Every seasoned CX professional has experienced this frustrating reality: you have the data, the insights, and the vision to transform customer experiences into company growth, but your biggest obstacle isn't technology or resources – it's people. The difference between customer experience initiatives that drive your company’s CX maturity and those that die in committee meetings isn't about having better ideas. It's about mastering stakeholders, especially internal ones. The good news is that proven tools and strategies can help overcome these challenges. Leveraging lessons learned from our wins and mistakes, we've identified the key principles for successfully managing change.
The Strategic Stakeholder Map: Your battle plan
The most successful CX leaders don't just manage stakeholders – they orchestrate them and bring them closer together. This begins with creating a strategic stakeholder map that goes beyond the typical org chart. According to projectmanager.com, Stakeholder mapping is a visual process that charts each stakeholder for your project, product or anything connected to show who can influence the work you’ll be doing.
Plot each stakeholder based on their decision-making power, interest and investment in your CX activities. Your C-suite sponsor might have high influence but moderate interest, while your customer service manager has moderate influence but intense interest. Each requires a completely different engagement strategy.
Map out not just who makes decisions, but how decisions get made. In complex organizations, the person with the title isn't always the person with the power. Understanding informal networks and influence patterns is crucial for navigating budget cycles.
For example, at Škoda Auto, we struggled to prioritize stakeholder engagement, while handling delivery with multiple stakeholders involved. A stakeholder map helped us visualize the importance and depth of relationship that we have with the various stakeholders across Škoda. We ended up with a prioritized list of stakeholders that we should invest proactive energy into aligning with and understanding their needs, while also explaining the value of what we are trying to achieve for them.
Building your coalition
In large organizations, isolated CX champions rarely succeed. You need to build a coalition of advocates. Find your early adopters by identifying stakeholders that are already frustrated with current customer experiences and are open to experimenting with iterations that might not immediately bring tangible results but have long-term perspective.
When your stakeholders have buy-in but are still resistant to larger investment, try to propose a quick-win initiative that can help develop their trust further. These become your initial coalition members and help build momentum. Then create shared ownership by framing CX initiatives as collaborative efforts where stakeholders have genuine input. By focusing this exploration on the needs and goals of individual stakeholders, you can transform potential resistors into co-creators.
In one of our episodes of Minimum Viable Podcast, Eva Šípková, Head of CX for e-commerce leader Alza, mentions how she is able to build coalitions across the complex organizational structure: “You need to be a partner of that particular department. We have to define what they should track, what their metrics are. For example, if they have a full portfolio of a particular segment… if they miss some vacuum cleaners there. The fullness of the portfolio could be one of those customer numbers, which is a business number for them.”
When facing mid-level resistance, strategically engage senior leadership. A brief conversation with an executive can eliminate weeks of downstream resistance – but use this tactic judiciously, as it goes against the collaborative nature of your previous attempts.
At the end, establish feedback loops to create structured opportunities for stakeholder input throughout your initiative lifecycle. Activities such as one-on-ones, retrospectives or reviews help with their investment and provide early warning systems for resistance while also giving you platforms to communicate successful outcomes and progress.
“Your customers are counting on your ability to navigate organizational complexity. Make every stakeholder interaction count.”
The ADKAR communication framework
When fighting for budget and resources, your communication strategy can make or break your initiative, ADKAR framework helps you form the narrative in 5 steps:
- Awareness: Lead with compelling data about customer pain points and their business impact. Make the problem impossible to ignore.
- Desire: Connect your CX initiatives to what keeps stakeholders awake at night. For finance leaders, focus on cost reduction and revenue impact. For operations managers, emphasize efficiency gains. For executives, highlight competitive differentiation.
- Knowledge: Translate CX metrics into business language, provide clear ROI projections, and offer concrete success stories from similar organizations.
- Ability: Remove barriers to stakeholder support. Help them secure resources they need to participate and facilitate conversations with their leadership when necessary.
- Reinforcement: Celebrate wins publicly and share credit generously. When stakeholders see their support leading to measurable outcomes, they become more invested in future initiatives.
Kamil Zahorjan, writes from experience at Škoda Auto as a design lead: “At the time we were dealing with stakeholder buy-in to research activities as a part of the product roadmap, due to time and budget. According to the ADKAR framework we build awareness by naming the risks of not doing research and pointing out specific examples where research was successful in the past, linking opportunity to business goals and context. After we identified the desire, we provided alternatives and mitigate risks connected to such activities. As an outcome the project executed with the research included and we used it as a reference for future research.”
The Trust Equation: Your long-term investment
Trust is the compound interest of stakeholder management. Build it through radical transparency – discuss risks in advance, share failures alongside successes to show you are addressing problems proactively. Practice promise management by consistently under-promising and over-delivering, creating invaluable credibility for future requests. Demonstrate competency by showing you understand both customer needs and business constraints, not just customer advocacy. Advocating for user needs is one thing – connecting them with business goals and KPIs is another thing entirely.
Treat resistance as valuable intelligence and an opportunity to calibrate your efforts:
- Listen deeply to uncover real concerns behind pushback – surface objections often mask worries about workload or performance metrics.
- Find the kernel of truth in even unreasonable resistance, acknowledging valid concerns while reframing around shared goals.
- Create safe experiments with smaller pilots that let skeptics experience benefits firsthand without significant risk.
Resistance becomes advocacy when stakeholders see improvements in customer experience as solutions to their challenges, not additional burdens of efforts seemingly going against their strategy.
Matej Karkalík, Data Analyst working at our client the European Patent Office, writes: “We struggled with resistance to using existing user analytics and collecting new ones to make better design decisions. We met regularly with product teams to understand their concerns, show possible impact using reference projects, and discuss opportunities. Building on positive feedback, we successfully implemented our initial analytics-driven design validation frameworks.“
Stakeholder management as your competitive advantage
In large organizations, stakeholder management isn't just a skill – it's your competitive advantage. While others focus solely on customer data and journey maps, you're building the human infrastructure that transforms insights into impact in a way that builds support and engagement in your organization.
The most successful CX professionals understand customers don't experience your organization's intentions – they experience your ability to execute. And execution happens through people. Master stakeholder management, and you master the pathway to sustainable CX transformation.
Step further: Not sure where to start your CX transformation?
The CX Transformation Guide will show you step by step how to gain support from people in the company and successfully manage change. You will learn what the four streams of change management are, and how to measure maturity in customer experience. It also offers practical tips on how to start with initiatives at different levels, and as a bonus, provides a sample CX transformation roadmap.
