Why CX teams struggle to act on their own research
We’ve been talking to customer experience professionals and noticed a general sense of frustration with their ability to act on research insights – of which they have no shortage. This got us thinking about what might be preventing them from applying this abundance of research insights to the experiences they design for their customers.
To clarify the hunch, our experience specialists over in New Zealand, Purple Shirt, ran a LinkedIn poll. It was clear that customer experience professionals are struggling to apply insights across their experiences. Most of them felt the reason for this was a lack of a coherent organisation-wide CX strategy.
A lack of a CX strategy is something we encounter time and again with our clients, and we enjoy helping people mature their strategic approach to CX. Read on to understand why a CX strategy helps you apply your research insights, and our tips on how to create an environment that supports people to use insights to improve all your experiences.
How a customer experience strategy helps you apply research insights
A CX strategy supports ongoing evolution of an organisation’s customer-centric culture by galvanising teams around a shared understanding of the customer and the experiences the organisation is committed to delivering.
It is this shared understanding of the customer and future experiences that supports the application of research insight more broadly across an organisation. CX strategies help teams and individuals by providing a stable decision-making tool to:
- help prioritise initiatives, research efforts, and work
- highlight opportunities to validate and create
Adopting a strategy and vision allows research insights to be put into action. When an organisation has committed to a strong strategy and vision, it has clarity on the experiences it aims to deliver, making any subsequent research easier to implement.
This is also where the starting point of the strategy matters. A CX strategy built on a clear understanding of what customers are actually trying to accomplish – the causal drivers of their choices, rather than just their satisfaction scores – gives research a sharper frame to work against. It shifts the question from “how do we improve this experience?” to “which improvements will actually change customer behaviour?” That distinction determines whether your research ends up in a slide deck or in a roadmap.
This is the foundation of our Causal CX approach – a diagnostic methodology that establishes the causal drivers of customer choice before any strategy is built, so that the research your teams generate has a clear frame to work against and a direct line to the decisions that matter.
What is a customer experience strategy?
A CX strategy is a strategic framework guiding organisations to design their actions, policies, experiences and operations to deliver a consistent human-centred experience for their customers. CX strategies are developed through the combination of extensive customer research and analysis of an organisation’s operational processes and strategic goals. These inputs combine to create a view of the customer experience with supporting models and frameworks to help teams develop a deep understanding of the needs of their customers.
The wonderful thing about CX strategies is that you never know what form they will take until you have synthesised all of your inputs. We tailor our CX strategies to meet the individual needs of each client and their customers. In saying that, there are some consistent components:
- Vision – a statement representative of the future state experience – not a promise to your customers but the intent of your organisation to improve customer outcomes
- Phased customer experience model – a representation of the customer journey showing the customer’s needs, pain points, opportunities and touchpoints they interact with
- UX research and design – generating the detailed understanding of how customers interact at specific touchpoints, and translating that into experience improvements that serve the broader strategy rather than optimising in isolation. UX sits inside the CX model, not alongside it – the two disciplines work best when the touchpoint-level insight of UX research is directly connected to the strategic frame that CX provides
- Experience principles or policies – guidelines to support the design of experiences
- Behavioural segmentation of customers – a set of user types or modes that segment customers by what they are trying to accomplish and the circumstances they are in, rather than demographics or surface behaviour alone. This is where a Jobs to Be Done diagnostic becomes a strategy input rather than just a research method
- Opportunities – broad areas of opportunity that address deficiencies in the current experience or unmet customer needs
- Assumptive roadmap – an assumptive programme of work that outlines how an organisation can move from current to future state, often defined by initiatives within near-term, medium-term and long-term horizons
Additional frameworks and models vary based on the organisation’s context, customer needs, and strategic focus. For instance, a hospitality management software provider might develop a model on how prospects evaluate solutions. Or a university might define interaction types to help different departments recognise they all have similar interactions with students.
How to create an environment that turns research into action
1. Develop a customer experience strategy
Predictably, the first step is to develop your CX strategy. This gives you the leverage to use your insights towards creating better experiences for your customers. It requires the commitment and coordination of resources and effort to build a deep understanding of your customers – but it is the foundation that makes everything else possible. That is why we have a team of experts who support our clients in this work.
2. Secure leadership buy-in without overwhelming them
Work with your leadership team to secure support to act on insights. Start small, run pilots, demonstrate value and build momentum rather than presenting the full strategic ambition in one go. Partner with your product colleagues, help them understand and use insights to inform their product roadmaps, and help them recognise the role insights play in prioritisation.
3. Make it easy for people to use your work
Do not be shy about sharing your valuable work and insights – if people do not know it is there, how can they use it?
Improving access to research insights creates an environment where people can see and recognise their value. What this looks like depends on how your organisation works, but it usually needs a combination of storage, processes, and communication.
For example, some teams create a research repository linked to a customer experience model (storage). From there, they encourage teams to review research insights as they begin work on a specific customer challenge or opportunity (processes). Finally, they use internal communications channels – team meetings, Slack, newsletters, even an intranet – to share their work and its value (communication).
UX research in particular has a habit of living in presentation files rather than informing ongoing decisions. Connecting it to a shared customer experience model – so that usability findings, user testing outputs and interaction research are visible alongside broader CX insight – is one of the most practical ways to stop good work going to waste. It also reinforces the relationship between UX and CX in practice: not two separate workstreams competing for priority, but one feeding the other in a continuous loop.
What good looks like: CX research that actually changes decisions
Successful customer-centric organisations do not just accumulate research insights – they operationalise them.
A coherent and actionable customer experience strategy serves as the backbone for doing this. It provides a structured framework, guiding teams to align their efforts with the organisation’s broader vision. Without it, even the most insightful research can go unused, leading to missed opportunities. By investing in a robust CX strategy and fostering an environment that supports the implementation of research insights, organisations ensure they are not just collecting data but translating it into tangible, customer-centric actions – deepening customer relationships and achieving sustainable growth.
Elemental Concept and Purple Shirt work with organisations across the UK, Australia and New Zealand on customer experience strategy, research and design. Find out more about our customer experience services.
