Kanga CX Strategist speaks at the Festival of Marketing 2022

On Thursday 6^th October, one of our Customer Experience Strategists, Barbara Stewart, spoke at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing 2022, joining an impressive roster of speakers, such as Steven Bartlett (Entrepreneur, BBC Dragon, and Investor), Edwina Dunn (Creator/Founder, Tesco Clubcard/The Female Lead), Anoushka Elliot (Managing Director, Global Head of Marketing, Goldman Sachs) and many, many more.

The Festival of Marketing is powered by the foremost industry authorities, Marketing Week, Mini MBA, Creative Review, Econsultancy, and Oystercatchers.

**Barbara Stewart, Customer** **Experience Strategist**

Kanga works with some of the leading thinkers in the digital and pharmaceutical communications industries and Barbara’s speech is the latest example of our talent providing key industry thought leadership and making a real impact on the digital industry.

Barbara was asked to present at the event and delivered a speech on ‘building the business case for CX’ and outlined the best strategies to get executive buy-in. In this article, we will summarise her insights and key takeaways.

Barbara’s best business-case-building tactics that support buy-in from executives:

Understand numbers and impact before building your case

Before you build a CX business case, you need to understand the potential metrics and realistic impact of the CX plans. Pick business metric(s) that are best suited to your business (e.g. increased revenue, customer retention, higher cross-sell or upsell potential, decrease the cost to serve).

2. Start your customer experience plans small and grow them over time

Rome wasn’t built in a day! Focus on creating a basic CX plan for growth and gradually add in more complex CX strategies over time.

Be sure to focus on making your estimates reasonable and realistic

3. Educate your C-suite in a language that they will understand

This is not the time to baffle your audience with science. When aiming for maximum buy-in from executives, walk them through the topic using minimal CX jargon and focus on aligning your proposal with the business’ goals.

4. Explain to your C-suite how each department in the organisation can impact CX

Every department has a role to play in the customer experience life cycle and creating a visual customer lifecycle map, which includes every department, is a good way to explain this to your C-suite.

Start by picking out the key steps that a customer goes through in their full lifecycle with you as a business. Under each key step, list every department that plays a role in delivering the customer experience.

If you have a more difficult sell-in, you might want to include how each department makes an impact on the customer lifecycle.

5. Demonstrate how CX supports the business and the bottom line

CX is a direct investment in your organisation’s financial performance and success. Increasing revenue, reducing risk, decreasing costs, and delivering efficiencies.

To optimise buy-in from executives, it is important to align CX efforts to company goals such as growth, retention, cost per acquisition, and shortening the customer lifecycle journey. You need to prove that CX will directly grow revenue and prove that it will cut costs.

Barbara advises creating a framework that clearly outlines the Return on Experience Investment, in collaboration with the wider business, particularly Sales and Customer Success. CX metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV), retention rates, time to value (TtV) and cost per acquisition (CPA)

6. Understand how you can lead change within your company culture

The key to any successful change management initiative is having effective leaders who not only embrace change but also effectively lead others through change. When building a business case for CX, you need to guide your C-suite through the process and effectively convey the effect it will have on business growth.

7. Securing the funding

When requesting funding, sell-in the benefit of your plans first, then ask for a budget.

NEW-Building-a-business-case-for-CX-FoM-1 Download

FN: Barbara was asked to be a direct keynote speaker at the Festival of Marketing, therefore the slideware shown is not Kanga branded.

Do you need help with delivering a great customer experience (CX)? From initial insight and planning workstreams, to cocreation workshops with customers, through to developing insight-led assets and tools to drive up engagement, Kanga can support you every step of the way. We help customers transform their customer experience in a number of ways, such as (including, but not limited to)

Mapping the digital landscape. We have a proprietary methodology for understanding the digital landscape that your customers and stakeholders experience. We map the assets and destinations your users will experience and rate their value in terms of reach, relevance, and impact.

Customer journey mapping and cocreation. We map the customer journey with your brand and across channel touchpoints to understand the most effective way for you to engage. We work with customers and target users to ‘co-create’ the ideal journey with them.

Strategy workshops. With all this insight we can work with your team to develop a digital and multichannel strategy that will provide maximum engagement and business and customer impact. Strategy workshops help develop the customer journey and optimise engagement and user experience.

Gap analysis. From the landscape and the insights, we can conduct a gap analysis and understand how your digital ecosystem can be developed to meet the needs of your users.

Online listening. We can identify and assess what is being said about your company, product or brand on the internet to produce massive amounts of unstructured data.

Online asset and tool creation. From patient/HCP websites, to product launches, creative online communications, apps and congress, our delivery team can help you realise the best customer experience using all of the insights and strategic approach.