CX CONSULTANTS AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE EXPERTS: HOW TO GET MORE FROM SERVICE PROVIDERS

The best CX consultants take on diverse sets of responsibilities across client engagements based on business priorities, pain points and budget. Yet all activities aim to reveal opportunities and design frameworks for more meaningful customer connections.

The CX consultant process typically kicks off with discovery research leveraging tools like interviews, customer journey analysis, observations and surveys. Experts gather insights around pain points, emotional triggers, channel preferences and brand perceptions from a customer lens. Business intelligence fuels future planning and enhancements.

Mapping the end-to-end customer lifecycle often represents the next consultant undertaking. With outside objectivity, CX consultants and consulting firms evaluate decision cycles, brand interactions, competitive forces and cultural components shaping customer acquisition, purchases, service issues, advocacy and loyalty. Journey visualization is pivotal for revamping experiences.

Advisors then use findings to pinpoint experience gaps or innovation possibilities against customer expectations. Short term, consultants may propose website redesigns enhancing self-service and ease. Long term, consultants architect ecosystem strategies unifying engagement across mobile apps, IoT, retail,contact centers and emerging channels.

Steering design sprints is another main task where CX consultants facilitate rapid customer-centric solution prototyping and testing for new ideas. Mockup creation and design iteration with stakeholders and customers accelerates aligned concepts.

For maximum impact, experts embed customer insights and outside thinking into organizational culture via workshops. Addressing mindset shifts C-level leaders must champion while equipping employees to advocate customer needs fosters lasting, enterprise-wide transformation.

Ongoing satisfaction benchmarking represents continuous CX consultant work as well. Deploying trackers like Net Promoter Score and customer effort score surveys then analyzing text feedback ensures visibility into happiness levels and brand perceptions that may shape operational priorities.

Throughout engagements, customer experience consulting firms inject frameworks ensuring initiatives remain anchored to client perspectives rather than internal assumptions for sustained results. With an outsider purview of fastest-growing companies, thought leaders also introduce innovations in personalization and journey flexibility for clients to continually raise bars.

Leading CX consultants tackle a myriad of intersecting tasks—from diagnosing pain points to championing agility to tracking sentiment—that ladder up to memorable interactions and deeply rooted loyalty which lend competitive advantage. Advisory work fuels this flywheel momentum.