Updating CX Foundations

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 attention through elevated customer experiences. Ready Set, Action.

Hey Everyone! It's Experience Action. I'm Jeannie Walters and we have another fantastic question.

Hi, Jeannie, this is Dean and I have a question for you. But first off, thank you for all of the things that you've taught us and my team around customer experience, and it's really been helpful for us rethinking how we approach our customer. But I do have a question that we've been wrestling with, and that is we have our customer experience mission statement, our success statement and our charter. It's been in place for a while, but is there a frequency that we should be revisiting those or updating those or coming back to "Are they the right things? Is it a regular exercise we should do, or maybe there are some signs or clues that we should be watching for that means we maybe need to revisit those. So love your stuff. Thank you so much again and would love your take on revisiting these things. Thanks again.

Thank you so much, Dean. That is really nice to hear that you already have your mission statement, your success statement and your team charter. That is fantastic. What I love to hear is that you're using it, and so one of the questions that I get sometimes is okay, we spend all this time actually developing these tools and then what do we do? What do we do with them? How do we make sure that they're really building that momentum we want and helping our business move forward? So I have a couple ideas for you.

That's going to change your life.

So, first of all, make sure you are using these on a regular basis, because the more you use them, the more relevant they'll become in your organization and the more obvious it will be when you do need to make updates or you do need to revisit these ideas. So, for example, your customer experience mission statement, I hope you're using that when you are evaluating performance, when you are bringing people on board, when you are starting a staff meeting, all of those ways that it can be front and center for your organization, because what will happen is people will start using that as shorthand and you'll start really seeing that kind of integrate and internalize throughout your organization. Your success statement is more time-bound. So I always like to say, with the success statement, make sure that you're aligning that with your organizational cadence. So if you have a goal setting annually, or if you have a big three-year goal that everybody's going for, you want to make sure that your success statement timing is aligned with that. So if you achieve a goal, if you actually get to those outcomes with your success statement, then that's a great time to really look at it and say, hey, maybe we need to come up with a bigger, better goal. Right? We need to go bigger.

So when you actually align your customer experience success statement with your organizational goals, that's where you start seeing the real outcomes that your leaders are looking for. So pay attention to when they are revisiting things, when they are deciding on their future outcomes. That's when you really want to make sure that your success statement aligns with that. But if you aren't already, I also encourage you to make sure you're using your success statement on a regular basis, and this is where you're having your one-on-ones with your team. What are they working on that aligns to those bigger goals? What are you reporting out to your leadership or to other teams about your success? That all has to align and again, it will become a little more obvious when things are misaligned the more that you use it.

And then the charter. So the charter is really about making sure that you have your goals, your roles and responsibilities and kind of how you all work together documented, and so if you find that the team is shifting or maybe the goals are changing or maybe there's a reorganization of the whole structure of your business, then that's a good time to really look at your CX charter and decide if it still applies or if you need to make some changes. Change is good. All of this comes down to really understanding what is the why here. Why are we actually using these tools? Why do we create these tools in the first place and make sure that we are connecting with that again and again and again? Because the more that we can do that, the more that that will shift your behavior and make sure that you are holding people accountable for the right efforts that will drive the business forward through customer experience leadership. So, as you approach all of these tools, remember that customer experience management is really a mosaic, right. We can't ever just go in a straight line, unfortunately.

It's going to be a maze.

We have to keep in mind that it's all about these different pieces. We identify these as intentional success. That's defining things. That's what these tools are there for. And then you also want to make sure that you have that commitment to culture, so making sure that what you're doing inside the organization is reflecting outside to your customers. Make sure those are aligned. And then we want to, of course, include our customers.

Customer collaboration. Are there ways with these tools, for example, with your charter? Look over your charter and make sure that if your customers saw that, they would understand what that is. They would see the efforts that are going in and see how it impacts them. Customer collaboration is where we get into voice of the customer and collecting customer feedback and all the things that are so important to keeping our finger on the pulse of what customers really want. And then the last piece is about using all of that information that we've collected, making sure that we are leaning into those goals for really experiential innovation. Make sure that you are looking ahead. How are you using this information to innovate around customer experience, to stay ahead of your competitors and deliver more for your customers, not just today but into the future?

So congratulations, Dean, on really making sure that you have all of these tools, that you've done all of this work. That's tremendous and I support you and salute you. So, and thank you for your nice feedback and really just thanks for asking this question. I think we always have so much to learn about customer experience and by each of us reaching out and asking questions and sharing what we know, that creates a better world, and that's what we're all about. So thank you again for the great question. I can't wait to hear what you ask me next week and for everybody listening. Thank you for all you do, not just for your customers, but for your organization as well. All right, see you next week. Take care. 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.