Aligning your customer experience (CX) strategy with business goals is crucial for driving growth and improving performance. While many organizations recognize the importance of CX, integrating it with broader business objectives remains a challenge.
Research shows that a strong CX can lead to a 1.6x increase in customer lifetime value and a 1.9x improvement in customer retention (Forrester). Yet, many companies struggle to incorporate CX into their overall strategy fully.
Often, organizations treat CX in isolation, missing the connection to key business goals like revenue growth, brand loyalty, and market leadership. In this interview, Sally Mildren, founder of Boss Lady Consulting, shares her expertise in aligning CX strategies with business objectives. With over two decades of experience, Sally explains how to create a focused, scalable, and measurable CX strategy that drives long-term results. Whether you’re refining your approach or starting from scratch, Sally’s insights offer practical steps to align your CX efforts with your company’s goals.
Sally Mildren: a journey in CX and leadership
Q: Sally, with over 20 years of experience in customer experience, marketing, and leadership roles, what first sparked your interest in customer experience? How has that passion influenced your career path?
As the Director of Marketing, hearing from customers at events, on social media, or at in-person meetings that their needs were not being met, or met well, is what drove my interest in CX. After seeing first-hand that it is not enough to create a brand promise and draw more customers to a business, you have to ensure that once they get to the business, the experience, product, and service they receive aligns with what we promise in marketing.
The literal disconnect makes everything harder – brand, reputation, marketing, internal communications, customer service, and retention.
What drives Boss Lady Consulting’s mission and approach?
Q: What inspired you to start Boss Lady Consulting, and what is the driving mission behind your work?
Our mission is to help smaller businesses, nonprofits, and rural health organizations align their brand, marketing, and customer experience to serve humans better and ensure their workforce is proud of and happy to work for them. Simply, we help businesses operationalize what is needed to take good care of the humans they serve.
Too many businesses only drive toward the bottom line and revenue goals, assuming that will drive the best growth. In actuality, the greatest growth comes from businesses with a healthy culture and a strong commitment to doing what is right for the customer.
McKinsey, Forbes, Garner, and other research studies have shown how an unwavering commitment to customer experience (CX) leads to more profitability and sustainable growth. Many smaller businesses think they should focus on that after reaching a certain level. It’s vital to integrate that into your brand and goal-setting from the onset.
Q: Your focus is on helping human-centric businesses grow. How do you combine CX strategies with marketing and branding to make that happen?
A brand is the expression of your mission and purpose, your values, and the impact you expect to have in the world. Marketing is the storytelling of that benefit to the people you are trying to reach, and CX is the expression and implementation of that promise. They are vitally interconnected.
Aligning CX with business goals for growth
Q: In your opinion, what are the most effective ways for organizations to demonstrate ROI from their CX investments?
For instance, if a key priority is revenue growth in your nonprofit, then you should identify key strategies that will drive retention of existing donors and possible increases of donations from them, as well as campaigns to recruit new donors. Both are vital to revenue growth, and both will make an impact on driving the primary goals of the organization. Both will help impact the experience of your donors in the organization.That’s far beyond impressions and clicks, but is the marketing driving donors, and is service and messaging retaining existing donors?
Measuring ROI and metrics for CX success
Q: Beyond ROI, which performance indicators do you believe are most valuable for measuring CX success?
- Contribution to revenue growth
- Contribution to EX
- Retention % of existing customers
- Increase of service/support/expanding existing customers buy-in
The role of CX in meeting business goals
Q: How do you ensure that a client’s CX strategy is aligned with their broader business objectives?
You start at the key business objectives and work backward instead of creating a CX strategy and trying to cram it in or align after the fact. Every CX strategy should be driven to the same goals as the organization, or you risk being irrelevant.
Q: How do you help organizations to shift from a profit-only focus to a more customer-centric approach for sustainable growth?
- By demonstrating how CX-centric approaches lead to better profitability.
- By tying your work to the key business drivers and measuring results honestly and transparently.
We help connect the dots for businesses to see how CX is tied to marketing and brand and then help create integrated approaches to address the needs of the customer in a way that drives growth. That takes looking at the data closely, the process and journey for the work, and the customer. In most cases, the messaging needs to be aligned with the brand to express the value proposition you bring to your clients clearly. This basic work can have a big impact in pretty short timelines.
Using customer feedback to improve CX
Q: How do you guide companies to leverage customer feedback and data to continually improve their CX strategies?
Feedback loops are the impetus for continuous growth. We help identify the key metrics and measures related to their ideal CX experience and the growth needed for their business, create a dashboard, and help them establish the process or relationships to get the information they need to measure.
For many business entities, marketing is not privy to the business reports that show sales, growth, engagement, or other key measures of success in the bottom line. We help those clients understand who to talk to and what information they need to begin being included in those conversations and reports.
It is vital for marketing and CX professionals to build an understanding of, and habit of referring to the data often. The data that counts. Is volume increasing? If not, are you talking to the right people? Is your message clear enough? Is there an access or experience issue? Are you on the right channels? Do you have enough brand awareness?
These are all important questions to have data tied to, and the results will give you directional insights into optimizing your marketing, ads, or messaging. It all is part of delivering campaigns and marketing that support the overall impact of the organization.
Adjusting to customer needs
Q: What are some common mistakes you’ve seen when organizations fail to align their goals with customers’ needs?
They create products that don’t sell because they don’t evaluate the customer’s needs. They stick with a product or service that is no longer relevant. They rebrand to fix a service or product issue. They over-emphasize new, shiny objects or “silver bullets” to fix their sales issues. They overspend on marketing without also measuring if their message, art, and approach are resonating with their core audience.
Balancing AI and human empathy in customer experience
Q: What are your thoughts on AI and automation in customer experience, and where do you see the biggest opportunities and challenges?
I think that AI can support better data collection and understanding and quickly assess that information to produce better service; it’s amazing. I also believe AI can be used to flag customer sentiment or loyalty triggers based on language choices for call center or feedback and help you restore trust quicker, resolve problems, and track trends.
Where I don’t think AI should be leveraged is to replace processes or services that require compassion and empathy that are only available from humans. So, if you intend for your entire call center to be replaced by AI bots, you will experience disengagement and frustration. A balanced approach is always the key. Great tech makes you more productive and effective at identifying what is best for humans. And it takes great humans to care for the customer.
How brand, marketing, and CX drive success
Q: What advice would you give to businesses looking to adopt a more human-centric approach to customer experience?
Creating a human-centric culture is not an overnight success story. It requires buy-in from the top leaders and funding – that will demonstrate your commitment is real and fuel sustainable change.
Create your culture and staff awards around the core values that place customers at the center of your decision-making, and you will see increased employee engagement. Create sales and marketing programs that celebrate, honor, and respect the customer and what’s good for them, and you will see increases in sales. Create a communications plan that celebrates the stars of your show (staff) and the stories of impact for your customers, and you will see increases in brand affinity and leads.
Being a human-centric leader and company is not just good for people, and it’s good for business.
Recap on the insights from Sally Mildren
Sally Mildren’s career spans over 20 years in customer experience, marketing, and leadership. Her passion for CX began when she realized that true business success requires more than just brand promises—it’s about delivering a consistent experience that matches those promises.
Sally’s approach is simple: align CX, marketing, and branding to create a seamless customer journey. She advises businesses to define their ideal CX, set measurable goals, and tie their efforts to business priorities like revenue growth and customer retention. She also highlights the importance of leveraging customer feedback and data to continuously improve strategies and optimize marketing efforts.
For businesses looking to enhance their CX, Sally stresses the importance of balancing technology with human empathy. While AI can improve data collection and problem-solving, it should never replace the personal touch in customer service. Keep in mind: Help Desk Migration makes it easy to import CSV data into your help desk platform and integrate AI into your CX strategy, helping you strike that balance.
Her advice for companies looking to build a human-centric culture? Empower every employee to contribute to the customer experience, take small steps toward improvement, and always listen to your customers. By doing so, businesses can drive lasting impact and create memorable experiences that set them apart.