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OK, let's get real about the buzz around customer experience. As has been the case with nearly every incarnation of customer-focus activity, the focus on experience is inadvertently randomizing corporations, sending people out on tactical missions to map customer touch points that have no future relevance to the operation, and making a lot of consultants happy.

To make customer experience stick as part of your operation, you need to have an organized and phased approach for integrating it into your organization. Without it, customer experience becomes one more customer-focused tactic that your company tried for a while and then abandoned.

So here, based on working with scores of clients from around the world, is the real-world approach for how to integrate customer experience into your operation—in a way that will make it stick and change how you work.

In this article, I'll discuss the first three focus areas. In the next installment, I'll discuss the last two focus areas.

Focus No. 1: Alignment Around Customer Experience

(Images in this article refer to an insurance industry example.)

Many organizations say they focus on their customers' "experience," but few do the hard work to define the stages of the experience from the customer's point of view.

Instead, each operating area does its own thing, driven by each area's internal tasks, agenda, and scorecard. A lot of work is done, often in the name of the customer, but it doesn't deliver a unified experience for the customer. The big things don't get systemically fixed, and we miss the opportunities for the big "wow" moments.

In this focus area, you define the stages of the experience and the moments of truth that determine all the customer touch points, which include both the obvious touch points, such as when the customer places an order, and opportunities that might be missed, such as when the customer places the 100th order or when the customer has contacted customer service three times in a month.

At this stage of the work, lead your teams to identify the top 10-20 moments of truth so that you can prioritize the touch points in order to begin improving reliability and weaving in those differentiating "wow" moments.

The significance of doing so is huge. Not enough companies understand that this is the first "duct tape" exercise, to get your organization moving together in one direction—to agree on the stages of your customer experience..

It is also the platform work for the journey to transform the customer experience; that is, once you've reached agreement, you can...

  1. Line up customer feedback to those stages—where you gather feedback on the experience
  2. Connect cross-silo operational metrics for the delivery of cohesive experiences
  3. Establish reward and recognition that enforces key moments
  4. Give leaders a way to hold the company accountable—both to the stages of the experience and to cross-functional teams that affect the stage. Doing this changes accountability from "down the silo" scorecards and dashboards to "across the experience" shared metrics and accountability.

Focus No. 2: Experience-Based Customer Listening and Feedback

Because of the way we take feedback and then hand it off for resolution down the silos, we inadvertently send a "false positive" to CEOs and company leaders that customer issues are being resolved.

See whether this sounds familiar to you: As your results come in from surveys, reports, and social media, they are handed over to an operating area, or silo, to "go work on it." The survey results are sent throughout the company, where each silo interprets the results and then decides what it will do.

What happens next is...

  1. Every leader interprets "go work on it" differently.
  2. Whichever department receives the survey results to "go work on it" does some action internally and then reports back at the next meeting.
  3. Because we take feedback results, categorize them into silo buckets, and then dole them out to be fixed by silo... the customer experience doesn't have a chance of getting fixed—from the customers' perspective.

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Customer Experience Leadership Survival Guide, Part 1

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Jeanne Bliss
Jeanne Bliss is the founder of CustomerBLISS (www.customerbliss.com), a consulting and coaching company, and the author of Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action.