Customer Experience Competency #3 – United (Cross-Silo) Experience Reliability and Accountability

United Experience Reliability  

Once you have done the foundational work of identifying your stages of the experience and have identified the key 10-15 “Moments of Truth” or Customer Touchpoints, you can start to build experience reliability in a focused manner that won’t feel like you are trying to change the world overnight.

Reliability in your experience is proactively managing the key touch points with shared accountability across the silos. This approach emancipates your organization from the one-note dependency on survey results for driving change.   Operational KPIs means not waiting for survey results – but knowing before the results come in where your operation delivered, and where it did not.

Take these steps to begin to manage experience reliability:

1. Identify and Establish Key Operational Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for your top 10-15 customer experience touch points,

2. Bring Cross-Functional Teams Together to Take Experiences from “Broken” to “Reliable” (and ultimately to a differentiating moment).

Once you get this process down, you can move past the top 10-15 touch points.  But start with just these few – otherwise the work will become too overwhelming.

3. Establish a “Customer Room.”

The customer room depicts the stages of the customer experience across the walls.

Beneath each stage we show the artifacts of the experience that customers physically receive: the packing slip, hang tags, materials, overstock notices, etc.

There’s also a list in each stage, which includes:

• Complaints we’ve received
• KPI’s for the key touchpoints
• Survey results that are impacted by it

This action brings the organization together to think “Experience” rather than “My Silo.”  We play customer calls so the folks in the Customer Room can hear the voice of the customer talking about how the experience was delivered.

On a quarterly or monthly basis, we convene the Customer Experience Room with leadership. We get passionate about the places where we are letting customers down – and send teams off to determine cross-functional fixes. As these teams work on improving customer experiences, they present their findings and recommendations, and ultimately results – which makes the Customer Room a place of celebration.

The Customer Room takes the customer work off spreadsheets and puts the customer square in the middle of the business with passion, fun and a great amount of collaboration and innovation.

This idea comes from something we did at Lands’ End long ago to get us out of our day to day tasks and experiencing the world as we were delivering it to our customers’ doors. We stock-transferred in every outwear product in the catalog to see how the products were packaged and what the hang tags and communication and outer packaging appeared. What a mess! But what an impact those exercise had.

We have now implemented this Customer Room with clients such as TD Ameritrade, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospitals, Bombardier Aircraft and many others.

Learn about the 5 Customer Experience Competencies

Competency #1 – Define the Stages of Experience to Gain Alignment around Customer Experience

Competency #2 – Develop Experience Based Customer Listening and Feedback

Competency #3 – This is the post you’re reading. United (Cross-Silo) Experience Reliability and Accountability

Competency #4 – Manage Customers as Assets – Prove the ROI between Experience and Growth

Competency #5– Create “One Company” Customer Experience Culture