It’s easy to make decisions in a small group, yet don’t always ladder up and across complex organizations without corporate and CX vision. CX leaders struggle with deciding where to start first. They require tools and structure across the organization to prioritize. Connecting the CX vision and hierarchies to the organizational goals is key. This can reduce conflict with joint products or projects in other verticals.

Humans naturally have biases and tend to lean toward assumptions of what they know. All too common various teams have different sets of data based on their KPIs or OKRs. Auditing available data, structured or unstructured, will support prioritization by looking at your customers’ attitudinal and behavioral decisions. Consider quantitative and qualitative customer research as additional contributions to your equations. Quantify your customer’s challenges including ethnographic, user testing, and center or support ticket inquiries. For employee experiences, evaluate operational, systematic, product, and invested cost data to score.

Prioritization can impact thousands of consumers at a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars while costing front-line employee time and brand impact. On an X and Y scale, score customer pain points based on the depth of the impact as well as the scale or volume. A customer’s inability to complete a process in small amounts could be just as impactful as a repetitive annoyance to your brand. Your executives should expect to make decisions based on science and not hunches. Data-fueled use cases will significantly help move agreement in your priorities.

It can be easy justifying “fixing” problems. Creating happiness on another level can have fickle human complexity in personas that is hard to measure. It doesn’t always provide value in the investment. Studies show meeting expectations can satisfy “joyful moments” with customers and even loyalty. An uneventful flight that met arrival expectations is considered by some travelers as a pleasant one.

A prioritization process carries considerations necessary to gather confidence in a decision for the customer and brand equally. With a 4 box matrix, you can show data between a customer’s needs and desires that prioritize. Understand what satisfies your customer personas for loyalty or satisfaction and what is necessary to delight them. Note these need to be revisited as expectations continue to rise.

Start with evaluation formulas that everyone in your organization can understand. Meanwhile, identify how they need to be improved for greater refinement. Layout target milestones, plan for advanced formulas as you evolve, and begin capturing data for baselines. Some brands commonly simplify customer data against business metrics as a starting point - but don’t evolve these metrics.

As an example, airlines for decades stressed on-time performance as CX when customer expectations evolved beyond that metric. Customer evaluations can map to experience, issues, expectations, desires, or overall ease of products or services. Business evaluations commonly map to corporate strategy, quarterly profits, transactions, risk, or reduction of operational costs. Find opportunities to weigh both as they lead to growth.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) should be used to prioritize the loyalty of your customers, It can also be used to evaluate how the product and services provided are performing. It creates focus on where to invest in promoters while defining a strategy for dealing with detractors. The scoring ultimately measures your who are unhappy and may never be.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is commonly used to prioritize efforts based on current customer service from CSAT. Understanding the response to certain products or services received is the key focus in using these metrics.

Customer Effort Score (CES) is used as a metric when you are evaluating the invested customer effort they must go through to resolve an issue with a product or service. It may evaluate the process improvements from inquiring and purchasing, to the proper use or returning of the products or services.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) can be used to prioritize initiatives in extending or optimizing a lifetime cycle with the brand. This might include adding services, support or halo products to maximize total amount of spend a customer will invest in your brand products and services. It can evaluate marketing, support and attrition costs on new customers and existing.

Customer Churn Rate can be used to prioritize customer investment in a loyalty funnel. It is understanding where and whom to best appropriate funds to keep or let go of customers who won’t be loyal. It can also help you prioritize growth as your churn has to be less than net new acquisition.

Customer Retention Rate is another great metric to prioritize efforts to retain certain customers, measuring their loyalty over your competitors. They are used to evaluate a given period of time or audience segment in a cost to benefit ratio. It’s a strong indicator in prioritizing campaign targets for loyalty.

When you need to prioritize call center improvements on the average length of time for a call center agent (phone or chat) Average Resolution Time (ART) is used. It helps prioritize improving resolution to a customer sales transaction or customer customer service inquiry. This is an important metric to evaluate the effectiveness of a team to deliver a target result through training and tools provided.

When improving training, policies or tools, First Contact Resolution (FCR) can measure the percentage of incoming calls from a customer who was able to resolve their request without transferring or follow-up calls. It can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a call center staff empowered and educated, eliminating the need to transfer customers to a manager or other IT Support to resolve their issue. It doesn’t necessarily measure customer satisfaction but rather how effectively call center teams can respond in that first response.