Contact Us

Good CX = Great Business Case

Jim Tincher Jim Tincher 10/31/2019

I’m returning home from a day and a half at Comcast’s headquarters, locked in a room with other marketing and CX thought leaders. (Okay, so not exactly locked in…)

They brought us to Philadelphia to share the work they’re doing in customer experience and to get our feedback and advice. But mostly to show us what they’re doing.

I came in pretty ambivalent. I’m not a customer – I wrote this post about firing them, but I’ve seen Graham Tutton speak twice (read about it here), and it appears they’re making a sincere effort to improve. What they shared today reinforces that positive belief – they really are working hard to change the trajectory.

What did They Share?

The Comcast CX team began by working on the blocking and tackling that many programs neglect, and I’ll write more about that in future posts. But one important thing they did really separates them from most CX programs: they began by engaging their finance team at the start of their CX transformation. From what I’ve seen, this is an unusual approach – but one critical to get executive buy-in.

CX and Finance aren’t typically best friends. That’s a missed opportunity. We don’t hate Finance – it’s just that few CX teams spend much time with them. As the Comcast team began their CX program, they brought their Net Promoter System (NPS) transactional survey data to Finance who confirmed that customers with a higher NPS score have lower churn and a higher customer lifetime value (CLV) than do those with a lower score.

This approach of asking Finance to validate your survey results is quite rare. Most CX programs aren’t confident enough in their survey data to expose it to this type of scrutiny. But I ask you – if your score doesn’t translate to customer behavior, then why waste your customers’ precious time with this survey? If customers with a higher score don’t stay longer, spend more, or have a higher share of business with you, then you have a broken survey.

As one Comcast leader shared about their approach to social care: “We didn’t do it for an ROI, but because it’s the right thing for customers. But the surveys sure helped with the business case.”

We can argue whether Comcast’s CX program is truly improving their customers’ experience – their data says they are, but ACSI still rates them poorly – however they’re clearly making a huge investment in CX, and are taking the time to create a deliberate, best-practices approach.

While most of us in CX can’t create a 400-person social care team, and others may not believe in NPS as a measurement, we can all learn from their partnership with Finance to prove (or disprove) the impact of our preferred CX measurement.

It’s just a shame that more CX leaders don’t do that.

Keep reading.

Stay updated with our insights.

Stay updated with our insights.