The 2020 Customer Experience Benchmarking Report published by NTT highlights a key element of being successful with Customer Experience, which is having a company embrace change through their leadership. We know that 81.6% of organizations agree CX offers a competitive edge.
It starts with the governing body that defines the strategy: the board.
Hence, board members must define the right Customer Experience strategy and then onboard the executive team to roll it out across all departments and business units. If I were to sit on your company’s board, I would orient the Customer Experience strategy towards 4 key pillars:
Fix things, fix them quickly, fix them permanently.
First of all, board members must know what is broken in the company. Forget the Balance Sheet, P&L, CAPEX and all financial metrics for now. Why is the company not performing well enough, where is competition ahead and what is the USP (unique selling proposition) of the company? The most urgent task for board members is to enable the executive team to go and fix things. Bubble up the broken things into the “Broken Things Report” that you look at during board meetings. What is your strategy to help fix them? And remember, time is money so activities to improve your company must fix things, quickly and permanently.
Receiving feedback from customers.
Probably a broken record but so many companies have an inside-out view of Customer Experience. Customers know better than you what they are in the need of, how they want your products and services to be delivered and why. Just ask them. The execution of it is to deploy a structured voice of the customer (VoC) programmes to drive CX improvements as well as innovation. Feedback is sometimes hard but customers who spend time explaining how a process is broken, speed is missing or wrong product information is displayed online is a gold mine to fix, improve and innovate.
Promote innovation with frontline workers.
The now famous frontline workers are working bees, creative workers and the source for innovation in a company. Innovation labs are great to materialise innovation into experiments. However, they often tend to not know the tiny little challenges that consumers face while experiencing your brand. Frontline workers are exposed to these tiny little challenges. One of the frontrunners was Dell in 2007 launched Dell Ideastorm. In 2020, equip your staff members with a “Improve my Company” feature in your Intranet, client-telling app or employee app.
Turn employees into ambassadors.
If you think that as member board you can sit in your board room with fat leather seats, a nicely served lunch thinking on how much attendance fees you’ll earn today, then you may want to resign. Or your chairman will do it for you. Go get your reality check on the ground and meet employees. Your ultimate goal as board member is to turn employees into ambassadors. What are the strategy tenets you define that make them efficient, happy and empowered to envangelise for your brand? One of the idea is to deploy an employee experience solution like Qualtrics XM that surfaces personalised actions for every leader so everyone plays a part in building an employee experience that attracts, engages and retains the best people.
If I were to sit on your company’s board, I would relentlessly push to integrate Customer Experience in the strategy of the company. Moreover, I would redefine the strategy to establish a clear line of sight between customers and how employees become your biggest advocates.
Read insights about personalisation and how to be relevant in my blog post Personalisation is about Delivering the Exception, not the Rule.
Stay well, stay safe and work hard to improve your Customer Experience!
PS: Download the 2020 Customer Experience Benchmarking report here.
