Want to make sure your Customer Experience Work Stays on Track?

Manage these Seven Inhibitors of Customer Experience Work Success

1. Starting with a mantra, not an action plan.

• Often companies decide that they want to get some early traction by telling everyone to “focus on customer experience”  What happens next is that people realize this is a big corporate priority and begin taking actions, making plans and creating new scoreboards and taking action.
• This proliferates the silo based approach to actions that is contrary to the discipline of experience development and management.  A lot of action occurs, executives get a “false positive” that action is occurring and traction is happening, but it eventually stalls out because the actions don’t aggregate up to improve complete end to end customer experiences.

2. Not first defining the customer experience and gaining alignment on the path of actions.

• This is similar to first point, but I am stressing it separately because defining the experience consistently and gaining alignment has major downstream implications if it is not done correctly and if the time is not done to get alignment.
• The organization needs to agree on the stages of the experience and the definitions of success.
• The importance of this is because we want to give leaders a new language set for which to ask and drive the business, and we want to establish the key cross-functional metrics for the development of key KPIs for priority touchpoints.  This is critical also to database management, as the stages of the experience interrelate to one another.
• Without creating this framework first, the risk is to experience the same failure as what happened when (most) corporations around the world rolled out CRM.
• They automated current processes without rethinking the business.
• The business of customer experience is about redefining the operation of the business to be driven from the customers’ point of view on how they experience the company.
• This new attitude and approach to talking about and managing the business is key to achieving the cultural transformation.  It’s only when we drive the experience from this vantage point, and hard-wire this approach into language, leadership and operations that it will become sustainable.

3. Not breaking the work into actionable pieces and not understanding what “success” is.

• Initially the work on the customer experience journey should be considered successful when “enabling infrastructure” actions occur, such as:

  • Aligning the databases to be able to manage customer data to know the value of the customer asset
  • Engaging leaders in personally becoming connected to customers’ lives by calling customers, visiting employees
  • Teaching the organization the competency of working together across the silos to solve and improve one (or two) customer experiences end to end
  • Changing the communication from leaders to drive customer experience accountability

• What often happens is that instead of building in (and celebrating) these new competencies so critical to the long termed sustainability – is that people want to attach a score.

  • “We will be successful when our satisfaction rates are x” or “we will be successful when our net promoter score is y”

4. Attaching early metrics to outcome metrics rather than operational metrics people can impact.

• It’s very enticing to jump to the outcome metrics such as survey scores.
• The challenge with this is that the outcome of a survey score is impacted by numerous factors, not all of which can be impacted by areas of the organization who are given the outcome metrics as their performance score.
• It’s more powerful to, for example, identify the operational KPIs that people can impact
• If the outcome metrics are added to early, before the underlying processes and culture change and coaching and development are put into place – people WILL want to achieve great scores – but they will rely on involving the customer in helping them to achieve a better score (follow up – any reason you can’t give me a ten?, etc.)
• They will also focus on actions so minute that it might move the needle a little on the score, but the overall approach to sustaining that skill or even building that skill is compromised.  It’s very hard to sustain this type of “go get a good score” approach.

5. Not having executives engaged in the effort.

• Often executives will say that they want to focus on the customer  experience – but they hand off the work to a department or area to work on.
• This work is not like a typical project.  Setting up a great project plan and executing on tactics and actions will get the infrastructure built (such as VOC systems) but it won’t drive the change in culture and the development of cross-silo competencies.
• Leaders must commit to being personally involved – beyond a perfunctory monthly “check in” meeting.  They need to engage in the process of the work.  Without executive involvement driving the new prioritization, driving out the actions that are in the way and giving people permission to work together – it is hard to sustain this work.

6. Not having clear communication to the organization that walks people constantly through the roadmap, and actions, and behaviors to model.

• It’s not enough to do the work behind the scenes. The organization needs to be constantly kept up to speed on what is happening and what it means to them.
• As new decisions are made that focus on customer experiences – people must be kept apprised of these decisions – and given permission to model this type of decision making.
• Leaders must emerge as constant communicators of why we are taking the actions we are.
• The organization must be kept up to speed on actions and successes.
• Without this constant communication and “permission setting” and “decision guidance” the organization will view the cx work as another in a long string of exercises or programs that will go the  way of the others – away.

7. Taking actions based on what they think, not based on understanding what customers need.

• Many companies, especially those long entrenched in their business, believe they know what customers need.
• Even when they do research, they make the research about “validating” their plans rather than beginning open minded and asking the customer about their lives and what they need.
• This approach will compromise the outcome of the new experiences that are built – and in some cases will completely backfire.
• The recent Walmart case is a great one to bring up.  Walmart did “research” and got from it that customers said that they wanted less cluttered stores.  So they set upon a plan (led by a past Target executive) to declutter the aisles, etc.  Then they asked customers if this what they wanted.  It backfired.  They have lost millions on this.  Look up this example --- it’s a good one!
• Customer experience differentiation comes when the experiences are based by truly understanding customers’ needs – rather than beginning with current processes and asking customers what they like or don’t like.  Many companies fall into this trap – from experience building to customer satisfaction scores that indicate that “they are doing ok”.  Customers are forced to react the box of the experience you are currently giving – they aren’t given the change to really talk about what they need.

Eliminate Silos, Be Fanatical, Stay Focused on Culture. 

San Antonio–based Rackspace grows by imagining the life of their IT manager clients. And that means making it easy to get help, support, and service without the customer “hot potato.” So Rackspace is organized by teams assigned by customer account, in order to create customer peace of mind. Rackspace’s Web site explains this commitment: “No more call centers. No more dealing with a different person every time you need something. No more transferring you to the ‘expert’ who transfers you to another ‘expert.’ . . . And, most importantly, no more feeling like you’re just one more anonymous customer stuck in a system that works against you instead of for you.”

Unify Accountability for Customer Growth

With this decision, Rackspace is there for clients, on their terms, with a reliable delivery method they can count on. Teams are assembled to include everyone a client needs: account managers, engineers, support technicians, billing, and data center professionals. Everyone on the team has a common set of goals aligned to the client’s goals. And they are all rewarded and recognized together— with shared accountability— for ensuring the customer’s needs are met. This team structure ensures that when the client calls their account manager, ready resources are available to support the client. The traditional silos that create the “hot potato” experience are gone. So the client doesn’t have to figure out who to call for what and when. Rackspace connects the team to give customers peace of mind.

Growth fueled by Being There

Serving a diverse customer base of over 99,000 worldwide, Rackspace’s growth is fueled by “being there” for IT managers. They understand that people who choose IT hosting want someone else to be responsible for their servers, period. By reliably and seamlessly managing the hosting of Web sites so that their clients can stay focused on their businesses, Rackspace has earned the right to grow. In recent years there has been significant growth in both revenues and net income, and has experienced revenue growth of over 55 percent annually. In 11 years, Rackspace grew from a $34 million to a $1.4 billion company.

Do you make customers traverse your organization chart to do business with you?

Would your customers say that they are handed off to many people before they eventually receive help?

Do the boundary lines of your organization chart keep people from going the extra mile?

Is collaboration something you’re good at, or do the silos impact the customer experience?

It’s a given, at some point your business will suffer a failure that disappoints customers. How your company reacts, explains, removes the pain, and takes accountability for actions signals how you think about customers, and the collective heart of your organization. It has been proven that a genuine apology strengthens the emotional connection that a customer has with a company. Being human and prone to making mistakes, we’re in luck. We have the opportunity regularly to make amends. There’s a difference between the way an “everyday” company decides to make amends and the manner in which a beloved company (one that customers grow) decides to make amends…

Apology Decisions that Drive Business Growth (in good times and bad):
Here are five recent decisions that beloved companies have made on how to decide to earn back customers’ good graces when a misstep occurred. They are five apologies to bolster your faith that business can connect commerce with humanity … and win!

Decision #1. Netflix, the DVD-by-mail service with 10 million subscribers, prescribes to decision making that “honesty is the best recovery.” They let ALL of their customers know when something goes wrong, not just those who experienced the occasional interruption in service. In fact, on August 31, 2009, Netflix emailed a large number of its subscribers to apologize for an Xbox Live streaming outage that occurred the day before. Netflix emailed everyone that could have possibly seen this blip in their service and offered a refund—including users who didn’t suffer through it at all.

The question is: Do YOU confess to customers when a misstep occurs in your operation? Is this when you show your true colors?

Decision #2. The University of Michigan Health System decided to enable doctors, nurses and all hospital staff to exercise their natural instinct and to say “sorry” when something went wrong. An early adopter of a process that encourages transparency with healthcare providers and patients and their families, the University of Michigan encourages (without fear) a swift and caring explanation, and when appropriate, a heartfelt apology. Doctors and lawyers worried that this level of transparency and just uttering the words “sorry” would drive an increase in claims and malpractice suits. But when put into practice, the complete opposite occurred.

The question is: Can YOU suspend the fear and say “We’re sorry?”

Are you able to table the corporate response and deliver one that connects on a personal level?

Decision #3. Saying sorry well in most cases should not require a committee, consortium or legal review. Most apologies should occur spontaneously, the moment the company knows a problem occurred. And the person who first hears the news should be in a position to respond appropriately. L.L. Bean’s guarantee frees their frontline to do the right thing. It keeps them close to their small-town company culture, “Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit; treat your customers like human beings and they’ll always come back for more.” True to those words, L.L. Bean’s frontline is trusted to take action, using their own best judgment to deliver a response warranted by the situation.

The question is: Can YOUR frontline rescue customers? When an unhappy customer contacts you, does your frontline have “permission” to do the right thing?

Decision #4. Southwest Airlines proactively says “sorry” to its customers every day. Each morning a group assembles to learn about passenger experiences the previous day and to anticipate passenger experiences in the current day. BEFORE customers contact them, Southwest reaches out, acknowledges any mistakes and extends an olive branch commensurate with the experience the customer encountered. A customized letter is created for each incident. Written with humility, remorse and whimsy when called for, this uniquely “Southwest” rigor won back $1,900,000 of return flights from customers in 2009.

The question is: How proactive are YOU? Do you have a recovery plan to wow customers when things go wrong?

Decision #5. Vancouver based home health care company, Nurse Next Door was born when the owners, struggling to find appropriate caregivers for their aging parents, became fed up with company after company making errors in service. Frustrated with their lack of options, they started Nurse Next Door, and decided that any errors in service would be promptly addressed with a sincere and heartfelt apology. When they slip up, Nurse Next Door sends a freshly baked “Humble Pie,” along with a note that says, “We are very humbled by our mistake and sincerely apologize for the poor service.” Nurse Next Door thrived in 2008, experiencing an increase in client growth over 25 percent. John DeHart, one of the owners, estimates that the company spent $1,500 on humble pies, but saved about $100,000 in sales.

The question is: Is your humility oven lit? Can you bake a humble pie? Acknowledging a mistake shows that you’re human. Admitting it is hard. But it’s what customers crave. Do you have the DNA to say “sorry” and mean it?

Go try this

1. Every day, or at the end of each week, bring your folks together to discuss what experiences disappointed customers. Reach out personally to those customers and acknowledge what went wrong and extend an "olive branch" to right what went wrong.
2. Inventory all the common glitches that sometimes get in the way of a great customer experience. Proactively create and prepare the actions as a "hero kit" that your folks can have readily available to deliver. Let them decide which is best for each situation.
3. Follow up with your customers who have experienced your gesture of apology. The follow up will seal in their memory that you were genuine and that you are a "company to keep."

Beloved companies don’t consider the job done until the emotional connection with customers is restored. Why do they decide to apologize in this manner? Because it’s the right thing to do. Our mothers told us that when you hurt someone, intentionally or not, you apologize and you mean it. You right the wrong. You make peace.

(Editor's note: You can watch Jeanne interview leaders from several beloved companies, including Fred Taylor, Jr., head of Proactive Customer Service Communications at Southwest Airlines, in this video from the Net Promoter Conference in New York, February 2010.)