To achieve extraordinary things, you must be bold. Unlocking success demands a dedication to what I term “The Golden Rules of CX.” The Golden Rules represent the essential guidelines for achieving success either broadly or within a specific endeavor.
This is the third in a series of articles on the nine golden rules for CX Success, originally published on CustomerThink.
Rule 7: Build Adaptive CX Cultures
Delivering exceptional Customer Experience (CX) requires more than intent; it demands action and adaptability. Recognizing the need for industry-leading CX is an essential first step, but it also highlights a sobering reality. Even when we identify the most frustrating gaps in our systems, finding and implementing effective solutions can seem insurmountable.
To bridge this gap, companies must cultivate adaptive cultures that respond to shifting environments, just like ecosystems — think of the Amazon rainforest — evolve to thrive under changing conditions. If your competitors adapt faster to meet customer demands, you risk falling behind or being overstretched to keep up. Success hinges on meeting the expectations of an increasingly empowered customer base that demands immediacy, personalization, transparency, reliability, trust, and innovation. Zappos exemplifies a culture of adaptiveness by empowering its employees to be responsive to customer needs.
Customers also expect to predict their needs and actively incorporate their feedback into future offerings. Airbnb encourages its employees to think like entrepreneurs to prioritize customer needs such as flexible cancellation policies. However, many organizations struggle to prioritize customers effectively because of internal obstacles like siloed departments, outdated processes, internal politics, and rigid hierarchies.
These challenges often create a disconnect between strategy and execution. Building a truly adaptive and customer-centric culture can feel overwhelming but it is critical to long-term success.
Creating an adaptive culture requires a shift toward collaboration that embraces diverse perspectives and innovative problem-solving. Too often, organizations treat problems as extensions of the past rather than opportunities to create a new future. True collaboration focuses on what’s possible, not just fixing what’s broken. Amazon practices these principles through their “Working Backwards” process, or their “Outside-In” mindset.
Casper disrupted the mattress purchase experience going beyond selling a sleeping surface. With an outrageously comfortable mattress “direct to the consumer sales approach coupled with compressed shipping delivered to your door and a 100% 100-day return guarantee,” Casper has won the hearts of customers.
Rule 8: CX Must Be Agile
The shift of power to tech-savvy customers (and employees) has made it challenging to achieve business goals. How often have you heard CX colleagues confess they understand concepts but have no idea how to apply or implement them?
This is the “knowing-doing” or the “what-how” gap. It is a source of stress. Customer demands exacerbate the uncertainty of this gap. In the face of uncertainty, how does one create customer and employee-centricity to drive financial and human health? What skills should employees possess to be masters of change? How should we build relationships so that our customers and our employees become advocates for our brand? How do we create emotional connections that last a lifetime? Yes, a lifetime! Is there a better end goal for any organization?
Interestingly, I have found that whenever organizations recognize that the experience economy is placing new demands on companies, these companies resort to adopting the latest technology to gather customer data. This is not a solution. It is only a tiny part of a complex mosaic. Our goal is to peel the mosaic, like an onion, and uncover adaptive capacity by following the seven steps in the journey toward agility and customer-centricity.
Step 1: Gather customer and market insights.
The first stage in the journey to influence customers is to collect data. There are many types and sources of data available to you. For example, customer relationship management (CRM) systems capture customer information, like demographics, purchasing behavior, online sales, payment methods, and more.
Using analytics-based insights augments employee judgment and improves customer buying experience to drive better results. Partnering with key stakeholders, like CS, Marketing, Operations, and IT is vital.
Case in Point: Amazon utilizes advanced data analytics and customer relationship management systems to capture detailed insights into customer preferences, purchasing habits, and browsing behavior. By leveraging tools like machine learning and AI, Amazon tailors recommendations, optimizes pricing, and ensures a seamless shopping experience. Cross-functional collaboration between IT, Marketing, and Operations ensures these insights drive meaningful customer engagement.
Step 2: Create and Map the Customer Experience View.
Construct an end-to-end journey map to identify those critical intersections or moments that matter to create emotional bonds and lasting memories.
All frontline employees — salespeople, call center representatives, and customer service agents, can engineer peaks and mitigate valleys. The peak-end rule, grounded in research conducted by Kahneman and Frederickson (1993), is a cognitive bias that impacts how people remember past and present events. Intense positive or peak moments are heavily weighted in our mental calculus.
At the same time as you create peaks, you must avoid valleys because of the recency bias. Customers often remember their last negative emotion/memory in their interactions with you. Moments of disenchantment or confusion are emotionally charged and can substantially affect customer impressions. Ensure that your customer’s experience of your product always concludes on a high note.
Case in Point: Disney excels in creating and mapping customer journeys with its parks and resorts. The company identifies critical “moments that matter” (e.g., meeting a favorite character or watching a fireworks display) to create emotionally resonant experiences. They use the peak-end rule by ensuring that key interactions and the end of a visitor’s stay are exceptionally memorable. Disney also trains its frontline cast members, to proactively address potential valleys, such as long wait times.
Step 3: Incorporate Customer Needs into Strategy
The first step toward successful change is to alter one’s paradigm about change itself. Effective organizations view change as ongoing and continuous experiments that can produce wisdom useful for further change.
Organization theorists characterize this as “action learning,” but recently this has been expressed as “human-centered” design thinking intended to solve problems through hypothesizing, prototyping, testing, refining, and implementing widespread changes.
It is an organic methodology that invites continuous reevaluations and adjustments as environmental pressures change.
Case in Point: P&G is known for embedding customer-centric design thinking into its product development. For instance, the creation of Swiffer involved ethnographic research where teams observed customers’ cleaning routines. Insights from these observations informed a product designed to solve specific pain points, such as convenience and efficiency. P&G’s iterative approach ensures that customer needs continuously shape its innovative pipeline.
Step 4: Develop Agility Through Engagement
Design thinking is a blueprint for agility. It’s about understanding customers in the context of their everyday lives through empathy, challenging assumptions, and reframing.
Designers seek to understand customers, their situations, and their needs by seeing the world through their eyes. The focus is on achieving connection and intimacy with customers.
Employees long accustomed to being told to be rational and objective find it challenging to be so personal and emotive. This is exacerbated by the requirement to engage in divergent thinking when employees are accustomed to valuing clear direction, cost savings, and efficiency.
As if this is not enough, imagine asking employees to experience failure, which everyone historically avoids repeatedly. Enduring the discomfort of design thinking is worth it because new possibilities and innovations can result. Leadership can encourage divergent thinking and ambiguity and rehearsing the future.
Case in Point: IDEO, a design and innovation consultancy, exemplifies agility through design thinking. By placing empathy at the core of its projects, IDEO helps clients develop products and services that resonate deeply with users. For example, IDEO worked with a healthcare provider to redesign the patient experience by observing real-life hospital interactions, resulting in improved patient satisfaction and operational efficiencies.
Step 5: Continuously Seek VOC Insights
To drive agile transformation, organizations must regularly review VOC data to understand customer needs and expectations. Go beyond surface-level insights and analyze pain points, desires, and unmet needs.
The goal is to extract actionable insights that can lead to meaningful solutions and improved customer experiences.
These steps represent the beginning of a transformative journey, designed to align organizations with the evolving demands of the experience economy. By peeling back the layers of this complex mosaic, businesses can uncover the adaptive capacity required to achieve true customer and employee centricity — creating lasting connections that fuel human and financial success.
Case in Point: Starbucks actively seeks VOC insights through initiatives like its My Starbucks Idea platform, where customers can submit suggestions and vote on others’ ideas. Feedback from this platform has led to tangible changes, such as free Wi-Fi in stores and the introduction of popular drinks. Starbucks’ commitment to listening to and acting on customer feedback has reinforced its reputation as a customer-centric brand.
Steps 6 and 7: Act, Improve and Close
Peter Drucker’s renowned statement — “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” — underscores the importance of measurement and driving improvement. By defining clear metrics and KPIs organizations can make informed data-driven decisions.
Measurement is more than data collection; it is about uncovering insights to drive change. It helps to identify inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement. When linked with targeted actions organizations can close the loop internally with our partners identified in Step 1 and externally. Closing the loop with customers is imperative. If they don’t believe they have been heard and understood, you could lose them.
Case in Point: Toyota exemplifies the wisdom of measurement and closing the loop. Its Total Production System (TPS) relied heavily on measurement and continuous improvement (Kaizen) to optimize its resources and enhance quality.
Conclusion
Market disruptions demand companies build agile personalities. One only has to look at examples of well-known brands that found their way to bankruptcy because of failure to build adaptive cultures. Blockbuster lost to streaming. Kodak and Polaroid did not see digital photography as a threat. Nokia was overwhelmed by the smartphone revolution. Toys “R” Us and Borders struggled to adapt to the rise of eCommerce. Blackberry relied on legacy technology. Sear missed the threat of modern retailers.
All these brands suffered from the “Icarus Paradox” — they were blinded by their past successes and did not adapt to changing business environments.
