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Now it’s on to building and supporting a Customer-centric culture. Well, culture’s a tricky one.” HR departments and ‘climate committees’ spend lots of time and energy spinning up theories and ideas about how to improve and foster a great corporate culture. How do you build a Customer-centric culture?
Building and Supporting a Customer-Centric Culture. A comprehensive VoC program and robust Process Engineering endeavor is a good start, but without the supportive force of a Customer-centric culture within your organization, you may just be talking-the-talk. They say that Culture eats Strategy for breakfast.
If you’ve read much of my stuff, you may know that, once you ground your CX strategy in your Brand Promise , the three moving operational parts of your Office of the Customer should be Insights , Process Engineering , and building a strong CX Culture. 20% Culture. Finally, there’s CX Culture. 50% Process Engineering.
If you’ve read much of my stuff, you may know that, once you ground your CX strategy in your Brand Promise , the three moving operational parts of your Office of the Customer should be Insights , Process Engineering , and building a strong CX Culture. 20% Culture. Finally, there’s CX Culture. 50% Process Engineering.
The answer is always going to reflect on your culture. Success requires fostering a culture of compassion over a culture of compliance. Do you devolve to the very front-line members you cared so much about during the hiring process the authority to work on behalf of your Customers they need? Do you trust them?
When it comes to the CCO functional responsibilities, they fall into three categories: the Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, Process Engineering (PE), and Customer-centric culture. All of this transactional work needs to be supported by a healthy Customer-centric culture within your organization.
When I speak with business leaders about their organizations’ cultures, there are some obvious things like I just mentioned that are top of mind. But the impact it has on CX is more acute and isn’t as simple as having a great work culture. And all that’s true.
There are three operational responsibilities for a Chief Customer Officer (and his or her Office of the Customer): Insights, Process Engineering, and building a Customer-centric culture. And culture programs will fall pretty flat if there’s not visible follow-through.
Let’s look at another example with a different Why : Although culture is a huge part of a successful CX effort, if that’s all it is, there’s likely an issue. It’ll look less like you’re trying to make your own life easier, but more like you’re trying to lift all boats—which, of course, you are.
It’s got the beginnings of a Customer-centric culture in that its leadership is at least talking the talk. As I’ve written before , culture can be tricky, but like CX itself, sometimes people make it more complicated than it really is, and there are actual, operational things one can do to work on a Customer-centric culture.
Meanwhile, you’ll expend plenty of resources that you may otherwise use to enhance the experiences for your actual Customers all the while patting yourself on the back about what a great culture you’ve created. and driving loyalty (hey, this company cares about my development!).
The role of a Customer Experience leader is to ensure all Customers are taken care of by interpreting the Voice of the Customer, improving overall processes based on those insights, and driving a Customer-centric culture.
I’ve written before about creating a Customer-centric culture. All had shown up in the online accounts within 48 hours. Of course, this isn’t just a gripe-session. There are applicable lessons to be learned here.
What’s worse is, often the same sort of culture that doesn’t enable and empower team members to take care of their Customers is the same one that doesn’t really care much about hearing back from us. I was sympathetic with my service lead and commiserated a bit even.
It’s not that Customer Insights or building a good CX Culture aren’t important , and not that they don’t sometimes require a lot of resources and attention themselves. And definitely it takes a culture that’s truly Customer-centric in order to get people on board with the whys of your process improvements. My response?
By the way, this is not to excuse an employer who has the prime responsibility for fostering such a culture and atmosphere.). But professionalism requires that these things be kept behind the curtain. (By As I’ve written before , trust is vital to the proper working of a good Customer-centric organization.
But either is duck soup if it represents a culture of dedication to the respective Brand Promise. The interesting thing is that, as with the example of the cable tech who skips his lunch, most of the time, these small gestures are invisible to the Customer in the first place.
Number Five makes good sense if you’re trying to build a culture that truly does put your Customers at the heart of all you do. If you want a good CX culture, sure you’ll want to hire people with a passion for serving Customers. Naturally we look for compassion and Customer-centricity in the team members we bring onboard.
Do we really think putting up banners around the place constitutes “CX culture”? Why do we ask the same questions on surveys? Why do we compare our NPS with those of our competitors? Are we approaching CX in the same way as our competitors do, even though they have a completely different Brand Promise?
Is the culture program responsible for an increase in market share? And no, I don’t mean avoiding a fine… that’s not income, and playing defense won’t win the game for you. Or ask if a specific hire (say, in the finance or supply chain departments) is directly responsible for certain sales or hitting a revenue target.
But it really takes a great Customer-centric culture to use it to its full potential. If that culture’s not well cultivated, it can show up even when you close issues. Yes, systemization is helpful.
There was a thriller movie in the 1970s (remade in 2006 and hugely referenced in pop culture) called When a Stranger Calls. But the SaaS business arrangement also offers one of the most glaring opportunities to think outside the survey box when it comes to assessing the Voice of the Customer.
Certification in Customer Experience can work as a pretty helpful shorthand for someone who has a solid understanding of the concepts of CX (strategy, VoC, Process Engineering, Customer-centric culture). And certifying is no slight lift.
Hire them because they know about strategy and VoC and Process Engineering and Customer-centric culture. No curiosity, no inquiry, no breakthrough improvements. So by all means, hire your CX leaders for their curiosity and creativity. Hire them because they have experience improving CX somewhere else.
And she had a bit of CX culture on her plate too: outreach, awareness, education, and the like. But one thing missing from her charter: Doing anything about the Customers’ experiences. Her boss had dedicated his full support to her job, but he’d defined it way too narrowly.
Clearly an essential—indeed, crucial—component of market success is that team, nurtured by the very culture so deliberately crafted by your HR Department. But notice that your HR Department nonetheless rarely if ever feels the need to “justify” its existence.
A lot of the work I do is with entrepreneurs, getting started with CX, and inculcating their new organizations with a truly Customer-centric culture and organization. “We know what our Customers want, we’ve been doing this for years,” they seem to be saying.
This concept should be simple enough, and it reminds me of the need within a good Customer-centric culture to not only enable our teams with the tools and processes to help our Customers at every turn, but also to empower them with the authority to leverage the tools.
That’s no excuse not to try to make the case, but it’s important to know where you’re starting and the built-in cultural challenges you’ll face. And it’s also fair to say that if the leadership of your organization doesn’t see the intrinsic value of good Customer Experience, you’re fighting an uphill defensive battle in the first place.
Soon I’ll write about Process Engineering and wrap up with notes on what it takes to build and maintain a Customer-centric culture. I introduced the concept here and my first post, on CX strategic alignment, is here. Folks often simply boil the Voice of the Customer (VoC) down to surveying. This is a big mistake.
Forget the culture that was being promoted by the boss to keep the numbers from being used properly (and effectively), the actual day-to-day work was being impacted. What was going on here was a very dramatic demonstration of people using their CX KPIs for no reason other than reporting.
In the last installation we’ll discuss what it takes to build and support a Customer-centric culture. We come now to the action part of this series of articles where I’ll emphasize what you do to improve your CX.
In the culture of this organization, I was seen as just another ticket that had to be cranked through the system that day. I’m sure in my experience above that the agent who replied to my inquiry wanted my issue resolved and for me to have a pleasant experience as a Customer. For them, the system was paramount, not the Customer.
One Big Question I hear a lot these days is about AI and automation. How will AI impact CX? How the heck should I know? Its clear Im the one writing all these articles, isnt it? I wonder if well reach the singularity and the world will implode if someone uses AI to write an article about AI and the impact it has. Surely itll be a glowing review.
An introduction to the concept can be found here , and look for briefs on the moving parts (VoC, Process Engineering, and CX Culture) coming soon. This post is part of a series on the four components needed for a CX organization to be successful.
I wrote the other day about what I thought was a conclusion drawn about the impact of automation and AI and all that stuff on CX, from a conversation Id had with a colleague.
Having spent a lot of time in education—corporately doing plenty of L&D work, having had lots of clients delivering workshops and such, and of course as a professor—I’m intrigued by how folks learn. What’s lost on a lot of educators, unfortunately, I’ve found, is the purpose of education in the first place.
I recently had a particularly silly experience with the US Postal Service.* I mailed an envelope (containing nothing more than a copy of my very thin, light book) from Denver across the country to a client. The estimated arrival time on the east coast was to be two days.
I’ve been thinking lately about what causes CX to go south. Well, okay, I do that a lot anyway. Naturally, considering my Framework , I concentrate a lot of my efforts on identifying processes and systems that are causing misalignment with a Brand Promise.
Some of your Customers are idiots. Hey, full disclosure, that includes me. In fact, in some circles, I’m known as the “LCD,” or least-common denominator. As the joke goes, Z is the dimmest bulb in the group, and as such, if I get something, everybody should be able to understand it.
I wrote recently about how the term “representative” can take on a different meaning depending on whether you consider your front-line agents as representatives of you as a brand, or of your Customers as they navigate your systems. When dealing with a hospitality brand recently, that came to mind.
I once had a great co-worker and mentor who, when teaching his Lean Six Sigma courses, would drop the quote: “Never take ‘No’ as an answer from somebody who doesn’t have the authority to say ‘Yes.’” Now, in his context, we were talking about internal politics and change management in general.
Folks who work in your Customer-facing organizations have a lot of different names. Agents, technicians, associates (which always makes me chuckle a little bit ), service providers, and others. One that often makes me think is: Representative. It’s curious to me because it can go either way, can’t it?
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