On a mission to improve your brand’s CX performance?
Meaningful improvement requires organizational transformation supported by core capabilities and an aligned process to achieve progress. As your organization evolves over time, that process will need to be repeatable in the form of a playbook to guide you along the way.
What are the 4 key actions to take to build a successful CX improvement playbook?
1. Build Awareness and Buy-In
To drive change, the organization must first understand that CX is everyone’s responsibility. As one CX innovator puts it – “all of us together and every one of our employees drives customer satisfaction.”
To help create awareness and establish buy-in, put organization-wide metrics in place and ensure that every executive and employee across the company – not just the customer service group – is incented to focus on CX.
2. Align Key Business Partners
Many functions across the company impact CX, and their partnership is a critical factor for a successful transformation.
So how do you get everyone aligned?
Start by reaching out to the business leaders who are responsible for delivering the customer experience. They most likely control the strategy and the difficult trade-offs that will need to be made to prioritize and invest in CX.
Next, be sure to align with field or retail operations if that applies to your organization. Field and retail employees interact directly with customers and the community and have a key role in delivering a better customer experience.
Finally, don’t forget to bring legal, finance, IT, HR and other staff functions on board. While they may typically operate behind the scenes, their functions can still impact the customer experience. For example, finance terms, credit authorization, hiring criteria and compliance rules all directly impact the experience that your customers have with your brand.
3. Build a Company-Wide CX Council
Customer experience transformation should be led from within the organization. A proven approach is to stand up a customer experience council with representatives from across the company. The council then organizes sub-councils around each of the key initiatives put in place to improve CX.
At one CX-leading organization, 100 employees participate in the customer experience council. The council members make valuable contributions to the success of the CX program and in exchange, the employees bring learnings and insights back to their jobs.
4. Practice Proactive Change Management
While setting up metrics, analyzing data and identifying initiatives is one thing, building and executing a plan against those initiatives is quite another. Once your action plan is put in motion, it also must be constantly evaluated and refined.
Transforming CX needs to be a continuous process with proactive change management. To be successful, the board, the CEO and executive leadership team need to support the process to address the conflicts and hard decisions that will certainly arise. All teams involved in CX transformation initiatives also need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable as change will need to be embraced to continue to improve.
Getting Started
There is no single best CX Improvement Playbook. Each organization will have their own playbook that considers the current state of CX, the challenges transformation will need to address and the change management process that is unique to the company.
The playbook will be the guide for transforming the CX experience from the inside out and every playbook should include the key areas that we outline above. As the CX innovator we spoke with explains – “I challenge our organization to be our own disruptors – before we find ourselves being disrupted by the market”
About the Author: Michael Vermillion leads CX improvement consulting for J.D. Power and works with CX-focused organizations to develop, align and execute CX strategy.
Where to find more insights like this:
This blog post was featured in the Customer Service Advice & Insights monthly newsletter. Make sure you're signed up to get the latest customer service channel intelligence >