The economy sucks right now. Make sure your CX doesn't.

Everyone has been whispering that dreaded word - recession - for at least a year. And now that we've had the second-largest US bank failure in recent history with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), many don't bother to whisper. It's a little too 2008.

The trepidation is tangible. In a survey conducted by Nielsen IQ, 62% of global respondents feel they are currently living in a recession, and 48% of those consumers expect this economic downturn to last a year or more.

Consumers and investors are fearful and therefore both risk averse; in a nutshell, that's how we got SVB gone. Whether you're in B2B or B2C, you'll need to adapt to this changing consumer mindset to survive.

What you will learn in this article: How to Show Your Leadership Team the Value of a Great Customer Experience Pitfalls Every CX Manager Should Avoid When Resources Are Scarce The Do's and Don'ts of CX Tactically in Tough Economic Times Concrete examples of what I did during the 2008 recession when I was CCO at Oracle

I've been through a few recessions and learned some valuable lessons along the way. At the time of the Internet recession and the recession of 2008, I worked for Oracle. I was their Chief Customer Officer (CCO) for 11 years.

During these times when your customers are hurting or scared, customer experience becomes more important than ever.

But let me be frank with you. Too often, when things go wrong, customer experience (CX) ends up on the chopping block instead, as many companies view customer experience as discretionary. They don't see how CX directly - day in and day out - affects revenue and product. Tough times mean the focus is on what it takes to make the next big sale and get the product out.

I'm here to tell all of you CX leaders that you can prove the importance of CX and make an impact during this scary time. However, we should talk about the right and wrong ways to do it.

How to prove the importance of customer experience

As I mentioned above, companies mistakenly think that customer experience is discretionary. You need to recognize this mindset and actively counter it. And when I say actively, I mean acting.

Be practical. Lose the fervor

We love to philosophize, don't we? Especially when it comes to understanding why people act the way they do. Customer experience fits nicely into this mold, but spending time socializing your ideas, processes, and principles will only reaffirm to decision-makers that customer experience is soft and fuzzy, and therefore discretionary in tough economic times.

You have to start asking yourself: what is the real impact on results?

Play the worst case scenario

In past recessions, I forced myself to imagine the worst-case scenario. I'm not always pessimistic, for the record, but in times of plenty it's easy to get distracted by the possibilities you might be pursuing. If you plan to have limited resources before things get scarce, this will force you to focus on the ways your team has the most impact.

And if you focus on these influential tactics as early as possible, it's more likely that the worst-case scenario won't happen.

To complete this exercise, ask yourself these questions:

If I had half my staff, what would we focus on and accomplish? If I had a two-person team, what would be our main goals? God forbid, what if it was just me?

Terrifying questions to consider, but this exercise forces you to be lucid about what really matters to the business due to the (imaginary) pressure of being the sole CX vendor. And what really matters is not theorizing and adhering to principles. This is how you, as CX leaders, generate impact through programs that already exist, and even more rudimentarily, how you personally show your influence through your own customer interactions.

Yes, you can tell the difference in higher and lower results.

You should contribute to marketing with demand generation. You have to help the sales team. You need to help the product team understand customer needs. You can fit into these teams and identify areas where you can show your influence through your client relationships. That was my strategy during the 2008 recession and it's...