How to succeed with customer experience in your organsation

 

Depending on who you ask you’ll receive many different answers to the question “who owns customer experience”. All companies are different and what works for one company won’t always work for another.  

 

You might wonder is customer experience a new fad, and is it something I really need to worry about.   The current climate that businesses have to operate in means it is becoming increasingly harder to complete on product or innovation alone – customer experience is a huge driver to success and differentiation.

 

Why is achieving excellent and consistent customer experiences so difficult for many businesses?

One of the main reasons is the way businesses are structured. If sales, marketing, customer service etc are all separate functions this often leads to a disconnect between processes, technologies and measures of success across those departments.

 

The easy answer is everyone should own customer experience – however this rarely works in reality. Instead of everyone owning it, no one truly does and customer experience isn’t prioritised or is neglected completely. When everyone is responsible, no one is. The way most businesses are structured result in silos where every department is only focused on their own interests and targets. In this kind of business, the customers’ needs can fall to the wayside and are often not fully understood. Someone needs to take accountability for customer experience in order to break down these silos.

 

Some believe customer experience should be owned by marketing, and while marketing can have the insights in regards to the customers wants, need and expectations – when a customer makes contact with a company it is usually with sales or service, not marketing.

 

It is becoming more common to appoint chief customer officers in larger corporations. It can be a good idea to have a dedicated leader to advocate for and manage the customer experience to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction. However, this is not always possible in smaller businesses.

 

Instead of broadly saying everyone should own customer experience it’s more important to know exactly what part of the customer journey each person within your business influences. Everyone within a business can influence customer experience and therefore everyone can ‘own’ their own part.

 

A good place to start is to define who in the business is responsible for what and identify where the cracks are – where have issues arisen due to no one being responsible for that area or uncertainty about who is responsible? Fix these gaps asap. Clarity around responsibilities is the start of understanding who will own each part of the customer experience.

 

Ensure all employees do whatever they can in each moment to ensure a great customer experience – even if it is not their ‘job’ per say. Employees need to be motivated and empowered to do this.

Determine what ownership of CX looks like for each leader and each employee, even those who don’t face the customer. Each employee should clearly know how their job can influence CX and how they can enhance the customers experience.

 

While everyone in the business can own specific parts of the customer experience, it is up to the business leader to foster and drive a culture and structure where customer experience is a priority.

Customer experience prioritisation has to be a top down push. Leaders should live and breathe CX.

Customer experience must be part of a company’s culture, this will help break down silos and empower employees to take ownership and accountability of CX.

 

There are some key things that need to be in place t o

 

 

• Define Strategy

 

It is important to know what you are trying to do; the whole company should live and breathe CX and it should be entrenched in the company culture.

 

 

• Map Customer Journey

 

To ensure you know exactly how many touchpoints your customer has with your business. Customers must be involved in this process.

 

 

• Align across the business

 

There has to be a consistent message across all business functions, including technologies and systems – data, feedback, CRM systems etc. There should be support for each other within the business even across different business functions.

 

• Measure it

 

Customer experience should be measured in companywide KPIs in order to engage the entire company