Many businesses used to define their success based on the products and services they provided. As the world become more digitized and markets more competitive, however, the tides have turned to where businesses often rise and fall based on how well they can retain and gain customers through customer experience (CX).
By prioritizing a customer-centric approach, businesses gain more traffic and generate more sales. But it’s difficult to integrate a transformation from a traditional product-to-customer mindset to one that sees the world through the customer’s eyes.
That’s why Chapel Hill-based CX Pilots is dedicated to helping B2B professional services firms—think law, accounting, financial services and engineering firms—to put “humanity back in your brand.” As one of the world’s leading end-to-end customer experience management (CEM) consultancies, their mission is to help organizations grow by becoming measurably more human-centric in every aspect.
And now—like many consultancies before them—they’re moving to offering software-based tech products to further scale their reach to more businesses. Think of it as a startup within a consulting firm.
CX Pilots has shown its commitment to ensuring success for human-centric approaches based on its accomplished numbers. They’ve created over $900 million in value for their clients, some including CIBC, JP Morgan & Chase, IBM and Google. They’ve completed over 400 projects through 40 completed CX transformations, while conducting over 300K customer surveys.
Even so, according to CX Pilots Founder and CEO Steven Keith, companies have been slow to adopt CX strategies because it can be difficult to reframe a traditional mindset. Understanding customer needs and expectations can be hampered by insufficient customer data, time constraints and high costs.
That’s where CX Pilots’ new tech-enabled roadmaps can help.
If a company is looking to pivot its business, CX Pilots will work with them to break down an assessment diagnostic benchmark, create a CX/business journey map and help implement strategies to keep up with the map.
The initial assessment mirrors the work that CX Pilots does, where they go in and talk to customers, internal stakeholders, and members of the management and board, then figure out from a customer and employee perspective what needs to change within an organization. Their traditional approach is through a research-gathering mode, where they actually go out and talk to people, but now, they’ve put all of those processes into a scalable stack by sending out questionnaires digitally and then producing the findings almost instantly.
They’ve then created a way to gather those inputs, put them into a tech stack that someone can log into, see what the company’s current approaches are and then segment it by the department, creating a shared understanding for the organization to focus more on centering around the customer and their experiences. After they’ve created this “on the same page” approach for all departments, they’ll then deploy strategies for what needs to be addressed and what needs to be changed.
CX Pilots is now offering three forms of engagement that an organization can choose from: Essentials, Foundations and traditional consulting.
Traditional consulting is what CX Pilots already offers, but it can be expensive for the customer and difficult to scale for CX Pilots because of the hands-on manpower necessary. Foundations is a new hybridized model for mid-tier businesses, where CX Pilots will administer as much help as they can through scalable tech, but will still offer their non-tech services. Essentials is a self-serviced, complete tech stack with no involvement from CX consultants.
CX Pilots Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Joe Bell said that as they gathered more data from previous analyses and consultancies, they wanted to come up with an aggregate solution so that specific organizations can see typical pain points or areas that need to be focused on. That’s why they’ve started to experiment with AI models that will predict strategies and data.
“We wanted to come up with a schema to essentially translate all of our past work into something that’s scalable and that the system can interpret and produce results from,” Bell said. “Using AI is helping us to predict things like customer churn and release some machine learning models on customer data because it builds off of all of the knowledge that our consultants had and goes beyond anything that we thought was ever possible.”
CX Pilots plans to launch their new tech offerings at the end of Q1. Even though it is not fully available yet, Bell said that the team is excited to start incorporating AI and tech to bring more human-centric approaches to more and larger businesses.
“Our mission is to change business so that business cares about people and it would be impossible to fulfill that mission without technology,” Bell said. “CX consultancies traditionally are not very tech-enabled. Usual tech components to CX consist of customer feedback systems, but to take that beyond just gathering data and to provide the same value that one of the world’s best CX consultants can do is really an adventure. And it’s really something that motivates me a lot and I’m proud that we are taking this company to that next level.”
