I have several friends who are public-school teachers. As with many teachers, they love the core mission of education but get frustrated by the administrative aspects of their jobs. Two of the most cumbersome are frequent changes in curriculum and state teaching standards.
Customer experience (CX) leaders face a similar challenge. In recognition of CX Day 2024, Bain & Company, in collaboration with Kantar and Qualtrics, released a new set of global standards for customer experience teams. The goal is to create a common set of guidelines to help CX teams address their attribution and influence challenges. It’s a laudable goal. But the standards fall short of providing CX leaders with the direction they need to attain that goal.
The good news is that the new standards do not significantly diverge from what CX professionals are likely already familiar with. Forrester has long offered to its CX clients an assessment tool to evaluate their function’s maturity. Many of that tool’s statements mirror the characteristics now espoused by the newly published global standards. Similarly, content and courses offered by the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) center around its CXPA CX Framework, which includes categories such as CX strategy, customer understanding, design, metrics, measurement, culture, and accountability.
On the other hand, on their own, no standards will dramatically improve CX leaders’ impact and influence. Our research shows that CX leaders continue to struggle with showing impact and ROI. What CX professionals really need to do is find a common language and approach that’s shared by stakeholders across their organization, like talking about ROI in CFO terms and CX initiatives in agile or project management office speak.
CX leaders can also align their work with existing standards that their stakeholders already follow. For example, ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) publishes a set of voluntary standards for service excellence that cover key topics like design thinking, cocreation, and journey mapping. Similarly, many organizations follow ISACA’s CMMI maturity models to improve business performance. While initially created for software engineering, the models expanded to help organizations in any industry evaluate their current levels of capability and performance and offer a guide to optimize business results.
I’m not advocating for a move away from existing or new CX standards. Instead, I’m suggesting that CX leaders try to integrate their work with standards that have already been adopted across their enterprises to help them better collaborate with their business partners.
So what action should you take with this new set of standards proposed by Bain, Kantar, and Qualtrics? Definitely read them, especially if you are new to your role and need guidance for kicking off your CX transformation. If you are already following a path toward CX maturity, chances are you will find little that is new. You might find some additional standards to help strengthen your position but not enough to warrant a wide-scale shift in your approach. Instead of adopting a new set of standards that continue to focus too inwardly, connect with what already works in your organization. Like our public-school teachers prefer, let’s stay the course and focus on implementation before seeking more change.
To stay connected to these topics and my other research, go to my Forrester bio and choose “Follow.” To delve more into how to demonstrate impact and value, please schedule time to talk.
