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Programming

Speaker's Blog: Building Maturity in CX Transformation

November 01, 2018 8:56PM

Customer experience is the customer’s perception of all the interactions they have with your brand and the value it creates for them. It is how you know and perform against their needs and expectations. Great companies like USAA, Amazon and Southwest understand their customers and intentionally design experiences for them. They know that working together across all the touchpoints a person has with the brand – and the relevance, value and emotion they create with each touchpoint – creates engagement with a brand and measurable financial results.

Building customer, employee and partner experience into the fabric of your organization is a bold undertaking. It’s a journey of many steps that often requires re-navigation and extraordinary fortitude to achieve results. You can learn more about how to navigate your organization’s CX journey at the November 5 AMA Minnesota event, “Implementing CX Through Using Best Practices and Maturity Model.” We will share how to engage your organization to build an action plan  – or accelerate your current plan – to build true business value through CX. 

Here are some thought starters to begin shaping the CX journey. Also register for the November 5 event "Implementing CX Through Using Best Practices and Maturity Model."

What do I focus on first?
Any transformation begins with a current state assessment, leadership understanding and a plan.  

  • Have discussion with your leadership team to define what they want to know about customers and their experience.
  • Build an inventory of what you know about customers (e.g., surveys, sales or support calls, social media, web analytics).
  • Develop a cross-functional council that represents the customer across all functions and can make recommendations about how to prioritize and take action.
  • Find some quick wins and stories to demonstrate what it means to improve the experience for customers (and be sure to include the financial business impact such as negative or positive social media mentions or impact to upsell).
  • Begin to build a charter. Define the vision, the outcomes, the roles, and the needs of the organization and the actions you will begin to take.

How do avoid some of the biggest pitfalls for companies that are just starting out in CX?

  • Start with the brand strategy and business goals, and think about how the customer and employee experience can create business results.
  • Don't underestimate the amount of change and transformation that will be required for your organization.
  • Don't collect a lot of information about customers without developing a plan of how to take action on it and drive change.
  • Don't over-rotating on a score rather than the impact of the experience.
  • Identify actions that truly matter to the customer – this can be costly for the organization if you don't (e.g., investing in a big new website when what customers are really looking for is for your website to be easier to navigate, or for an instant chat feature).
  • Make sure your team has the skill or understanding of how to measure the financial impact of making changes and tell the story of business impact.

How do I begin getting stakeholders from across the business aligned?

  • Build a common language and base knowledge throughout the organization about WHAT CX is, WHY change is important, and HOW the organization will begin to act differently.
  • Share stories about other organization’s achievement with experience improvements – for employees and customers. Leaders need to see what success looks like AND how that organization was able to achieve those results.
  • Engage many people in the organization to contribute to a creating great experiences – everyone wants to be heard, valued and contribute to a larger success.
  • Take the time to understand what makes them tick – learn their language and figure out what is important to them.
  • Develop a governance model that keeps the business close to the customer experience strategy.
  • Communicate and tell the story of the potential for change – the art of the possible – to the organization to build excitement and buy-in.

How do I get my CFO to care about CX?

  • Learn the language; understand how he/she measures success.
  • Help him/her understand the connection between changing the experience and positive business outcomes.
  • Demonstrate the financial value of a quick win (don’t start with a boil the ocean approach).

Creating great experiences requires a plan and new skills. Ignite your journey by leveraging best practices and capabilities of successful brands.