Many organizations invest heavily in tracking and improving the customer journey to support customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS), but they still struggle to make a measurable impact because they lack certainty about where and how to prioritize improvements and deliver the insights necessary for stakeholders to do their job effectively.

In fact, over 70% of CX leaders say they struggle to design projects that increase customer loyalty and achieve results, according to Gartner.

Also, most voice of the customer (VOC) programs—structural drivers of good CX—are not evolving, according to Forrester's "Top 10 Trends Among VoC Leaders" report. Instead, those programs focus too much on surveys, squander unstructured and unsolicited feedback, lack data integration, and struggle to prove business value.

In addition, most businesses aren't approaching CX with a holistic vision. Silos and one-off myopic projects get in the way. But a wide-angle, macro view is mandatory to see and resolve problem areas.

That may sound intimidating, but a unified and businesswide approach to CX actually simplifies a company's efforts.

And though it is important to move to a companywide, unified approach to CX, it is equally important to fully understand CX challenges. Every organization is unique, but most of them struggle with CX in the same ways:

• They aren't listening everywhere: Despite the flood of information coming in, a lot of valuable data is left unused.
• They can't analyze data intelligently: Scarce resources make it impossible to pull actionable insights from your CX program.
• They aren't prioritizing the best actions: Finding problems is easy, but identifying fixes, product changes, and strategies that move the needle on CSAT and NPS is rare.
• There's no companywide CX commitment: Teams are disconnected, insights are siloed, and executive interest waxes and wanes.

And CX is not getting easier. Even as CX grows more important every year, the landscape is becoming harder to navigate.

Customer journeys are becoming more complex as interactions increase and channels expand, and expectations around self-serve, speed, and engagement authenticity get higher. Organizations struggle with striking the right balance between automation and human touch, and internal teams and budgets are stagnant while external CX demands increase.

A New Customer Experience Framework to Supercharge CSAT and NPS

Organizations can't make measurable progress on satisfaction or meet business goals by playing CX whack-a-mole—i.e., chasing one problem after another hoping to hit on the right formula. Rather, CX has to be a holistic effort, driven by leadership to keep focused on prioritization and organizational alignment.

"The CX programs of the future will be holistic, predictive, precise, and clearly tied to business outcomes. Those that stick with the traditional systems will be forced to play catch-up in the years to come," McKinsey & Company predicts.

CX isn't a box you can check. It must be an essential part of doing business and a first-tier organizational mandate.

A new customer experience framework is needed to consolidate, visualize, and analyze experience data to drive fast, smart decision-making and move the needle on beacon metrics such as CSAT and NPS. To do that, businesses need a standardized approach to data integration, analysis, and visualization. The approach must allow senior executives to practically use large volumes of data to actively improve the quality of customer interactions.