How Customer Centric are you?
Customer Experience is half heart, half science.
When I was CEO of a multinational in the US, one of our cornerstone strategies was to drive a passionate culture of customer-centricity.
My first step was to create a management board position - we created the Chief Customer Experience Officer. This role owned the customer experience and was accountable to create a culture, management system and metrics around that accountability.
We launched an "I'm On It" campaign which highlighted our desire for every employee to take ownership and be responsive for the customer.
One of the first things we did was to map all the customer touch points - how the customer came into our organization, and all the ways that we reached out to the customer - every touchpoint. we mapped over 80 ways in which the customer interfaces with us and we set out to flow and measure each one, putting the accountability for improvement on the functional and operational owners of the process.
We tailored our customer surveys to this mapping. We created internal metrics that we could measure, that mapped to the external survey questions. In other words, for every question we were asking in the survey, we looked to have a process metric we were tracking. When we did that correctly, we would see a correlation between our internal metric improving (or deteriorating) and how the external survey metric tracked. It took us over a year to get it right, and we were constantly working to improve it. These metrics became a part of our weekly management meeting, along with the financial performance reviews.
As with anything, when you focus and measure, and when you have a quality improvement process to address performance gaps, you will see results and we saw very statistically significant results.
The thing about managing Customer Experience... its half heart and half science. You have to imbed the passion and the culture, but that is not enough. To improve, you have to measure, have to have a process that can be managed like anything else.
When I was CEO of a multinational in the US, one of our cornerstone strategies was to drive a passionate culture of customer-centricity.
My first step was to create a management board position - we created the Chief Customer Experience Officer. This role owned the customer experience and was accountable to create a culture, management system and metrics around that accountability.
We launched an "I'm On It" campaign which highlighted our desire for every employee to take ownership and be responsive for the customer.
One of the first things we did was to map all the customer touch points - how the customer came into our organization, and all the ways that we reached out to the customer - every touchpoint. we mapped over 80 ways in which the customer interfaces with us and we set out to flow and measure each one, putting the accountability for improvement on the functional and operational owners of the process.
We tailored our customer surveys to this mapping. We created internal metrics that we could measure, that mapped to the external survey questions. In other words, for every question we were asking in the survey, we looked to have a process metric we were tracking. When we did that correctly, we would see a correlation between our internal metric improving (or deteriorating) and how the external survey metric tracked. It took us over a year to get it right, and we were constantly working to improve it. These metrics became a part of our weekly management meeting, along with the financial performance reviews.
As with anything, when you focus and measure, and when you have a quality improvement process to address performance gaps, you will see results and we saw very statistically significant results.
The thing about managing Customer Experience... its half heart and half science. You have to imbed the passion and the culture, but that is not enough. To improve, you have to measure, have to have a process that can be managed like anything else.
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