Be determined to transform and sustain a customer-led business
Change is hard yet if you pursue that line be assured that the rewards are immense. According to research, many change programmes fail to attain the level of success envisaged in the average organization.
It has been discovered that 70% of change projects fail. Implementing change requires a good mix of leadership and followership to ensure that the goal of re-focusing and birthing a new agenda can be reasonably achieved regardless of the challenges posed. The Late John F. Kennedy declared famously that “Change is the Law of Life, and those who look only to the past and the present, are certain to miss the future”.
The implications of the “murky” nature of a change journey cannot be over-emphasized. Never mind how thoroughly you plan prior to the commencement of your change initiative or how well-resourced you are, things can simply go wrong inexplicably. Many of us can identify with how hopeful we have been in the past about a change opportunity or project only to relent mid-stream, due to a myriad of challenges.
These encompass limited resources and budgeting, unclear objectives, resistance from as many quarters, and the age-old perception that we “are comfortable where we are what’s all this fuss about!” Let’s reiterate that change is undeniably hard; however, we must cease the opportunity to play ball when the need arises.
When a business pursues the journey to enhance its customer experience the path of change we have just described becomes imminent. To address the customer journey in ways that enhance the experience requires the involvement of the whole business from the CEO to the least in the organization. The conversation about the customer must ring across board to ensure that there is a general awareness of the customer’s importance and the need to address the customer’s concerns timeously, and with great attention to detail, to ensure that the customer leaves very satisfied and is willing to come back for more of the same.
The journey to embed a customer-centric culture can be lengthy and challenging. This notwithstanding, it is worth the effort if planned properly and implemented with the right approach.
This means having in place a realistic plan, adopting the right strategies which may include effective stakeholder management to guarantee alignment, setting realistic targets to help manage progress, and enlisting a willing team of change agents or “special forces” to influence new thinking and behaviours that are supportive of the change, and embedding the new processes to build and sustain the “new normal”. Being systematic and organized is imperative to achieve any level of success in the process.
Here are a few pointers to help us in our change journey. First, develop the building blocks of your change agenda to ensure successful outcomes. It is imperative that you carry out the change in manageable chunks.
Second, develop a team of change ambassadors to drive your change initiative at all levels.
Third, facilitate customer experience workshops to sensitize all and sundry about the change with the customer at the centre.
Fourth, adopt a model that resonates with your organizational culture and be prepared to tweak your processes to adapt to the new customer-centric culture. Fifth, ensure that the leadership is committed to the CX agenda and fully involved in its processes.
Manage the Change
A good place to start your change programme is to identify the need for change. How you address this will be no different from mapping out your change agenda for customer experience. Note that your programme will impact as many people in your organization, therefore you need an engagement strategy, but first define your vision to crystalize the message in terms of where you are going.
Next, you must communicate this to everyone who will live with the change. Your communication plan must factor all your stakeholders in the mix. As leaders, we tend to have a good understanding of where we are going, but how to bring everybody else along with us is where we are challenged.
According to Alan Pennington (2016), leaders must ‘remember that at the heart of the issue is that business leaders, often unintentionally, miscommunicate the goal – the challenge is how to articulate and describe what you are setting out to achieve and then to manage our human reaction to it”.
So a gap analysis will help to drive awareness especially if the process of identifying the gaps is participatory enough in order to help gain buy-in from all concerned. Your primary goal is to create awareness about the importance of the customer and what this means to your business.
It is necessary to find out what opinions are among your internal actors, regarding your customer to help you understand where you are as an organization. What you seek is an informed view of what the customer’s needs are and the extent to which this is understood internally. On group of people whose voice matter in this process are your frontline staff as they have regular contact with your customers and thus have a better understanding of their needs. Also, note the level of the employee experience as it impacts the customer experience directly. Managing the change is essential to ensure that the outcomes are measurable and impactful. More importantly ensure that the change is delivered in manageable chunks to avoid getting swarmed or overwhelmed.
Team effort
Your quest to step up customer engagement hinges on a culture that ensures everyone is committed to your customer experience programme. It is critical that everyone feels a part of the new culture. A recommended approach is to commission a cross-functional team to drive the programme, with leadership support behind it to add weight to what they do.
To reinforce the team effort you must elicit feedback from your employees, prior to, during and after the implementation of the programme. This sends a clear signal that it is everyone’s responsibility to build better experiences. The feedback from your frontline is pivotal to help identify gaps and to put together an agenda that has buy in.
The primary aim of the customer experience team is to educate the wider team (rest of the organization) and instill confidence that improvements are deliverable.
Specifically, they will provide senior leaders with support through coaching, awareness sessions with the aim of equipping them to actively engage with the customer experience with confidence, inject customer experience into training and development courses; engage in customer journey mapping work, and provide opportunities to introduce the customer voice into the business at various levels.
A well-managed team takes customer experience to the tactical level, a move that can potentially be very impactful.
According to Shep Hyken a customer service and experience expert “A big part of the customer experience team’s responsibility is to analyze every touchpoint that a customer has at every interaction they have, or could have, with any part of the journey they experience when doing business with the company.”
When teams work collaboratively on customer experience projects, they contribute a great wealth of insight and ideas that improve the initial concepts and inspires the development of more effective customer-centric processes. The key is to work collaboratively to achieve quick wins, by bringing the right people into a room and structuring their input potentially leads to rapid developments.
Facilitating your customer experience workshops
There is a sequence of events that need to take place to begin to drive customer change. This must be sustained over an extended period of time to effect real change to the culture of the company. A key stage in your change agenda is the customer experience workshop.
The process involves breakout sessions of up to 6 people to allow enough breadth of knowledge and to ensure that everyone’s voice is audible. Mix the groups to provide different viewpoints and don’t hesitate to change them around if the dynamic or knowledge sets are not working. Encourage divergent thinking to draw depth in ideation as you work to shape the company’s customer agenda.
The format may be as flexible however your goal is to design new experiences at the end of the day. Work in plenary sessions to craft the messages that the company is trying to convey, and that the customer is trying to hear. List these on sticky notes and place them on the wall for all to see.
You will find that there is a plethora of messages drawn from the sessions, leaving the team with the additional challenge of how to communicate these measures and when. Make the workshop environment fun and stimulating, use videos to highlight wow experiences, make sure there are refreshments and props for people to use, take frequent breaks. This process must be consistent to sustain the momentum of your customer agenda.
Ensure that the sessions are two-way and involve informed discussions about how to address customer needs effectively, encourage team contribution rather than broadcasting, you might want to facilitate these sessions off-site for great effect.
The outputs from these workshops must be consolidated in a report of opportunities and ideas. Once you have approved the set of ideas and your newly designed experience, the final stage in the process is to engage with the ‘inside-out’ (internal) business processes. You then ask the question ‘what do we need to do to make this happen’? This unearths ideas about how to respond to the customer’s needs based on the insights shared.
Customer-Centricity is intentional
The workshop will lead ultimately to the creation of a design for the experience you are reviewing that records what happens at each key moment. My personal experience of a ‘free-bee’ years ago in a UK supermarket where I went home with groceries I had purchased for ‘free’, following a machine malfunction attests to the fact that customer experiences are not accidental encounters.
My brother enjoyed a planned experience when the hotel staff all referred to him by his first name anytime he entered the restaurant. By identifying target scenarios for your customer experience, you will be better placed to design unique experiences for your customers with regularity.
You can begin by identifying scenarios for different areas in your organization. Plot parallel activities across functions and teams e.g. marketing, sales, operations, and legal, you will see who is doing what, when, and be able to discuss together how this is contributing to, or impairing the target customer experience. Draw blueprints on whiteboards to create a shared view of the customer which may later be captured as a key requirement document. We have a good reason to believe that the experiences offered by major brands are not accidental. They are the result of careful planning and measured execution based on a clear understanding of the customer’s viewpoint. As a small business the same principles apply when engaging your relatively smaller team.
Here are a few examples from some major brands; Kohls provides an easy to shop online and in-store. The customer experience of their website is excellent in that they make everything simple to locate. Zalando is doing a great job of providing a cohesive customer experience.
They successfully combine fashion and IT processes with complex logistical operations to ship products to customers and process returns. Netflix knows a lot about how to make user experience really great. They provide an easy to use platform which offers a lot of movies/series, but they do more than just provide streaming – they also produce their own movies and series based on their informed understanding of their customers’ needs.
The Role of Leadership is Pivotal
Leadership influence is critical in successfully navigating a culture of customer centricity in the organization. Firstly, leaders define the culture of any organization, their behaviors and practices is what their followers imitate and adapt in large measure thus it becomes the norm. ultimately these qualities impact on the customer experience.
Looking at this more tangibly as we have outlined they are the culture, which is essential in that alignment with the right culture fosters a culture of service excellence. They set (SMART) objectives to ensure that all departments and work cohesively to enhance customer satisfaction.
A leadership committed to customer-centricity will ensure that they provide training to employees to enhance their capacity to function effectively in delivering unique experiences. This way they ensure that employees are fully engaged and involved in the customer conversation.
They support teams by encouraging experimentation (reasonably), and gather insights to draw lessons from, and leverage to deliver excellent customer experiences. This underscores the assertion that customer experience is intentional. Where leadership fails to commit in this way the results are unfavourable and customers are bound to notice this.
Leaders who pay attention to the customer’s needs are particular about earning their trust and loyalty and would commit resources to build emotional connections with the customer. Richard Branson came up with the ‘what if there was another way…?’ idea to introduce his airline service and went at lengths to find out what other airlines were not doing so that he could find ways of dealing with the gaps he identified. He interacts with employees and lives and breathes customer service. Leadership is key in building trust and loyalty among customers. Customers in response to the attention paid to their needs, become advocates for the brand, further amplifying its reach and reputation in the market.
In summary, effective leadership is integral to creating a customer-centric organization. By fostering a supportive culture, providing strategic direction, empowering employees, and driving continuous improvement, leaders can significantly enhance the customer experience, leading to increased satisfaction, loyalty, and overall business success.
There are 2 key lessons from the deliberate planning and implementation of a customer experience change agenda. These are first, pay attention to customer feedback, listening to your customer offers a priceless opportunity for you to learn about their concerns at first hand.
Second, make everyone accountable for the customer, do not leave customer experience to a formal function, and forget about what they do. Great customer experiences are derived from well-managed internal cultures with leadership supporting efficient teams where feedback from customers is taken on-board and duly addressed.