The Recipe for a Successful Customer Experience Transformation

Investing in and improving satisfaction requires understanding your customers’ wants, needs, and expectations, and incorporating them into your current strategy. Achieving a successful transformation of the customer experience is like following a recipe, ensuring all ingredients are carefully laid out and organized beforehand. However, the recipe won't turn out as intended if a crucial element like leadership support is missing. 

In this episode of Innovating the Customer Experience Podcast, J.D. Power experts Michael Vermillion, Senior Managing Director of Global Business Intelligence, Mark Miller, Customer Service Advisory Practice Leader, and Scott Killingsworth, Director of Customer Service Advisory, discuss the challenges and tactics involved in successfully transforming your customer experience, how this can be achieved, and its overall impact on your bottom line.

Defining a CX Transformation 

Comprehending the factors that drive consumer behavior and anticipating customer expectations is crucial to providing a great experience. This customer-centric approach must be ingrained into an organization's DNA to be successful.  Assessing your current performance in relation to your competitors is essential to enhance customer satisfaction. Once you understand your organization’s current performance level, determining a specific benchmark or goal is necessary for any transformation. 

CX Transformation Challenges 

Despite the benefits down the line, organizations may struggle to rally around CX changes due to various reasons including: 

• Lack of budget and resources to support effective CX transformation. 
• Getting the organization aligned with customer needs when dealing with multiple competing priorities. 
• Inadequate executive leadership support to implement a new CX strategy and provide incentives that promote and sustain these changes. 
• Ineffective communication throughout the organization.  Sending out a couple of memos is not enough to implement CX changes. To ensure success, organizations need a dedicated manager who embodies the strategy and drives the change forward. 

Why is it so difficult for organizations to rally around CX changes?   

There is no doubt that providing exceptional customer experiences is important, but many organizations often face resistance when making significant changes to accomplish this for several reasons: 

• Organizational silos and office politics may prevent meaningful CX transformations. 
• An absence of visible executive leadership support and an unclear vision can derail these impactful changes.  
• Trying to show the benefits down the road of what a CX transformation can do for a company’s bottom line.  
• Leaving the frontline team out of these CX changes.  

What are the benefits of involving your frontline team in your CX transformation?  

Involving front-line employees in the process is crucial for successful implementation as it allows for faster execution. These employees are the closest to the customer experiences the organization is providing. Leaving frontline employees out of the CX conversation can erode confidence. However, when you take time to get their feedback and implement these ideas into your new customer experiences it will help frontline employees feel valued. This will lessen any type of resistance to management asking them to make lasting changes when their input was not asked for.  

If you’ve been charged with leading a CX transformation, what tactics can you use to ensure you have buy-in from your peers? 

• Start by having a clear vision that can be communicated to your team.
• Appoint a strong leader who can execute this vision throughout your organization. 
• Look at your competitors and analyze current opportunities. Gather information to determine where your organization can transform in relation to competitors to stand out with customers.

How are other organizations successfully pulling off a CX transformation?  

One stand-out multinational company that J.D. Power advised was able to become a top performer by implementing key components such as strong leadership, effective communication, front-line integration, and openness to transformation. A key ingredient to their success was utilizing customer data to identify gaps to create consistently excellent customer experiences. The company replicated this success throughout the organization by applying general transformational experiences down to a granular level, and by creating an environment that allowed employees to feel safe and honest when providing feedback.  

Final Thoughts and Next Steps 

The best way to get conversations about CX experience transformations started within your own organization is to ask a few guiding questions. 

• Ask your team, as an organization why haven’t we implemented a CX transformation? Is there an element/behavior keeping us from coming together to make a change? 
• What is our current level of performance? What goal or benchmark do we want to achieve with a CX transformation? 
• How is our performance in comparison to other industries? Is there an opportunity for improvement that our competitors are overlooking to help us stand out with customers? 

Listen in to the episode below to learn more about successfully incorporating a CX transformation within your organization and the benefits it can provide.