Xperience This!

Consider the following language from one company’s leadership regarding the fundamental principles to which they believe the company must adhere to achieve their business goals:

We must act in the customer’s best interest, not once in a while, but consistently. This means offering outstanding products and services and being helpful, courteous and quick to follow up. We need to be keenly aware of the competitive landscape and quick to act. The field – the employees closest to the customer – should drive this process and have ample resources and authority to be the best at serving customers. Our strength resides in the field. We must exceed customers’ expectations and constantly make it easier for them to do business with us. [My emphasis.]

This language may sound familiar. It may even echo the language of your own company’s mission/vision statement. Perhaps there are posters around your workplace boldly proclaiming similar corporate commitments.  As an advocate for your customer, I find these principles and posters admirable; however, I can tell you from personal experience that the mission articulated by the company quoted above and the experience of doing business with said company are in diametrical opposition.

So why does the actual experience of interacting with so many companies often belie the customer-centric principles they claim are fundamental to their success?  Here are six surefire causes we have identified as we’ve helped various companies improve their experiences.

1)      Senior leadership has got the talk but not the walk. Providing your customers with a highly valued experience requires self-awareness, discipline, consistent monitoring at the frontlines and prioritized processes for standards, governance and an imperative of constant improvement.  This level of commitment requires backing up the words used to describe the desired experience with both clear expectations regarding employee behaviors and with the resources your employees need to meet or exceed those expectations.   

2)      Customer Strategy is a long-term play in a short-term world. Truly understanding who your audience is requires ongoing vigilance. Unfortunately, many well-crafted customer-centric efforts designed to gain long-term competitive advantage are often sacrificed to meet short-term needs.  For example, a decision to cut costs by outsourcing “Customer Care” can distance your firm from valuable direct interaction with and feedback from your audience.  Implementing an enterprise-wide IT-driven change designed to reduce overhead without consideration for how it will affect the people using the new systems can lead to costly decreases in productivity.  Stuff happens. Things change. The one constant should be monitoring and reacting to how those changes are influencing your customers and employees.

3)      The business treats various customer touch points separately. Customers don’t care about the distinctions your organization makes between its traditional marketing and its digital marketing, or the organizational separation between your sales organization, your marketing organization, and your service organization, or that you distinguish new account activation from customer service.  All your customers care about is having their expectations fulfilled.  They are often frustrated because the various touch points are managed and measured disparately; thereby creating an experience that feels different one touch point to the next.  Exemplary customer experience sees all touch points as parts of a single overarching experience.  (Digital marketer Jim Sterne wrote eloquently on this topic recently.) The key is to understand what you want that overarching experience to be and make certain each touch point moves you closer to that goal.

4)      Leadership perpetuates an irrational gap between the Business and IT.  An excellent customer experience requires the alignment of all systems and people with a common vision of that experience.  Imploring your people to deliver exemplary service without providing them the resources necessary to do so will fail. Your various business disciplines and the technologists who support them need to be in it together.  They need to share the same vision.  They need to see how that vision manifests in real life.  And they need to be held to the same business-based measures of success.  Organizations that have cracked the customer experience code have done so in part by bridging the gap between the Business and IT.

5)      Customer experience reflects your employees’ experiences. When was the last time your company reviewed the experiences employees have of working for your company? When was the last time your company assessed how employees perform their respective roles in the context of what company leadership expects them to achieve? Are your various organizational units truly aligned around the principles your company has set forth in your mission/vision statements?  We have learned that behind every fragmented, inconsistent and unsatisfying customer experience can be found an equally fragmented, inconsistent and unsatisfying employee experience.  Great customer experience begins at “home.”

6)      The procedures your employees follow don’t align with the experience you want your customers to have. Policies and procedures are put in place for good reasons – e.g. security, privacy protection, consistency, regulatory concerns, efficiency, etc.  From a customer experience perspective, the problems start when your frontline people are trained to treat SOPs as inflexible. Companies that differentiate themselves through attention to customer experience provide employees with an understanding of the intent of the rules and with guidance on the how to bend them. Think about how you felt as a customer that time an employee accepted your return without a receipt, or took a little extra time on that service call to walk you through the online interaction because it saved you money, or ___fill in the blank. Frontline discretion combined with the training on how to use it in a way that aligns with the experience you want your customer to have are among the most important tools you can provide your employees.

Odds are one or more of these conditions exist within your company.  This list makes clear just how hard it can be to live up to the expectations organizations set with the grand words they put in their mission statements.  It requires a serious commitment from C-level and buy-in at street level to assure that people’s behaviors and the systems that support them are all aligned and measured in accordance with the goals set by the organization. We call this Strategic Experience Alignment (SEA)^SM.