Great customer experience starts from the top: CX Mini Masterclass – E55

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 55, and today I have another Mini Masterclass presented by a leading customer experience expert and friend of the show, Stephanie Thum. If you missed Stephanie’s insights on reframing how organizations should think of customers in episode 45, or her take on customer experience in government in episode 50, then be sure to check those out. It’s a pleasure to feature Stephanie’s pearls of wisdom once again on the show.

She’s a seasoned customer experience professional, a CCXP, and is one of the founding members of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. She’s remained closely involved with the association, even spending some time as part of the association staff team. In her career as a customer experience practitioner, she’s amassed deep expertise for her diverse professional background. She’s had the opportunity to drive customer-centric change within government.

And while she’s known for her background as one of the US Federal Government’s first agency customer experience leads, she’s also been a practitioner and consultant in the B2B world, working with small and mid-sized companies. My last two episodes have focused on organizational alignment and accountability. Episode 53 explored customer experience KPIs. Episode 54 provided a methodology for prioritizing experience improvements before delegating them to teams.

And in this episode, Stephanie stays with the theme of accountability, but with a different lens. Today, Stephanie explains where and how CEOs can begin advocating for the customer. She speaks about the role of data and then six things that CEOs and their teams should be prepared for as they champion the customer mandate and keep shareholders happy. The CEO is and should be the starting point for customer experience leadership and organizational alignment.

This can be the birthplace of great customer experience. But Stephanie’s practical guidance is applicable to any customer experience leader, regardless of their level of seniority or their organization stage in its customer experience evolution. If you’ve been looking for some fresh ideas on fostering alignment or some food for thought that you can send to your organization’s leadership team, then stay tuned. And as always, if you happen to be out for a jog or driving to work, 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 find out more about Stephanie’s work and how you can get in touch with her. So with that, I’ll let Stephanie take it away. Thanks so much, Julia.

Well, by now, almost every CEO has heard the phrase customer experience. Some CEOs may have even considered adding a chief experience officer to their leadership ranks. And it makes sense for CEOs to have customer experience management on their minds. After all, it is the CEO’s responsibility to advocate for modern business practices that attract customers and profits.

But customer experience management is a newer management discipline. Some CEOs and their leadership teams might not be familiar with the competencies and skills associated with the discipline, or they may not know exactly where to start. But you don’t necessarily need to be an expert to get going. So where do you start?

Well, it’s fairly simple and practical. Start where it makes sense for your business. One place where many organizations get going is with data, metrics, and measurable customer experience goals. Data and metrics can be a good place to start because chances are, you and your team probably already have access to plenty of customer-oriented operational data.

Maybe it’s your latest application processing data, new customer numbers, website usage statistics, smartphone app downloads, fees and revenues, hiring numbers, order turnaround times, or contact center KPIs. You may even have some customer experience data, survey results, Yelp ratings, notes from customer roundtables, complaint letters, or feedback from your advisory board. One manufacturing company CEO I know started his company’s experience management efforts with sales figures, numbers of new hires, and content from online reviews. He started weekly standup meetings with his plant manager, HR leader, and lead customer service rep to go over that data.

The company’s customer experience management efforts grew from there. So choose five or six data points. Set some performance targets around those data points. Then pull the data, the targets, and your company’s performance to those targets into a single spreadsheet or dashboard so that you can easily view and understand the basics around your customer’s experiences.

Update the dashboard regularly. Show it to others. Consider creating a customer experience advisory board that will review and triage that data regularly. Then what?

Pull together your management team. Put the data you have in front of them. Ask your chief operating officer, your strategic planning chief, or another senior leader who doesn’t have a department specific agenda of their own to begin monitoring, sharing, and socializing the customer data, what it means, and how it connects to your company’s strategic goals. Decide when, where, and how you’ll take action as a team on what the data tells you about your customer’s experiences.

Meanwhile, here are six things to be prepared for as the work you’re overseeing unfolds. First, get comfortable being uncomfortable. I once worked with a CEO who said, if you’re comfortable, then your performance targets are not high enough. Customer data will undoubtedly cause you to bristle, worry, and even cringe from time to time.

And if that’s the case, then the data is doing exactly what it should do, trigger a desire to improve the business. Number two, if the numbers aren’t great, get comfortable explaining the reasons why. It’s never a good idea to gloss over data that tells a not so great story about customers’ experiences with your company. No matter if it’s stakeholders, shareholders, employees, or a board of directors, you want to tell the truth behind the customer experience data and the company’s performance to its targets.

Say what you’re doing to improve, and then support the change by helping to clear a path for progress for your teams and anyone that you may assign to address the systemic issues that will surface as you review data. Number three, align your management teams. Think of your management team as an extension of your commitment to creating a customer-focused culture. Communication and example are everything.

Write and speak about your company’s commitment to customers at every opportunity. Give your team space to team up and address change. Ask for customer updates at leadership offsite meetings. Your senior team’s direct reports as well should be given a chance to pitch in.

So much of customer experience improvement is about socializing concepts and giving people a chance to contribute. Words and actions put you on the right path. Number four, present customer experience as a triage tool, not a policing mechanism. I recently encountered a CEO who was very excited about hiring the company’s first Chief Experience Officer.

It was very obvious that he got it when it came to CX. That is until he said, yes, they’re going to be like the police for us when it comes to customers. Big red flag here. As a CEO, you will want to choose better words.

Customer experience victories happen collaboratively, usually with a cross-disciplinary team from a variety of departments. You don’t want to present the Chief Experience Officer or the discipline of experience management as though they’re policing mechanisms. Instead, encourage collaboration and talk about making changes that are good for the business, employees, and customers. Number five, keep going no matter what.

In a past life, a company leader I know made it mandatory for cross-disciplinary teams to meet each week to triage customer experience data. He asked me to furnish my colleagues with written reports, and we discussed the ups and downs at senior team meetings each week. That regular cadence of data sharing helped to build an understanding of customers’ experiences with our business, and it led us to making changes that helped us to become more efficient. But it took time to see results, so cadence is very important.

Finally, number six, when the numbers are great, celebrate. When the numbers are not so great, don’t point fingers. Celebrating customer wins is just as important as correcting the direction when things are off course. One CEO I know holds a monthly coffee for employees celebrating a birthday that month, and he incorporates verbal thank you messages into those gatherings.

Another company leader I know used to spend one hour each Friday writing emails to everyone he’d seen make a difference with clients over the past week. Pick up the phone and personally thank someone who saved a client from walking away, or send an email to someone who went the extra mile to meet a customer deadline. These suggestions are just a place to start. There’s much, much more to the field practice and discipline of experience management, and I highly recommend reaching out for expert credentialed help.

The Customer Experience Professionals Association maintains a database of credentialed customer experience practitioners and consultants where you could start your search. That website is www.ccxp.org. As CEO, your overarching commitments mean you may not necessarily be in the trenches doing all of the customer experience work yourself, but you can certainly lead the charge. You can support a start, provide funding, and hold your team accountable.

In the end, it’s about more than just saying you want a customer-focused culture for your organization. You want to show it to your staff, your shareholders and stakeholders, and to customers themselves. It’s an everyday commitment. Seeing the return on your effort requires, among other things, organizational patience, but the work is worth doing.

Thanks so much for listening. So there you have it. Special guest, Stephanie Thum, taking us through the CEO’s Guide to Advocating for the Customer. All but many of you are thinking about how to subliminally send this message to your CEOs.

Well, you’re in luck. Stephanie has written a wonderful article covering these same points. It’s going to be published on CX Day, which is October 1st, 2019. Once her article does go live, I’ll include a link in the episode show notes.

Along with information on how to get in touch with Stephanie. If you’re on Twitter, Stephanie’s handle is at Stephanie Thum. She’s active on this platform and is always sharing great gems and insights. I’ll be back next Thursday with another episode of Decoding the Customer. If you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet or LinkedIn message.

My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or Decoding the customer.com.