7 Customer & Employee Experience Tactics to Implement at the Start

This summer, I’m taking a bit of a break to prepare exciting new content for you, and in the meantime, I’m replaying a compilation of some snippets of conversations from past episodes. I know how much you all love when we get straight to the facts and tactics, so I think you’ll really appreciate the tips that come from CX leaders when they answer the question, “how did you assess the work that needs to be done?”

In today’s episode, we take a look at how Lucy Norris, Executive Vice President, Chief Customer Success Officer at Genesys and Daniel Coullet, Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Experience at PTC, handled the first year in their role. Both CX leaders represent tech companies but share advice that can be relevant to CX leaders in other industries.

Define and Develop Expectations

When Lucy first had to assess the work that needs to be done at Genesys, she did the following:

1. Be Physically Present

Lucy spent almost a year traveling, listening to salespeople, customers, partners, and going to conferences. She needed to understand the space she was in, and what both partners and customers thought about their experience with Genesys.

2. Develop a Business Plan

While things were slow as she first stepped into this role, Lucy took some time with her fresh perspective to develop a business plan centered around growing the maintenance business. This meant focusing on selling long-term maintenance contracts to customers while continuing to drive recurring revenue. It took her 5 months to develop the plan and begin rolling it out; she presented it in three phases:

• • What’s your hill? What are you looking to climb? What is at the top?
  • What is the strategy to climb the hill?
  • What is the execution?

3. Understand Current Customer Satisfaction

In tech, maintenance and support are extremely important. After some research, Lucy realized that the experience was not yielding happiness for the customers and decided to spend time figuring out how could she solve this problem. She also wanted to design the organization in a way that would help achieve more positive outcomes.

4. Define Customer Experience and Success

Additionally, Lucy spent time with her team defining customer experience and customer success. According to Lucy, at Genesys, customer success and customer experience are related but they’re not synonymous. She views customer experience as the journey along the way while customer success is the outcome.

When first assessing the work to be done in your CX role, be physically present. -Lucy Norris, @Genesys #CX #customerexperience Share on X

Understand How Your Employees and Clients Feel About The Company

When Daniel Coullet stepped into his role as Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Experience at PTC, he realized one of the first things he needed to do was to actually understand what customer experience meant to PTC.

1. Understand How Your Employees View Their Work

What does the work being done mean to your employees? Daniel wanted to understand how employees viewed their work and the definition of the customer. Did it go beyond revenue? That was important to know.

2. Get Everyone on the Same Page

He also spent time clarifying terms and expectations for folks within the company to ensure everyone was one the same page. Similar to Lucy Norris, Daniel shares that it was important for them to define customer success. With a focus on customer success, Daniel and his team started meeting with his teams internally to understand the various points of view and contributions so they could start mapping the customer journey.

3. Listen to Your Customers’ Direct Feedback

Daniel needed to know directly from customers how they felt about their Genesys experience. He had some customers share their experience via video, and it was extremely eye-opening. Daniel reminds us that even your best customers have some suggestions for improvement and can give you specific insights regarding how certain behaviors impact the business.

Spend time clarifying terms and expectations for folks within the company to ensure everyone is on the same page. -Daniel Coullet, @PTC Share on X

These notes only touch the surface on the conversations had between myself and these leaders. I encourage you to listen to the episode for more insights and feel free to check out the original episodes where we go beyond what happens in the first year: 3 Steps to Communicate Your CX Plan with Leaders, Stakeholders, and Outliers (Lucy Norris) and 4 Ways Building a ‘Customer Room’ Can Reshape Your Customer Experience (Daniel Coullet).