Speak Softly & Focus On Changing The Actual Experience

In this week's edition of the CX Patterns podcast and newlsetter, I'm back talking again with @Paul Pember, the founder of the CX Score consultancy, and a man of action, my words, not his. What you will hear and read in ths week's edition are practical lessons and example that should guide you and galvanize you to make substantive changes to your customer experience.

You Are A CX True-Believer - No One Else Is At Your Organization

Organizations are not democracies. As Paul reminds us in this conversation, getting leadership bought in, truly believing in the value of CX, going beyond lip-service, going beyond platitudes to actually lead from the front, is absolutely critical.

I'll go further: Until and unless you have that backing, you have to keep making that your top priority. Now part of how you win their support is by demonstrating the value of CX through real improvements, and so fair enough, fix the actual experience, and use those case studies and proof points to convince executives. Executives are on the hook more than anyone for results. That means you must deliver results if you want them to care.

The work of convincing your executives to not just pay lip-service to CX, but to actually lead from the front is your most important job until it's done.

CX Teams Own Customer Experience - Because They Own Orchestration Of The Experience

The conversations and debates online are endless about who really owns customer experience. I look forward to the commenters coming out to take sides once again. But the reality as I see it as that the customer experience team does own CX, even if they aren't led by a C-level Customer Officer, even if they aren't literally accountable for CX results. How can that be? How can you be responsible for something when you're not actually responsible for it?

Because nobody is responsible for the end-to-end experience at most companies. This is a simple statement of fact - the vast majority of companies do not have a C-level executive with named responsibility for the end-to-end customer experience. When no one is responsible for something it creates an opportunity for a team to fill the void. That's what I'm recommending CX teams do - become responsible for knitting together all of the other teams and departments that own pieces of customer experience, but not the entirety of it. If you do this, you are acting as if you are responsible for customer experience.

In other words, when the question gets asked, "Who's in charge here?" The answer is whoever is acting like they are in charge. That can be the your CX team.

CX teams are responsible for getting everyone else to do their jobs with a customer-centric lens, with an eye towards the impact on customers.

CX Vision Statements Have More Power Than You Think

If you seen one CX vision statement, you've pretty seem them all. They use similar combinations of words to express similar sentiments about the customer experience.

So they're meaningless, right?

Wrong. This is where the wonderful quote from Dolly Parton comes in. Just because your words in your CX vision sound similar to another company's doesn't matter, necessarily. If your words truly describe your unique CX vision, and represent accurately the experience you are trying to deliver to your customers, and, critically, that your customers value, and will be loyal to you if they receive, then you have a working CX vision. So yeah, go ahead, and use Trust and all the other CX vision bingo words, but only if that is truly the emotions you want to and do deliver to your customers.

Figure out who you are, and do it on purpose - noted CX expert Dolly Parton.