Editorial
The Gist
- Integrated strategy framework. A robust customer experience strategy integrates organizational strategy with customer lifecycle insights and creates alignment across all departments.
- Leadership's role. Senior executives must take ownership of customer experience initiatives and embed them into core business strategies for sustainable success.
- Engaged employees matter. Connecting employee experience to customer experience drives engagement and ensures that employees understand their role in delivering exceptional service.
Despite its central importance to the success of every business, customer experience is rarely implemented as effectively as it could be by leadership teams. This happens because customer experience still isn’t fully integrated into the core of strategy planning, development and execution.
The challenge that customer experience practitioners face is to make sure that senior executives take on the fundamental ownership of customer experience.
Customer experience practices have two major problems.
The first problem is that the design process of “empathize, define, ideate, design, test” is never explicitly located within a wider strategic methodology. Because of this, many design and innovation teams never manage to gain traction for their ideas at the boardroom level, and therefore they never gain acceptance and support for the ideas they are attempting to put into practice.
The second problem is that traditional approaches to strategy do not explicitly include the customer lifecycle. By placing the customer lifecycle at the heart organizational CX strategy, an organization can better deliver value to customers and clients by aligning every person, activity and process, ultimately achieving its higher vision and purpose.
When customer experience strategy is developed and communicated effectively within an organization, everyone understands their role in achieving the strategic objectives. There needs to be organization-wide alignment and coordination to transform customer experience. To achieve this, leadership teams need to start with the customer lifecycle.
Why the Customer Lifecycle Matters in Your Strategy
The customer lifecycle has traditionally fallen within the purview of marketing, with core activities focused on sales and retention. However, it is far more than a top-level description of customer journeys. Its importance transcends customer relationship marketing, serving as the very foundation upon which a customer-centric organization is built.
Customer centricity is the formal way of referring to a focus on customers. It places the customer at the heart of strategy, aligning all aspects of a company's operations — including product development, marketing, sales and customer service — around delivering value to the customer. This concept goes far beyond customization, which is a specific customer experience strategy based on tailoring a business's services and products to fit the unique needs and preferences of each customer.
Customer experience strategy therefore needs to be integrated into the three major strategic activities of an organization — planning, translating and implementing strategy.
Related Article: The Blueprint for Customer-Centricity: Aligning Teams With Vision
Key Elements of a Customer Experience Strategy
Strategic planning relates to the analysis of socioeconomic, technological, political, legal and environmental factors to prepare for future challenges and opportunities. The outcomes of this stage include:
- The identification of an organization’s strategic drivers, which are the key factors or elements that influence its overall strategic direction and decision-making process.
- A clearly articulated value proposition.
A Customer Centricity Strategy Framework starts the process of strategic planning with the New 4Ps framework, which helps senior leadership teams analyze their most pressing strategic questions in a systematic manner across all four dimensions:
- Platforms: How will digital technologies, architectures, functionality and platform-based business models alter the way the organization operates, evolves and interacts with clients and collaborators?
- Purpose: How can the overall purpose of an organization be articulated in a manner that clearly explains why it exists and what differentiates it from competitors? What needs does it meet, and how will it deliver these needs?
- People: How can the organization develop higher quality relationships with people — both with customers and within the communities where it operates and has an influence?
- Planet: How can the organization develop a systemic understanding of the positive and negative impacts it is having on our planet?
We use the New 4Ps framework to facilitate dialogue between people across functions and levels to help them understand how their roles must evolve to make sure their organizations continue to thrive in the future. In helping leadership teams develop a more systemic form of thinking, answering customer-related questions can start to influence strategy at its earliest stage and before strategic drivers have been formally established.
Translating Your Vision Into a Strategy
Strategy translation is the process of translating high-level strategic vision and strategic drivers into objectives, goals and initiatives that can be understood and executed by various departments and teams.
Once a customer experience strategy has been developed, it is implemented through strategic projects and organizational processes. By necessity, projects and processes are implemented by people. This means that leadership teams need to ensure alignment between all three elements — people, projects and processes.
The success of a new customer experience initiative goes beyond simply implementing new processes and customer marketing systems. People in every area need to be prepared for significant change. The Customer Centricity Strategy Framework is explicit in placing the leadership activities of communication and change management at the start of the strategy translation stage.
In this stage, leadership teams need to invest time preparing people to help them understand the strategy in a systematic way, starting with the value proposition — the description of how the organization delivers value to its customers. The most effective way to do this is by transforming the strategy into a map so that people understand not only its individual elements, but also the causal connections between its parts.
Implementing Your Customer Experience Strategy
Strategy implementation is the execution of the strategic plan, which involves the implementation of projects and processes, deployment of resources, alignment of activities and monitoring of progress. At this stage, there should be no surprises. Everyone in the organization should already be prepared for change, fully engaged and aligned through the communication of objectives, indicators, goals and initiatives.
The strategic projects relating to customer experience in this stage depend on the level of customer experience maturity of the organization. Examples of project goals include improving customer experience ratings, uncovering new customer requirements, researching new market segments, understanding the lives of typical customers, mapping out customer journeys and designing the business processes involved in supporting the customer experience.
Related Article: Surviving the Journey of Customer Journey Mapping
The Role of Leadership in Customer Experience
The Customer Centricity Strategy Framework includes a new concept that we call “leadership experience,” which we use to help leaders explore how they make sense of the world and how others perceive them. Leadership experience (LX) relates to people’s inner psychological world, complementing employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX).
We developed the concept after being taken aback by conversations we’ve had with presidents and CEOs who did not have customer-centric mindsets. One, for example, told us that he didn’t have time for customer experience as he was “focused on results.” When leadership experience is recognized as important for improving customer experience, teams become more open to addressing challenges. This shift encourages mentoring and training for those responsible for managing team performance.
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The Role of Employees in Strategic Success
A Customer Centricity Strategy Framework visually connects the employee lifecycle to the customer lifecycle. Not only is it important to structure an employee’s development and career path during their time with an organization, but it is also important to use customer experience design expertise to think about how employees comprehend and experience the strategy.
For example, gamification and storytelling can help senior leadership teams communicate strategy maps to employees who may not have sufficient training to understand the technical terms used to describe strategy more formally. By writing a story that explains the complex relationships between the parts of a strategy, leaders can make sure everyone understands the strategy's purpose and where they can contribute to its implementation.
These aforementioned efforts can excite people about customer experience strategy and engage them in its processes — from planning through to implementation. Also, it provides a path for placing more designers and customer experience practitioners into positions of authority in their organizations. The goal here is to elevate organizations to achieve transformational results by locating customer centricity at the very heart of all that they do.
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