Really good customer experience grows prosperity of customers, employees, and organizations in tandem. This is the focus of CX Day 2023!
A good customer experience team is a catalyst to foster a positive, holistic customer focus across the entire organization, one that is informed by data and designed with empathy in order to deliver win-win outcomes that help everyone achieve success.
How do we make this happen?
- This vision must be shared by your CEO and Senior Leadership Team. They need to set you up to foster holistic customer focus across the entire organization. If your team is positioned to be an ally to the success of every work group, then they are more receptive to customer insights and engagement in your initiatives. If every work group across your firm is expected to show good customer experience progress (for internal and external customers), then your company is on its way to stronger customer-centricity and CX maturity. To help you do this: share my executive-aimed articles with your senior leaders (see list below).
- Your CX team must have skills to foster holistic customer focus across the entire organization. They need to speak the language of different functional areas in customer experience reports, presentations, and conversations. This seems daunting at first, but it’s much more effective than trying to teach everyone your CX language. When you tailor CX to what matters to them, they see it as something they own rather than an extra burden on their plate or something those other people are taking care of. Ownership for good customer experience performance must be shared by every work group, because any of them can cause a CX crisis. To do this, you need to know how to identify leading indicators of CX that are within each work group’s workflows. To help you do this: Automatic Experience Excellence and Experience Value Exchange (see list below) are the perfect complement to your CXPA membership as easy ways for all experience managers (CX, EX, PX) to learn how to influence every work group in your ecosystem (including partners, suppliers, agencies, etc.).
- Your CX data must inform your entire organization. They need to tailor insights to Legal, Finance, Facilities, Procurement, and so on. Show them what they need to do to (a) stop prevalent customer issues from recurring and (b) prevent customer issues from occurring. Data informs and patterns stimulate. Go beyond data sharing via VoC dashboards. Your CX team must know how to connect various customer data sources, conduct extensive data mining to surface unexpected revelations, and use multivariate analysis and old-fashioned deep thinking to find patterns. When you show managers patterns in every CX report, their curiosity is piqued and they can’t wait to see your next discovery. You want to instill an unquenchable thirst for CX patterns. This stimulates managers to act on good customer experience insights to create necessary win-win outcomes. To help you do this: CXPA archives contain vast resources contributed by members and sponsors over the past 12 years. Use the search feature in CXPA.org in addition to the forum discussion.
- Customer focus must be designed with empathy. This is the missing ingredient in the employee experience fiasco of the 2020s (quiet quitting, great resignation, reshuffle, etc.). Empathy is not just for your customer-facing groups’ interactions with customers. It’s not just for your appreciation of customer-facing groups’ challenges with demanding customers. Empathy is at the heart of internal interactions — if you want to avoid dysfunction and silos. Your CX team can foster empathy by showing how much poor CX is costing your company in value-rescuing (remedial costs to serve), rework, redundant work, negative word of mouth, churn, extra marketing effort to make up for all this, and so on. To help you do this: resources mentioned above can put you on the right path to good customer experience as described here.
Win-win outcomes for customers, employees, and your organization (i.e. investors and community) mean your CX team is a catalyst for big-time value creation, not just value rescuing and revenue-generating. Value is an important topic to discuss every week and continually research. Value has many dimensions: perspectives of the giver and the receiver, immediate and long-term, financial and emotional, and so on. Overall, win-win outcomes mean you are pursuing investors’ prosperity via employees’ prosperity and customers’ prosperity. The more prosperous you make customers, the more your employees will benefit, and in turn, the more your investors will benefit. What investors get from you is not your revenue, but rather, your profit. Therefore, ensure your CX team is attuned to efficiency as much as effectiveness, to grow lifetime value and earnings per share.
See these referenced resources:
CEOs: What You Need to Know About CX
Chief Customer Officer Playbook
Automatic Experience Excellence
Image licensed to ClearAction by Shutterstock.
