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It's probably the number one question I get in presentations.

Someone will invariably ask, "How do I get my CEO to care about customer experience?" The person will go on to explain their CEO, or other executives, just care about the numbers.

I've struggled to provide a good answer to help get buy-in for customer experience (CX) when it’s not already obvious.

So I turned to CX pioneer and bestselling author, Jeanne Bliss, for some advice. Bliss shared some wonderfully practical tips in our interview and I'm really fired up to share it!

CX Pioneer and bestselling author, Jeanne Bliss. (Photo courtesy of Customer Bliss.)

Here are just a few topics we covered:

What metrics does your CEO truly care about?
Why are we losing customers?
What should be included in an executive dashboard?
How can silos obscure CX problems?
What is leadership bravery, and why do we need it?

You can watch the full, 22 minute interview or just skim the highlights below.

What metrics do executives care about?

You ultimately need to tie CX to the company's financials. Unfortunately, many common CX metrics fall short.

For example, a transactional survey score might tell you if customers were generally happy when they visited your store, called customer service, or tried out your latest product. But there's no direct connection to revenue.

Bliss recommends getting your CFO to help you answer the following questions:

What's the volume and expected value of customers we gained?
What’s the volume and expected value of customers we lost?
What's the net change in customer value?

It's important to gain consensus from the rest of the executive team on how new and lost customer numbers are calculated, along with their relative value.

You can then boil down the numbers to a metric your CEO will likely care about: net customer growth.

Bliss shared an example from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. In the past, a St. Jude leader might organize a fun run event to raise money, and report the percentage increase in participants. Now the organization reports the net increase in number of donors, and tracks what activities brought more donors in.

Bliss recommends reporting customer growth data in numbers of customers and expected dollar value, rather than just percentages. She suggests that a percentage can be too abstract to demonstrate a clear financial impact.

Calculating this number is the first step. Attaching it to a clear story is step two.

Why are we losing customers?

There’s a great moment in our interview where Bliss describes the utopia of a CEO pounding on the boardroom table and demanding to know why the company is losing customers.

“Why?! Why?! Why are we losing customers?!”

Finding the answer to that question requires us to reframe the stories we share to focus on your customers' goals. Focusing on your customers' goals makes it easier to draw a line of sight between net customer growth and customer experience.

Bliss shared the example of Bombardier Aerospace, which sells planes to high net worth individuals. Those buyers don’t care a lot about internally-focused data such as the sales process or how many spare parts are in stock.

Private jet customers have somewhere to go, and they need to get there fast. Bliss helped Bombardier reframe its customer stories to focus on how it would keep customers flying. That’s far more important to customers than a survey or the lead time on a needed part.

Bliss described how executive dashboards often contain red, yellow, and green dots to indicate key performance metrics that are doing well (green), in the danger zone (yellow), or failing (red). She said something that really stuck with me:

When you're measuring the wrong stuff, you're going to get a green dot for stuff that's a red dot for the customer.

Learn more from Jeanne Bliss

Did you skip all the way down here without watching the interview? Do yourself a favor and go watch the full interview here. Bliss is both insightful and entertaining.

You can see more videos from Bliss on her website, including her three principles for improving lives. I think you’ll also enjoy her description of the “find your three blocks long” concept.

Bliss has written a number of books, and I'm a big fan of Would You Do That to Your Mother? It describes how to navigate away from burning customers with "gotcha moments" to earning their loyalty through "we've got your back" moments.

This post was originally published on the ICMI blog.

A busy contact center needed to hire more agents.

The manager presented her case to the executive team. Her proposal focused on key performance indicators (KPIs) that indicated the contact center was short staffed:

Long hold times
High abandon rates
Poor service levels

The manager was disappointed when the executive team rejected her proposal. She thought she had put together a strong case based on compelling data.

So, what went wrong?

The short answer is the contact manager focused on the wrong KPIs. Here's how to identify KPIs that executives truly care about.

Step 1: Target Hot Buttons

The first step is to figure out what issues executives care about the most. I call these "hot buttons."

There's no single answer here. Take the time to ask them directly. Listen carefully to the types of questions they consistently ask you.

Let's go back to the busy contact center. Executives there cared most about cost containment. They had recently invested in some new marketing initiatives and needed to rein in spending in other areas.

The manager's hiring proposal was rejected because she didn't directly address cost containment. In fact, it raised a red flag because hiring more people would increase costs in the short run.

A more successful strategy would have been to illustrate how hiring more agents would save the company money over time. For example, adding staff might improve first contact resolution, reduce discounts given for poor service, and cut down on customer churn.

Step 2: Link Executive Hot Buttons to KPIs

The next step is to link KPIs to the issues your executive team cares most about.

Here's how a different contact center leader successfully pitched hiring new agents to the company's CEO.

The manager started by recognizing that cost containment was the CEO's hot button issue. In particular, the CEO often asked about the volume of overflow calls sent to an outsourced contact center. (This was because calls sent to the outsourcer were more expensive than those kept in house.)

So, the contact center manager focused on the percentage of calls kept in house as a KPI.

Using this KPI, the contact manager was able to show that hiring more agents would reduce costs. Saving money was music to the CEO's ears and he quickly approved the plan.

Step 3: Create Clear Reports

Executives don't have a lot of time to read dense reports. They need clear reports that are easy to read.

A great example comes from Lupe Zepeda, Customer Service Manager at CSA Travel Protection.

She met with her executive team to identify and agree upon the KPIs they were most interested in seeing. Zepeda then created a report that was easy to skim and scan, but also contained additional information.

Here's the format:

The report is shared with executives on a monthly basis. (That's their preferred time frame.) It provides a clear snapshot of the contact center's performance and allows executives to quickly identify any areas of concern.

The smiley column on the right hand side is a best practice. Some people worry that a simple, color-coded smiley graphic is too silly for an executive report. Executives actually like it because it tells them at a glance whether or not the KPI is on target.

Getting Started

Sharing KPIs with executives doesn't have to be difficult. Just keep in mind their primary purpose. They're called Key Performance Indicators because they're designed to provide a quick snapshot of performance.

You'll do well if you can use KPIs to show executives how your contact center is contributing to organizational goals and the specific issues they care about most.