How To Use a Customer Experience (CX) Mission

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker, and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready, set, action.

Hi everyone, it's Jeannie Walters here and I am here for you. Don't forget you can leave me a voicemail with any question you have about customer experience, employee experience, leading with intention, any of those things at speakpipe. com slash experience action. And I received a great question I'm so excited to get into because this is something that's near and dear to my heart, and it should be near and dear to every leader's heart, in my humble opinion. So let's get right to the question.

Hey Jeannie, my question is, how do we use a CX mission statement?

Oh, the customer experience mission statement. This is something we started developing many, many years ago because we started seeing a big gap. So the first way to really use a customer experience mission statement is to understand why it's there in the first place. Some corporate or organizational mission statements might serve this purpose, but what we saw was that many of those overall overarching mission statements didn't really take into account who the customer was, how we serve them, or what the promises that we've made. So, the purpose of a customer experience mission statement is to really make sure everybody can internalize what is it that we are to our customers. What is the promise that we've made, and how do we show up no matter what? We'll talk about that a different time, but for now, if you have a mission, if you have a customer experience mission statement, or if you're working on one, we have a free download you can take a look at. But, essentially, it's not just a bunch of words. The best missions are used as a tool and in many, many different ways. So this is where we get intentional and proactive about customer experience. And this is where CX change agents. And I imagine that if you're listening to this podcast, that's you. You will introduce the mission statement in many ways, so where should you begin? First of all, we need to take the mission statement out of the abstract and make it more visible as part of the company culture. So there are so many different ways to do this, but here are a few of my favorite ways to use your mission statement. You ready? The first way to use this is when you're actually hiring somebody. So put that mission statement out there, first of all, in your job posting so that if somebody sees that job posting and they see your mission, they go, Whoa, I can relate to that. I want to be a part of that team. Now, the mission of my organization and my personal mission is To Create Fewer Ruined Days For Customers. We use this all over the place. I always invite my clients to join me on this mission. Whenever I speak, I talk about this. Whenever we talk to job candidates, we talk about the mission. And one of my favorite ways to do this is to discuss your CX mission statement and what it means to the organization, but better yet, share a few mission moments. So talk about, you know what, here are some of the ways we've lived up to this mission. And then ask the candidate if they can recall a time when they could relate. So if we talk about something like, you know what, we have a mission statement focused on everybody feels valued throughout their journey. How do you feel valued as a customer? How would you make a customer feel valued? Why do you think that's so important? Those types of things, weave that into your job interviewing process to find candidates who are really connected with the mission because they will be more likely to carry it forward in their own journey. A second way to use a mission statement, create a habit in the first 90 days, meaning a lot of employee onboarding journeys, sometimes they look like this. There are two days of training and meet with HR and fill out your forms and review the handbook and maybe sit in on a training session. But the best employee journeys start with this focus on the customer experience and the mission statement is a great way to start that journey with the right focus. So yes, the mission should be covered in the training and handbooks, but if it's only words, if it's only something that people read, then you're really missing an opportunity to help people internalize it, which is what we're trying to do. So one of the things to do is to kind of gamify this for the first 90 days. So you can award points, you can use all the different tools and programs out there. You could even do this on something like Slack, but essentially you ask people to really be aware, to keep their radar up for the mission. And so these are a few questions you can ask. What mission moment did you witness or deliver? Ask them to really observe where are we living up to this. Number two, why do you think it lived up to our mission or not? Get them to explain that. Number three, is there an employee or team to celebrate for living up to the mission? Because you really want to recognize and reward people who actually deliver on your mission. Number four, this is a great question. Is there a lesson or idea to improve things for the future? So maybe somebody missed a moment. Maybe you didn't live up to the mission. That's all worth exploring. And making sure that you can really kind of go through it and say, why didn't we live up to that? What can we do about it? It's a way to continually look at your ideal customer journey and continually improve it as you go. By inviting employees to record what they see, it encourages them to keep your mission on their radar to recognize when the principles of the CX mission are fulfilled and when they're not. So I encourage you to really use this in your daily conversations. And then let's say you're continuing on through the employee journey. You're, you're in the day to day now. How can you use a CX mission. Well, one of the best ways that I know is to start key meetings with a mission moment. It's a way to bring the mission to life and to bring it top of mind again. So one of the things that I like to encourage is when we develop something around CX teamwork, let's say you're developing a charter for your CX team, you always start with that mission. And then you literally start the meeting with a mission moment. I like to actually rotate the responsibility of this around to different people. So you say, Hey, Jane, next meeting, mission moment, you're going to start with a mission moment. So it's up to Jane to come to that next meeting with something to discuss. And that can be a story of moments employees in organization and the organization really lived up to the mission. or when they didn't. And that's important because we want to empower people to really talk about this, use it as a tool, acknowledge that, you know what, we're not always going to get this right. A mission is aspirational. We're going to do our darndest to try to live up to this all the time. But when we don't, let's talk about it. Let's talk about why. So if we are focused on, you know what we want to develop people within this organization, this is another great way to do that. Because you're essentially asking people to look around and say, okay, here's when we did something really right. Let's take the best parts of this and use it throughout the customer journey or gosh, we didn't get it right this time, what can we do about it next time? It's a culture of honesty and accountability, and we have to reinforce that all the time. So there are so many ways that you can use your customer experience mission. The most important thing is that you use it. So if you have a mission statement right now that you look at and you think, Oh my gosh, if we could live up to that every day with every customer, how exciting would that be? If you are not really using that mission on a regular basis, then you're missing a huge opportunity to not only improve the lives of your customers. But also to make your employees more engaged and empowered and through that make their lives better as well. So it's really a win, win, win, win, win. And if you haven't developed your own, we do have a free workbook. I encourage you to check it out at experienceinvestigators. com. It's free to download and I would love to hear about the mission that you develop. So by being here today, you have actually helped me live my mission, which is so cool. Because my mission is To Create Fewer Ruined Days For Customers, and the fact that you're here listening to this podcast, taking on your own learning proactively, that is helping me live that mission through you. So I just want to say thank you, and I also want to say keep going. Keep going on developing your mission, on living your mission, on using your mission as a tool. Thank you so much for being here. I'm so appreciative of everybody who has reached out so far. And don't forget, you can leave me a voicemail with your question at speakpipe. com slash experience action. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, Check out free resources at experienceinvestigators. com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program, and more. And please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn. Thank you so much for joining us today. And don't just talk about customer experience, act on it. See you next week.