Words from the Wise as we review an assemblage of excellent leaders talking through Customer Experience. Whether it is Herb Kelleher, Jeff Bezos, Tony Hsieh, or Richard Branson, there is something for everyone here.
Do you want to embrace advanced Customer-Centric thinking and become Outside-In?
The YT channel features more than 500 videos that talk about business transformation, customer experience, and business process management. What are the topics that grab your attention? Here are the ones that are getting the greatest traction at the moment…
This time we feature a nice short video from the CX Rockstar James Dodkins.
A quick google search on ‘Silo working’ reveals 37.1 Million finds and this is not a new topic. Hammer and Champy were not the first to raise the issue in 1993, but they were early advocates of sweeping away that silo thinking in ‘Reengineering the Corporation’ with their cry of ‘Don’t Automate, Obliterate!’
The Silo Mentality as defined by theĀ Business DictionaryĀ is aĀ mindset present when certain departments or sectors do not wish to share information with others in the same company. This type of mentality will reduce efficiency in the overall operation, reduce morale, and may contribute to the demise of a productive company culture.
Do you want to embrace advanced Customer-Centric thinking and become Outside-In?
An output is something you produce; an Outcome is a result of what you produce. āI have answered the customer queryā is an output, āI have solved the customer problemā is an outcome. Hereās anotherā¦ āWe have made 10 cars todayā is an output, āI have sold 10 cars todayā is an outcome. As Steve Jobs said in 1997, āYou have to start with the Customer Experience (and their successful outcome) and work backwards.ā
Unfortunately, most organizations focus on outputs and correspondingly can get really good at doing dumb things. Think of the call center and the major typical KPI of Average Handle Time (AHT). That is an output measure. But what is the actual Outcome achieved from the customer contact? If your primary focus is the AHT, thatās what will drive the behaviors of the people as a priority over everything else; no matter how much you talk of customer-centricity, if you pay them for great AHT, that is what they will focus on.
A model that we use to help us connect the dots is the Customer Performance Landscape.
It is a fantastic tool for creating the linkages between everyone and everything to ensure we are all aligned to Successful Customers and grow shareholder value. You can experience this in our ACX Master program.
Strategic positioning of customer experience is now widely recognized as a key to business success.
If youāre customer-first and do it in a smart way, then it can help the company.
Gartner 2021
Unfortunately, the majority of many well-intended CX initiatives become a victim of organization inertia and bureaucracy and sink to the level of metrics on dashboards buried in functional departments.
At best these failing efforts deliver small incremental performance improvements rather than providing the customer and business insights necessary to strategic success.
We have identified five major errors and causes of failure
1. Top teams have unreasonable expectations of CX success
2. Customers needs are not clearly defined from the Outside-In
3. CX Initiatives are not implemented with transformation in mind.
4. CX Initiatives focus on the wrong measures, rather than successful customer outcomes.
5. CX Initiatives go way down deep into functional complexity
šError #1: Top teams anticipate CX Success without understanding the enterprise was never designed to do this stuff.
Talking about customer experience and implementing the changes necessary to delivering CX success are two quite distinct things. Many organizations brief their senior people with the importance of the business transformations underway, why a focus on the customer is essential to survive and thrive, and why it is necessary that the dots are connected from every activity to the customer experience. Fair enough. However, Top teams then anticipate internal leadership towards customer centricity but at the same time do not enable the underlying functions to realign to achieve successful customer outcomes.
The organization structure, rewards systems and technology were never designed to deliver great customer experiences
The realization that the organization structure, rewards systems and technology were never designed to deliver great customer experiences, they were in fact originally designed with an industrial age mindset to achieve industrial age goals. To achieve strategic CX success, it is necessary to understand the limitations imposed by inside-out thinking (getting better at doing stuff faster) and help the organization migrate to Outside-In thinking and practices (alignment to delivering Successful Customer Outcomes)
šError #2: Customers needs are not clearly articulated and underpinned by smart Outside-In metrics
The challenge here is two-fold. Do we understand who our customers are, and what success looks like from their perspective?
It is frequently observed that 80% of profit comes from 20% of customers however organizations are especially fickle when it comes to understanding where they should focus limited resource to get the maximum sustained return from the appropriate customers.
Good discipline here is about identifying the categories of customer and prioritizing them in terms of needs and success. That can mean migrating away from undesirable customers. Intrinsic in this failure is arbitrarily segmenting customers by circumstance (where they are based, the length of relationship, immediate spend available etc.) rather than categorizing customers based on their needs.
Needs assessment is NOT about asking customers what they want.
Needs assessment is NOT about asking customers what they want. If you asked your kids what they want for dinner, don’t be too surprised if they say burgers, ice cream, chocolate and gummy bears, on one plate. That question is just plain stupid. So why go asking customers what they want?
Smart CX companies figure out their customer needs even when the customer doesn’t know them. Case in point would be the launch of the iPhone more than a decade ago.
Apple’s genius was in understanding the new customer and getting ahead of the game to design products and services that met, at the point of launch, something customers could never have articulated.
This is not, however, an excuse to stop listening to customers, that is more essential than ever before. Just stop asking them dumb questions which may cause you to do the wrong things (rather like Nokia did).
šError #3: For CX initiatives delivering success will require change and transformation
This is a very common problem and is rooted in the idea that CX initiatives are just another thing to integrate into the existing ways of working. This couldn’t be further from the truth. A fundamental of successful CX initiatives is identifying and implementing the ongoing change required across the enterprise to align everything to Successful Customer Outcomes.
align everything to Successful Customer Outcomes.
Once the customer needs are articulated work backward to recraft the appropriate structures that will guide the enterprise progressively towards success. That will, of course, require potentially significant changes to the shape and technology of how work gets done. It will reach into every nook and cranny of the business. Ultimately the organization may look quite different from the industrial age model and will become shaped to achieve the ongoing change brought about by the digital revolution.
šError #4: CX Initiatives focus on the wrong measures, rather than successful customer outcomes.
The Successful Customer Outcome is like the beacon on the hill; everyone should be aligned and progressively moving in that direction. If your metrics are not contributing to that alignment, you may be getting better at doing the wrong things (in the context of delivering an optimized CX).
There is a remarkable lack of science in this sphere of CX Initiatives.
Here’s a good question to ask anyone in the business “is everything you are doing aligned to delivering a successful customer outcome?” and if the answer comes back with anything other than “yes, 100%” you may be doing dumb stuff really well. The why of that is easy to understand – you get what you measure, and frequently companies excessively measure outputs (what is produced) rather than business outcomes (what is delivered).
If you task people to measure outputs and reward them for improving those outputs, there is often a repeated disconnect between the work performed and the end customer delivery. Getting a balance right here is essential.
There is a remarkable lack of science in this sphere of CX Initiatives. Reliance on simplistic measurement systems, with ‘one question rules them all’ approaches is not only misleading but may cause you to do precisely the wrong things.
šError #5. CX Initiatives go way down deep into functional complexity
CX Initiatives have lofty visions but all too often become bogged down in organization politics and the natural resistance to change. Often the local leadership pays lip service to the customer experience ‘it is not my job after all’ and this resulting crawl ultimately thwarts the CX initiative.
focus on winning the triple crown – simultaneously improving the Customer Experience, Reducing Costs and Growing Revenues
To deliver and ensure ongoing success, the guiding light of the Successful Customer Outcome and it is associated focus on winning the triple crown – simultaneously improving the Customer Experience, Reducing Costs and Growing Revenues – should be on every agenda in the business. Linking the triple crown across the departments and divisions dispels the practical objections as everyone becomes accountable for demonstrating their substantial triple crown contribution. This, in turn, ensures a significant contribution to delivering the ROI for the CX Initiative.
There are many bear traps and blind alleys to avoid on the journey to delivering CX success however an understanding of the most common errors will ensure a greater chance of success. After all the goal is to deliver strategic Successful Customer Outcomes that result in terrific and rewarding customer experiences.
Do you want to embrace advanced Customer-Centric thinking and become Outside-In?
Complexity is an insidious thing. Humans seem unable to keep things simple and will add rules, reporting lines, and complications seemingly for the fun of it. And process people take it to a whole new level.
Why is that so? There is a simple answer, but many people donāt like it, or donāt want to admit it; if you pay people for doing dumb stuff they get really smart at it.
Are you rewarding people for doing dumb stuff?
Politicians are especially good at creating fiefdoms and empires, and the ones really clever at that rise above the rest, making the problem progressively worse by in-turn recruiting like minded people.Ā
Now as much as humans have traditionally done this, there is a new kid on the block. And this new kid is defining a whole new way of being, one that is built and operated with the customer at the center of everything.
Donāt get me wrong, it isnāt that people havenāt talked about the customer before, just this time it is very different. The new game is all about customer experience management (CEM).
Here are a few of the meaningful stats that back this up.
According to Gartner, 89% of all businesses will compete on customer experience this year.
Another 89% believeĀ customer experience will be their main differentiatorĀ by 2022.
TheĀ Temkin GroupĀ found that companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average,Ā an additional $700Ā million within 3 years of investing in customer experience.
Ā 84% of companiesĀ who claim to beĀ customer-centricĀ are now focusing on the mobile customer experience.97%Ā of global consumers citeĀ customer service as important in their brand choice and loyalty.
CX also influences on-the-spot purchasing, too – asĀ 49% of buyersĀ have made impulse purchasesĀ after receiving a more personalized experience.
BPG Research 2021
And for those organizations effectively embracing the customer experience CEM is much more than journey mapping and the surface experience. For the leading companies, CEM is the opportunity to connect everything they do, from the customer interaction, right through to individual task, activity, and systems that support them.
Interestingly this eradicates unnecessary complexity and creates a virtuous circle. You figure out what a successful customer outcome looks like, you align everything you do to achieve it, the customer āgets itā and comes back for more, and you evolve the customer experience to be even better next time.Ā
It is a bit like a fitness regime as you get fitter, you get faster, you become better, and what was once difficult becomes easy.
š Those who Get It Win the Triple Crown
Not surprisingly great CEM drives down the cost of delivery, improves service and grows revenue. This triple crown of deliverables becomes the tangible measure of success for Customer Experience Management.
And as if this wasnāt motivation itself to do more CEM the work environment is simplified; we can increasingly reward each other for delivering results and outcomes (doing the right thing), rather than just measuring and rewarding what we do (doing things right).
That is what I mean when we say āletās get more scientific about the customer experienceā
