3 Tips for Getting Internal Stakeholder CX Buy-in

Published 17/02/25 under:

We have delivered customer experience (CX) solutions for hundreds of companies at Kerv. Along the way, we have helped revolutionise the CX landscape with seamless digital transformation underpinned by expertise and innovation.

Yet it remains the case that some leaders still do not get the value of investing in CX. And stakeholder sponsorship of innovation on this scale is essential—you cannot hope to transform CX merely on day-to-day operating budgets.

So how do you build a compelling case to secure buy-in and investment for transformational integrated CX solutions from internal stakeholders? A business case that will drive investment, integration of business processes and ultimately improved customer satisfaction and engagement?

Some elements of the business case will depend on your sector, your internal and client-facing communications and your regulatory compliance needs. But there are three core elements of internal stakeholder management that apply to almost any business: the internal audience, the case for risk avoidance and addressing concerns.

Understand your internal audience 

Listen to your stakeholders. Identify their goals and challenges, understand the priorities of each business discipline and individual leader. Spell out simply how your solution will improve their lives and their teams’ success.

One of the best customer examples of this is Skipton Building Society, where the customer experience ranking had fallen 38 places.

This triggered wholesale digital transformation across the business, with a new contact centre platform, telephone migration to the cloud and integration of existing workforce management solutions and data warehouse infrastructure affecting every leader in the business.

Ben Shirt, project manager at Skipton Building Society, said: “We needed to ensure internal stakeholders and key decision makers felt comfortable, particularly among our business readiness council and internal audit team.”

Grow internal confidence in your proposal

As you communicate with stakeholders, build a case for corporate risk avoidance supported by proof points. Facts and figures will help secure emotional and financial investment for the solution across the leadership team.

Industry data, particularly from reputable sources such as Gartner, adds powerful third-party credibility, endorsement and reassurance to your proposal.

Storytelling is another powerful asset: case studies and examples from other brands, solution implementations and your competitors can be powerful tools in securing buy-in.

At Kerv, for instance, we supply vendor data to demonstrate 100% regulatory communications compliance for call recording and data capture. We encourage customers to talk to each other about their experiences of transformation and transition.

As an example, Terra Firma, an equity firm, migrated to Voxivo4Teams and achieved a 50% cost saving on calls while retiring legacy PBX technology and endpoints and enabling a team of 55 to work remotely without interruption.

Be ready for questions and concerns

Queries from stakeholders are often signals of interest rather than objections. Identify and anticipate these before you present to individual stakeholders. There will be predictable questions around migration and integration of new solutions within the existing tech stack, systems and workflows.

Regulatory compliance may also be a concern in many markets. Our Consultancy Services team works with customers to navigate current and future issues with stakeholders. If you don’t have an answer to a concern, consult with us and we can help you formulate a response.

The solution implementation and transition can trigger a wave of innovation across key business functions, so be ready. We can work with you to prepare an innovation roadmap.

For our client Atom bank, it enabled an improved focus on service quality, employee experience and customer support. The solution affected forecasting, workforce management and rationalisation of queues and call flows.

Atom stakeholders felt the knock-on effects across the business, from staff recruitment and retention through to enabling an individual call centre operative to manage phone calls, chat, email and Facebook customer interactions from a single desktop.

The employee dimension is always a key consideration in terms of transition, readiness and innovation, and at Skipton Building Society we trained 1,700 users in three weeks.

The data from continuous regression testing and monitoring during the ‘Go-live and Hypercare’ early phases also helped increase stakeholder confidence and demonstrated tangible value.

Putting it all together

As we near the end of the financial year, it is important to start thinking about CX strategies and budgets. We’re fortunate to have dedicated practice teams available to help you build robust, informed cases for investment. They will ensure your internal proposal includes the following points:

Problem/opportunity

• What’s the issue and what’s the impact on the business?
• Why it matters.
• What happens if we do nothing?

Strategy

• Summary of vision.
• Simple high-level summary of tech, process and organisational changes needed to achieve strategic goals.

Costs/benefits

• Cost of strategy.
• How strategy enables the business overall to increase income.
• When will return on investment will be delivered.

In summary, know your stakeholders’ priorities, anticipate their concerns and be armed with data. Stay focused on the business case, not the technology.

Keep stakeholders involved in the ongoing integration and performance testing process and adopt collective goals and success or improvement metrics for the broader corporation that the transition will enable.

Reinforce stakeholder involvement with ongoing communications to reassure with pre- and post-implementation updates and success metrics. Keep customers top of mind and highlight anticipated improvements in customer satisfaction and experience, using proof points and examples.

And with all your interactions, always keep it simple. Leave out as much IT-related detail as you can. What counts is keeping stakeholders needs in mind. For help in building your own CX business case, contact us now.