3 CX Program Hurdles to Clear to Prove Your Business Results

Here’s how to overcome the most common roadblocks to organizational alignment on customer experience.

As customer experience (CX) leaders and change agents, we naturally understand how our work helps organizations grow and thrive.

• Proactive and intentional customer experiences attract new customers and prove we make their lives better.
• Great experiences turn ordinary interactions into something pleasant or memorable, building true connection and loyalty.
• Focused CX creates a flywheel of feedback and improvement.
• And all this leads to a more diverse customer base, greater retention, and higher customer lifetime value.

But here comes a hard truth: It isn’t always easy to prove the business value of CX. Our success requires us to align our efforts with overarching business goals and clearly communicate how CX improves the bottom line.

Having worked with business leaders and CX teams for decades, I often see common hurdles holding us back from hitting our stride. Let’s explore three of the most common challenges CX leaders often face and how to overcome them.

3 Common CX Program Roadblocks (And How to Overcome Them)

Every CX investment needs to tie back to your overarching business goals so you can deliver a meaningful ROI, and explain the impact of your efforts to leadership. This requires strategic thinking about what results are most important and how to get there with your existing resources.

Regardless of how mature your CX program is, you’ll likely face these three hurdles:

Unclear Definition of Success

Organizations often aspire to “provide a great experience every time” or “show up for customers no matter what,” but those well-intentioned hopes are hard to build a plan around. Every CX team needs to have a clearly defined Customer Experience Mission Strategy Statement. The statement explains how you’ll show up for customers. (And this isn’t just for customer-facing teams. This mission is for everyone!)

This acts as the guiding force behind every decision you make and how you’ll know if you’re moving toward your mission. And the best part? Your statement will align with your organizational goals, giving you a significant advantage in communicating your business results.

Lack of Clear Measurement (Or Overmeasurement!)

Organizational leaders may want to focus on metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), or Customer Effort Score (CES), but your CX efforts may take time to influence these scores.

Question why you track any metric, and ensure you don’t focus too heavily on any individual metric. 

Every metric gives a clue about the health of your program. However, you’ll inevitably miss areas that could be vital to your program’s success if you’re only looking at one score. There’s no magic metric!

Consider the objective ways your current efforts may deliver for the business, like:

• Reduced customer churn at a specific stage of the journey
• Increased customer order volume for a specific product or service
• Fewer support interactions or inquiries about a specific problem

Explain the financial impact of your individual efforts while keeping an eye on the bigger picture scores.

Misalignment Across Teams

Every member of your organization plays a key role in shaping the customer experience. Too often, however, CX leaders focus their efforts on empowering just the customer success and sales representatives who frequently interact with customers.

Achieving the true potential of your CX program requires ongoing employee education and advocacy:

• Include CX at every step of the hiring and onboarding process. Explain how CX is a priority in every job description, and share your CX Mission Strategy Statement in every employee’s onboarding.
• Celebrate team wins through email and during meetings regularly. Explain how individual employees fulfilled your CX Mission and how their efforts drove tangible business results.
• Align with departmental leaders to understand their business unit goals and adapt your CX reporting to ensure you can speak to improvements in those areas.

Instilling CX as a priority for every team — and showing how a great CX uplifts everyone in the organization — creates a culture that inspires ongoing excitement and innovation to deliver better for customers.

Operationalizing CX for Ongoing Improvement

Customer experience success is driven by a clear mission and definition of success, metrics to track your progress, and the support of your entire organization. With these three areas in place, you can more confidently identify priorities and experiment with new ways to delight customers — which is where the fun really begins.

Of course, there will always be hurdles in your way and new surprises in store. That’s why it’s so important to prioritize your ongoing professional development and build a network of CX connections who you can share ideas with and learn from.

One of my favorite ways to catch up with my CX community and make new connections is by attending events like Medallia Experience, an annual gathering of the most exceptional brands and pioneering CX leaders. The event is like a big group hug each year, and I walk away inspired to keep transforming how I help change agents like you transform your customer experiences. Register for Medallia ‘25 here — I hope to see you in Las Vegas!