How’s Your Experience Reliability?

The information and experience you gain by working through the customer experience competencies and holding people accountable to customer metrics will condition the organization to redevelop the customer experience for greatest marketplace differentiation.

Managing the corporate patience while developing the competencies required to establish a reliable experience is not easy. But if leadership has the fortitude to move the company through the pragmatic stages of what people will see as endless “getting ready,” the payoff in this stage will be worth it. Because the organization will have accomplished the process work and customer-facing metrics, they’ll understand how to rethink through the customer experience.

When you have established a reliable experience, you’ll find it more natural to create cross-company teams for rebuilding aspects of the experience because cross-company metrics are being used. People will be more sensitized to what customers respond to because of customer listening, the trending of comments and feedback. This will build a more intuitive approach to brainstorming a differentiated experience.

Finally, leaders will have a greater understanding of the importance of letting go of functional execution and will be more willing to inspire people to think “experience,” not operational execution.

1. Customer Experience Reliability – Resolving issues that create irregularity and lack of reliability in your customer experience.

This means:

• Managing the customer as an asset
• Listening to the customer across the silos and channels
• Establishing a collaborative problem resolution process

2. Customer Experience Improvement/Innovation – Creating differentiated experiences at key touchpoints or “moments of truth.”

This means:

• Knowing your customer lifecycle and gaining company-wide commitment
• Identifying key touch points and gaining clarity on co-dependencies and accountability
• Understanding what customers value across the silos and channels

For customer experience work to be successful, collaboration is required. As early as possible, engage the operational leaders and matrix organizations who you will be working with. Consensus needs to be agreed upon regarding how the organization will unite the silos.

• Gain agreement that people are ready to work collaboratively on building the competencies.
• Challenge each other about how realistic it will be to move from silo-based approaches to unified company-wide approaches.
• Decide together how you will step your way into these transitioned approaches.

Showing up and proposing that independent work processes are collapsed into one approach is not a successful approach that I’ve seen.  So, have the hard conversations now.

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