5 STEPS TO

IMPLEMENT CX
IN YOUR
COMPANY

by Mary Drumond
CMO, WORTHIX
TABLE OF CONTENTS
00 01 02
Intro Step 1 | Step 2 |
page 3 DESIGN YOUR PERSONAS MAP OUT THE JOURNEY
page 5 page 8

03 04 05
Step 3 | Step 4 | Step 5 |
INNOVATE AND MEASURE THE DISTRIBUTE RESULTS
IMPLEMENT THE EXPERIENCE INTERNALLY
CUSTOMER-CENTRIC page 15 page 20
STRATEGY
page 12

06 07
Conclusion About Us
page 22 page 23
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INTRO
5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

For a company to survive in the Experience Economy it must have

customer-centricity at its core. How can you make those values a reality in
your company?

In this practical guide, we will outline the 5 steps you need to take in order
to implement a Customer Experience strategy across your organization.

The first step to customer-centricity is understanding and identifying who

your customer is, what motivates them and what their pains are. Next
is understanding how that individual perceives and interacts with your
company throughout their lifecycle by designing a customer journey map.

Once you’ve mapped out the entire journey, you can start on the path to
improving the experience through innovation. But, it doesn’t end there!
You’ll need to set up processes to measure, tweak and update experiences
on a recurrent basis.

Before we dive into these steps, let’s quickly clarify what “customer
experience” means. How you define this term will reflect not only on your
corporate initiatives, but on the way your customers see you as well.

Customer Experience is not Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service or

Customer Success. While all these aspects may contribute to an overall
positive or negative experience, “Customer Experience” per se refers to
how your customers perceive and remember you before, during, and after
they engage with your company. Delivering experiences that align with
customer expectations is crucial since these perceptions and memories will
form the foundation of their decision to buy, re-buy and stay loyal.
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Everything starts at the need. The instant that need arises, customers begin
5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

to look for alternatives in the market that attend this need, and this is when
the experience begins.

The experience also includes customer expectations, comparing

competitive offers, and the way customers weigh out the pros and cons
of your value proposition until arriving at the most important moment: the
decision of whether your offering is ‘worth it’ or not.

If something is ‘worth it’, understanding why customers buy from you (or
not) is the best way to find out what is working (so you can do more of it),
and what isn’t working (so you can stop doing it).

But, it doesn’t end there. After the moment of the decision, post-purchase
or post-renewal sentiments, perceptions, and future expectations are all
part of the experience. An ideal experience will eventually loop back into
re-purchase or up-sell.

Let’s start the guide at the best place for any customer-centric organization
to start — with the customer.

00 | Intro
01
DESIGN
YOUR PERSONAS

5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

 6

Customers all have different needs and expectations. Therefore, they all
5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

deserve to be treated accordingly. Designing customer personas can help

with that.

A persona is a fictitious person that represents a larger group of customers

with various social demographics, geographics, and psychographics.

• Demographics are the collection of data for a specific population

in order to categorize the needs of consumers (i.e. race, age, gender,
income, education, job title, family size, religion).
• Geographics refer to the location of the individual. It can be
extremely broad like the continent, hemisphere, or all the way down to
a specific location like a neighborhood, zip-code or venue.
• Psychographics are the habits, behaviors, lifestyles, interests, and
hobbies of consumers (i.e. shopping preferences, leisure activities,
hangouts, social media channels, favorite shows).

On occasion, research can get into deeper details on personas, but we

generally focus on these three. Personas are useful for segmenting
marketing strategies, targeting, and communicating who your customers
are across an organization. Simply stated, it helps companies bring the
right stuff to the right folks to meet their needs, wants, and expectations.

Persona design is an exercise in empathy. Your job is to put yourself in

the customer’s shoes and see the world from their perspective, literally if
possible. This way, you can have a better understanding of their needs,
pain points, likes and dislikes. This will help you reach them with
marketing and engagement campaigns and give you ‘someone’ to build
your customer journey around.

Many persona designers (or impromptu designers, if you would) like to

create a profile in order to create a visual association with the persona.
I’ve heard of companies who have created life-size cut-outs of their
personas and placed them around the office to keep them top-of-mind.

01 | Design your Personas

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This is what a traditional persona design would look like:

5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

Lucy
Occupation: College Professor

Demographics Motivations
- Age 40 Amy is very motivated by her children,
- Single mom of 3 family values and the community
- Salary of $80,000 around her
- Master’s Degree in English
Pains
Geographics - Lack of time
Atlanta, Georgia - Limited understanding of
technology
Hobbies
- Zumba Goals
- Cooking - Balance work + homelife
- Reading - Find easy ways to stay active
- Crafting

Whichever method you choose, what matters is the time and thought you
put into understanding and identifying who your customer is and how you
can help them fulfill their needs.

01 | Design your Personas

02
MAP OUT
THE JOURNEY

5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

 9

From the moment a need arises until beyond its fulfillment, a customer
5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

journey map is a visual aid that identifies every interaction a customer

has with your company. It provides an overall understanding of customer
pain points, efforts, inquiries, concerns, expectations and other valuable
insights on the customer experience.

Customer journey maps enable your company to continuously measure

what’s important for your customers at every interaction and share
insights throughout the entire organization. It ensures that everyone in
the company is aware of the impact their work has on the customers’
perceptions of their experiences and the resulting customer decision.

HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP

To start off, here’s a checklist of the things you must highlight in your
customer journey map:

a) Persona: Use the persona designed in step one, but also consider
consulting with real customers through VoC surveys to find out what
drives them to do business with you.
b) Goals: Note the beginning and end goal of the journey. What does
your persona need to accomplish?
c) Touchpoints: These are points of interaction your company has
with your persona from first contact to after sale. These moments
are important for measuring the relationship of your company with
its customers. Basic touchpoints are taken as a given and customers
expect it as a standard. But there are also unique touchpoints that
exceed expectations. These are the moments where you can go
beyond what is expected and create memorability.
d) Emotion: How you make your customer feel along the touchpoints
of the journey. Mark the pain points, high points and moments that
could generate emotional responses.
e) Engagement: The way your company interacts with customers along
the various touchpoints to help accomplish their goal.

02 | Map out the Journey

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f) Innovation: You can separate from the pack by innovating 1. Share-of-wallet, or SOW
5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

is the concept of making

key moments in the experience, consequently gaining a you customer decreasing
greater share of wallet1. It’s been proven that people are spending with other
suppliers while increasing
willing to pay more for better experiences. Innovation is
their spending on the
not only meant to make the CX journey easier and more products and/or services
delightful, but also to capture money for the company that provided by your company

the consumer would otherwise spend elsewhere.

Here are the steps that will help you create a journey map that
can change the outcome of your company’s processes and
interactions.
1. Strategic outlining: The initial stage where you outline 2. KPIs: Key Performance
Indicators
the motivation for this project, set goals and KPIs2, and get
approval with leadership. This is a good moment to secure
an internal sponsor that will help champion this project with
the executive board.
2. Stakeholder consulting and co-creation: Once you’ve 3. Cognitive Dialogue
Technology (CDT) is a
outlined the project, you must assemble the team that system that continuously
will collaborate to detail each moment of this journey. You measures the key
experiences and market
cannot do this alone. You must consult with all areas that
competitors that impact
touch the customer to understand every inch of the process. the way customers perceive
your worth.
Ideally, you would invite customers, third-party resellers or
It uses AI to build
partners, and employees to share their point of view. If you unique dialogues that
cannot bring your customers in to contribute, this is the best automatically adapt to what
each customer wants to
time to use cognitive dialogue technology (CDT)3 to gain talk about, with millions of
a full understanding of the experience. customers simultaneously.

3. Journey mapping: Go over the current customer

journey, or the journey “as-is” step by step and evaluate
what happens at each touchpoint. It is crucial to look
beyond processes and take in the entire outcome.
Map out pain-points and sensitive or high-tension areas that
require attention and/or improvement.

02 | Map out the Journey

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5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

Mapping is a great team building exercise and there’s no right or wrong

way to construct it – post-its, whiteboard, digital, or even pen and paper.
A journey map can be created for multiple personas for any industry, even
though their needs are completely different. The most important part of
this exercise is to walk a mile in your customers’ shoes in order to provide
them with a better experience.

02 | Map out the Journey

03
INNOVATE AND
IMPLEMENT THE
CUSTOMER-CENTRIC
STRATEGY

5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

 13

Now that you know all the good and bad of the current 1. You may also consider
5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

reducing effort and friction-

journey, set out to reduce the negative while boosting the points, since they tend to
positive experiences.1 be common contributors to
negative experiences.

Here’s where we’ll switch things up a bit. Instead of following a

basic scientific research method (hypothesize test confirm),
Let’s try a different approach.

Why guess or hypothesize what your customers value when

you can ask them?

How do you ask them? Through Cognitive Dialogue

Technology (CDT).

What would you consider a smarter move from a business

perspective? To arbitrarily decide what your customer wants,
and set out to build processes based on assumptions hoping
your customer likes it, or simply ask them what they want to
begin with?

The second option, right? Well, the same thing applies to

understanding what motivates decisions. You can guess, or
you can ask. Before you set out to innovate your customers’
journey, make sure you’re focusing on the parts that really
matter to the customer and are the driving force behind
their decisions.

For instance, you may believe that ‘relationship’ is the most

important thing to your customer, and invest a significant
amount of money, time and effort into improving your
call center only to find that the real reason your customer
choses to buys from you is your short delivery times. Do your
company and your budget a favor and don’t make strategic
decisions without listening to your customer first.

03 | Innovate and Implement the Customer-centric Strategy

 14

Once you have consulted your customer and designed an 1. A fundamental aspect of
5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

any customer experience

innovative customer journey, it’s time to bring it to life! To do so, improvement project is
you’ll need to hand the project off to the individual departments a clear communication
channel to your front-line
that will apply the innovation. Consider assembling a employees, outsourced
representatives or third-
“task-force” composed of team leads that will encourage
party vendors, and/
departments to work together. A system of leadership and or any customer-facing
stakeholder.
interdepartmental communication can help avoid one of the
biggest threats to any CEM (customer experience management)
project: silos. If silos go unaddressed, they could become the
downfall of the entire project.1

Test thoroughly! Running a pilot program with a control group

before large-scale implementation is a good way to certify
that your changes are having the desired effect on customers.
Once the test phase is concluded, company leadership steps
in to approve and execute the plan accordingly.

03 | Innovate and Implement the Customer-centric Strategy

04
MEASURE
THE EXPERIENCE

5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

 16

Once your new journey is up and running, the next step is

5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

verifying whether all is going according to plan. The following

step digs into measuring the experience and you should do so
at multiple touchpoints throughout the journey.

You’ll now learn how to create a Voice-of-Customer channel

that listens to how your customers are responding to your
innovation and new customer-centric initiatives. Here are the
main goals companies should aim to accomplish throughout
the journey:

1) Verify whether your company is delivering the right

experiences
As mentioned earlier, Customer Experience is not just about
delivering high satisfaction, low effort or good service. It’s
about how well you are delivering on your customers’ needs
according to their expectations. Dialogue technology can
help you understand which of your customer expectations
and perceptions are impacting their decision.

2) Conformity check 1. I do not recommend the

use of metrics designed
When companies reach out to their customers immediately to measure branding
and loyalty, such as
after a purchase or interaction with the company NPS® for transactional
(transactional surveys) they can verify whether the company surveys. Consider using
a conformity metric such
delivered what was promised to the customer as planned. If as CSAT, a self-adaptive
metric like Worthix® or an
there were issues or expectation gaps along the customer Effort score, like CES.
journey, the company has the opportunity to intervene and
make it right.1

04 | Measure the Experience

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3) Stay up to speed with your customers’ ever-changing expectations

5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

Who’s going to be the next Toys ‘R’ Us? Every time innovation or
disruption occurs, a new standard is set for the market. Remember
when Amazon Prime first introduced guaranteed two-day shipping?
Suddenly, the 4-to-6-day shipping offer was no longer good enough.
Customers became aware that it was in fact possible to get their
products on short notice, and that shifted the expectation of the entire
market towards shorter delivery dates.

4) Gauge customers’ emotional connection with the brand

Both Net Promoter and Customer Satisfaction were created to measure

how customers’ feelings affect their relationship with a brand. While the
way a customer feels doesn’t necessarily mean they will always churn or
stay loyal, it’s a game changer in commoditized markets with multiple
options that customers can chose from.

5) Understand customer decisions

For years, companies had no way of pinpointing why customers buy.

But now, we have the know-how, the technology and the methodology
to do so.

04 | Measure the Experience

 18

Customer surveys are essential for gathering the insights needed to take
5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

your business to the next level of customer experience, but not everyone
gets the methodologies behind well-constructed and rigorously thorough
surveys. Here are the steps that must be taken in order to guarantee a
scientifically sound survey:

1. Determine Sample Size: To conduct a survey, the number one step

is to consider sample size. Sample size is the number of respondents
that you’ll need in order to accurately represent your entire base
without surveying all of your customers on a frequent basis.

2. Pick your methodology: Your methodology for capturing customer data

can include, but isn’t limited to CSAT, NPS, Worthix, CES, and others.

3. Design your questionnaire: Probably the most labor-intensive

part of the process. First, make sure your questions are bias free;
they must be ambiguous and not lead the respondent one way
or the other. Second, make sure the questionnaire isn’t too long.
Respondents may abandon the survey before it’s over, disqualifying
their answers. Last, ensure your questions flow properly, with option
trees for yes/no responses.

4. Choose your platform: You could choose between Do-It-Yourself

(DIY) platforms or an all-in-one solution. If you choose DIY, make
sure you have the manpower and knowledge to collect, process and
analyze results on your own. All-in-one solutions deploy, collect and
analyze responses for you, as well as offering consulting services.

5. Deploy: Send your survey to customers through whichever

channels you prefer; email, text, phone, in-app or through social
media platforms.

04 | Measure the Experience

 19

6. Analyze Responses: Extract relevant and actionable

5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

insight from a sea of endless data. You’ll probably need a

team of analysts to do a proper job. If you choose
to analyze the data on your own, make sure you are
qualified to do so. Incorrect handling of data may
compromise the scientific integrity of the research.

7. Update: If you use recurring surveys at multiple touchpoints

along the customer journey over long periods, you’ll need to
constantly update your surveys to guarantee that questions
and answers reflect your most recent value proposition.

When it comes to analyzing feedback, you will probably need 1. Or you can get yourself
an all-in-one A.I. powered
the marketing research or data analytics department to go platform that does all of
over your results and present their findings. If you don’t have this for you, like Worthix.

an internal research team, you might need to outsource this

job. Regardless of how you choose to process the data, your
goal is to benchmark your new results with past data to prove
your efforts are paying off.1

04 | Measure the Experience

05
DISTRIBUTE
RESULTS
INTERNALLY

5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

 21

Don’t skip this step. This is where you present your leadership with the
5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

feedback collected through customer dialoguing.

Presenting the ROI is a step most CX practitioners tend to overlook. Make

no mistake: no matter how amazing your results are, if you can’t prove
profitability, your project will either get dropped or put on the backburner
for the sake of a new project that can!

In STEP 2, we covered identifying an internal sponsor to champion your

project. It’s time to bring this person back into the picture to help get
these results in front of the right people. When designing your reports
and presentation deck, it’s important to highlight the revenue potential
with improved customer loyalty, repeat purchases, and decreased churn.
These are the numbers that your board wants to see.

05 | Distribute Results Internally

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CONCLUSION
5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

The path to customer-centricity is one of collaboration and empathy.

The success of your project hinges on all the moving parts coming
together to reach a common goal: a positive customer experience.

The secret to reaching the finish line is to track your efforts every
step of the way and deliver a customer journey that provides your
organization’s decision makers with tangible metrics. These metrics will
empower them to make confident decisions that benefit the customer,
as well as the company.

Lastly, the best way to be customer-centric is to understand your

customers’ needs. The best way to understand their needs is to ask them,
instead of inferring.

Cognitive Dialogue Technology (CDT) is a system that continuously

measure the key experiences and market competitors that impact the way
customer perceive worth. Understand customer needs and expectations
with Worthix.

REQUEST DEMO
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ABOUT US
5 STEPS TO IMPLEMENT CX IN YOUR COMPANY

THE AUTHOR
Mary Drumond is Chief Marketing
Officer at Worthix and host of the
Voices of Customer Experience Podcast.
She has a passion for consumer
behavior and extensive experience
in marketing research, specifically
customer experience (CX) and customer
experience management (CEM).

Mary currently serves as a board

member for the University of Georgia
Master’s in Market Research program,
Officium Labs and Latinas in Tech.

Connect with Mary on Twitter and LinkedIn

WORTHIX
Worthix was born in the Experience Era where customers are the backbone,
and customer centricity is the soul of every company.

Innovation is our core and we believe in wielding technology to bring

companies and customers together. Our purpose is to use cutting edge
mathematical models and Artificial Intelligence to extract actionable,
relevant, and easy-to-understand insight straight from your customers’ minds.

Learn more about Worthix at worthix.com