Achieving a great customer experience can sometimes feel like aiming at a moving target. Just as your company finds an optimal way to connect with consumers, the market changes and you head right back to the drawing board. During a 2015 Engagement and Experience Expo session titled, “Customer Experience Progress over Perfection,” Milista Anderson, Chief Customer Officer for SunGard Corporate Liquidity & Energy, shared insight about how to stay adaptable in the constantly evolving world of CX.
The first step to improving CX, according to Anderson, is to find and repair bad experiences. To this end, SunGard has established a board called the Solving Systemic Problems (SSP) group in the interest of finding ways to improve customer experience.
“[The SSP group] is small by design,” says Anderson. “Collaboratively, we identify systemic issues that are blocking us from providing good customer experience.”
In measuring customer experience, SunGard uses seven satisfaction indicators:
- Do you get value from our products and services?
- Are you likely to renew when the time comes?
- Are you likely to recommend us to others?
- Overall, are you satisfied?
- Do we (SunGard) feel like a partner to you and your business?
- Do you feel a sense of trust in us?
- Do you feel a sense of loyalty with us?
These questions provide a clear and complete picture of how SunGard is perceived by customers, and have been an important resource in measuring CX improvement.
What’s more, Anderson explained that assuming a dedicated CX role means taking on three personas: A teacher, a preacher, and a screecher. In other words, creating better CX requires a leader to teach others about what great customer experience looks like, preach the message over and over in order to begin the companywide shift, and “screech” loudly enough to create change.
“I don’t have a customer experience team behind me, and I don’t want one,” Anderson said. “I would rather create evangelists out of everyone else in the organization than to have a full customer experience department.”
In pursuing better customer experience as a company leader, Anderson stressed the importance of forming relationships throughout every part of the company.
“I can declare that something needs to be done, but I also need them to buy in,” Anderson said. “I need to keep circling back with them to say: ‘This is a legitimate thing to do. This is the right thing to do.’ It needs to be done not because I said so, but because I’m able to demonstrate over time that it’s an important cog in the wheel.”