What does a business leader need to do to achieve exceptional customer experience results?
New ways of thinking are required to be successful at improving customer experience.
Classical management approaches, with a reliance on rigid structures, prior experience and linear thinking are counter-intuitive to the customer experience discipline. To shift an organisation to consistently and sustainably deliver exceptional customer experience and exceptional business results, we’ve summarised the 5 P’s of Customer Experience improvement.
These are:
- Purpose – Important in two ways. Firstly, you need a higher-order purpose for your organisation that is more than just commercial. Your purpose drives your identity and this drives behaviours of your leadership and staff. Purpose is also fundamental to your customer experience aspirations. As a leader, you need to deeply believe and show the belief that you see customer experience as a priority.
- Passion – You have to be prepared to engage over the long haul and directly champion higher-order purpose and your customer experience aspirations. Be repetitive and consistent in this.
- People – Not only do you need the soft-skills side of getting people organized around purpose, but you also need to have a a strong operational capability. As a leader, you won’t have the capacity to do this yourself so get the right people around you. Effective customer experience operations involves having customer experience results correlated, analysed, shared and propagated across the organisation and at all levels.
- Program – Insights you have from customer experience need to be correctly interpreted and need to be converted into hard projects/programs to fix things. Your end-to-end operational process needs to be systemised and this involves a systematic continuous improvement capability, and if necessary, the use of more strategic investment program funding to build capability or make the change happen and stick.
- Platform – A platform for customer experience should include Business Intelligence, Customer Feedback Capture, Data Sciences including propensity modelling, Social Media (unstructured data) analysis, Operational Data Integration, Alerts to drive pre-emptive customer contact. An integrated platform is fundamental to your customer experience maturity.
We have recently been working with an organisation (total employee size of 5,000 and 800 staff in the division we are working with) that started formally adopting the above approach. We started with Purpose (Passion was already there) and used Simon Sinek’s work as inspiration. The results after 9 months of the Program are outstanding; A substantial increase in staff productivity with 900,000 outstanding cases now reduced to a few tens of thousands, Employee Engagement scores rising substantially, and substantial revenue increases within the same timeframe. The work with this client shows the power of Purpose, Passion and People and how culture can significantly improve business performance.
With the inner workings of organisations becoming more complex due to rising customer expectations, a plethora of new channels and ‘big data’, it is increasing difficult to operationalise improvements to a business and in customer experience without a systematic approach. Leading practice has evolved quickly; how do you rate across these 5 P’s?
Raj is the founder and Managing Director of The Customer Experience Company. He is a seasoned executive having built a career in management and technology consulting with organisations including Accenture, Ernst & Young and Capgemini. At Ernst & Young and Capgemini, Raj held senior leadership and operational roles at both a local, Asia-Pacific and global level. In his client facing roles, he directed projects and managed client relationships within the financial services and telecommunication industries. Raj has qualifications from the University of Melbourne (Electrical & Electronic Engineering) and a Graduate Management Qualification from AGSM in Sydney. To contact Raj, please email him on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
