Growing Leadership Listening Skills With 6 CX Recipes

Optimizing customer feedback is one of the most straightforward ways to gain momentum for customer focus.

You don’t need to spend millions on a “satisfaction” survey. You only need to engage active leadership listening and direct the organization to hear your customers’ stories.

By using the “one-company” listening path (competency 3)  that your organization creates, you receive a constantly refreshing source of information organized by journey stage.

Leadership will be able to understand customers’ lives with a connection to customer behavior and growth, as well as to the data.

Leadership Listening Recipes

Get leaders and the organization to hear and respond to your customers’ stories, which builds your united one-company story based on the customer journey framework.

#1. ALIGN THE LEADERSHIP TEAM: Leaders commit to a united one-company listening path

Gain leadership agreement to build a one-company listening path across the enterprise:

• Unite methodologies
• Consolidate information

#2. ALIGN THE LEADERSHIP TEAM: Use multiple sources of customer listening

Use multiple sources of customer listening to pinpoint customer priorities and opportunities:

• Qualitative information to visualize the experience
• Quantitative data to validate and prioritize
• Experiential listening to step your leaders and employees in experiences your customer go through

Get more details on multiple sources of customer listening: Listen to Customers & Build a Customer Listening Path

Move the emphasis from the survey score to understanding and improving customers’ lives and you’ll earn the right to growth.

#3. GIVE PERMISSION: Present insights by stage of the customer journey

Transition the presentation of customer listening content from customer surveys or silo-based dashboards to presenting insights by stage of the customer journey.

#4. GIVE PERMISSION: Enable cross-company collaboration

Advocate cross-company collaboration to improve the experience, not to just get “lift” on a survey score.

#5. PROVE IT WITH ACTION: Practice Active Listening

Establish a “Be Our Customer” immersion process. Identify the actions customers are required to complete, and then require leaders and the organization to try to complete the same tasks.

Get more details: Engage the Ranks of Your Company to Hear Your Customers’ Words

#6. PROVE IT WITH ACTION: Stop the fire drills

Stop reactive, one-off projects and fire-drills started from anecdotal or incomplete, silo-based information.

Customer Stories Create Your One-Company Story

As you build out your organization’s listening path, your customer journey provides the frame for storytelling. (That’s why getting agreement on simple journey stages is so important.)

Journey stages allow you to collapse multiple sources of information into your one-company story. This story shows customer interactions across the journey map. By chunking feedback stage by stage, you can understand the customer perceptions and perceived value as the customer experiences it. This view enables a focused prioritization of actions to earn the right to customer-driver growth.

When you present this cohesive view, you can unite the organization to align decision making on actions that will have the most impact.