The single biggest piece of advice I give to senior executives setting out on the Customer Experience journey is to STOP.
Yes seriously, the vast majority of CX efforts are completely misaligned.
Customer Experience Efforts Misaligned
Don’t get me wrong the intentions are good. Unfortunately, it goes something like this:
- Top Team are listening and decide they need to get with this customer centricity thinking.
- Senior Management makes noises that the customer is THE thing the business must focus on.
- The Executive engage the marketing guys to get with it and start pushing the message.
- Functional leaders hear the noise and bluster. They start using the language, whilst thinking this is just more fluff and nonsense. They make the right moves for now but keep their heads down, hoever they know this will go the same way as so many other ‘strategic initiatives’.
- Fundamentally functional heads carry on working with the out of date reward system that promotes industrial age thinking and practice.
- The Executive see the repeating inertia i.e. results not coming through apathy and indifference and decide their business isn’t really an Amazon.
- Top Team then reverts to just getting better at what we are doing, then when someone in ‘our industry’ proves it we will follow.
- Functional leaders breathe a sigh of relief and invest even more in industrial age systems and training. The illusion of doing something, in this case, is actually worse than doing nothing.
- The businesses failure is noted by customers who move to those who do understand and deliver Customer Experience success.
- The company becomes another footnote in the history books. Talked about at business schools and picked apart because of the failure to get the new Outside-In customer-centric mindset.
There is a way to optimize the chances of success by Upskilling, using a proven tried and tested approach, and make sure your folks are capable, aligned and rewarded for Successful Customer Outcomes. Have a look at some of the workshops that might help achieve your Customer Centric Objectives.
