– lead from the middle to keep the customer agenda in focus
As is the case with all other business functions and campaigns, one of the critical elements in successfully driving a well-coordinated customer agenda is leadership. A few individuals direct their energies to influence and guide followers to an end for the common good. Lee Kwan Yu is credited with Singapore’s phenomenal success story as he was the visionary who dreamt of that country’s future and strove to make it happen. Locally, we can credit Stephen Appiah and how his sterling leadership qualities led the Black Stars to the big stage and made a mark that we all reminisce about to this day.
The bulk of the work performed by a CX leader is internal. Even though the customer-facing processes of the business require external engagement, much of the work required to keep the customer engaged and satisfied needs a few individuals within the organisation to persuade stakeholders to do or stop doing things that affect the customer experience positively or adversely. The CX lead must be able to build bridges across every stakeholder team, function, business unit, and P and L sector. The test of your leadership will come from the impact you have on your colleagues most impacted by the CX programme you advocate.
An extremely important point here about the CX leadership is the need to be really grounded in what is happening around the customer experience. How you harness the learnings from your engagement on the ground plays a big role in enabling you to understand how it plays into the bigger picture. Note that there are many types of experiences one can have; however, it is important to understand how the experience aligns with the broader spectrum of things in the organisation. As much as the data is important, be careful not to get lost in the data. Use the data productively.
You may pick out some of the ‘gold nuggets’ and look at how and where you can leverage them with the respective categories, and markets you work with based on what you can do that is better for your customers, to get them to come back more often and perhaps, more frequently. How you make the customer feel must be consistent with your own story. The Emirates airline has a tagline ‘Fly better’; what the average traveller says about the experience after travelling with them attests to the consistency of telling your story and demonstrating that you can deliver what you have promised. As a leader, this is where you come in to drive the CX agenda in the right direction.
Building the customer experience management programme is not ‘A walk in the park’. How you address business challenges and align the right resources to the right problem in the right way for the right result is key. The CX professional is a change agent advocating for customers and the mutual benefits of making adjustments to the organisation’s products, services and processes. In most cases, CX leaders are not empowered with enough authority to address these challenges. Their influence is largely informal that needs one to employ human-centred strategies to effectively navigate one’s way to successful outcomes. Here are a few tips to help you in your journey to lead CX efficiently.
First, be innovative, come up with new and improved methods of doing things, be prepared to take risks, and learn from mistakes and successes. Second, add to organisational culture, embrace the shared values of the organisation, and drive and motivate the employees to achieve desired goals. Third, work with integrity. Be who you are and people will trust you and not see you as one who charms and manipulates. Fourth, communicate a lot. Communication is essential for learning and making your work, especially successes, widely known across the organisation.
Be innovative
As much as we desire to deliver out-of-world experiences for our customers, the hard truth is that there is no universal experience strategy just as there is no one-size-fits-all business strategy. Your goal is to meet the expectations of your customers by intuitively delivering the kind of experience that your customers want to feel. This notwithstanding, if you get your customer experience strategy right, you are guaranteed rewards that radically outweigh your efforts. Today’s customer is driving change in every industry. The average customer uses every possible communication channel from Facebook to Snapchat, blogs, and review sites before purchases.
Today’s companies need curious and courageous leaders who are prepared to launch new initiatives and take their businesses in new directions. As a CX lead, you must have both practitioner and innovative thinking modes to envision the future; however, note that although you need both mindsets, the truth is that “even though they don’t clash, they disrupt each other” says Jonathan Shroyer a CX Advocate. If you have to introduce an App to make your touchpoints more accessible, you potentially deliver significant benefits to your customers.
Consider this example where restaurants are introducing Apps to enable customers to order meals and have them delivered at a reasonable cost to save the customer having to travel to the restaurant to buy meals. It ensures that they can receive orders with little effort. It also means more revenue, referrals and recommendations for the business. These days, brands specialise in technologies to fully integrate their supply chain using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Point of Sale terminals (POS) to address business logistics requirements, minimising human interventions and improving service delivery.
You want to align solutions around a specific business case and be driven by the customer’s need. The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a heavy blow to the tourism and hospitality sector. During the period, 91 percent of the global population had limited travel opportunities. Consequently, there was a decrease in international tourism by 22 percent in the first quarter of 2020, according to CX Today. What emerged from this was that the travel industry has introduced excellent customer experience opportunities, offering customers omnichannel booking opportunities. This has made it easier for people to start travelling again.
Influence organisational culture
As CX lead, you may not be the owner of the organisational culture. However, you have a great opportunity to add to the culture by influencing a customer-centric mindset across the organisation. An organisation has a customer-centric culture when all employees and leaders see the customer as pivotal to everything they do. In other words, customer happiness – and not just satisfaction – is the driving force for all strategic actions and communications, both internally and externally. Michael Gerber, E-Myth Entrepreneur author, narrates his experience in a hotel he checked in during a trip.
The next morning, he received his preferred newspaper and remembered that when he checked in the night before the receptionist asked him the newspaper he preferred. He hadn’t given it another thought, but there it was! Exactly the same scenario occurred each and every time he returned. After the first time, he was never asked about his preferences again. He had become a part of the hotel’s management system. The system had provided a match, a mint, a cup of coffee, and a newspaper! But it wasn’t the match, the mint, the cup of coffee, or the newspaper that did it. It was the fact that somebody had heard him. And they heard him every single time!
For this hotel, the customer is at the core of everything they do. They go out of their way to try and find out what the customer prefers and they work hard at keeping that customer happy in the way they engage. One way to create a customer-centric culture is to set an example throughout the business by making sure desirable actions and attitudes are highly visible. Where leadership lives the dream, everyone follows. You can appoint a team of CX ambassadors whose actions model the change you are looking to see. These will be empowered to mentor and guide others.
I visited a hotel recently on a business retreat and got what you might call the Michael Gerber experience. The check-in was seamless; we were in our hotel room snappy as the process was quick and just as I was settling down, there was a knock on my door and young man introduced himself as my butler. Wow! I felt important all of a sudden. At the restaurant, all the staff were all smiles and eager to help. There is so much more to say about this place here in Ghana at Ada. Let me leave it here. The lesson is that culture is a mindset and when the experience culture is driven the customer feels it.
Work with integrity
Be who you are, and people will trust you and not see you as one who charms and manipulates. Use your experience and skillset in your role as CX lead to support internal teams to help clients and partners ensure they deliver honest and sincere services. A big part of that is knowing what the customer is looking for and how best the need can be addressed effectively. The focus on consumer experience ensures an 86 percent chance of re-purchase. In a study of 10,000 USA consumers, almost 9 of every 10 clients that had an excellent experience would probably re-purchase from the same business. This can be compared to the 13 percent of consumers that received a poor CX.
Reaching these success levels requires a consumer-centred transformation to take place. By transforming a simple transaction into an experience aimed at delighting the consumer, every time that individual thinks, buys, uses or speaks about the product or service being purchased, the experience is enhanced as is the opportunity for advocacy. We must endeavour to ‘Keep the Promise’ by clearly understanding the customer’s experience as it is today and how we want it to be in the future.
It requires mapping out the current client journey through all the potential touchpoints, identifying the weak spots at which the experience is not satisfactory, and then mapping out the ideal journey. What you see is what you get (WYSIWG). How do you keep your promises and keep improving your service delivery? There needs to be a management infrastructure to manage all the changes toward CX, including dashboards with key performance indicators to monitor the impact on client experience. You want to develop and sustain an environment where you can beat yourself on the chest and say about your brand that “it does what it says on the tin”.
What it means is that the entire organisation must adopt mindsets and behaviours focused on the client. Many times, this requires cultural transformations and robust change in management processes. There is this brand of mineral water that pays a fraction of its sales to charity for every bottle you buy. This puts them in a frame where they are working to make a difference and where they are determined to give back. Keeping this promise is critical to their reputation and integrity. It should not be only about profits or the bottom line. Being human-centred is admirable and central to the customer experience.
Communicate a lot
Getting buy-in from employees is critical to a successful CX campaign. When employees understand and are inspired by what your business is aiming to achieve, they will align with you. Getting everyone to support the customer agenda is about them resonating with your CX vision. This is where you must be able to tell your story in a way that makes them see what’s in it for them. Employees will keenly support when their personal values are in sync with the employer’s values. This is why it is essential to start by communicating the vision and values of your organisation.
In a recent survey, 88 percent of millennials said they would remain in their jobs for more than five years if they bought into what the company was trying to do. This underscores the fact that when employees are engaged, the team culture is highly influential in the work environment. The environment is evidently one that sees everyone collaborating, sharing, and learning from one another with a common focus on delivering customer satisfaction. Have a two-way communication with them using a channel that they are comfortable with. Years ago, we worked with a client whose email culture was below par.
People only read their emails when their pay slips were handed to them. For anything else, they hardly read their emails. Getting the right communication media is key to this process. What channels are your employees comfortable with? Knowing what success would look like and clarity on the right behaviours will emerge from the communication model which is the right fit. Get the right metrics in place so that employees will be accountable and would be able to establish when they are right. An effective internal communication model is the key to engaging employees positively around the customer conversation.
Aim to communicate effectively to every member of your team so that they can be part of the process. Internal communication is an evolving process and you need to give it the time, energy and creative resources it needs so it continues to motivate your team to deliver on your brand promise.
| The Writer is a Management Consultant. He can be reached at 059 175 7205, [email protected], |
