Customer experience capability needs direction. Without a clear strategy grounded in customer evidence, even capable teams can end up working on initiatives that don't align with business priorities or address what customers value most.
We often see organisations where customer experience work happens without shared direction. Different teams pursue their own improvement initiatives, executives aren't aligned on what success looks like and there's no clear connection between customer experience strategy and business outcomes.
This is why we have included Strategy, Leadership & Culture as a category in our CX Scorecard.
It's not about creating vision statements or running culture programs. It's about whether your organisation has a clear customer experience strategy informed by customer insights and business priorities, whether leadership is aligned on what you're trying to achieve and whether frontline teams feel empowered to surface problems and contribute improvement ideas.
The real problem this solves
When strategy, leadership alignment and culture aren't clear, effort goes in different directions. Without a shared strategy, teams pursue different visions of customer experience improvement. One team focuses on digital transformation, another on personalisation, another on reducing friction. These initiatives might all be valuable but they're not coordinated toward achieving specific outcomes that matter most to your business and customers.
Leadership isn't aligned on priorities. When executives don't share customer journey KPIs or have different views on what customer experience success looks like, it becomes difficult to sustain investment or make coordinated decisions. Customer experience initiatives compete for resources without clear criteria for what should take priority.
And frontline insights stay trapped. Teams closest to customers see problems and opportunities that leadership misses. But without mechanisms to surface these insights or a culture that encourages input, valuable knowledge stays trapped. Improvement ideas come from headquarters rather than the people who understand customer struggles firsthand.
What strong capability looks like
They have a clear strategy grounded in customer evidence. Customer experience strategy connects directly to business priorities and is informed by journey performance data and customer insights. The strategy specifies which customer experiences matter most, what outcomes you're trying to achieve and how success will be measured.
Leadership is aligned on what success looks like. Executives share customer journey KPIs and have a consistent view of customer experience priorities. This alignment enables coordinated decisions about resource allocation and sustained commitment when initiatives require cross functional effort.
Design principles guide consistent decisions. Documented principles help teams make consistent choices about how customer journeys should work. These aren't aspirational statements but practical guidelines that inform design decisions across different touchpoints and channels.
Frontline teams contribute improvement ideas. The organisation actively encourages and captures input from people closest to customers. Mechanisms exist to surface problems, share insights across teams and turn frontline observations into improvement initiatives. Customer experience gets better because people who see issues can contribute solutions.
What we're measuring
We're identifying whether direction is clear, leadership is aligned and culture enables the people closest to customers to contribute.
Organisations that establish clear direction, align leadership and create culture where frontline insights flow upward are the ones that sustain customer experience improvement over time and achieve better outcomes through coordinated effort.
If you're responsible for customer experience but teams are working toward different visions, or leadership isn't aligned on priorities or frontline insights about customer problems aren't flowing into improvement initiatives, that's the gap this capability fills.
Get your CX Scorecard to see exactly where your capability sits and receive personalised recommendations on where to improve.
