Welcome to the year 2023!

In 2022, our continent (Africa) and data-inspired prediction was that businesses would be looking inwards to appraise the benefits of investing in customer experience. We predicted that they would do this by conducting what I called a customer experience appraisal. After due consultation with business owners in Africa, a chief financial officer (CFO) and a number of students in the MBA class of 2021/2022 at the University of Warwick – Warwick Business School MBA program courtesy Roli Esisi. (Congratulations on your graduation!), we arrived at the below definition.

We predicted that more businesses will demand a return on customer experience investments and will seek to understand what has worked and why, what hasn’t worked and why and what can be done to maximize the wins or get more returns leading to businesses hiring or firing CX professionals, requesting for CX management capability boosting across the board, the dissolution or reassignment of CX teams and exploring other options to managing customers and CX profitability.

An Overview of Customer Experience in 2022

How did the above prediction turn out? In my opinion, We were spot on especially for the African continent. More and more businesses want justifications before any renewal or acquisition of resources to improve customer experience, especially technology. We are also aware of CX professionals that were fired because of their lack of relevance with regard to translating CX management activities to business goals.

In joint research with Mandisa Makubalo, we discovered that there were overall 7 major challenges that businesses faced in 2022 which you could consider as directly or indirectly related to CX management. The image below shows the top 5 challenges.

If you look at the top 2 challenges, you can see that high operating costs and supply chain challenges gave businesses the most concerns in 2022. So yes, CX professionals may be ticking all of the boxes by tracking CX metrics but herein lies the result of all our efforts. How does an increase in CX metrics which we’ve celebrated reflect on the bottom line while addressing operating cost, supply chain, financial recovery, customer-centric culture and employee attraction & retention business challenges? After doing all the customer research, journey mapping, feedback collection, sharing with stakeholders and tracking metrics, what next?

It’s Time To Extend Customer Experience (CX) Management Methodologies To All Business Units

Have you given any thought to the fact that businesses can succeed as well as sustain and scale successes by adopting the CX management methodologies company-wide? This will mean that the CX management thinking demand of CX-related staff is required for all employees in varied degrees. This will mean that CX-thinking is no longer the exclusive requirement of the CX management team. Now more than ever, every employee is required to have the capabilities to manage CX ranging from a novice level to an expert level depending on job roles and designations.

If you have never given this any thought, 2023 is the time to do it and we predict that businesses in Africa that can do this will address the aforementioned 2022 business challenges. If our guess is right, the question in your mind is what are these customer experience management methodologies.

Inspired by the 5 phases of design thinking and reflecting on our vast experience researching, designing and managing experiences for multi-sector clients in Africa, the below image details CX management methodologies from my point of view.

Whether its operations, marketing, customer service/customer support/customer success/customer relationship management, finance, supply chain, corporate services, human resource management (inclusive of learning & development), internal control, business development (including product & service designers), information technology, leveraging the above methodology in your operations by way of CX extension is a sure way to not only address business challenges but to sustain successes.

As mentioned earlier, the knowledge and skill required to design and manage experiences in companies in Africa are no longer exclusive to employees in customer service or customer experience management. It applies to everyone. Every employee should be proficient in customer experience management if we are going to solve real business problems practically and sustainably. We cannot all rely on the head or manager of CX or the C-Suite to solve problems from a human-centred perspective. From the entry-level to the executive management level, if businesses are going to win and address supply chain, operating cost, employee retention, market share and customer centricity, everyone needs to get plugged into CX by way of adopting a CX extension mindset.

This means that:

• if you are in operations, you will need to understand the different beneficiaries of your operations processes, tools/systems and their jobs to be done so you can design or redesign experiences that reduce your operating costs while being considerate of employees and customers collecting and acting on feedback to sustain your wins
• if you are in human resources (HR) management, you will need to understand the kind of employees you want to attract and retain, the best fit for your company vis a vis company values, vision, mission, etc and their jobs to be done so you can design or redesign experiences to increase offer acceptance rate and reduce attrition rate while collecting and acting on feedback to sustain your wins
• if you are in sales and/or customer service, you will need to better understand your target customers, their jobs to be done, how your product/service can sustainably meet that need, where you can find them and how they prefer to be served to repeatedly/increasingly sell, cross-sell or upsell to increase market share while collecting and acting on feedback to sustain your wins
• if you are in marketing, you will need to better understand your target customers, their needs, preferences, expectations, culture and jobs to be done to effectively communicate product/service value to repeatedly/increasingly stay top of mind, increase customer conversion and increase market share while collecting and acting on feedback to sustain your wins
• if you are in supply chain, you will need to understand the different customers/beneficiaries in your ecosystem from requesting departments to vendors, suppliers, etc and their jobs to be so that you design or redesign an experience/process that solves your existing supply chain challenges while collecting and acting on feedback to sustain your wins

The businesses that will dare to THINK DIFFERENTLY and get everyone plugged into solving existing business challenges by looking inwards and outwards stand a chance to record great business results in 2023. Let’s call it the THINK DIFFERENTLY cycle.

What Next?

What will you be doing differently? Are you going to consider plugging into the customer experience (CX) extension? Let us know how it goes it works out for you/your organization and with your permission, we will be honoured to document and showcase your success(es) as a case study to demonstrate that CX management methodologies can be leveraged to fix business problems and unlock business growth.

Have a good one! ❤️

deBBie akwara, CMC, XMP

Founder & CEO, Niche Customer Experience Group.