Managing the change to initiate and develop a customer experience strategy

– plan and deploy a CX strategy that aligns with the direction of your business

In the past few weeks, I have been on ‘Cloud-9’ taking a dip into the CX Masterclass and learning more in-depth about this new journey that has caught my attention in the past three years or so. My Customer Experience Journey has been one of self-discovery, leading me to some exciting revelations about a domain that is hardly thought of and yet has great potential for the average business, if managed well. First of all, a big shout out to our resource persons and lead facilitator, President of CXP Ghana Esther Dokuwaa Ofosuhene, whose vision has birthed great awareness of the CX culture and the potential it holds for us.

I must add also that it has been a privilege to sit in the same room with industry stalwarts who have boldly taken the bull by the horn and are working tirelessly to change the narrative about how we engage and manage customer relationships. My key takeaway from this training is firstly, that CX as a game-changer in today’s highly competitive and volatile world is an incontrovertible fact. Secondly, any business that embraces a customer-centric culture and invests in delivering out-of-world experiences will ultimately earn the trust and confidence of its customers. Why am I saying this?

Any business with a definite CX strategy will become the preferred choice of customers over its competitors. The CX Guru Ian Golding, in his book ‘Customer What?’, shares the story of JC Penny – a well-known brand in the USA that lost touch with its customers as its CEO who took over in 2011 planned and executed a change agenda without the involvement of key (internal and external) stakeholders. He went on to change a number of things, including the logo of the business, pricing policy (no more discount sales and coupons), and the layout of the stores.

These changes were catastrophic and ended up costing the business over US$4bn during the tenure of this CEO. His only crime was that he failed to consult with employees and customers. The rationale of this story is simply this, Customer Experience – as a process – needs deliberate attention from everyone to ensure that there is awareness among all employees about the importance of the customer and the need to manage the relationship with this customer flawlessly across all touchpoints. It will require a collective commitment by all to work collaboratively with one clear purpose, to satisfy the customer.

From the beginning (awareness) of the engagement to the point where the customer completes the transaction (purchase) and perhaps even decides to come back as well as inform (advocacy) friends and colleagues, customer experience is a critical part of ensuring business success. To be deliberate about the customer experience, you will need a plan that will facilitate the building blocks of the customer experience agenda, one that aligns your business strategy with the backing of leadership from the top. Here are a few nuggets to help us plan our customer experience strategy.

First, define your Customer Persona. This is a fictional profile that represents your target customer. Second, develop your CX Strategy, this encompasses all of the plans that you make to ensure positive, high-quality customer experiences. Third, align your CX strategy with your business strategy. Fourth, evaluate your CX maturity to determine its current state; this is a framework that helps your organisation evaluate its current level of CX and provides a roadmap for CX growth and improvement. Fifth, Change Management. This is about treating your employees just as well as you want them to treat your customers.

Customer persona

This is a semi-fictional archetype that represents the key traits of a large audience segment based on the data collected from user research. It highlights the characteristics of prospective customers and weighs potential options that address the problem they want to solve. This is captured through surveys, user interviews, contacting your frontline teams, and other user research methods. It enhances your ability to understand the target customer. The data obtained from this process is synthesised carefully to discover similarities and patterns between your test participants.

The output from this process is used to create a customer persona shared across the organisation. Information captured will typically include the age of the customer, where they live, their gender, the industry they work in or the nature of their occupation, the highest level of education, and their profession, among others. A good starting point will be to ask who actively uses your product. Your customers give you the greatest chance of finding a match for your target persona. Your focus must be on customers who value your product; however, it also pays to listen to negative sentiments to learn and improve.

Consider the persona of a tourist who wants to visit the country during the summer break. This would be someone desirous of travelling to Ghana. I have met someone like that before, who was visiting Ghana for the first time. A hotel in the Central Region caught his attention and they managed to reach out to him (online perhaps) and won his heart with a tour package at a relatively reasonable cost. A persona will reflect the likes and dislikes (frustrations) of the customer, the background of the customer, and other important attributes. Think of how valuable this is to a boutique (or any other) hotel.

CX strategy

Any company that wants to ensure that it delivers positive high-quality customer experiences must have a deliberate strategy for this purpose. The strategy will ensure that there is consistency in how the company delivers customer experience, spanning all the interactions between the business and customers. It is about how customers feel about their interactions over time. This requires that there is a definite plan of how the business engages and addresses customer needs regularly. The CX strategic plan must flow from and align with the overarching goals of the business strategy.

Having a strategic plan ensures that there is guidance in developing the portfolio and prioritising CX projects and investments. As a business, you will definitely have your goals and internal capabilities to help drive these goals. What the CX strategy does for you is that it ensures that you address the gap between customer expectations and internal capabilities. There is a plethora of models that can be employed in designing a CX strategy. For example, the Agile approach addresses the CX strategic plan aligned with demand and supply. Some other important components are listening, learning, and taking action.

A few questions to ask in this process include: what technology, people or processes do we need? What gaps exist between customer expectation and actual experiences? And where do we stand now in terms of a customer-centric experience? Answers to these questions will help you better shape your CX strategy. Note also that your employees are key to delivering a great customer experience. In this regard, it is imperative that you pay attention to employees and customers. If a customer mentions a birthday when making a reservation, the manager must come over to wish them well – a gesture that must have reciprocity for employees.

Aligning with business strategy

By aligning customer service strategy with business goals, we maximise Customer Success. It is about proactively meeting customer needs and ensuring that there is longevity and success in relationships with clients. Achieving ROI (return on investment) in customer service is sometimes a little difficult to quantify. Core departments – such as production and other technical departments – can easily quantify ROI. Support departments generate ROI through improved retention, increased sales, and expansion of business, with customers serving as a marketing channel, sharing their great experiences with others.

Data-driven customer service management is pivotal to all successful businesses. They include watertight key performance indicators (KPIs) to manage performance and to provide crucial information on how each of the support wings is performing and how they can improve the services provided. Some of these indicators are Net Promoter Score (NPS), depicting how likely customers are to recommend your service to others; Customer lifetime value (LTV), highlighting the average amount of money your business earns from customers over a specific period; and customer churn rate, for number of customers you lose over a certain period of time.

There are others, such as customer satisfaction score (CSAT), reflecting how satisfied a customer is with a specific feature, product or interaction. These are used at multiple touchpoints to find failure points. The process includes the relaying of feedback from customers to marketing and other business units so that customer sentiment and branding can be evaluated. To facilitate a better understanding between teams, cross-team training sessions can be arranged. these cross-team training sessions help to build cohesion between teams and allow for a better discussion of key issues that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Assess CX maturity

Qualtrics, the US experience management company, has come up with this model to help businesses improve customer experience holistically and avoid the trap of focusing on superficial changes. They are six competencies to help you evolve through the stages of maturity. These are LEAD, REALIZE, ACTIVATE, ENLIGHTEN, RESPOND, and DISPRUT. They evolve through five stages of maturity.

Stage 1 – Investigate. Companies in this stage should work on identifying the ‘best’ first steps and building buy-in with senior executives to acquire the resources needed for moving forward. Stage 2 – Initiate. Here, an ad-hoc or part-time team is usually formed. The goal is to educate executives, define the initial strategy, and formalise Voice of Customer efforts. Stage 3 – Mobilise. Once executives view CX as a strategic priority, the organisation taps into full-time CX staff who distribute insights and drive experience improvements. It is about defining what good CX looks like for the entire organisation. Stage 4 – Scale. With strong CX practices in place, the organisation systematically uses insights to identify and improve experiences, and invests in engaging the entire workforce in CX. It includes using CX metrics and insights to improve CX and tracking the impact of their CX efforts. Stage 5 – Embed. In this final stage, CX skills are ingrained across the organiastion, and it is able to rapidly adapt to shifts in the marketplace. Mature CX programmes enable an organisation to continuously learn, propagate insights, and rapidly adapt to the needs and expectations of all relevant stakeholders. Customer Experience Maturity Assessment (CXMA) enables you to measure and benchmark the performance of CX in your company, align all departments around a common ambition, and define your prioritised CX roadmap. The result is an aligned roadmap to take the organisation to its next level of customer centricity.

Manage the change

This is the process of planning, implementation, feedback and re-evaluating. A successful change management process involves open communication and encourages collaboration among all members of the organisation. Experts have established that Customer Experience (CX) and Organisational Change Management (OCM) make a great pair in not only delivering on our customer’s expectations, but often exceeding them. A big part of change management is people. As much as we care about impact, we must focus on meeting customer expectations. We want to meet them where they are and do what we can to make their journey easier.

We are able to accelerate our CX improvements with a clearly defined strategy that allows the company to evolve effectively. This includes defining a vision and aligning the organisation to a common view, with core values driven by customer expectations for how you will make decisions, truthfully assessing the maturity of your organisation, and building a roadmap for change. Engaging all in our OCM initiative will help us in driving discussion on what is working well or not and how to influence or change those engagements. Kotter’s fourth step in change management is to enlist a volunteer army.

Change is about people. There’s no way a small team can directly influence every touchpoint and interaction. You have to find creative ways to spur action that permeates your entire organisation. One of the plethora of models for change is Prosci’s ADKAR model. To build your volunteer CX army, make sure your communications are compelling so that recruits are aware of the CX programme and desire to join it; know how to support it and are able to support it and have their support continually reinforced. It is all about generating excitement for change, amplifying your efforts, and enhancing your influence.

To implement a potent CX strategy, you must boldly drive initiatives internally by creating the case for change, forming a guiding coalition and sharing the vision. To sustain the CX vision effectively, you need the strong hand of executives to back you to ensure that your programmes are prioritised for full impact. Failing that, your CX agenda will find itself behind what the organisation sees as more important business requirements.