The 17-second customer experience strategy

I’ve been doing customer experience strategy and customer-facing, customers-as-growth-engines work for north of 30 years now. I’d never claim in reality that you can ‘hack’ the system in 17 seconds. The work is hard and demanding. I named my podcast The Chief Customer Officer Human Duct Tape Show for just that reason: in this work, you’re typically the ‘duct tape’ of your organization. You unite the silos and align the experience around the value of the customer.

But I have put together some resources that can help you start the journey towards a workable customer experience strategy. Let me explain.

Customer Experience Strategy, Level 1: The Five Competencies

The core of the work we do with customer experience strategy is about the five customer experience competencies, notably:

1. Customers as assets
2. Align around experience
3. Build a customer listening path
4. Proactive experience reliability and innovation
5. One-company accountability, leadership, and culture

The thing is? These take time. In the second episode of my podcast, Margie Dillon of Liberty Mutual said it took her nine months — almost a full year! — to even begin to see change in some of the above aspects of how she related to her fellow executives.

Another way to look at ‘nine months’ for some senior leaders is ‘three quarters.’ Many companies think, and operate, this way. And in environments that are very beholden to the quarter system and ‘making the quarter,’ three quarters of work before results might get the idea of customer experience strategy tossed out.

So you need to stay the course on the bigger picture, but you also need a quick solution to help drive your customer experience strategy forward. That’s where Level 2 comes in.

Customer Experience Strategy, Level 2: Customer-Centric Recipes

I went and created a series of customer-centric ‘recipe cards’ for customer experience strategy. Each of the five competencies above is broken into five actions within three categories:

• Uniting the leadership team to support and enable customer asset growth with consistency and commitment
• Giving Permission to employees to deliver Value and addressing the human issues critical to building the customer growth engine
• Proving It with leadership team investments and prioritized actions and examples to model

It’s about moving from thinking about customer experience strategy to executing on customer experience strategy. The shift can be immediate.

As for the headline of this post, it takes about 17 seconds to sign up and download the cards. So, while I’m again not claiming that you can master this challenging work in 17 seconds, you can in fact spend 17 seconds and start looking into immediate, executable ideas.

What are you waiting for?

Next week we’ll be back with a podcast episode on Tuesday and a recap of my first 12 episodes — and customer experience strategy lessons I’ve learned from over eight hours of conversation with CCO senior leaders — on Thursday. Have a great weekend!