2014 State of Customer Experience: Who Are UK’s Leaders And What Can We Learn From Them? (Part 4)

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Today’s conversation completes this four part series (part 1, part 2, part 3) centred on Nunwood‘s 2014 UK Analysis report. In this conversation I want to talk about CX improvement.  Specifically, what Nunwood say about what it takes to generate CX improvement.

What Does It Take To Excel At The Customer Experience Game? How Should Your Organisation Go About It?

The authors of the Nunwood report show up for me as being practical folks. They get that there is fine balance between aspiration and pragmatism. Here’s what they write (bolding mine)

For most brands, trying to improve performance simply by emulating John Lewis or First Direct can be counterproductive. Trying to move too quickly, or claiming to be something at odds with reality, can cause credibility and cultural issues. The rapid and sustainable progress of the top brands is the result of long-term, diligent investment. 

… the temptation of many chief executives ….. is to set an expectation … that the organisation will soon resemble a top 10 brand……. Transformational change is seldom less than five year project. In fact, a considerable number of brands ranked 100th to 263rd in this study have publicly held similar goals since 2010 and climbed no more than a few places over this time. Rallying cries must be credible, as well as loud. 

Equally dangerous is the risk of myopically focusing just on the immediate sector competitors, who are often only marginally different in the consumers’ eyes.

Given this what is it that the authors advise?  Here is what they say:

… the question for many brands is not how to get into the top 10 within 12 months, nor is it simply how to be the best of their immediate competitors. Rather, the best dividends come from understanding how to accelerate the rate of customer experience change. 

Which Four Critical Dimensions Do Businesses Need To Master In Order To Accelerate Customer Experience Improvement? 

According to the authors these are the four critical dimensions that businesses need to master to generate sustainable and significant improvements in CX excellence:

  1. A business is mobilised around a common vision;
  2. Customer journeys are mapped and prioritised for change;
  3. Measurement is owned by the frontline and linked to actions; and
  4. Customer experience motivates the employee experience.

As I look at these four critical dimensions it occurs to me that the only one that is ‘easy’ is the first half of the second item on the list: mapping of customer journeys.  Why is this the case? Because you can get a bunch of people together and get them doing customer journey mapping without any disruption to organisational politics or day-to-day operations.  Is that why customer journey mapping, and VoC surveying, are so common place. And action that actually changes anything worth changing so rare?

It occurs to me that it is no easy-simple task to come up with a common vision for the customer experience. And it is a major challenge to get everyone in the business to row in the same direction and in sync with one another. The devil often turns out to be in the detail. The other day I was in a meeting where all the buzzword were there: trusted, easy to do business with, personalisation, consistence…. And everyone was in agreement in this level. The fun came when it came to filling out these empty words with something concrete: What set of practices are ruled out if we are to be trustworthy? What set of practices do we need to embrace to be easy to do business with? What does personalisation actually mean? And so forth.

Take a look at number three on the list: measurement is owned at the front line and linked to actions.  Ask yourself why the call-centre agent on minimum wage, working in factory like conditions, should care, genuinely care, about owning measurement and taking action.  Or flip it and ask yourself who loses out if power moves from head office to the operations, from managers to the people who actually deal with customers?  Furthermore, for this to genuinely occur then something like the practices put forth by Deming (‘drive fear out of the workplace’) and implemented by Toyota (the workers own the design-execution-improvement of the work processes and machinery) need to occur.

Customer experience motivates the employee experience. What does this mean? I take it to mean that you start with figuring out the kind of customer experience that you propose to generate. And use this to figure out which kind of employee experience you need to cause in order for the employees to cause the customer experience you have in mind.  In many businesses, and every service business where the employees touch the customer, it means relaxing control, embracing flexibility and encouraging improvisation-creativity-responsiveness to the situation at hand.  It means treating employees as human beings rather than resources which come in the troublesome form of human being.  It means that power has to move to where the action occurs: the frontline. Who does this threaten? Managers at all levels of the organisation.

Why do I point this out? To reinforce the point that the authors make and which I shared earlier:

Transformational change is seldom less than five year project. In fact, a considerable number of brands ranked 100th to 263rd in this study have publicly held similar goals since 2010 and climbed no more than a few places over this time. Rallying cries must be credible, as well as loud. 

At this point, I ask you this question: what kind of leader and exercise of leadership plants the seeds of transformational change and then nurtures this seeds to fruition?  Can it be the kind of leaders that are commonplace today?  Which leader is going to embark in a journey which involves hardship, including putting one’s reputation and selfhood at stake, and which not yield fruits for at least five years?  It occurs to me only one that it is going to be there in a leadership role for much longer than five years.  Now think of Jeff Bezos at Amazon, or Tony Hsieh of Zappos, Steve Jobs at Apple, Richard Branson at Virgin…

That concludes the conversation on Nunwood’s 2014 UK Analysis report. I hope that I made some contribution to you. Thanks for listening.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Maz Iqbal
Independent
Experienced management consultant and customer strategist who has been grappling with 'customer-centric business' since early 1999.

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