3 Steps to Communicate Your CX Plan with Leaders, Stakeholders, and Outliers

“If you have a customer success job in an organization that isn’t interested in customer retention, you need to consider doing something else,” says Lucy Norris, Chief Customer Success Officer at Genesys, a technology company that provides solutions for customer experience, marketing, and sales. In today’s episode, Lucy and I talk about how they define customer success and customer experience at Genesys and how she’s been leading the CX transformation in the organization. At Genesys, customer experience is defined as the journey along the way, and success is the outcome.

As global leader of customer success, Lucy has been afforded the opportunity to define and transform how the company thinks about and services its customers. When first coming into the role, Lucy looked into what the customer experience was for clients who were working with Genesys, especially around maintenance and support. Customers complained that their problems were taking too long to be solved. Lucy had to figure out how to design her organization in a way where all of the departments are working together to achieve customer success.

Communicate Your CX Strategy With Leaders, Stakeholders, and Outliers

In order to get a better understanding of how others experienced Genesys, Lucy spent time out in the field – speaking and listening to partners, listening to salespeople and customers, as well as going to user and partner conferences. Once Lucy collected her feedback, she presented the state of Genesys to leadership by categorizing her findings into three categories:

1. What’s your hill? What are you looking to climb? Why that hill?
2. Strategy – what is the strategy to climb the hill?
3. Execution- what will you do to get there?

Lucy shares the following example of how she used this method to address recurring revenue growth.

1. The hill: increasing recurring revenue by a sizable percentage
2. Strategy: connecting the dots between customer experience and increasing revenue by explaining where Genesys was, where they need to be, and how they could help customers achieve success. Lucy and her team looked at pricing and governance to see how these aspects may affect long-term contract maintenance. Additionally, the strategy included a plan for an improved customer experience so the customer would see that something has been differentiated.
3. Execution: Talk to the stakeholders about the strategy to get their viewpoints on how this new approach may affect the business. Understanding what will this mean for partners, resellers, and customers.

During this execution phase, Lucy explains that she spent time presenting to key stakeholders and leadership teams, and also made sure to meet with any possible detractors in the organization. This goes back to a point I made in one of my recent vlog posts about the importance of understanding and engaging with the outliers in your organization. In order to be successful in executing your plan, you need to also bring your outliers into the plan and understand what their specific issues are.

In order to be successful in executing your plan, you need to also bring your outliers into the plan and understand what their specific issues are. #CX #CustExp Share on X

Acquire the Right Talent to Help You Execute

During this change management process, Lucy explains that in bringing various teams together, in addition to presentations, she brought in a management consultant to help them bridge communications and achieve their mission. Sometimes, because we’re so entrenched with our work and the culture of the organization, we need an outsider to help further the agenda with the various players. As Lucy mentions, this work isn’t just about the leaders and the folks at the top of the chain, it’s also about acquiring the right talent that can help execute.

Employees are your organization’s biggest asset, and Lucy stresses that the frontline managers are the backbone to Genesys because they’re a significant contributor to an employee’s happiness. Because of this, Lucy’s frontline is empowered to execute the mission and challenge preconceived “norms.”

What Do You Know Now That You Wish You Knew Then? 

Lucy says:

• Do not lose sight of your hill. If you keep your hill always in front of you, then you will be able to vet out what matters and what doesn’t. Make sure that if you start to get confused, come back to that mission statement.
• Don’t be afraid to be decisive. Ask yourself for each major decision you make, what is the worst thing that can happen? Anticipate that worst case scenario and what you do about it. But don’t let that worst case scenario cause you to not take the risk.

About Lucy Norris

Lucy joined Genesys in 2012 to create a global support and maintenance program and led the launch of Genesys Care and the transformation of the Genesys Customer Care organization to a global 24X7 center of excellence. Prior to Genesys, she served as senior vice president of global customer care at Global 360, a Texas-based leader in business process management software, acquired by Open Text. She has served as vice president of product management, customer care and commercialization at Eastman Software, Inc., a subsidiary of the Eastman Kodak Company.

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