It doesn’t matter if you’ve mapped a beautiful customer journey, built a set of key personas and designed a great digital experience if you can’t execute.
You need EX4CX...Execution for Customer Experience.
If you’ve been in the CX space for a while, you know how important it is to operate “Outside In” and understand what’s happening from a customer perspective. However, this practice runs the risk of creating a lack of attention to what happens inside the company. Rather than choose one over the other, companies who create (or who aspire to create) successful Customer Experiences, need to focus on both Outside In AND Inside Out. Otherwise, they’re just CX fluff ideas with no substance. Execution matters.
4 reasons why Customer Experience solutions fail to execute
CX ideas fail to consider operational reality
Where does the group most focused on CX sit in your organization? This doesn't have to be a specialized CX team. It can be Product, Marketing, Design, Tech, Business Leadership...anyone focused on creating great Customer Experiences. If you’re trying to create a delightful agent-to-customer phone experience, how well do you know what an agent experiences day in and day out? If you’re not completely dialed into the work the business does…and HOW they do it, you run the risk of designing something completely untenable. Creating an impossible situation for your customer-facing roles destroys engagement.
You rely on those organizations to “get things done”. Build trust with those teams so they know your CX improvement proposals keep their interests in mind. Understand how vital WIFM (What’s In it For Me...where "me" is the employee) is to the success of your CX programs.
Organizationally, CX can be in many different places but it MUST be in sync with operations to succeed. If your team is organizationally separated from operations, the onus is on you to build the relationships and indirect influence it takes to get ideas moved from the head to the hands. If you’re in the same place, stand up and use the “sneaker-net”. Put your shoes on and walk over to the desks and live an hour, a day, a week in the organization’s shoes. If you can’t physically be with the teams delivering the actual customer experiences, you need to find ways to truly connect with their world. Anything less and you run the risk of designing the impossible…and destroying your CX impact.
Teams fail to show where the process and customer experience intersect
This is process mapping. Yes…good ol' Visio, Post-Its and process flow diagrams. If you don’t understand your processes, then you don’t understand where you touch the customer. This is the yin to the yang of customer journey mapping. Some companies have abandoned process mapping in favor of customer journey mapping. I celebrate the adoption of customer journey mapping across businesses these days. However, choosing only to do one or the other, will prevent you from delivering great CX.
With a great process map, you can know at a glance where a customer’s negative experience could have been prevented…and gives you the answer on how to fix this permanently. It also shows you where customers experience great delight in the process in order for you to amplify that area (and celebrate it…more on that below).
To be clear, process mapping can bog down in a big way if you obsess too much over minutia. That’s a topic for another blog. For now, get started with pens, Post-Its and peoplewho do the process. Get the basic flow in place. Then you can always point to where things went awry based on customer feedback.
The Voice of the Customer fails to reach the groups closest to the customer
How well do your ops teams know your customers’ stories? What is your first thought when you read a particularly atrocious, or delightful, customer comment? Make the customer come to life for everyone in the company. Consider the words your company uses. Are you discussing files or do you talk about families?
Emotions motivate. If your company doesn’t feel the customer’s experience, you’ll lose traction on why CX matters.
Tell a weekly customer story. Note that I said tell, not email. Have a periodic huddle with your teams and tell a customer story. For companies too large for a few huddles, leverage your org structure to tell the story cascaded across teams and levels.
Build an environment where people naturally experience empathy through story telling. As that muscle grows, they’ll deliver that same empathy inside their live customer interactions.
Imagine the impact if you brought real customers to your next organizational all-hands session! Have the customers tell about their experiences in front of your entire organization and that'll truly bring the customer to life.
Share what the customer says in their comments on a survey, or an user experience/empathy session, or any other source of the actual customer's voice. Share all of them. Certain privacy elements may require that you control some of that information flow but START with the assumption you want to share all that your customers say and scale back from there…not the other way around.
Celebrations of customer success fail to reach the people who actually delivered the great CX
Great CX can only come when there is great AX (associate experience). CX initiatives sometimes get an ivory tower reputation, always working on projects out of sight, rarely interacting with the people actually working with customers. Customer facing roles are HARD. Celebrate these teams!
This doesn’t require a massive investment. Tie a balloon to the back of someone’s chair who connected with a customer in a wonderful way. Publicly share the appreciation note a customer wrote with a wide company audience. Make sure your associate knows they're famous for delivering a great experience. Post it on a wall. Take the associate to a celebratory coffee/lunch. Make them feel special because they made the customer feel special!
This has the dual effect of humanizing the customer (similar to story telling above). As people see what a great customer experience looks like…and how it is celebrated…the customer becomes more real. Great CX comes from this.
A key caution here...how you approach recognition could create the unintended impact of manipulation. You’ll need to walk that line between celebration and creating an environment where associates feel pressured to deliver CX for self-recognition instead of on behalf of the customer. With recent scandals as lessons, make sure you always put thought to the unintended consequences of recognition in order to develop a well-managed and above-board program.
Create EX4CX
Avoid those 4 and you'll be on your way to EX4CX. Even still, there are dozens of other reasons why a company can have the best CX intentions and designs in mind but still disappoint the customer. What are your examples where EX4CX fell short…or even better…what do you see successful companies doing?
Rick Denton solves customer experience and business challenges. In his leadership roles with Capital One, JCPenney, Washington Mutual and several other industry leaders, Rick created customer obsessed cultures, high performance execution systems, and clear outcome-oriented alignment. Rick delivered these results across multiple industries and company size profiles both domestically and internationally. As a Principal at EX4CX, Rick helps clients create CX visions, metrics and culture while driving operational improvement, achieving process excellence and customer success.
Rick believes the best meals are served outside and require a passport.
Are you ready to create great customer experiences for every customer, every time?
info@ex4cx.com