Customer Transformation is a Team Sport
The best CVM playbook: climb the ladders, avoid the snakes
In every business, there is always at least ONE.
One person who really “gets it”.
A customer champion.
- It could be the call centre worker who puts a note in the suggestion box every week.
- It could be the engineer who wants to fix existing app bugs over launching new stuff
- It could be the sales guy who wishes for a new lead channel from customer referrals
- It could be… YOU.
Good ideas to improve customer experience often die or fizzle out
Many organisations are blessed with loyal and highly skilled staff. There is usually lots of ambition, energy and good ideas from people at all levels in organisations.
Sadly, many good ideas for improving customer management, services and customer experience will never get past the initial idea stage.
That note that was put in the suggestion box perhaps came with dodgy hand-writing and the idea was never fully understood or followed up on by the recipient.
The back-log of existing app bugs is going to remain on the back-log because the team was told there is only capacity to work on new development requests.
The idea to create customer referrals & recommendations to drive up sales was briefly discussed over team lunch, but faced early pushback due to low forecast volumes.
Having a conducive environment for ideas to be nurtured and developed is quite key for any organisation. Also, it is equally important that the person who had the original idea thinks carefully about when and how to best put forward their idea and do so in a tactical and structured way.
This is your best bet to try to avoid the graveyard of where many good business ideas are laid to their final rest.
“There is no shortage of remarkable ideas, what’s missing is the will to execute them.”
— Seth Godin
Why delivering many small projects can be more difficult than delivering a single huge project
Anyone and everyone think they are customer-centric and commercially focussed until the day they are faced with making hard choices about which projects to prioritise.
Budgets and resources are limited, whilst business targets are stretching.
Organisations that are for-profit will seek to run their commercial operations in a way that maximises shareholder value. This will happen by optimising efficiency, effectiveness and allocating budget and resources to those projects with the highest commercial returns.
That makes good businesses sense and the challenge here for practitioners in the fields of Customer Experience, Customer Engagement or Customer Success will be to navigate the fact that these projects often come with a measurement problem.
Whilst it’s fairly easy to track KPIs to measure improvements in customer satisfaction, engagement, activity or complaint-ratios — it is far more difficult to translate this into a value figure measured in dollars.
For this reason, if a company decides to rank activities by revenue impact, their project prioritisation pipeline is going to end up looking something like this:
Priority 1: Must-do activities (license to operate / keep the lights on)
Priority 2: Growth/revenue/commercial campaigns
Priority 3: Customer engagement / CX campaigns
Priority 4: Any other business
This approach might not have any noticeable implications on customers in the short-term, although thinking about this more strategically and longer-term — this is not a good idea and the route you want to be travelling down.
In practice, it means that most CX and customer engagement initiatives are ending up towards the bottom of the prioritisation list. At worst, they may never happen at all in case the company runs short on budget and resources as they work their way through the projects in priority group 1 and 2.
Initiating and delivering change — especially in large organisations —have been resembled by some to a game of Snakes and Ladders.
If you’re not familiar with this board game, the idea of the game is to try to ascend to the top of the playing map by climbing up ladders. However, if you land on a square with a snake, you will slide down to the bottom again and have to start over.
Think through your next step carefully and proceed with caution!
This is a metaphor for navigating the governance, processes and administrative tasks that you will work your way through as you are trying to gain agreement and eventually launch your customer improvement proposals in an organisation.
How to manage change and drive customer transformation
To drive change and customer transformation more effectively in organisations, I would make two suggestions:
Consider setting up a dedicated “Customer Change Board / Forum” which is separate and independent from whichever unit or forum deals with all other type of project requests. Consider pre-allocating resources and budgets to this governance structure. This will ensure it has sole discretion and control over how funds are used, without having the choose between projects that are like comparing apples and pears.
Think of your customer improvement proposals activity as a Team Sport. There is strength in numbers and your voice will be heard louder by seeking out like-minded individuals in the organisation who will back you up and support your endeavour. If you got a great idea, don’t try to run with it alone.
One reason why adopting the above approach is important is because of the measurement problem of CX initiatives that I mentioned. Although, because of the effect of compounding, the cumulative impact of many small improvements can grow large over time and really start to add up.
This is a key reason why it’s in your interest to group the initiatives together into similar themes.
Let’s dive into this second point in a bit more detail and flesh out what this might look and feel like in practice.
Here’s a step-by-step plan that you can follow when you start sketching on your next customer improvement project.
Step-by-step guide to gain support and momentum for customer change initiatives
Step 1. Identify and partner with like-minded customer champions in the organisation. Create a very small working group. Two (or more) voices will become stronger and louder than a single one.
Step 2. Approach your Finance or Analytics teams and establish a strong relationship with this unit. This is a critical step to ensure you can get readily access to customer and financial data on-demand.
Step 3. Spend plenty of time with your Operations / Customer Servicing teams. Listen to what these people are saying! This is important because the operational staff often knows about 100% of the challenges that customers face, whereas senior management teams often do not have visibility of all details. Embed these insights as customer research into your project proposals.
Step 4. Align with your Marketing and Product teams. Make sure that planned product improvements and marketing communications are directly addressing customer pain-points, customer needs and opportunities of improvement that you’ve learnt about from the prior customer research.
Step 5. Gradually build out and formalise your “core working group” with the stakeholders from step 2, 3 and 4 but ensure the group stays small and effective by only involving people are able to attend as decision-makers or individual contributors.
Step 6. Secure the support of a Senior Leader. You’re ultimately going to need the blessing and sanction for your customer initiatives, so make sure they are on your side and kept in the loop to provide formal approvals and provide back-up support as required.
My personal working style leans towards driving customer engagement as a grassroots movement throughout the whole organisation, whereas the day-to-day involvement of senior leaders and executives should be saved for when it really counts.
This is how you’re creating a movement and momentum in an organisation from the bottom-up in order to drive customer transformation and implementing a customer-centric culture.
I would welcome your views and comment on today’s topic. Feel free to comment or ask questions. If you enjoyed the content today, please give it a like or a share. Thanks!
100% a team sport, @jens. Every team, from product to frontline support, plays a role in delivering a truly customer-centric experience. When everyone understands their impact, the whole company moves in sync. The real challenge? Making sure that alignment isn’t just a slogan but part of how the business actually runs.