The CXU Student Brief
A monthly newsletter for Upgraded Online Course Subscribers
Insights from the 2018 Customer Experience Conference at The Conference Board
Customer experience is best when it fits with the emotions of your customers. They want to feel they can trust companies, regardless of industry. Therefore, they look for evidence. In the 2018 Customer Experience Conference at the Conference Board, observations from 112 senior practitioners were recorded. Here is the first set of observations…
Issue 2: When implementing a new customer experience initiative, use a change management approach.
- Decide what your organization stands for and create a common framework for and definition of the customer experience before jumping into a change initiative.
- Make sure all senior leaders are on board with your new customer experience plan. They can’t just approve the new brand and customer experience initiative—they also have to understand and feel like they own it so they can get their teams on board.
- Think about the brand from the inside out. While developing a new brand and customer experience initiative, one financial service company worked with HR for two years to rewrite corporate values, change the recruiting process (including interviewing, orientation, and onboarding), and overall employee experience before sharing the strategy with everyone else. The company launched the new brand internally six months before rolling it out externally so that all 54,000 employees would have time to learn what it was about.
- Communicate the new brand so that everyone understands what your new customer experience initiative is in the same way. A financial services company shared its change initiatives with its 54 offices and all 54,000 employees, starting with a town hall co-hosted by the retiring and replacement CEOs. Then country managers held their own town halls to explain what the changes meant for merchants, services, engineering, and employees, and after that, departments held their own town halls. The company also mailed each employee a tote bag that contained a newspaper and other literature describing how the changes would affect each department, and it sent posters to each office before the first town hall.
- Hold everyone accountable for providing an excellent customer experience by making it a goal in the performance management process and linking it to compensation.
- Hold ongoing training to define customer experience, what your customer experience initiatives will entail, and any current changes and updates to keep employees and managers engaged. Also, explain what success looks like, how it will be measured, and how it ties back to goals and compensation. Also, appoint brand ambassadors to help everyone through the process. A financial services company appointed 2,400 brand ambassadors as a stretch assignment to assist with its internal brand launch.
What Customers Want {Video}
Watch as Sylvia Henderson, the Idea Implementation Expert, explains three strategies to transform business ideas into action and that understanding clients’ needs saves you time & money.
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