The New Customer Experience Manifesto How to Create a Customer Experience Board
How to Create a Customer Experience Board If you agree delivering superior customer experience is vital to your business, you ve no doubt realised that things in this space are really starting to change. Paying lip service to customer experience is not enough. In fact, it s no longer just about companies meeting customer expectations, but exceeding them. It s time to surprise and delight your customers, so they want to come back to you time and time again. If you re reading this ebook, chances are you understand that making the right choices and having the right people involved in your customer experience team is key to making it a success. This ebook can serve as your comprehensive guide on how to build up your cross-functional customer experience board and really make a difference. Learn about establishing the tactics you can use and how to go above and beyond customer expectations, right through to some ideas for being really disruptive in this space. 2
Chapters 1. Customer experience why are the stakes so high? 2. Why a customer experience board? 3. How can you start to put the customer first? 4. How can a customer experience board make a difference?
Customer experience why are the stakes so high? 1
Customer experience why are the stakes so high? These days, customers have more choice than ever before. You only have to look around to see a lot of industries dramatically changing in favour of the customer. Sometimes it's because of new entrants, like Uber, Airbnb, etc. but often it's due to changes in legislation and compliance. More and more, you see decision making powers shifting away from companies and towards their customers. As individuals and organisations, we need to react to stay relevant. This calls for you to have a real-time pulse check, at a transactional level, so you can start to build up a picture of what is really happening from your customers' perspective. But it also means that you need to adapt and evolve to deliver the type of experience that your customers now expect. Ultimately, you ll be judged against the brands delivering the best customer experience, not just those in your own industry. It s people that are delivering a fantastic experience already that you should be trying to compete with, rather than just your close-knit sector. If, as an organisation, you re struggling to decide whether you should care about customer experience, then you're probably not an organisation that is focusing on it in the first place. A lot of people give lip service to delivering a good customer experience but don't have either the structure or the philosophy to see it through. You absolutely have to believe it's the right thing to do to have any chance of delivering it. For customer experience to thrive, it has to be something that's at the heart. It has to be part of the beliefs and culture of an organisation. Only when it s genuine can you surpass expectations and provide a high level of service, and experience. 5
Why a customer experience board? 2
Why a customer experience board? Many brands are centralising customer experience in terms of who's responsible and who s involved. Increasingly marketers are expanding their remit to understand that every time a company engages with their customers it is an extension of their brand. Execs from both customer service and operational roles are also responsible for customer experience. Bringing this together, with a more formal structure and creating a customer experience board makes sense. It s about making sure everyone who can impact customer experience is represented and having a more unified approach. Find other people, and there are plenty of them in the business, that are truly passionate about putting the customer first in every situation. Quite often organisations fall into the trap of doing things the way they've always been done. But there will always be people who recognise change as an opportunity to make improvements and to successfully meet customer expectations. Join together and create an internal movement. Put together a team that can make a difference, whether that team is part of separate functions or across your entire business - they can engender the change that needs to happen. It s really tough to move every single part of your people, process, systems and technology towards the end goal of delivering customer experience. You really need to put in the right levels of technology and process to support your people to deliver the customer experience you want to be known for. To be truly disruptive you need to identify where your sector is consistently failing to meet customer expectations and then focus solely on delivering against them. Sometimes this might mean creating a whole new business model - there are several examples of organisations who have done just that. In their pursuit of becoming truly customer centric they have realised that to actually deliver what the customer wanted, they couldn't follow the business model of the industry, they had to revolutionise it. 7
How can you start to put the customer first? 3
How can you start to put the customer first? Some organisations are still at the starting line. They know that customer experience is important, but they don t actually know where to begin. Others are further along the path and are now looking to make those marginal changes that turn good customer experiences into great customer experiences. Often, the first step to improving the customer experience is getting support from the board. Hiring somebody that is ultimately responsible for driving the customer experience has to be seen as a positive by management. After all, if you don't have any board level buy-in, then it's going to be very hard to get the resource you need to make any kind of customer experience programme work. Next, it s time to listen to what your customers are already saying to you, and we mean really listen. Many organisations rationalise customer information through reporting all the way through to the board. Customers are often asked to fill in surveys, answer questionnaires, and score their experience, giving you factual, structured, and rational information. But the problem is these methods focus on the information that is important to the brand, not necessarily the issues that are affecting their customers. Crucially, none of these methods are able to capture the emotion behind their customers' answers. Rather than relying on your interpretation of your customers' feedback, uncover what they're actually feeling. Then, start to work with those areas of the business that have the most interaction with your customers, so the people in the field or in the Contact Centre. Engage them by gathering feedback from customers. What you ll probably find is that far from being inundated with complaints, your customers will have quite a lot of positive things to say. Then find ways of putting this positive sentiment to work, before you even begin to undertake any analysis. 9
A lot of people think that senior management are the most important internal stakeholders. But that s probably a misconception. Typically, there is a general understanding at senior management level that customer experience is important. The real struggle is how do you operationalise it? How do you prevent it from being just another initiative, another action or another incentive programme? How do you turn it into part of the company culture? By engaging with the frontline, you can start to create a small movement within the organisation, sharing those little nuggets and stories that have surfaced from the frontline team and distribute them through an internal bulletin or newsletter. Then your customers will start to live as real people rather than just numbers and revenue. Now if you're going to ask for feedback, you really have to be prepared to act on it. If you put yourself out there and say "We're listening" and then don't deliver, you ve set an expectation and you've got the potential to disappoint customers even more. If you make the decision to say, "As a company, we're going to be all about customer experience", then you really have to be. Because if customers don't feel that they're being listened to, it's very easy for them to switch and go to somewhere that they know they'll be heard. If you can get it right, then this is where your customer loyalty is going to grow. People will know they can come back to you and you ll actually listen. But even if you get it wrong, even if the brand makes early mistakes, then it can still help. As long as you're proactive about making it right and explain to the customer that that's what you're doing, then often, that breeds the most loyal customers. They've just had a really negative experience, but you have managed to turn it around and make it positive. 10
How can the customer experience board make a difference? 4
How can the customer experience board make a difference? If customer experience is about creating a different, genuine way for you and your customers to interact, then what can you do to really make a difference? Trends come and go. Each passing year tests the durability of trends. Which ones will stick it out and which ones are already past it? Perhaps most importantly, what are the emerging trends that you need to stay on top of? Or in other words, how prepared are you for the next 12 months? Here are the 6 tactics for a customer experience board to really start to make a difference: 2. Have an agile approach to customer experience Remember the old days of IT? You had an analysis phase. Then you used to define the documents and the requirements before anybody would start building any code. What you'd then find is that the users had already changed their opinions before the first release was eventually churned out. Agile, as an IT methodology, was brought to life to overcome this challenge and help work through very difficult and complex change processes. 1. Make it easy to be a customer This is about making the whole experience for the customer as easy as possible. The example many people use here is Amazon. People keep going back to them time and time again because everything about their service delivery makes it so easy to be a customer. They can get what they want within seconds. As long as customers get what they asked for when they ask for it, then they're not really looking for much more. It s about making everything customer-centric with minimal effort on their part - they don t have to call in and chase for updates because you ve already communicated with them and they know what s going on. This approach is now being adapted in the customer experience space. Rather than looking for and defining a big transformation, which is the traditional approach to change management in large organisations, you see a more agile approach for making smaller, faster changes. Many organisations have already made a big shift towards embracing customer experience. Now it s time for these organisations to move from good to great. It's about marginal gains, it's about those micro transformations in their business that slowly push the service levels beyond expectations or certainly in-line with the rapidly changing customer expectations. Customer feedback fits really well into this because it allows you to have a more evolutionary approach and shape yourself and your processes around what your customers are telling you. 12
4. Break down silos between departments 3. Support the emergence of the Chief Customer Officer In more and more companies, we're seeing the emergence of Chief Customer Officers or Chief Experience Officers. They're being tasked with putting together teams that are really concerned about the customer agenda and, often, represent the customer in the boardroom. Having someone in this role means that the CX board will have the senior support to see things through. To be effective in this role, they have to truly have the backing of the board. They also need to be the type of individual that is able to rally all of the different business units that are involved in delivering the service. Unless they are an extremely influential individual that has the political clout and backing to be able to make significant changes, they will find it tough to create lasting change. Many companies have different data sets for every single department. Marketing has one set of data, customer service is using another and they can t, or won't, share their information with each other. This creates silos, where different information about customers is held by different parts of the business. One of the most common reasons silos exist is because of legacy systems. These have all been built separately and it's very hard when you're a big, established business to change those processes. It's much easier for someone who's coming in and just growing quickly to make sure that they get those processes right from the beginning. But, even for established businesses, if you get all of that information in a central database, such as a CRM system, you have somewhere that you can go in and look at each of your customers. You can understand their journey, every touch-point that they've been through. It makes it so much easier to understand the context and then deliver the right experience to each customer. 13
5. Change mindsets within the organisation Breaking down silos is not just about making sure you have the right technology in place and are properly communicating and sharing information. It's also about making sure that across departments, people are prepared to collaborate and understand that customer experience is important. There are times when you ll come across resistance, where people are unwilling to change their mindsets. It s always going to be a challenge. But, there are ways to break down this resistance. Perseverance is number one. But it s also about making sure that you can prove an ROI and get your stats and facts in place to prove the business case as to why you should be making that change. If you can build a strong business case, then it undermines the arguments of people that think customer experience is just a bit wishy-washy or vague, because you can prove to them with the facts and figures that there's a real business benefit to it. There are a lot of things associated with customer experience that people see as costly. They might be enhancing the customer experience, but when you're talking to a CFO, you really have to justify your position. Customer experience people need to get a lot hotter on proving the ROI. It's really about building a business case and getting support on the board level, agreeing that that's what they're all striving towards. Then, you ll be able to embed customer-centric decision making in the boardroom. So every decision they make is influenced with the customer in mind. The main ethos then becomes that the customer drives every decision. Instead of behaving like people expect a bank or utility company to act, it s about challenging yourself and striving to be more like the best in breed companies for customer experience, regardless of your industry. 14
Conclusion The days of just meeting customer expectations, just doing enough to get by, are nearing their end. Customers now have more choice than ever before. More and more, they turn to the organisations that they know will provide a great experience and why wouldn't they? As customer experience becomes increasingly important, it s time to react and do something different. Companies who don t see this risk being left behind, losing customers and ultimately, revenue. We re all judged against those companies delivering a fantastic experience. It s no longer about just being better than your competitor, it s about challenging your industry norms and being genuinely disruptive. 6. Get your customers to input on your product/service Take customer experience to such a level that your customers are actually inputting suggestions and ideas for product development. If you've got a good relationship with your customers, a dialogue about you as a company can begin to take shape. So your customers feel that they are participating in the solutions and that what they have said has influenced the direction of the company. They feel they're in control. It's almost a flipped model, with the customer determining the company strategy. This can mean change and it can be dramatic. To actually put the customer first and not just pay lip service to delivering on your customer experience promises means a shift in mindset, a shift in approach and even a shift in structure for both individuals and the whole organisation. Now is the time. 15
Webinar: On the 19th of May at 3pm we ll be hosting a 'House of Ravers' Webinar alongside Jason Sharpe, MD of SharpeBusiness and former senior exec at First Direct, Vodafone and OVO Energy, on how you can transform your Customer Experience by challenging conventions and embracing innovation. Register here or send your details to hello@rantandrave.com and we ll do the rest. Want to know how Rant & Rave can help? We re always on the lookout for brands with the same ethos as us - those who aren t afraid to think outside the box and do things differently. So whether that s already you or you re looking for some inspiration, we d love to be a part of your plans. Call us on 02476 011 911 or email us at hello@rantandrave.com www.rantandrave.com We re proud to be working with... 16
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