When I ask you whether your organization has a customer experience culture, how do you answer?
If the answer is “Yes!” just what does your customer experience culture look like? Sound like? Deliver like?
For starters, this phrase simply may pay lip service to the phrase: “customer experience.” In reality, there is no “culture” that has your back, at all.
Instead, each quarter, the sales force chases high customer experience (CX) survey scores from the folks who sign the contracts. What an experience, for that sales force! Ultimately, that definition of customer experience becomes numerical obsession, rather than customer obsession. And, that CX number is tied to seller and management bonus compensation, instead of process and product improvements leading to changes in organizational behavior.
Then again, consider what happens when a customer experience culture starts walking the walk, instead of just talking the talk.
When the focus of employee experience becomes collaboration, people, services and processes are prioritized over attaining a score. This shift in mindset creates a collaborative pre-sale and post-sale continuum of activities focused on the customer. Instead of numerical obsession, there is workforce obsession around the question of: “How can we create better and better customer experiences by creating better and better ones for ourselves, as we work together with each other?”
When the focus is on creating a customer experience culture comprised of collaborative people, processes, and outcomes, CX is more than a number.
Organizational cultures are not comprised of measurements and numbers. These are organizational tools. However, they often lack the context to stand on their own. Rather, organizational cultures are comprised of the words, actions and values of the people within those cultures. Including all people, in all locations, from all employment, educational and professional tiers. Not just the sales, marketing or service folks.
When my current and prospective clients talk about “getting a customer experience program together”, we talk about whether they want to chase numbers or build an enduring footprint within their clients’ organizations.
That question usually gives them reason to pause. And it should.
Throwing a CX software program, or any type of program for that matter, at customers is meaningless, over the long haul. What makes your customer experience program relevant and valuable is how your organization backs it up. Walking the walk involves the power of people, processes, behaviors and culture creating remarkable client experiences.
Before you invest in a CX program, let’s focus on how your customer experience program will leverage the collaboration created by an actual customer experience culture.
Start moving one millimeter forward, today.
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Babette Ten Haken, Founder & President of One Millimeter Mindset™ serves organizations as a corporate catalyst and innovative speaker, strategist, coach and storyteller. Babette’s One Millimeter Mindset™ Workshops and Speaking programs leverage collaboration to catalyze professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer retention, especially in challenging Industrial Internet of Things environments. Babette’s playbook of IIoT team collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. She is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM, PMI, and the National Speakers Association.
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