Following on from Dan’s article last month, this month we’ve invited Steven Bruce from Public Trust to share his thoughts on what it takes to deliver world-class customer experience. Steven is Head of Customer Strategy at Public Trust, which is transforming its business to become more customer centric. Steven has previously held roles in strategy, marketing and customer experience at organisations such as ANZ National Bank and Westpac. His work has also been show cased in case studies as world best practice by the Washington DC-based Corporate Executive Board. 

 
As we emerge from the global financial crisis, organisations worldwide have begun to dramatically change their focus from cost management to improving the customer experience…. and for good reason.
 
Numerous global studies have shown a strong correlation between customer experience improvement and revenue growth.  Improving the customer experience has been proven to reduce churn and increase advocacy, buying intentions and cross sales.  These are all good outcomes for any business!

Therefore it is hardly surprising that two thirds of companies in a recent global survey from the Customer Contact Council said that the customer experience was a ‘critical focus’ for their organisation.

Despite this focus, most organisations have found it very challenging to achieve significant organisation-wide customer experience improvement. Most improvement efforts focus on elements of the service experience at the touchpoint, which may not address wider issues.

Strong leadership is required to cut across organisational boundaries and overcome all of the barriers to implementing customer experience improvements. In particular, rather than the business shaping the experience that customers’ have, customers need to start shaping the business.  Then organisational capability needs to be aligned to delivering what’s important to customers.  
 
Sounds good in theory, but how do you move from a company-centric to customer-centric approach? Here are ten steps you can take to help ensure your customers start shaping your business, so you can deliver the best experience to your customers.
 
1. Decide on a Customer Experience Goal

• Agree on a single, measurable customer experience goal that the whole organisation understands and buys into.
• Ensure that there is Executive and organisation-wide KPI alignment to the achievement of that goal.

2. Develop a Customer Experience Strategy

• If you don’t know where you are going or how you are going to get there, it doesn’t really matter what road you take. Make sure you have a clearly defined customer experience strategy and blueprint for customer experience improvement that you can articulate to stakeholders.

3. Gain the Support of the CEO and Executive Leadership

• Critical to your success is gaining the total support of your CEO and Executive team. Look at what Rob Fyfe has achieved at Air New Zealand, or Bob Iger at Disney.
• Without CEO and Executive support, your customer experience improvements will tend to be tactical, fragmented and silo based.  You will struggle to gain the resources and organisational buy-in needed to improve the customer experience across the whole organisation.

4. Institute an Organisation-wide Voice of the Customer Programme

• Do you know how your organisation is performing against your customers’ expectations? Are you giving your customers the opportunity to tell you where the biggest improvement opportunities are? Are you using customer insights to prioritise resources and deliver customer experience improvements that matter to customers?
• There is an old North American Indian proverb that says "to understand the man, you must first walk in his moccasins."  An organisation-wide Voice of the Customer (VoC) Programme enables the whole business to see the company through your customers’ eyes, from the outside in.
• Without a VoC Programme, you will struggle to identify the specific areas of improvement that will make the biggest difference to your customers.  You will be aiming at a dart board blindfolded, struggling to hit the bulls eye.
• A VoC Programme involves regularly listening to what your customers are saying and acting on this to drive customer experience improvement. 
• Ensure you analyse specific elements of the experience, collect verbatim feedback on what needs to be improved and that you have an overall score for the end-to-end experience.

5. Create a Programme of Customer Experience Improvements

• A VoC Programme is only an enabler – you need to act on what your customers are telling you.
• Create a cross functional team that includes senior leaders, that prioritises customer experience improvements and allocates resources to specific initiatives.

6. Execute a Cultural Change Programme

• Transforming the customer experience to deliver significant improvement requires customer insight to be infused into decision making right across your organisation.
• You have to change what are often entrenched attitudes, behaviours and ways of doing things, and cut across many organisational boundaries.  This requires significant cultural change.
• Unless you are fortunate enough to already have a truly customer-centric culture, you will need a cultural change programme.  This is essential if your customers are to start genuinely shaping your business.  

7. Ensure that you have the Right Competencies and Role Alignment

• Once you have a better understanding of what type of experience your customers want your people to deliver, you can determine what skills and competencies your staff need and whether roles need to be changed. Feed this into your coaching and your recruitment.

8. Embed a Customer Experience Model in the Business

• Central to any customer experience model is understanding how you are performing against your customers’ expectations.  It’s not about exceeding expectations every time. That just continuously raises expectations and increases costs. It’s about ‘right sizing’ the experience, which is understanding what you need to do to meet their expectations and only exceeding customers’ expectations at critical moments that are most important to them.
• Make sure whatever customer experience model you use has a clear link to revenue growth. A good example of this is the Customer Contact Council’s work on the Customer Effort Score.  They have shown that there is a clear correlation between reduced customer effort and increased advocacy, repurchase and increased spend.

9. Identify and Resolve Customer Complaints

• Complaints and problems occur when your customer experience has failed.  So identifying and resolving issues needs to be a priority.  Capture them.  Make them visible within the organisation.  Create feedback loops and avoid a ‘blame culture’.  
• Conduct root cause analysis to prevent the same problems and complaints occurring repeatedly in the future. 
• Train staff on how to recover from problems and complaints. 
• Reducing problems and complaints lowers costs, and improves loyalty and advocacy.  It’s worth doing!

10. Measure and Report on Customer Experience Improvements

• A Customer Experience Dashboard is essential for measurement of specific drivers of improvement and your overall customer experience goal. 
• The dashboard should inform the business on how well it is performing in terms of attracting and acquiring new customers, growing the amount of business they have with you and retaining them.  It should be updated regularly (ideally monthly), have the full support of the Executive team and be reported to every business unit.

Hopefully you have found this article helpful in your efforts to improve the customer experience and become a more customer centric organisation.  Enjoy the journey!