Speaker 1: 0:18

One, two, three, four of the things that happens when I am coaching executives, when I'm working with CX teams, when we're prepping and planning for workshops with our clients, is sometimes I have these really extraordinary conversations with leaders, just like you, and I wanted to share a little bit about a recent one that I had. Now this leader has had to kind of reinvent themselves and their customer experience team. Frankly, in the last several years the company at first started by saying, hey, let's do some customer experience. I heard it's important. They started implementing things like voice of the customer programs. They had a lot of data, a lot of metrics, and people started asking okay, now what? And what she said to me that really resonated, that I thought I would share with you, is you know what it feels like.

Speaker 1: 1:08

I have to figure out where to start all the time, and I bet that's something you can relate to. So today I want to explore where do you start with customer experience strategy? How do you know you're going in the right direction? How do you know you're going in the right direction? So, when you think about where to start, usually if you apply this logic to, or question to, things like operations and marketing and sales. You know, sales is usually where we start in an organization. We say what are our goals around sales? How are we going to get there? Everybody's very clear on that. You know, we need a certain amount to function, we need a certain amount of profit. We have certain goals that our leaders have asked us to execute on, and so we kind of work backwards from those goals when it comes to sales.

Speaker 1: 1:56

It's very easy in some cases to tell are we successful or not? What happens with customer experience is people have not really defined what does success look like. So what happens is your leader has a certain vision and let's say the vision is, you know what everybody who walks into one of our customer facing channels will be greeted warmly, will make them feel so special that they will, you know, tell their friends we're going to get these really high net promoter scores, we're going to be lauded in the industry, whatever it is. But that is often in their heads. And then what happens is you start looking under the hood and realizing well, the reason that the people who are dealing with our customers directly aren't always as warm and friendly and excited as maybe they should be is because their systems are hard to use. They don't necessarily know where this customer is coming from, the purchase history, the service issues that the person has had in the past all of those things. If they don't have access to that, it's really hard to help somebody feel warm and valued when you can't see exactly where they are or who they are on their journey. Now there are also things like you know what? Maybe our Voice to the Customer program has been running really well for 10 years, but we're asking the same questions that we've always asked and it's not really giving us any new insights. Or maybe the insights that we're getting, we don't know who to turn to to say hey, we're hearing that if we improve this part of the journey, that would actually result in the higher marks that we're all looking for. We don't have the authority or accountability or even influence to go talk to those leaders and say I need your help, so we get stuck Now.

Speaker 1: 3:51

Another thing that can happen is you have a culture that isn't yet committed to this. Now you might have leaders who are talking a good game. You might have people on the front line who are doing their very best to deliver for your customers. You might have great business analysts who are looking at your data and trying to uncover those insights, but you don't have that universal understanding that customer experience is everyone's business. Customer experience is something that everyone not only has to care about, but they play a role, whether you are directly or indirectly dealing with customers, but they play a role. Whether you are directly or indirectly dealing with customers, you have an impact on the customer experience. And if you have not created that universal definition of success, if you have not focused on are we getting what we need out of our voice, of the customer program, are we actually delivering those insights in a way that people can act on them and understand that it's an important role that they play? And do we have everybody on board here? So we all are rowing the boat in the same direction. Now sometimes we go in and we talk to these leaders and I ask a simple question when was the last time you talked to a customer? When was the last time you asked a customer directly? When was the last time you really collaborated with customers to make sure that they were getting what they wanted? And usually the answer is not quite sure, right? So if we are not collaborating with customers on a regular basis. We are missing a piece of the puzzle in our customer experience strategy.

Speaker 1: 5:23

Now, all of these pieces we've put together in our CXI Navigator Framework. There are four parts to it. The first part is intentional success, and, ironically, this is what people skip over. We need to define who we are to our customers, no matter what, and how do we define success? Because if we can define success, then we can work backwards and figure out how do we get there, what does it look like? How do we define success? Because if we can define success, then we can work backwards and figure out how do we get there, what does it look like? How do we make sure that we are making progress? All of those factors, so intentional success is incredibly important.

Speaker 1: 5:56

Sometimes, though, people start in different places, because the next part of this is customer collaboration. Customer collaboration is making sure that we are listening to our customers in the right way. We are paying attention to the signals that they're giving us, not just what they're talking about, but also what are our operational metrics. Tell us If people aren't renewing, that is a signal. If people are telling their friends on social media, never go to this place, that is a signal we have to pay attention to all of those things. We also have to pay attention to what's happening inside the organization to make sure that the employee experience is reflective of that for our customers. So customer collaboration is a huge part of that. Maybe you have a customer advisory board, maybe you invite people in for special events to get their feedback. There are all sorts of ways to collaborate with customers, but it's a critical piece of any customer experience strategy.

Speaker 1: 6:53

And then we get to cultural commitment. This is where we really look at what is happening in the culture. How do we make sure that every single person here understands that their role has an impact? Now I will say I love training, I love workshops, but this is more than one training folks. This is not just about going in and saying everybody should think about the customer, or maybe mentioning customer experience during onboarding. This has to be a regular heartbeat in your conversations, in your commitments and in the way that you even evaluate how people are doing. You also want to make a safe culture so people can raise their hand and say you know what? I'm seeing something that's not working for customers and I want to figure this out. It's not about blame. It's about making sure that we all know what does success look like for our customers and for our organization?

Speaker 1: 7:46

Cultural commitment is a huge part of everything we do, but we have to make sure that it's within the bigger context of that definition of success, sure that it's within the bigger context of that definition of success? And then, finally, I like to look ahead. What are we actually learning that we can apply to the future success of this organization? And that's where experiential innovation comes in. Now, innovation is often focused on products and adding on more features, things like that. What I want you to think about is how can we innovate around the experience for our customers? The brands that have disrupted All the industries in the last decade plus have been experience-driven. They have not changed a product per se. They've changed the way customers experience them. That's what we have to look for. What if we were disrupting our industry today? What would we focus on for the customer? What's missing for the customer? What are they asking for around? More convenience or transparency, or data privacy, or all the things that are real concerns for our customers today? So if we can focus on those four things intentional success, customer collaboration, cultural commitment and experiential innovation we have a working flywheel of what works.

Speaker 1: 9:08

Now, like I said, we love to start with intentional success. Sometimes we don't have the buy-in, we can't quite get there. So start where you can. Start where you can. Sometimes that means getting people on board with a more tactical step, like a customer journey mapping session. That can be seen as both customer collaboration, cultural commitment. That hits a lot of the spaces here. You can use that to help define what success looks like in the future. Maybe your leaders are more interested in you know, making sure that you are looking ahead and innovating for the future. Offer an innovation session, say let's get together and figure out how can we disrupt the industry through the experience that we deliver. We do this with something called a disruptor day with our clients. It's super fun, it's really effective and it helps everybody look ahead and look beyond what's possible today.

Speaker 1: 10:08

Now, why am I sharing all this with you? Because every leader I talk to struggles with this question of where do I start, and it's not that simple of a question to answer. So several years ago we developed this tool called CXI Compass. Now you know, because you're here as a listener and viewer, that CXI stands for Customer Experience Investigation. The Compass is really a tool to help point you in the right direction. When you have limited resources, when you have limited time, when you're not sure where to start, what we do is you answer 11 questions and then we tell you. You know what it looks like. You need help in cultural commitment. That's where we're seeing the lowest amount of maybe understanding or success or all the things. So let's figure out what that looks like. This can help you have the language you need to speak to your leaders. So I encourage you, if you haven't already, check out the free CXI Compass at cxicompasscom. Once you take the compass, we offer a call with you to go over the results. So there are steps in this that will really help you get to that place where not only you know where to start, but you start defining what does it look like to succeed and how do we get there? Because customer experience strategy is absolutely a winning business strategy when it's approached in this way.

Speaker 1: 11:33

The problems I see again and again is that nothing is defined. People are looking to you as the CX leader and they're saying things like why isn't our net promoter score up? As if you have accountability over that. Instead of just reporting on it. You have accountability over that. Instead of just reporting on it, you are asked to do the impossible day after day. I want you to set up some guardrails. I want you to say, hey, this is what I want to prioritize and here's why and here's the success that we can forecast from it. So if you need help, we are here for you.

Speaker 1: 12:06

If you are looking for resources, we have so many free resources and articles at experienceinvestigatorscom and I encourage you to ask yourself today where do I start to make the most impact, to reach the highest levels of success for my organization and for my customers? Through customer experience. And if you need to prioritize, sometimes that means you know what. Our voice of the customer program is running fine, everybody's okay with it, so we're going to let that run. While we prioritize looking at the culture or looking at innovation or simply defining what success looks like, we all have to make decisions and trade-offs and prioritizations around our time and energy and resources. So while you are asked to do a lot as a customer experience leader, I really encourage you to think about how can you prioritize the right thing in the right moment and simply get started.

Speaker 1: 13:13

I hope this was helpful to you. If you have questions, don't forget you can always reach out to me. You can leave a voicemail or a written question at askgenievip, and I hope that you will check out the CXI Compass at cxicompasscom. Please let me know what you think, what you're struggling with, what your challenges are. That's why we're here and we're all in this together. Thanks everybody. See you next time To learn more about our strategic approach to experience. Check out free resources at experienceinvestigatorscom, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more. And please follow me, jeanne Walters, on LinkedIn.