Framework for CX Transformation: How to Operationalize CX at Scale

CX transformation is the transformation of an organization’s values, structures, operations, technology, and culture to mature its CX capabilities by creating an environment able to operate with a focus on the customer and deliver high-quality CX at scale.

Many organizations today struggle to achieve CX transformation. In this article, we present a high-level framework to guide organizations to transform and operationalize CX work. This framework outlines 4 key areas within the organization where change must happen. These focus areas are:

Company’s vision and strategy
Employees
Operations
Technology

We found these focus areas can be transformed by using several approaches to change, based on:

Establishing CX leadership and governance
Culture management
Using customer insights and metrics to monitor CX and react promptly to dips in the experience
A solid practice of experience-design operations

Our Research

We set out to understand the challenges of achieving CX maturity and to uncover strategies utilized by organizations to develop a CX-focused operational structure.

We conducted research specifically geared toward helping our audience of UX practitioners and organizations, who may already have a mature UX practice within their organization at the product level but seek to broaden their experience-design work, operationalize it within their business, and deliver high-quality customer journeys at scale.

This effort included a survey with 148 UX practitioners, 22 in-depth interviews with customer-experience leaders across many industries and of varying roles, including executives, directors, and consultants, and a large-scale literature review of research and resources relevant to these challenges and the ways organizations seek to resolve them.

Why CX Transformation

Most companies were built to support the traditional experience of doing business in person or over the phone. Decades of investment in operational structures created silos of responsibility within the organization to handle the various arms of the business. As these businesses started offering services via digital channels, they added separate digital-product groups to their operational infrastructure. But, unfortunately, a silo-based infrastructure is not flexible enough to address customers’ expectations for smooth interactions across all available channels.

The problem is that today’s users often complete their customer journeys using many different channels and touchpoints and expect personalization and perfect synchronicity among all these points of contact with the business. So, even though the experience on each individual channel can be stellar, if transitions across these channels are difficult or these experiences are inconsistent, the overall experience will suffer.

However, achieving a good broad-scope user experience, commonly referred to as customer experience (CX), is no easy task. This discipline cannot simply be wrapped around a company’s existing legacy business. For CX work to thrive at scale, beyond one-off initiatives, companies must develop an operational ecosystem that allows quick reaction to customers’ needs and thoughtfully designed and delivered experiences, rather than a patchwork of fragmented brand interactions. Creating this ecosystem requires organizations to transform their internal operations to resolve the challenges that legacy business practices impose on these business goals.

Although many organizations recognize the importance of developing these capabilities, most are still not equipped to deliver — partly because it’s not always clear how to get there. Implementing the CX transformation is largely uncharted territory, with little guidance available to aid companies in making this transformation.

Framework for CX Transformation

Based on our research, we developed a high-level framework to guide organizations through CX transformation. It involves:

4 main focus areas in the organization where change must happen
4 strategic building blocks for change, that, in combination, describe how change can happen

Focus Areas: Where Change Must Happen

The focus areas represent the areas within an organization where change must occur for organizations to deliver high-quality digital customer experiences at scale.

Vision and strategy: Committed leadership invested in a long-term and defined customer-focused strategy
Employees: An organizational structure with an established network for collaboration across teams, departments, and silos
Operations: New processes and procedures designed to foster collaboration and work across functional groups toward a shared vision of journey-focused experience design
Technology: A technical infrastructure that supports crossfunctional operations and journey-focused customer-experience management

CX focus areas — *There are 4 main areas in which to focus transformation efforts for an organization in order to develop a comprehensive approach toward successfully designing and managing experiences at scale.*

Building Blocks for Implementing Change: How Change Must Happen

In analyzing the efforts organizations undertook within each focus area, they all involved a combination of strategies on 4 main dimensions (that we call building blocks):

Experience-design operations: The definition and standardization of design practices for journey-level and relationship-level customer experiences
Customer insights and metrics: The ongoing collection of behavior, experience, and business metrics and the constant monitoring of these metrics in conjunction with customer feedback and sentiment for the purpose of continuous iterative improvement
Culture management: The cultivation and maintenance of a CX and journey-focused working culture across the organization
Leadership and governance: A defined system for decision making, compliance, and overall stewardship over the organization’s CX operations

CX Focus areas and building blocks — The CX building blocks (right) represent principal strategies used by organizations with proven success in developing and managing superior digital customer experiences. These strategies influence the specific efforts, programs, and changes put in place across the organizational focus areas (left) to operationalize CX.

The building blocks are grounded in proven tactics and best practices implemented by organizations that have successfully achieved CX transformation. These building blocks must be operationalized and embedded into the organization’s way of working, specifically within the 4 CX focus areas. The building blocks will manifest in unique ways within each focus area in the form of programs, processes, and strategic decision making.

Let’s explore these focus areas and building blocks within the context of the following software-service scenario.

Example Scenario: Software-Service Company

Suppose the leadership of a software-service company has seen stagnant growth over several quarters. Analysis of the company’s offerings and the market identified a few challenges:

Engineering focus: The long-established business grew with an engineering-innovation mindset. The company’s products were expensive and had the most advanced features in the market. However, analysis showed that product complexity has become a detractor, as customers began opting for simpler alternatives, with the features they needed for their everyday lives.
Fragmented working structure: Internal analysis showed that departments did not share information or collaborate. Each business unit’s success was measured differently, which meant they had different goals as they interacted with customers. This lack of coordination was reflected in fragmented and often contradictory interactions between customers and the business and caused customer frustration and mistrust in the brand.

For these reasons, the organization knew it had to shift focus away from the delivery and sale of products and toward creating cohesive customer experiences. This process means putting the customer at the center of its operations through a CX transformation.

Let’s explore how this organization may implement change in each of the main focus areas using a combination of building blocks for developing change-directed strategies.

Focus Area 1: Vision and Strategy

When an organization embarks on an effort to embed customer-experience practices into everything it does, the first tangible step toward change is to craft a vision statement that captures its intentions and goals for how it will deliver services to customers going forward. This statement will serve to create focus and commitment among leadership roles and to align all employees around a unified strategy and guide them in choosing customer-focused strategies in their day-to-day jobs. For example, hotel chain Ritz Carlton’s vision statement reads, “The Ritz-Carlton experience enlivens the senses, instills well-being, and fulfills even the unexpressed wishes and needs of our guests.” Although short and simple, this statement illustrates the priority placed on customer experience and asserts the specific goals for the quality of experience it seeks to provide.

In our example, the organization’s leadership develops a vision statement and strategy to encapsulate its goals and intentions going forward. The vision statement reads, “We meet customers where they are to deliver relevant, low-effort experiences with every single interaction creating life-long customers that not only stay with us but tell their friends about us.”

Leadership should also develop a strategy for establishing basic capabilities within each of the 4 building blocks.

Focus Area 2: Employees

To deliver on the unified vision, the organization needs to connect employees across traditional organizational silos. In line with a defined vision and strategy, as well as direction from leadership, a transformation-focused team should be formed to coach and coordinate teams that have ownership over various phases of the customer journey to collaborate toward the development or optimization of customer-journey experiences.

This work should be based on user-driven insights rooted in research and design best practices; new roles or working groups may need to be defined to support it.

Example actions:

Leadership and governance: Organizational leadership puts together a customer-experience team to develop a customer-experience program aimed at communicating the CX vision and at helping employees and teams understand how it impacts their work and how to put it into practice. CX research specialists supply the CX team with insights and performance data to inform program governance.
Experience-design operations: The customer-experience team develops standards and processes to drive crossfunctional collaboration and enable functional teams in the application of user-centered design practices to their work.
Customer insights and metrics: Data scientists and CX research specialists are hired to focus on journey-based research and analysis to fuel decision making at all levels, while employees are trained in ways to utilize this data to improve the customer experience.
Culture management: Employees take part in training and culture-change initiatives that support the new way of thinking. Change-management specialists may be hired to spearhead this initiative.

Focus Area 3: Operations

To support this new way of working, the CX-program leadership group should institute new working processes and standards for the delivery of work. These efforts should establish a guide and toolset for functional teams to apply user-centered design and research practices to how they work.

Example actions:

Leadership and Governance: The customer-experience team analyzes the working processes of all teams having ownership over parts of the customer journey. It collaborates with crossfunctional leadership roles to develop a playbook for:
- o how different aspects of work will be approached
- o how teams and individuals will be held accountable for adhering to the new standards and operations
- o how work will be prioritized based on user-research data, which roles will be involved in prioritization, and how often prioritization meetings should occur
Experience-design operations: New journey-level design operations are defined including details such as how functional teams will collaborate, how work is reviewed and evaluated, what design principles should be applied, and a high-level design process.
Research operations: New journey-level research operations are defined, including details such as which touchpoints will be measured and how, how will data be analyzed and distributed for use.
Culture management: Culture-change initiatives are designed and delivered throughout the organization to influence necessary changes in employees’ mindsets and ways of working, so that the focus is on customer experience.

Focus Area 4: Technology

The organization’s technical infrastructure can present significant constraints to the delivery of cohesive customer experiences. Team and departmental silos have resulted in disconnected data silos, where information is fragmented and impossible to share across systems; this data fragmentation prevents organizations from using it to improve the quality of their customer experiences. Organizations should evaluate their customer-data structures and work toward the integration of data.

Example actions:

Leadership and Governance: Technology stakeholders are brought into work-prioritization and future-state planning to provide insight into technical capabilities.
Experience-design operations: Technology stakeholders are tasked with establishing a technical infrastructure with a unified data model enabling experience designers to orchestrate customer experience down to the individual-customer level.
Research operations: Investments are made into customer-experience–management software platforms to support research operations and aid in journey orchestration.
Culture management: Digital workplace tools are utilized to deliver CX-program initiatives, promote CX successes, and generally communicate culture-change initiatives.

Conclusion

The framework introduced in this article can be used as a lens to guide CX transformation and establish an operational structure for the ongoing management of customer experience.

Since each of the 4 building blocks applies to each of the 4 focus areas, you have a total of 4×4=16 things you can (and should) do to improve CX. The number of things to get right is one of the reasons CX transformation is difficult: many projects fail because they overlook critical elements, which is why it’s useful to have this framework to analyze your efforts. To reach full maturity, all 16 of these improvements should be made across the organization, but as an organization begins this transformation it should focus on foundational changes such as establishing basic leadership, research operations, and technical infrastructures that are required to support design operations.

Our newly published report Operationalizing CX: Organizational Strategies for Delivering Superior Omnichannel Experiences provides detail about each component of this framework, along with case studies and considerations for application. In addition, our training course CX Transformation and Journey Management provides an in-depth overview of the topic, along with relevant hands-on activities.