Foundations of a great CX program: CX Mini Masterclass – E60

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

This is episode 60, the fifth episode for the month of October, a month I’ve dedicated to exploring topics that are a buzz in the CX professional community. I couldn’t think of a better way to cap off the month than with an episode from a returning guest contributor, global thought leader, and Australian customer experience expert, Ben Motteram. Ben has over 20 years experience developing and implementing customer acquisition and retention strategies within some of Australia’s largest organizations.

Through his consulting company, CXpert, Ben now assists clients in areas such as CX Strategy, Voice of the Customer, and employee engagement. Last time Ben shared his expertise in the show was episode 29, where he covered CX Strategy. In this episode, Ben takes us through the foundations of a great CX program, defining seven key principles that are important for effective and sustainable customer experience management. Ben approaches this topic from a green fields perspective.

So it’s an ideal roadmap for anyone who’s busy setting up a new CX function within an organization. That said, Ben’s insights are just as applicable for a CX practitioner working within a CX program that’s already up and running. We all know that CX programs are always a work in progress, and Ben provides some excellent food for thought. If you’re looking for an expert’s take on the structure, strategy and approach for an ideal CX program, then stay tuned.

Today is Halloween, so if you happen to be out stocking up on candy or carving a pumpkin, and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I’ll also include links to get in touch with Ben and his blog, which has been recognized for its insights on all things customer experience. Enjoy the show.

Thanks, Julia. It’s a pleasure to be back on the show again. Thank you for having me. So before I get into what I consider to be the foundations of a great CX program, I just want to talk a little bit about what originally inspired me to think about this topic.

Now, I grew up in a town called adelaide in South Australia. Now, it’s a reasonably small city. There’s only about 1.3 million people who live there. And the place is best known for being the birthplace of Sia, the recording artist, some of its beautiful wine regions, places like the Barossa, Cunawara, and Clare Valley.

And it’s also the home of Australia’s major cycling race, which is called the Tour Down Under. And for over 30 years, my mum has hosted walking tours around the city, where she takes groups of people around and tells them about the history of adelaide. And being a bit of a history buff myself, and having been on a few of these walks with her, I’m pretty familiar with adelaide’s history. And one of the more interesting facts about the place is that the act that created the city was actually based on a number of principles that were contained in a series of letters, written to the local paper by a guy named Edward Gibbon Wakefield in the 1820s.

Now Wakefield’s blueprint for structuring a colony from a blank canvas, literally a Greenfield site, got me to thinking if I was structuring a CX program from scratch, what would be the major principles I’d use? And I came up with seven. Now the first one is to know your purpose. Now organizations need to understand why they’re in business and what higher purpose that they serve.

So go back to why the founders of the company created the firm in the first place. What customer needs did they satisfy back then? Is that still the case today? Then I’d look at defining your company’s mission and vision.

Now these are the broader statements that define the aims and values of the company and how it sees the future based on the work it does. And once they’re defined, communicate them far and wide to connect to your customer base and to motivate and inspire your employees. I think that a company’s purpose, mission and values are really its soul. These three statements are the bedrock upon which everything else is built.

The second principle is know your customers. So the most successful companies in the world know their customers inside and out. They have built an intimate understanding of their customers, needs, motivations, behaviors, preferences, challenges, jobs to be done, you name it. Now, not every company is going to have the resources to ascertain all those things about their customers.

So start with the basics. Spend time talking with your customers to understand at a very minimum, why they come to your company, why they stay with you and importantly, talk to ex-customers to understand why they leave. If you’ve got the time and money available, some of the other things you might want to do is run surveys or hold focus groups or even conduct some ethnographic research. You could even create a customer advisory board where the executives of your company meet regularly with senior stakeholders within a cross-section of your customer base.

At the very least, I’ve been sure that all levels of management spend time talking with your customers on a regular basis, either in store or out in the field or on the phone. Number three is engage employees. Now, if you’ve been in CX long enough, you’ve no doubt heard the saying that the internal experience determines the external experience. And what that refers to is the fact that companies with disengaged workforces simply don’t cut it in the world of CX.

And this is backed up by a ton of research. There’s a great video on featuring Sir Richard Branson, who was asked who he prioritized in terms of customers, shareholders and staff. And he put staff number one. It’s a really good interview.

If you’re interested to see it, you’ll find it online. Just Google, why customers come second at Virgin. So you need to inspire your employees. Give them the training they need and the delegation they need to satisfy customer expectations.

And of course, give them the tools that they need to do a good job. And also when it comes to engaging employees, don’t forget to look at your hiring practices to ensure that you’re bringing people into the company that are consistent with your values. Another thing I do is build a CX component into all employee job descriptions, so people understand how the work that they’re doing impacts customers. And when it comes to reward and recognition, make sure that behavior you’re rewarding is aligned to your values, and that you’re recognizing the achievement of CX goals.

Things like an improvement in first call resolution, for example, or maybe a reduction in the number of customer complaints. The fourth principle was a little controversial when I started bouncing these principles off a few CX buddies of mine. I put it in as define your aspirational customer experience. And the reason I put it in the list is because of the old saying that goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up someplace else.

But other people I spoke to were of the opinion that there’s no point defining a whiz bang experience for customers when maybe the organization doesn’t have the resources to support it. But the way that I see it is that the experience you give customers is way too important to lead to chance. So it makes sense to define your aspirational customer experience as part of your CX strategy. And of course, sense check it with your customers before setting it in stone.

If you’ve got an opinion on that one, I’d love to hear it. Number five is understand your current customer experience across all channels and touch points. Now in my last guest appearance on this podcast, I used the analogy of a map to describe a CX strategy. And I’m gonna borrow the same analogy again for this principle.

Once you’ve defined your aspirational customer experience, which is akin to your destination, you need to know where you are now. So you know how far you’ve got to go and what the best route to take is. So you need to understand the experience you’re delivering to customers today. Now the best way to do this, of course, is through the process of customer journey mapping.

I’m not gonna go into detail about journey mapping today, but if you’re interested to know more about it, Julia covered it brilliantly in episodes 18, 19 and 20 of this CX Mini Masterclass. So go back and listen to those. What you may wanna do though is augment your journey maps with process maps which show the internal processes that support the external experience and I thoroughly recommend them. The sixth principle is embrace agility to execute change.

Now if there’s one thing that we know about customer needs, it’s that they’re evolving at an incredibly fast pace. So businesses need to be agile. And by that I mean that they’re prepared to ensure they understand the changing needs of their customers and can respond in a timely manner. And when it comes to executing new customer experiences, don’t spend too much time trying to create the perfect experience.

Be comfortable making small changes as you move towards your aspirational experience and perfect it as you go. The last of my seven principles is measure and communicate success. Putting customers at the heart of a business requires stamina and support. So stamina to continually drive change and the support of everyone in the business.

No business is going to transform over night. It’s going to happen in incremental steps. So as you move towards your aspirational experience, ensure you have the metrics in place that will enable all internal stakeholders to understand the impact of your efforts and communicate with customers, employees and other stakeholders regularly. And finally, don’t forget to celebrate your wins along the way.

That’s really important. So those seven principles again were know your purpose, know your customers, engage employees, define your aspirational customer experience, understand your current customer experience across all channels and touch points, embrace agility to execute change, and measure and communicate success. Before I go, I just want to acknowledge Alicia Clark for her contribution to these principles. She was a great sounding board and an invaluable source of inspiration while I was putting them together.

Okay, with that, I’ll hand back to you, Julia. Thanks again for getting me back on. It was a pleasure speaking with you again. That was special guest Ben Motteram taking us through the foundations of a great CX program.

Be sure to check out the show notes for this episode, for links to get in touch with Ben, and to find out more about his work. Late last year, Ben was the only Australian named on a list of global thought leaders to follow on Twitter. So if you’re on Twitter, he’s definitely one to follow. I’m a huge fan of social media as a means to connect the global CX community.

If you and I aren’t already connected, let’s change that. I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt. Thanks for listening.

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All right, I’ll see you next week.