If you are reading this post, you have probably been asked to either lead or be involved in creating the customer strategy for your organisation. That is an incredible opportunity. However, I recognise it could be somewhat intimidating too.
In this post, I want to guide you through the critical things you need to consider in your customer strategy.
However, before I do that, I want to start by explaining where things can go wrong.
The Problem with Most Organisation’s Customer Strategy
I work with a lot of organisations to help them improve the customer experience, and many of those organisations have already put some form of customer strategy in place.
Unfortunately, all too often that customer strategy is failing and they need my help to get things back on course. There are many reasons this is the case. However, most of them boil down to the organisations overall approach towards who is responsible for improving the customer experience.
You see organisations tend to adopt one of two attitudes. Either ensuring the customer has a great experience is everybody’s responsibility or it is the responsibility of a particular customer experience team.
Unfortunately, both of these extremes present problems.
The Problem With Everybody Being Responsible for the Experience
The idea that every employee is responsible for the customer experience is a good one. It does indeed take every employee working towards that single aim to create a truly exceptional experience.
That said, this great principle fails to work in practice. That is because:
- If everybody is responsible for ensuring an outstanding customer experience, then effectively, nobody is accountable.
- If everybody is responsible, this will be in addition to their regular responsibilities. As a result, it will never be at the top of their list of things to do.
- They will only be responsible within the scope of their existing responsibilities. That means there will be nobody considering the customer experience holistically or addressing weaknesses where the customer is passed between teams.
- They lack the knowledge required to identify weaknesses in the experience or how they can be addressed.
It is hardly surprising then that many organisations choose to form customer experience teams. However, this also presents problems.
The Problem With Making a Single Team Responsible for the Experience
By centralising the customer experience, you:
- Absolve the rest of the organisation of responsibility for improving the experience.
- Create an organisational bottleneck because the customer experience impacts every part of operations.
- Cause departmental conflict as this team ‘interferes’ in the responsibilities of other business silos.
The result is that most customer experience teams I encounter are spending their days’ firefighting specific customer experience issues within projects. Instead, they should be implementing a customer strategy or improving the experience holistically.
It would help if you had a third way. Fortunately, one exists.
A Blended Customer Strategy
The best approach to your customer strategy is a blended one that does have a central customer experience team. Still, the day-to-day work of improving the customer experience happens in existing silos across the organisation.
It is this basic structure your customer strategy should be outlining, not a roadmap of specific changes or improvements you should make to the experience. It should fall to the customer experience team to determine that.
Instead, your customer strategy should focus on defining the exact responsibilities of this new business function.
Now it may be that you already have a customer experience team. Perhaps you are a part of it. If that is the case, then I suggest you see creating a customer strategy as your chance to redefine the role of this team. It is your opportunity to escape the trap of firefighting and involvement in every project with a vague connection to the customer.
So, how should you define the role of a customer experience team? I believe it should focus on four areas:
- Promoting the customer.
- Providing best practice education.
- Encouraging cross-silo collaboration.
- Creating a customer experience framework.
Let’s look at each of these in more depth.
Promoting the Customer Internally
In my experience, one of the main reasons a company provides poor customer experience is because they do not consider customers enough.
Employees are so focused on deadlines, key performance indicators, budgets and other project factors that they fail to give the customer the attention they deserve.
Even when they do think of the customer, they often have an inaccurate perception of them and their requirements.
One of the main functions of any customer experience team is to prevent this from happening. Their job is to raise awareness of the customer so they cannot be overlooked and to ensure that the entire company has the same, accurate picture of who the customers are.
Furthermore, the customer experience team should give project teams the tools they need to define their customers on a per-project basis better.
Providing Best Practice Education
Equipping employees to be able to help customers and improve their experience should be one of the primary responsibilities of any customer experience team.
That means any customer experience team should develop a robust educational program for employees introducing them to user research techniques, testing methodologies and design thinking.
That should support different learning styles, including, but not limited to:
- Lunchtime presentations.
- Online learning.
- Service manuals and playbooks.
- Internal conferences.
- Workshops.
- Coaching.
This kind of education will empower colleagues to improve the experience without making the customer experience team an organisational bottleneck.
That said, there is one area of project work where the customer experience team will need to be more directly involved.
Encouraging Collaboration
As I said earlier, there is a danger if everybody is responsible for the customer experience that the customer will fall between the gaps of departmental responsibility. For example, the handover of the customer from sales and marketing to customer services is often fraught with dangers.
To avoid this problem, it will fall to the customer experience team to look holistically at the journey and pay particular attention to these joins between various departmental responsibilities.
It may be necessary to instigate projects in these areas and ensure all relevant stakeholders and departments are actively involved.
However, there is one final area that will require the customer experience teams attention.
Create a Customer Experience Framework
Three different factors can undermine the hard work of a customer experience team:
- How staff are assessed.
- How success is measured.
- The example set by leadership.
It is therefore essential that your customer experience team, and by extension, the customer strategy addresses these.
The customer experience team should ensure customer experience becomes part of staff performance reviews. Staff should need to demonstrate how actions they have taken have provided a positive impact on the experience.
Equally, key performance metrics for everything from company-wide and department metrics through to individual projects should include customer experience indicators too.
However, more than that, a customer strategy needs to identify any existing metrics that actively damage the customer experience.
For example, the famous story of the United Airlines passenger who was tasered when they refused to vacate a seat for which they had paid was almost certainly caused by the aggressive metrics the airline has for turning around flights. Because the flight attendant felt pressure to act quickly, they made a poor decision.
Not that it is only metrics and assessment criteria that shape employee behaviour. The example being set by leadership matters too.
Leadership often send mixed messages when it comes to customer experience. They say that they care deeply about the customer experience and yet make demands on staff that make providing that experience impossible.
Any customer strategy you write needs to flag this potential danger and recommend that leadership provide tangible evidence of their commitment to the customer.
As David Maister writes in his book “Strategy and the Fat Smoker:”
If people are to make the right strategic decision in every location of the firm, in every operating group, and at every level, then they must absolutely trust that management will back them up and reward them (or at least not punish them) for acting in accordance with the declared strategy.
He goes on to write:
I have sometimes asked firm leaders whether they are willing to announce to their people, right upfront, that they will resign their roles if measurable progress is not made on the strategic plans they advocate.
Although suggesting to your leadership team that they should resign if the customer experience doesn’t improve may well be unwise for your career prospects, the principle that they need to show firm commitment remains true.
Addressing the Practicalities in Your Customer Strategy
So at the heart of a customer strategy lies these principles:
- We need a customer experience team.
- That team needs to be focused on awareness, education, collaboration and the big picture.
- That this team needs to be supported by leadership and the right metrics.
However, this throws up three additional questions that need addressing:
- How big does this team need to be?
- What should the makeup of the team be?
- Who should this team report into?
These are not questions I can answer in a blog post. It will depend on your organisation’s size and structure. However, I can share a couple of pieces of advice that might help.
About Your Customer Experience Team
The size will be directly proportional to the size of your organisation. The more people to win over and educate, the more resources you will need.
However, even a small team can be effective if they focus their effort on more scalable educational approaches such as playbooks and self-learning courses.
That raises the question of who should be in the team. Often companies hire user experience professionals. However, although this is a skill set that is required, these people tend to be ‘doers’ rather than teachers. As education is a critical role of these teams, that kind of expertise is essential.
The ‘doing’ should be kept to a minimum as that leads to being a bottleneck and is resource-heavy.
UX designers are better being embedded in departments and project teams even if they ultimately report into CX function. However, that is very much dependant on the organisation, and so I wouldn’t want to suggest absolutes here.
Who Your Customer Experience Team Reports Into
As for where these teams sit, that can often prove contentious and needs to be handled with care. That said, in an ideal world, your company would have a CXO (Chief Customer Officer) who heads the team and sits on the board.
In essence, the higher in the organisational structure the team is placed, the more their perceived importance.
However, failing that, the team should be positioned as near to that power base a possible. For example, if sales drive the company, then the team should sit under sales. It is the perception of importance that matters more than where is ‘most logical’.
A Customer Strategy Is Not a Project Roadmap
It is worth noting the one thing that is conspicuously absent from my description of a customer strategy; it does not contain a project roadmap. It should not focus on a set of deliverables.
That is because, in my experience at least, most organisations are not aware of enough of what needs to be done when they endeavour to create a customer strategy.
Also, you do not want to commit to a fixed program of work because that allows no flexibility to adapt as your understanding of the customer improves, or their needs change.
Ultimately a customer strategy should be about putting the right people in place, doing the right job as they endeavour to shape the culture of the organisation to prioritise the customer experience.
