New data sources enhance the “CX Management Cockpit” trend

Six months have passed since we published our CEX trend radar forecasts. Since then, a lot has happened regarding the “CX management cockpit” trend in customer experience management. In this blog post, we would like to highlight the most important developments.

One of the tasks of CX management, which links the external customer view to internal processes and business results, is to measure and manage the customer experience comprehensively. By tying customer satisfaction and behavioral metrics to revenue and costs, companies can more clearly assess and optimize the value of their CX activities.

Today, most companies measure classic metrics such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction but often do not integrate this data into a comprehensive CX strategy roadmap. Successful CX management requires prioritizing and linking key metrics to reveal their impact on business strategies. Highly mature companies understand the importance of this link and implement it successfully.

In addition, for CX management to be effective, we must look at process-related key performance indicators in the context of the entire customer journey and pave the way for measurements in real time to understand the interrelationship between our actions and our customers’ perceptions and to be able to respond promptly.

New drivers facilitate organizational control

In our opinion, one driver of new developments, especially during the first six months of 2024, has been the use of generative AI for the analysis and aggregation of customer files. Customer data becomes more quickly available at the individual level and is presented with advanced insights such as the calculated likelihood of defection or the resale potential. This is a quick way for marketing, sales, and customer service professionals to identify what they need to do for individual customers. In terms of CX management, you can, of course, take this information and “think bigger”: With the aggregated probability of defection, senior management can see how at-risk their customer base is, and they can apply the aggregated cross-selling potential to sales management “of their own customer base.” Since it can be up to seven times more cost-effective to sell to your existing customers compared to acquiring new customers, this information is instantly beneficial to have.

These recent developments show that there is a focus on the economic assessment of CX actions. It is critical to link behavioral metrics like the NPS and the Customer Effort Score (CES) to our business metrics. Companies need to select specific KPIs and involve top management to ensure that they run their customer relationship management holistically and profitably.

As we predicted, the trend towards CX management cockpits is accelerating sharply from 2024 to 2025. More and more top managers understand the value of customer-oriented management, although there continues to be some distrust of misapplied KPIs, such as the NPS. Going forward, it will be critical to increase and quantify the understanding of cause-and-effect chains in top management.

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Author

Prof. Dr. rer. pol. Nils Hafner (born 17.05.1973) is an international expert on building long-term profitable customer relationships. He is Professor of Customer Relationship Management at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and heads two study programmes on digital banking and sales and marketing in banking. Together with the CEX expert Harald Henn, he annually develops the CEX Trend Radar, an overview of all important CEX trends from the people, process, and technology areas.