MC: 0:00

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.

MC: 0:26

Ready set action. One, two, three four.

Jeannie Walters: 0:31

It's the Experience Action Podcast, where usually I answer your questions, but today I'm going to ask you one. My name is Jeannie Walters and I speak to leaders like you in the customer experience world every day. We consult, I speak, we train, we do all sorts of things, and part of what I'm seeing is a little bit of a warning that I want to give to you. So here's the question. Maybe you're at the end of quarter, maybe you're looking at next year, maybe you've been asked to submit your KPIs or your OKRs or your outcomes. Here's what I want you to ask yourself. Are you planning with a small P or are you planning with a capital P? What I mean by that is I see lots of customer experience plans that are really just lists of ideas. I want you to think about leadership a little bit differently. So, first thing I want to remind you of, as you are planning with a capital P, I want you to make sure you are not confusing tactics and activity for impact.

Jeannie Walters: 1:46

Now, when we create tactics without a strategy, that's really some busy work that might not lead to the outcomes that our leaders and organizations expect. Surveys, dashboards, journey maps these are all incredibly useful tools and I want you to use those as tools, but they're not the strategy itself. So if you are creating a quarterly or an annual plan or maybe something that's part of a bigger strategic initiative, and if you submit something that says we expect to send X number of surveys this year, we expect to roll out a new survey platform, that is a tool, a tactic. That is not a strategy in itself. We have to make sure that we are defining the strategy in the right way so that the tactics that we want, the tools that we want, they can be executed against that strategy. When customer experience gets stuck at that tactical level, we risk being dismissed as an overhead activity, a budget line item that can be crossed off because it doesn't affect revenue or cost savings or growth. Now, of course, you and I know that's not true. Customer experience absolutely affects those things. But we have to make the case. Sending a survey it really doesn't do anything unless we use the insights to improve the experience, to drive more revenue and cost savings. So we must shift our perspective as we're planning and make sure we are talking about strategy and not just activity. We want to talk about impact and not just tactics. All right, number two.

Jeannie Walters: 3:29

You've heard me say this a lot Customer experience is a business discipline. It is not necessarily a department or a program or a project. We would never assume that moving forward, we're just going to get rid of operations right. That would never be assumed. But it gets assumed with customer experience. And that's because sometimes we get siloed, we get told that we're kind of living on an island and it's not part of the greater business ecosystem that we're in. And guess what I call foul on that. So here's what you do. You think about customer experience that should be seen as a business discipline, with real efforts every day, every week, every month, every year that drive outcomes. Those outcomes are things that you can measure and you can show the progress on.

Jeannie Walters: 4:20

Just saying things like we're getting better at customer experience is not enough. So if we treat this like a business discipline, then we're going to rely on what we rely on in other business disciplines. What gets measured gets managed. That famous quote we can use it here. How do we measure success? Making sure that we have all of that in line.

Jeannie Walters: 4:42

We want to make sure that we are aligning our initiatives with enterprise level goals. We want to make sure that what we're talking about is what our leaders actually care about, and we want to show that the efforts, the tactics, the tools, the people, the support, the technology all of that is supporting those goals. So while sending surveys might be a very important initiative in order to get the feedback to make those improvements, we still have to tie all of that back to our greater organizational level goals. So we have to show how CX directly influences growth, efficiency, risk management, retention of both customers and employees. We have to connect those dots in everything we do, and part of that is when we decide where do we want to put our effort and attention. We can actually tie that back to those bigger goals and then finally remember that buy-in is one of the most important things we need as customer experience leaders. That can literally make or break the success of the efforts around customer experience. So leaders who connect customer experience to outcomes win that buy-in, win the support of the executives, win the budget, win the resources, all of those things, and we want to make sure that we're doing that on a continuous basis. Everything we do is building a stronger business case, but really we want to make those executives who believe in us and who give us that buy-in. We want to make them look great. We want them to feel really good about that.

Jeannie Walters: 6:19

So if you're in the C-suite listening to this right now, I encourage you to think how are you impacting the customer experience? What is the work that's happening under your purview that is either creating a better experience for customers or maybe not so great, and what does that have to do with the bottom line? If you can't answer that, then you need to reach out to those other customer experience leaders and ask them what's happening here. How will we use the insights from these surveys? Make sure that you're connecting to the leaders who are seeking that buy-in, and if you are the CX leader looking for that buy-in, then make sure that you are making a strong case, asking for input, providing feedback and updates and progress reports along the way. We want everybody involved to realize that customer experience is a win-win-win. It's a win for your organization, it's a win for your leaders, it's a win for your customers, oh, and it's a win for your employees. So I guess I added one.

Jeannie Walters: 7:22

So when we are thinking about how to really plan for the future, we need to make sure that we are doing that as a strategic leader. We are doing that as an organizational leader. Take the CX hat off for a minute and really look at what is it we want to do for the organization and how will what we want to do for our customers impact that? That's where we start and that's how you plan with a capital P. So don't confuse activity with impact.

Jeannie Walters: 7:53

Make CX a business discipline, not a project or a program or even a department, and translate customer experience work into business outcomes to really secure the support that we need. And make sure that if we're providing that support, if we are that executive sponsor, that we are feeling good about it because we are seeing those progress reports, we are asking the right questions of the leaders who are doing the planning as well. I hope this is helpful during planning season. And don't forget, if you don't know where to start, try cxicompass. com. This is an 11-question analysis of where you are on your customer experience journey, which helps you prioritize the very efforts we're talking about. Until next week, thanks for all the great questions, thanks for all the great work you do and let's get planning. See you next time. 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.