How to start writing your customer experience strategy

Over the next couple of weeks, I want to challenge those of us in customer facing roles managing customer facing teams to think a little more broadly, strategically and boldly about our plans for our customer facing functions. In this post, I want to discuss the general approach to getting started on your customer experience / service / success / support strategy.

One of the challenges with getting started on your strategy is that someone has usually already set an overall business strategy, then requests a solution to long-standing, costly or high impact customer-facing issues to fix. Each of the issues cannot have its own strategy, that would be counter-intuitive, so there needs to be an overlying strategy (1,2 or 3 - year bold outcomes), of which the high impact issues are constituent elements. After a period of observation (what is happening to customers and what is the impact?), discussion (who / which functions are involved with the customer delivery, and when in the customer lifecycle?) and learning (what might have the highest and most positive impact?) within the business, you are ready to define a strategic plan to transform the current current customer experience, develop and engage the customer teams and enable a scalable model that fits the customer and business needs.

The business ultimate output is always the same: revenue. The outcomes we wish to drive to achieve the output might typically (ideally) be more people- and customer-centric (e.g. deliver customer delight through delighted people), and together with a set of measures to deliver the outcomes (CES, employee health score, cost / upsell), you can build a strategy and track the progress towards the outcomes via the measures. I’m a “from the heart” kind of chap, so I use data to convince the ‘from the head” type people. No point in making a change if you can’t measure it!  

There needs to be a WHAT we do (objective measure of change impact, valued by customer / user and business) and a HOW we achieve it (subjective measure of change impact, driven by the people and valued by the customer / user.) When I look at the challenges and growth for many scaling start-ups, they need a more tangible strand about engaging the people (how we do it.) So are there outcome-based benefits for adding the “people” strand?

This is not about business improvement efficiency, this is about developing those within to find their voice, share the solution to the problems and feel confident with the right knowledge and skills to effect the change - in this way, you create a sustainable team for the future, drawing future leaders from within.  You are supporting the establishment of your brand, not just making the workforce happy!

For those who work on the frontline or indeed in any customer role, the risk that the repetitive nature of the role over time erodes their passion and engagement is very real - I know this as I started out on the frontline. Without an imperative to drive people engagement, you also stifle the brilliant input and ideas that customer facing people can add to a customer experience. Creating a space where it’s OK to try any idea, no matter how daft it might seem is really important. There is no such thing as wrong, because wrong is just a step on the path to the right solution.

Finally, customer experience, or CX is a mantra that we all need to adopt. Customers pay the bills, and without them, we don’t exist. We learn to love our customer (genuinely, not just saying the words) through connecting with them.

“CX is responsible for removing customer barriers in a managed journey and providing business insight to enhance, improve and simplify sustainable customer value.”