Organizations today are seeking new ways to engage customers, drive new sales and increase customer satisfaction by providing engaging customer experiences. A customer experience initiative that lacks a strong, clear vision often fails to achieve its intended result.
It’s important for an organization to create a compelling customer experience vision and socialise it throughout the company. A clearly defined and communicated customer experience vision gives a sense of purpose for employees. They want to be part of something that is bigger than they are and want to know “what is in it for me?”
Companies like The Ritz-Carlton Hotels, Zappos and Singapore Airlines are famous for their customer service and, in particular, their friendly employees.
Unfortunately for many organizations, creating an effective customer experience vision is a challenge, even though it is a fundamental step to create a customer-centric enterprise. It’s often difficult to engage all stakeholders to work together to develop a vision and strategy because the customer life cycle cuts through many different departments and functions. In addition, adoption often suffers from the organization’s inability to communicate to employees the necessary changes that come with that vision.
Four key attributes of a customer experience vision
There are four attributes that are consistently mentioned by our clients as the most important to craft a compelling customer experience vision:
• It makes an emotional connection with customers and employees.
• It provides a compelling value proposition that differentiates the company from competitors and shows the organization understands what its customers want.
• It is simple and intuitive – it needs to concisely state the purpose and be easy to understand.
• It demonstrates commitment and sets customers’ and employees’ expectations.
Bring your customer experience vision to life
Once you have a vision for customer experience in your organization, it must be understood internally to have any impact. Communication is the key. Your vision becomes the employees’ common purpose when they are able to associate it with real-life examples and personal feelings.
To make that happen, you need to:
• Make it real and believable: Communicate the vision using stories. Link the vision with the question, “What is in it for me?” People feel passionate about things that have a personal impact, and passion will drive employees to go the extra mile to exceed customer expectations.
• Paint a picture of the journey: Tell your employees and partners why they should embark on the journey and where they are going. Also make it transparent to customers.
• Find champions: An organization needs to find champions to “walk the talk” and be passionate about the vision. The leaders of the organization are not the only ones who need to be the champions, so do the employees, who are the role models and strong influencers in the customer service teams. They need to be identified and made visible.
• Communicate value, purpose and impact: Formalise a strong message. Organizations need to tell their customers, employees and partners about the compelling value proposition differentiating their companies from their competitors. Communicate (externally and internally) the progress of the implementation of the customer experience vision, and the impact on customers.
• Form active communities of practice: The purpose of these communities is to synthesize employee insight about the customer experience and funnel it back to management — the community should have direct access to a senior leader to create the feedback loop.
Implement across multiple departments
To be successful at creating great customer experiences, the organization needs to work as one — organizational collaboration is required. This is where the vision helps to guide everyone in the same direction.
Typical roles and departments may be focused on only part of the customer life cycle. As in all companies, there is a collection of senior executives that have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. However, this doesn’t always ensure that they are focused on the customer, because their roles and departments may be focused on only part of the customer life cycle.
IT leaders we’ve spoken with agree that top management is the key driver to create a customer experience vision. However, organizations must be sure to get all parts of the business involved in the process. Having only part of the group in place can skew the results toward an individual agenda instead of the overall corporate vision. Without representation from all parts of the organization, the complete customer life cycle won’t be captured.
Take action
By focusing on these top attributes and best practices, it will be much easier to create a convincing customer experience vision and put it into action. Just remember that it must have an emotional connection, be simple and intuitive, and demonstrate your compelling value proposition and commitment.
– The author, Olive Huang is Research Director at Gartner