Take These 3 Actions to Prevent Customer Experience Implosion

Customer experience implementation within an organization is a major undertaking. It often involves multiple departments, the organization’s leaders, and the C-Suite. I always stress to my clients that CX work has to be done in bite-sized pieces because it’s an initiative that becomes a part of the company’s long term strategy. You can’t try to tackle it all at once. The guests on my podcast, The Chief Customer Officer Human Duct Tape Show can certainly vouch for that sentiment.

Do you know what happens in CX implementation when you try to take on more than you can handle? I call it “boiling the ocean.” You take on too much, too fast. When you “boil the ocean,” you end up creating a bigger mess because eventually, multiple parts of the organization end up translating and taking action independently (then you’ve got siloed work). To avoid this problem, my suggestion is to learn and understand the five competencies. The five competencies establish an engine for driving customer growth and drive clarity for the customer experience transformation as a whole.

CX work has to be done in bite-sized pieces because it’s an initiative that becomes a part of the company’s long term strategy. You can’t try to tackle it all at once. #CX #CustExp Share on X

5 Competencies for Customer-Driven Growth

1. Honor and manage your customers as assets: this allows you to focus on measuring if you did or did not earn the right to customer growth.
2. Align around experience: this changes accountability and the story of the business from silo performance to customer life improvement.
3. Build a customer listening path: this unites multiple sources of customer feedback to tell the story of customers’ lives by stage, as they experience you/your organization.
4. Proactive experience reliability and innovation: this lets you know before the customers tell you if the experience you delivered was reliable and valuable to them.
5. One-company accountability leadership and culture: this unites leaders to guide and enable the company to improve customers and employee lives.

3 Methods to Successfully Implement Customer Experience Transformation

With the 5 competencies in mind, follow the methods outlined below. These 3 steps will help you establish a more realistic strategy for implementing customer experience so that you don’t create an overwhelming plan that attempts to “boil the ocean.”

1. Break the five competencies down into crawl-walk-run action steps. For example, in Competency 1, honoring and managing customers as assets, don’t wait until you have all of the data perfectly aligned and automated until you roll this out. Start with the data you have now, even if it means manually building spreadsheets.
2. Improve priority experiences while developing the five competencies. Unite leaders on the identification of the priority customer experience touch points. Learn how to work as one-company to solve and improve them.
3. Prove out the process before expanding. I had a client who wanted to embed the five competencies in three countries simultaneously. My recommendation was to rollout version 1 of the five competencies in one country first, working out the kinks and gaining experience and relevant examples. Instead, there was pressure to go broad and go fast… you can predict how that ended.

Now that you have an overall framework of how you should think about approaching your customer experience implementation, it would also benefit you to know where your organization stands in terms of what work that needs to be done and in what areas. At the beginning of each coaching engagement I have with my clients, I conduct a 5 Competencies Audit to determine how much work has already been done in each other the 5 competencies.

Take this Reality Check Audit to help you understand how and where you need to embed the competencies into your business operations. Good luck!