– learn and strive to turn challenges into opportunities
With the help of YouTube these days we get to see a lot. One of the benefits, among many others, is the opportunity to see what happens in the cockpit when an airplane takes off and when it lands. Watching the pilots go through the paces and manoeuver the controls in-flight brings you very close to what goes on while the rest of us are being ‘pampered’ by the cabin crew. Two lessons I take away from these videos are that piloting an airplane is no walk in the park. The pair in the cockpit flying the airplane must work in harmony, supporting each other and ensuring that they are both aligned in executing their roles as they keep the ‘bird’ flying.
Second, as much as the pilot’s work is no child-play, and requires great attention to detail, so too do we need the diligence, commitment, alertness and focus in anything else we do in this life. Perhaps, just as a pilot has so much to deal with to run an airplane from point A to B, we must also demonstrate a high sense of professionalism and commitment to ensuring that the customer’s journey plays out in good harmony. From the inception of the journey, awareness through to the other main touchpoints – findability, reputation, pre-purchase and post-purchase and the point of advocacy, we need great skill and dexterity in keeping things alive.
One imperative for the pilot is impeccable knowledge about all the instruments and the protocols to follow from the start to the end of any flight. Knowing all the details of the customer’s journey is also imperative for the CX team. In our CX delivery, we must ensure a consistent, high-quality service to leave the customer with great memories of the encounter. We must ensure that our inputs delight customers quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively. It requires deliberate efforts to develop key insights into the customer’s behaviour and preferences to prepare us for the challenge of creating out-of-world customer experiences.
The quest to keep customers happy is not a one-off activity. It requires endless iterations of learning and ploughing-back, including a process of building and managing relationships. Therefore, like the pilots and as is the case for everything else in this world, you need a well-orchestrated mix of processes and methods to run a harmonised CX campaign, developing internal synergies to feed into your external engagements. You will need to have a good understanding of all the facets of customer-related activities, directly and indirectly, to ensure that you are synchronising with all the moving parts both within and outside of your organisation.
Here are a few pointers in this direction. First, know your customers and be attentive to what they want, what they do and why they do it. Second, prioritise CX problems and opportunities. Ensure that you have an intuitive understanding of the customer’s behaviour, can quickly spot challenges and work out appropriate solutions to satisfy them. Third, be on top of employee development and influence a process of knowledge and training to keep them up to date. Fourth, break down organisational silos through collaborative working; and fifth, ensure leadership buy-in to drive customer centricity from the top downward.
Know your customers (KYC)
Knowing your customer is about ensuring that you have identified who the customer is, what they want, what they do, and why they do it. There are a range of ways companies adopt to identify who their customers are. They include face verification, biometric verification, and the use of ID card verification. These days, with the help of AI, businesses use human data to speed up their customer onboarding process and provide insights into each customer. KYC is, therefore, a way of empowering businesses to customise their customer relationships with the help of modern technology matched with well-thought-out organisational processes.
Experts define KYC as a “standard due diligence process used most often by companies to assess and monitor customer risk and verify a customer’s identity”. This approach is a critical set of procedures to manage the various customer risks that businesses face daily. Common ways of doing this include, but are not limited to, Customer Journey Mapping. A customer journey map is a visual overview of how customers interact with and experience your brand, products or business across multiple touchpoints so you can identify which business aspects support a good customer experience and work out which touchpoints need improvements.
The whole customer journey from awareness to advocacy plays out on the journey map (touchpoints) and helps you align your backend processes to meet the customer’s expectations as they engage with your brand. Another way to know your customers is to listen to them regularly. Gather voice-of-the-customer (VOC) feedback and share it throughout the company. This will help everyone understand pain points, validate ideas, and create a better experience. Consolidate this by managing communication channels effectively; strong communication improves customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Prioritise CX problems and opportunities
What do we prioritise on the journey to create a better customer experience? In organisations, we find ourselves dealing with varied and competing priorities. How do you know which opportunities to act on first, and which are worth investing time and resources in? The key here is to start by identifying and quantifying the impact of CX obstacles and opportunities. We then prioritise them using an objective, rather than subjective, approach. Improving the customer experience requires a structured CX strategy aimed at orchestrating internal mechanisms to create memorable customer experiences coupled with data that offers meaningful insights.
According to experts, it’s about developing capabilities to analyse customer behaviour data, across all touchpoints to uncover meaningful customer segments and quantify their effect on your business goals. You then choose high-impact ideas and measure their timeline and economic impact. With these capabilities, you will be better able to prioritise initiatives with clear customer and operational benefits. You are better equipped to reflect on each CX task and its impact on KPIs such as user satisfaction, customer acquisition, reach, revenue and retention. Ensure that every CX project has a metrics hypothesis associated with it.,
A very effective way of doing this is by using the Hoshin Kanri Matrix. It is a management technique developed by Professor Yoji Akao in Japan in the 1950s. In Japanese, Hoshin means “direction” or “compass needle” while Kanri means “control” or “management”. Using the Hoshin Kanri matrix enables the organisation to map strategic goals to guide every decision and action. It also enables you to get everyone aligned and working toward the same organisational goals. You define annual goals and cascade them to see what every department must do to achieve the defined goals by the end of the year.
Step up employee knowledge and training
Just recently, I was in a discussion on customer experience with an executive of a well-known brand in Ghana and he gave a brutal verdict of why CX is elusive in many Ghanaian businesses. According to him, the working conditions for many are way below par and as such, there is very little desire to do anything extra for customers. Does this explain why in some top supermarkets the ‘floor walkers’ just sit and passively watch shoppers move in the aisles? Apart from the occasional response to queries, they hardly show any enthusiasm for helping the customer or making the customer’s shopping experience easier and exciting.
Most of them are engrossed in banter with their colleagues as shoppers grapple with the items in the stalls trying to find their way around the shops. To be fair to them, they do help out when you engage them. My point, though, is that if they understood the value of customer experience and were well-trained in addressing customer needs and in managing the employee experience, they probably would have a different attitude. You can address this by giving your employees the tools they need to provide inspired services to clients. Keep employees in your experience loop by giving them direct feedback so they understand how to improve.
When they are empowered, they will not hesitate to find creative solutions to customers’ problems. Initiate education and training sessions to familiarise your team with your CX strategy and get their input. Leverage findings to customise and deliver bespoke training. Your goal is to develop a customer-centric culture internally and to leverage the culture to deliver out-of-world experiences to customers. A customer-centric culture puts not just customers, but all of its people first. It helps teams understand why they come to work every day and allows employees to develop empathy and better understand the impact of their roles.
Break down organisational silos
Organisational silos are commonplace in many organisations today. Most of them were built from scratch to function that way. Having different departments from Finance, HR, Marketing, Procurement, etc. is what most companies are used to; however, in today’s era of Business Process Reengineering (BPR), it makes sense to drive initiatives through cross-functional processes; and CX thrives on silos-free protocols. A siloed organisation is not great at sharing information and is not effective in cross-channel, multi-channel and omni-channel experiences. Silos are an issue for both the organisation and for customers.
To address this, we need a governance structure that outlines people, roles and responsibilities associated with the customer experience strategy. The journey map forces us to collaborate, share, communicate and understand the customer experience. It enables us to link employees to the customer. Ownership of customer issues becomes a collective responsibility, building synergies in delivering customer value is the way forward. Years ago, in my IT role, I managed an ERP software with cross-functional ownership encompassing Sales, Procurement, Inventory Control, and Asset Management. Customer information was centrally-managed.
Working cross-functionally is of great value. We build synergies around the processes that address customer issues. Consistency in service delivery across all touchpoints is easily noticed by the customer and appreciated. Organisations thrive on beliefs and principles that guide them in everything they do. These guiding principles help employees to act and behave in ways that project the brand positively in the eyes of customers – working together, sharing and collaborating for a common purpose and a common goal. What customers want is to get their needs addressed, they don’t care how an organisation is organised.
Leadership and executive buy-in
To launch a customer experience, roadmap we must aim to put the right people, systems, practices and technology in place. To do this effectively, we need leadership buy-in. A strong customer-centric culture starts from the top. Leadership must identify the people, process and technology, and prioritise a roadmap to resonate with customers and align with business goals. When leadership is aligned with the customer experience, they focus on goals that stakeholders can get behind. They set clear, shared objectives that speak to teams and adapt them when product or organisational situations change.
Experts coin the term Lead-er-ship to articulate the pivotal role of leadership in any situation. When the ship is on the right path everyone is safe. In contrast, a ship in distress does not offer much comfort. The leader empowers followers to do what they need to do to achieve the vision of their leader. Achieving a noble cause is very satisfying but it requires overcoming challenges that stand in your way and can be potentially frustrating to the course. An CX leader must be a strategic thinker able to communicate a compelling vision of brand purpose and values that are meaningful to customers. It is about walking the talk. The leadership BEAT acronym epitomises this principle.
Pentacle UK’s BEAT principle is about a leader’s influence on followers. It refers to Behaviours that support Emotions, which help Actions, which make it concrete, and Thinking which is ahead. An inspirational leader influences a culture of open communication to keep employees engaged about what is important to customers and how this ties in with the CX vision. By creating a line of sight between employees’ roles and the company’s goals, you connect everyone around a shared common purpose. Followers respond because they are keen to learn, share their vision, feel inclusion, receive direction, and get motivated to support the leader.
Being aligned around CX to meet customer expectations is the goal of every CX campaign. Delivering exceptional customer experience must be a shared goal. It requires deliberate actions and leadership support to set up a consistent customer experience across all channels. It is an all-inclusive affair driven by top leadership with organisational buy-in. Every business must make it its business to invest more heavily in customer experience initiatives to ensure that the customer journey delivers experiences worth sharing. The Samaritan woman in the Bible did it so well telling everyone she met about Jesus after her encounter with Him at the well.
