Jeannie Walters: 0:00

You know, this podcast is called Experience Action because that's what I want you to do. Take action to deliver on your customer experience for strategic business results, which is why I was thrilled to get this question from Katrin.

Listener Question: 0:15

How do you explain the strategic value of customer experience to organization where customer experience isn't a defined role and is still seen as a good service? What's the simplest way to communicate its business impact, cross-functional nature, and the need for ownership so that leaders from sales, service, marketing, and HR finally understand what customer experience strategy actually is. Thank you.

Jeannie Walters: 0:50

Alright, this is such a good meaty question, and this is something that I see and I'm betting that a lot of you are currently dealing with. When we are talking about customer experience, it is easy to assume that everybody should get this, right? It seems so logical. We deliver great experiences for our customers. They in turn stay with us as customers, they spend more money, they refer others to us, and this is key, there are fewer service issues, meaning that we're not spending money on service requests or refunds or retributions or simply unhappy customers. We have everything from that lens of the customer so we can make better decisions. So let's walk through this. The way that I've always talked about customer experience, and this is really what's outlined in my upcoming book, Experience is Everything, it is a mindset, a strategy, and a discipline. And what do I mean by that? Well, essentially, customer experience has to be an organizational mindset. But sometimes I say that and people say, yeah, yeah, we're told to be customer centric. But the key here is making sure that you've defined what is that mindset for your organization. We can't just say, let's deliver great customer experience. That could mean different things to different people, to different buyers, to different employees. And so it's up to us as the customer experience leader to make sure that we have that clear vision of the mindset, that we have defined it in a way that everybody understands this is who we are for our customers and this is how we show up no matter what. That step alone, creating what we call a customer experience mission statement, is something that makes everything else easier. So start there. When we think about customer experience, it's really about the human outcomes of our business decisions. And when we conflate it with customer service, what we're saying is we're going to be reactive. We're only going to respond when things go wrong, or we're only going to worry about those transactions in front of the customer. Customer experience is about making sure that every process leading up to that is also delivering for the customer. We have to deliver to one another within our organization to make sure that the experience is what we want it to be. So think about your processes. Think about the folks that maybe think, well, I don't deal with customers, so this doesn't apply to me. We are all on the customer experience team, if you will. But customer experience is so much more than a role or a department. We have to make sure that we are defining that mindset. That is step number one. So if you are not sure right now, I would encourage you, Katrin, to go out and talk to a few people in your organization and ask them, what is a great customer experience here? How do we define that? I bet you'll get a lot of different answers. And that gives you ammunition to come back and say, we need to get this right. We need to centralize this, we need to define it as an organization. Then if we think about customer experience as a winning strategy, what we're saying is when we do this well, when we deliver on the customer experience, when we focus on refining our internal processes and external processes to reduce friction, to make sure people can get what they need in the easiest, seamless way possible, that becomes a winning business outcome for us. So the way to define this, we use something called a customer experience success blueprint. And essentially what we're saying is okay, let's make sure we understand what our organizational goals are. Now, I don't know your organizational goals, but I know that your organization has at least two of them. One is we need to make more revenue. This one comes up. Even in nonprofit, even in healthcare, all of those things. Revenue is very important, top line. The other easy one to think about, how do we reduce expenses? Look at your customer service area right now. What are some of the metrics that you know are costing the company money? Is it customers are calling back because they're not able to get their issue resolved? Is it because they're all calling about similar issues that maybe we should have fixed before they became problems? Look at all of those things because that will help you understand how we can reduce expenses. We can invest in the customer experience. When we invest in the customer experience, when we make sure that earlier in that customer journey, they don't have those problems. We get proactive and intentional. And that's what I want you to think about. How can you get others to understand that this is about being proactive and intentional? When you have a defined strategic blueprint, what you're doing is saying, these are our organizational goals. This is what we've agreed to. Well, then think about your leaders. What do they care about? Your chief financial officer wants the dollars and cents. We need to explain things in this is what it means to the bottom line of the organization. Your chief marketing officer might get excited if you say, you know what, I think investing in customer experience could actually reduce the cost of brand awareness. Because we will have people out there singing our praises, evangelists and those who refer business to us. And then you want to break that down into what are the levers you can actually pull? And how can you get other people to understand that they are part of this? Now, you might get a lot of complaints about a product, but you don't design that product, you don't engineer that product, you're not even distributing that product. So going through those teams and saying, this is what we're hearing, this is why it's a win for you. If we do this well, if we create a better product, or if we fix what's broken right now, what that means is your goals are going to be achieved as a leader, as a team, as an organization. The strategic blueprint allows you to think through what are those things that we can do. And then finally, we have to show up and do this work every day. That's why customer experience is a business discipline. I like to think about this as, you know what, why isn't this like every other part of the business? We would never just get rid of marketing. We would never just get rid of operations. We would never say, well, everybody should understand our operations. So we don't need a team, we don't need a leader looking at that. But that happens with customer experience because we make assumptions that people understand what they should be doing every day around this. We need to help people define what are the ways that they can actually contribute to this strategy and this mindset, and what will they get out of it? So by investing in a few daily efforts, what will they get in return? So the more we can define that, that is usually tied to the measurements and the metrics that you might already be using. So when we get that customer feedback and when we start tracking things like net promoter score, customer effort score, or customer satisfaction rates, when we share that information in a meaningful way, others can understand their role in that number and how that shows up. So we have to make sure that we are consistently showing up within our own organizations as a strategic leader and saying this isn't just this generic thing called strategic customer experience. We are defining it for us here today. It gives people something tangible and it gives everybody a shared goal and experience. Now, obviously, this is not something that happens overnight. I sometimes say this isn't a light switch moment. This is a journey that you're on. So what I would do, Katrin, is start with the folks that you know might be supportive on this and start reaching out and saying, you know what, I think we need to do a better job of defining this. This is how I think we should do it. By showing up in that strategic way, that's how you get the buy-in that is so incredibly important for customer experience. So, yes, customer experience is a winning business strategy, but we can't just say those words. We have to do the work to define what that means, to make sure we understand how do we measure success, and then we have to become incredible storytellers and coalition builders. That's how you move from just talking about customer experience to actually receiving the results and outcomes you want from it based on the work that you do. I know you can do this. I'm very excited for you. And really, when we wrap this all up, and if you're looking for that one line to share, I would encourage you to think about saying something like, you know what, customer experience isn't a role, it isn't a department, it isn't just customer service. It's the systems we build to deliver on the promises we make. By showing up as that leader, by creating the right systems, by making sure you're approaching this as a mindset, a strategy, and a discipline, you will see the outcomes you want. And better yet, so will all those naysayers that you're working with. Good luck and keep us posted. Now, if you have a question, of course we want to hear from you. Don't forget, you can record just like Katrin did at askjeannie.vip. And I have two final requests for you today. One, if you like this podcast, please go ahead and get those ratings and reviews in. Those really help us and they help others discover this podcast. And the second is to check out and hopefully pre-order my upcoming book, Experience is Everything. You can find this at experienceiseverythingbook.com or frankly, wherever books are sold. I can't wait to hear your next question and to support all the amazing work that you continue to do. Keep up the great work, everybody. We're in this together. See you next time.