Proving CX value to senior management with limited research budgets
Return on Investment (RoI) is extremely important to most businesses — it makes sense. As CX practices, philosophies and methodologies have become more and more mainstream the focus is no longer just on keeping the customer happy. With so much budget wasted on things that don’t deliver the results, why not ask your employees to prove the value of what’s being spent?
But how do you show RoI when stakeholders don’t want to spend much on research and data collection. Of course, research is time consuming and costly, but it doesn’t have to be.
An early practice in the world of CX came in the form of the double diamond, where lengthy (and often costly) Discover Phases were an absolute requirement to kick off any project. Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room. You don’t need to run a huge Discovery phase at the start of a project. These large research pieces don’t always provide the value needed in the months following its completion when you’re deep into the design process. More than that, they can often sap budget away from later stages, diminishing the output that you’re trying to create. You end up hearing comments like, ‘We can’t carry out more research, we already ran a large Discovery phase last year and can’t do it again’ or ‘We’ve got personas, let’s use them for this’.
Sometimes that research is also not relevant, it may not have the answers to what you need to know, but as it’s all you’ve got, you search for what you can from it. No doubt, you want to get your use, but that can lead to harmful practices, building assumptions from the foundations, reading into the data beyond what it’s telling you and even post rationalising. And what suffers as a result? The perception of CX, more specifically than that the perception of the value of CX. Understanding how to evolve your practices to fix the giant value question mark is the fundamental baseline to creating engaged advocates from your senior stakeholders.
So back to the exam question — how do we prove CX value with limited research budgets, ultimately ensuring your insight practice is correctly embedded with the mindset of senior management as well as customers? The truth is, it’s all about planning and communication, and this article is here to give you some helpful pointers in starting or continuing that journey.
1. Start with the answer to form better questions
A lot of the time, research can be seen to be nebulous or to lack focus so target activity around the goals and outcomes that you’re looking to achieve, designing an effective pathway to get there. That means you start your process with tangible outcomes, making it easier to get buy in as you are speaking the language of delivery, a firm favourite of senior stakeholders. For example, if the goal is to increase the conversion on a product page, run a concentrated study on discovering the most important decision-making factors and the prioritisation of information and how different stages vary that. It’s not about breadth and covering off all customer needs across every stage of the journey.
Even for a larger transformation project, you can still be targeted and clear in what you want to learn from the research and what that insight will then go on to inform.
2. Start small and scale:
Scale as and when needed rather than have a big plan. You’ll likely get budget for smaller pieces and then you can carry out further bite sized research with a reason.
For example, you could start with looking at existing analytical data to tell you what’s happening, this shows a need in discovering why we’re seeing behaviour like this. This part’s free except for your time. You could get budget to run a quant study that tells you why this is happening and what customers are thinking (at scale). Whilst that answers why you’re seeing results like this, you still may not know how to fix it, and therefore may need to run some qual sessions.
Whilst this may help with releasing small bits of budget. This isn’t the approach for all businesses, it may be that you’ll more likely get sign-off once, for a larger amount, but even in this scenario you can still start small and adapt the plan based on what you’re seeing from the results of the first method.
3. Think holistically beyond the project
Earlier, we talked about being focused and now we’re talking about being holistic. While it may seem that these contradict, they don’t. While you’re focused on your goal, you still need to understand the wider context and know the impact of how customers think and behave in a larger way. Whilst businesses tend to be siloed, senior management tend to think holistically, and you should be thinking about what is impacting performance outside of what you’re in control of.
For example, if you’re working on a website redesign, you may have no control over the product value, but it could be an issue. You can address it through content and you can have a positive impact on experience and purchase. Bringing in that outside data, helps when you tell the story to management.
4. Customise your own methods
Don’t be limited by standard processes, we fall into that trap with CX. As it’s a new-ish industry, we tend to focus on typical ways that our peers do it. Most senior management don’t care about process, they care about output. So make sure your deliverables actually deliver. Change up the way research is carried out, the way we understand journeys and customers. Limited budgets can help with this. If you want to know how to positively change behaviours, create behavioural principles for each segment type, if you want to prioritise propositions on what has the highest impact on customer retention, run a study that measures each proposition/scenario against the likelihood to stay/leave.
The key thing here is to make sure you’re holding your methodologies to account.
5. Analyse by answering the question
If you’ve framed the research around a focused goal, you should get a direct answer. You’ll get lots of other interesting data, but your stakeholders may just want the answer. Whilst they care about the high level numbers and impact, if you can be clear and answer the following, then there will be confidence in the numbers and the plan of action:
- What’s the unmet need/problem and the scale of it
- Why and where has this come from
- What’s the solution
Underpinning each of these snippets of advice is one global thing that I’ll reference back to my point on communication. To be successful, you need go beyond talking the language of customers to expand into the language of senior stakeholders.
Start by understanding your business’ cultural maturity when it comes to CX. Figure out what makes your stakeholders tick, what are the measures they care about. You may have a rare (or frequent) touchpoint to connect with the board, so how do you maximise that and ensure each interaction is an opportunity not a check point? You’ve got to be the voice of the customer, but you’ve also got to be heard by the business, who may talk a very different language. You may be a purist, but your stakeholders are unlikely to be. Your job isn’t to make them a purist as it probably won’t happen, but you’re the one who can translate the needs of both. Your job is to provide confidence in what you’re delivering is going to have a positive impact, so show that. Show the recommendation (outcome), what it will deliver (impact) and how you know that (the confidence level). Use numbers and data, but keep it succinct.
When you interact and present outcomes in this way, you naturally increase the credibility and value of research. Some may say, that senior management don’t care about the story, but many do. They might not care about the detailed process you went through, and what the individual customers you spoke to said, but they want confidence in what you’re saying, because it’s informing the direction of travel for the whole business, a direction of travel for which they will be held to account.
You may be reading all of this, thinking, ‘How is the writer of this a CX expert? They have assumed and generalised how senior management think and what they care about’. So in my conclusion, I’m putting a full disclaimer…this is a varied world and many other factors could impact what needs to be done, including the business’ CX maturity, the size, your position, the business tenure, the way the business is structured, where research sits, and the list goes on and on. But I hope, there are learnings in here that help you to get that balance between the customer and the business, no matter who the stakeholder is.
Experienced in both Service Design and UX, Veronica is an expert in transforming the CX discipline. Some of the clients sheʼs worked with include Bupa, Sony PlayStation, Vodafone, British Airways, Greyhound Buses, British Gas, Channel 4, Ministry of Defence, TfL, NHS and more.
She previously headed up CX teams in the agency world, and is now the Managing Director of ImpactSense, an insight company who are disrupting the way research is done today. www.impactsense.com
