.

At the same time, nascent CX programs could experience exponential ROI for the first few quarters due to new practices and processes being put in play and measuring the right metrics.

Nevertheless, they may struggle to maintain that pace as they resolve CX quick wins and invest in CX initiatives that may take longer to produce significant results.

While customer delight and happiness should always be a focus on CX initiatives, CX teams should add finding opportunities to further key business priorities as a key focus, too.

Key quote:

“Understanding our leaders’, stakeholders’, and budget holders’ mindset is critical to being able to prepare the right type of information. . . make sure that you seek out folks who can help you really wrap your mind around what that financial mindset may be, because focusing on the points that you want to make is going to be your shortest way to failure and a big fat “no.”

The webinar is perfect for:

Broadly, this is helpful for any CX practitioner who’s struggled to demonstrate why CX is a necessary and profitable investment. 

More specifically, InMoment’s webinar is a must-watch for:

CX teams who don’t know where to start. CX teams know that it’s important to show that they’re bringing in more money than is invested in them. However, it’s also essential to show the C-suite that you’re helping to achieve business-wide goals like retention and revenue growth in addition to being a profitable team.

InMoment’s webinar provides excellent advice on how to pair up with financial teams to better under the C-suite's priorities and objections, as well as tips for showing returns whether you’re a new or old CX program.

CX teams that feel like they’ve stalled.  It's not uncommon for older CX teams to feel that their momentum has stalled. That’s why it’s essential for CX teams to transition from looking for quick wins and instead create a framework that links CX activities and results to organizational objectives. InMoment’s webinar shares excellent tips on how to better tie in CX activities into the wider company goals and show that they’re moving numbers important to the CFO in the right direction.

CX teams who feel that they’re measuring the wrong things. It’s easy for CX teams to fall into the strange situation of collecting too much data but measuring the wrong things. Incorporating the CFO’s concerns – and organizational goals more broadly – can help CX teams to develop more efficient measuring systems and get the answers they need more quickly without collecting too much extraneous data.

Basically, getting executive buy-in involves getting into the minds of your C-suite and demonstrating how CX programs are helping them to achieve goals they’re responsible for.

Communicating with business pros is a great first step, but from there on CX practitioners will need to do what we do best – continue to innovate and reiterate until we find the winning combination of customer delight and organizational success.