Customer Experience is about Business Transformation

The more we interact with clients the more we have come to realize that Customer Experience (CX) is fundamentally about business transformation. Understanding customers and responding to market dynamics accordingly requires an agile approach, but must companies are flummoxed as to where to focus their resources first.

Here are some suggestions for CX as business transformation in the short, medium and long term.

Short term

1. Get to know the organization. Talk to employees, customers, and industry and functional experts to understand the state of your industry and your company’s current and potential positioning within it.
2. Talk to your internal stakeholders on a regular basis. Listen for their guidance on organizational strengths and weaknesses – people on the ground generally know where key problems are and even have great suggestions for solving them.
3. Begin to diagnose the problems and create an internal assessment. We use a SuiteCX Quick Start program that collects data from the voice of the employee, voice of the customer, and voice of management. This effort aligns common customer complaints with what might really be going on behind the scenes.  It then sets you up to accurately map what are the key moments of truth and pain points experienced bynyour customers today.
4. Use the knowledge from the Quick Start program to identify quick wins. These are initiatives that have high impact, yet are fairly easy and cheap to accomplish. With quick wins under your belt, you can then use the momentum and additional revenue or cost savings to fuel future, more complex initiatives.
5. Create a simple but clear charter so the organization knows what to expect from the CX team. Define clear objectives and tactics for the team so that all successes can be compared to baseline metrics.
6. Launch an internal communications plan to reinforce what CX is doing, to help fuel long term growth and contribute to the health of the employees and the customers.

Mid term

1. Establish a strategic direction for CX to build on the brand promise. Relate the plan to the company’s overall growth initiatives.
2. Revamp internal metrics to be sure that organizational goals and KPIs support the new initiatives and business models. This will enable the disparate teams within the organization to work cooperatively and manage more co-creation.
3. Build cross-functional lean development teams to focus on the different solutions that need to be created. Celebrate innovation, creativity and progress so the reset of the organization feels engaged.
4. Continue to monitor and update the voice of the customer and the voice of the employee, and conduct regular journey mapping to be sure you are ready and able to change direction if needed.

Long term

1. Ensure Senior Management is leading and supporting the CX team and vision in both word and deed.
2. Deploy change management methodologies to ensure that the employees are ready, willing and able to make the required changes.
3. Be sure that Human Resources is a transformation partner that hires and reinforces the new CX values and training. After all, great Customer Experience starts with employee engagement.
4. Identify and support the talent that is necessary to fill the new roles required to bring CX to life. This may include roles such as UX designers, design thinking professionals, big data experts, analytics gurus, etc.
5. Commit to being agile and willing to support continuous change.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.  Many of the short-term suggestions we make here can be accomplished with small teams and budgets.  Any questions?  Just call us!