For true CX success, small and nimble wins

By Simon Hall

Out of the many emails I’ve received over the last few weeks, one in particular stood out. It was from a regional roofing company that I used to fix a hole a while back.

This was not the typical, meaningless ‘we’re here for you’ email that we’ve all been receiving lately. This was something completely different. It contained a personal message from the CEO about how the pandemic has affected his own family and outlined their plan to adapt their business model to accommodate the current business climate.

They recognized early on that how they interacted with their customer previously was not going to work during the pandemic. What’s really incredible is they managed to completely redesign and implement a brand new customer experience model in about 3 weeks. I’m talking about everything from a new online customer portal, software partnerships, virtual meetings for customer and staff, and on top of all that, financing options for new customers.

I’ve no doubt that there will be issues and hiccups with such a speedy implementation, but to customers, sometimes there’s as much value in trying as there is in succeeding.

This type of service innovation in a larger company would take many months - if not years - to implement. Research, metrics, budget allotments, more research, and umpteen meetings between c-level, management and operations would have been required before they even had a plan for such a change.

In other words, it would likely never happen.

Why does our industry continually highlight big companies when discussing CX best practices and innovation? Is it possibly because the entire CX industry is being represented by a few over-priced, over-valued and imminently impotent SaaS platforms?

It’s been our experience here at Human that small/medium businesses have been all but completely overlooked in the CX industry, yet we’ve seen some of the best CX practices and innovation in this segment. We’ve also found that they are much more open to discussions regarding improving their customer’s experience and implementing our recommendations.

These are the companies that really get it. They’re usually owner-operated, with small, nimble teams that are able to assess and implement innovations quickly and efficiently. This is where we as an industry can better demonstrate the true value and potential of CX, not with the multinational ‘titanics’ that take months to change direction.

When I hear the CX industry is in trouble (still), that we’re not demonstrating ROI, and that executives just don’t get what we’re doing, I have to wonder whether we’re just focussing on the wrong type of companies.