CX Questions All Organizations Should Ask About Their Customers

Public and commercial sector organizations have committed to enhancing the customer experience (CX) they provide. In this article, we provide simple, yet impactful questions to help organizations better understand, align, and build the capability for CX. This article can guide public and private sector organizations at any stage of their CX journey – whether new to CX or looking to transform their existing approaches to CX. 

What is CX?

CX refers to a customer’s impression of an organization and its products or services. CX is shaped by a variety of factors, including the quality of products, the effectiveness of services, and the relationships forged from interacting with the organization. These relationships can be built from direct interactions with the customer, such as using the product or service, or indirectly through brand advertising and industry reputation. 

CX as a discipline requires organizations to rethink their business approach – intentionally working across entities and functions within their structures to address the customers’ needs through the customers’ point of view. For example, the public sector relies on the Life Experiences framework to ensure the public’s needs and preferences are at the center of their work. It is difficult for the public to understand every government program, budget line item, or organizational chart to decern which part of which organization to request assistance from. Instead, the public experiences life events, such as the birth of a child or a natural disaster, and agencies collaboratively provide their services based on these life events.¹ As federal agencies put themselves in the shoes of the public in these circumstances, they are more easily able to discern which solutions and services are the most effective and accessible.

Ultimately, the customer is the driving force, while the organization paves the path for the customer to achieve their goals with various expertise and resources. 

What key questions can improve CX?

Based on Guidehouse’s extensive experience in providing CX strategies and best practices to clients in the public and commercial sectors, we have created a list of questions below that enable organizations to align to customer needs, determine what organizational needs are essential for excellent CX delivery, and establish processes to monitor customer sentiment for continuous improvement.

These questions help establish the building blocks for organizations to exceed their customer’s expectations. Organizations should pose these questions to themselves early and often as the interactions with their customers evolve – from understanding the customer to delivering services and consistently evaluating the customer’s perception of the organization and its product. 

Define customers and their needs — Questions that help define the customer and their needs.

• Who are our customers? What are their values, goals, preferences, capabilities, and resources?
• What are their needs?
• Where, how, and when do we engage with these customers?
• What are the resources, tools, and capabilities required to understand the customer?
• Are the customers individuals or are we providing services to other organizations and entities?

Are the customers individuals or are we providing services to other organizations and entities? — Why does this question matter? 

Organizations that provide services to other organizational customers (e.g., states, regional governments, non-profits, counties, etc.) have additional considerations when designing an approach to CX.

Relationship complexity — Organization to organization interaction means understanding and engaging multiple stakeholder/customer groups across the organization. Organizations should pose the questions above for each stakeholder/customer group they interact with. Additionally, organizations should ask themselves whether they can implement a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program or a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to manage the complexity that comes with interacting with several entities. 

Nuances within organizations — Organizations who can segment their customer entities into groups should target and tailor their approach to serve these groups/organizations more holistically. Organizations should identify the values, goals, preferences, capabilities, and resources for each of these groups and ensure they address the needs of these groups throughout their CX journey.

Access to data — Understanding another organization’s capabilities, capacity, and resources requires accurate and timely information, which often means more data mining, management, and analysis. Organizations should focus on determining what resources, tools, and capabilities are required to understand the customer to ensure that these additional capabilities and requirements are accounted for prior to delivering a service. 

Determine organizational capacity to deliver excellent CX — Questions that help assess how your organization can best help the customer achieve a positive CX.

• How does our organizational structure position us to deliver the best services to customers?
• Do we have the right capabilities, strategies, processes, and systems? Are they aligned to customer needs?
• How do we create an environment for leadership and employees that prioritizes customer needs?
• What partners should we be collaborating with to better achieve the customer needs?
• Is our organization’s culture and employee experience optimized to drive collaboration, impact, and delivery excellence to deliver on the customer needs?
• Do we have the right qualitative, quantitative, and unstructured data and data analytics processes/tools to analyze and visualize customer sentiment? Are we able to translate this analysis into actions to improve?
• Do we have recent CX initiatives that address the customer’s identified challenges and gaps? If not, do our existing CX strategies and tools address these pain points?

Evaluate and monitor CX across all journeys — Questions that help ensure continued evaluation and monitoring to maintain a positive customer experience.

• Are we consistently providing these customers the services, products, and experiences that best meet their needs?
• Are we consistently requesting and incorporating feedback from our customers?
• How are we measuring success and positive CX?
• What emerging trends or policy changes can impact the current CX strategy? How do we ensure our CX efforts remain relevant to the customer? 

Why are these questions important?

According to a recent survey report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 94% of respondents believe that CX is important to their organization’s overall success.² These questions enable organizations to prioritize CX, which can decrease burden, increase efficiency and transparency, and ensure an equitable experience for customers. In turn, CX can impact profitability, act as a key brand differentiator, and lay the foundation to customer loyalty, setting businesses up for long-term success.

For public sector organizations, Executive Order (EO) 14058 recognized CX improvements as a priority across 17 federal agencies.³ In particular, federal agencies designated as High Impact Service Providers (HISPs)⁴ are critical to meeting the EO goals due to the scale and nature of their public-facing services. Posing these questions allows agencies to focus on CX, which can increase confidence and trust with the population they serve, improving their ability to meet their missions. 

What do we do with the answers?

These questions are designed to provide organizations with valuable data about their own capabilities and how they can dynamically align with their customers’ preferences to ensure customer satisfaction throughout service delivery. Organizations should evaluate these answers and identify any trends, pain-points, and insights that can translate into actionable CX strategies.  As organizations continue to evolve their relationships with customers, circling back to these questions can allow organizations to consistently adapt their approaches to place the customer and their needs at the forefront of their operations.

If organizations routinely adapt their business approach and services based on the answers to these questions, they can secure longstanding success and a positive CX that leaves a lasting impression.