There is a new engagement ecosystem in which Customer Experience has significantly expanded its breadth and depth, according to Diane Magers, Customer Experience Executive at AT&T.
During her session, Inside CX– Giving Structure and Heart to your CX Program for Optimal Outcomes, at Monday’s Engagement & Experience Expo, hosted by Loyalty360, Magers explained to attendees various prevailing themes in the Customer Experience world today.
Here are some current CX trends:
It’s About Me: Customer Narcissism
It’s About Purpose: Associate needs
Desperately seeking human (connections/relationships)
I Knew You Wanted That
Mobile, Social, Personal
Everywhere, Anywhere, Multi-brand
“A huge shift in customer interactions has been underway,” Magers said. “It’s based on demographic changes, new technologies, and new forms of communication and interaction. It means changing the way we operate, how we manage talent and information, and how we accelerate and innovate to grow. It means creating purpose and value. It’s all about how we work as organizations.”
Magers noted some interesting points from successful CX CEOs:
Keep CX on the agenda
Operate around end-to-end CX
Understand what it takes
Prioritize and make investments that support CX
Define short-term and long-term value of CX
Focus on employees
Create platform and structure to collaborate
Simplify processes and systems
Challenges for CX leaders:
Optimizing Data & IT
Alignment & Agility
Talent & Skills
Employee Engagement
Influence & Dynamic Change
Internal Collaboration
Organizational Transformation
Key Elements of Success:
Strategy, Intention, and Purpose: Do we have the right priorities, culture, incentives, empowerment, skill sets, training, communication, and mindset to “do the right thing” for customers?
Ability to execute: Do we have the proper governance, systems, processes, technology, and access to data to effectively engage with customers?
Comprehensive, Orchestrated Change Management: Ability to Execute Can we build and sustain complex, multi-level changes to core structure, employees, focus, and power and ensure the customer leads?
Reaching understanding (“We want people to think holistically,” Magers said.)
Embedding collaboration (cross-team project charters)
“A lot of what we do is dependent on collaboration,” Magers said.
Engaging employees is absolutely imperative to drive effective CX, Magers said.
“Help them understand their impact, shift perspective, reflection vs. reaction (carving out time to think beyond reacting to the issue of the hour), along with individual and team actions (what they can and will DO with ideas understanding link to results),” Magers explained.
Magers said that understanding the “Why” is critical in showing employees their impact and how they are so important to success in strengthening relationships.
Formalize the Why, How, and What:
The Heart (Feel, Understand): Motivate, inspire; what’s my role; align to personal values; emotional connection.
The Head (Think/Do): What to deliver; why it’s important; develop skills; end-to-end customer journey.
The Hands (Use/Impact): Tools and resources; what to do to deliver CX; working standards and consistency.
Impact Points Exercise
Identify points of connection that they can personally influence or control
Rate experience and impact on customer
Define actionable takeaways based on ratings
Human Center Design Thinking
“This is built into their professional development,” Magers explained.
Interview and observation
Journey mapping
Abstraction laddering
Creative matrix
Sketching ideation
Storyboarding
Empathy mapping
Rapid prototyping
Changing internal processes:
Insights, execution, and results.
Embed tools and resources: CX scoring, CX products, service assessment, CX change and readiness plan.
Employee experience journey mapping (“Turned lens of CX on our employees,” Magers explained. “A technique to help us think about, understand, and design the experience−and the journey−from the customer and employee’s perspective.
Translate vision to behaviors:
Know Me−Understand My Needs (Gain and use deep understanding of the customer’s needs)
Good examples:
Keep the customer’s verbatims a part of every meeting
Share examples of customer expressed needs with my team
Identify and track measures which reflect the customer’s perception of how we met their needs
Make sure employees are a part of a team that is creating new solutions
The opportunity: Data
Adding the human element (“We begin to marry stories to the data,” Magers said.)
Understanding CX impact: “Everything a company does drives how we feel,” she added. “These emotions drive behavior. Ninety-five percent of what we do is subconscious and emotional.”
CX impacts to an organization:
Revenue/value
Spend/share of wallet
Reduce cost/effort
Referrals
Retention
Loyalty
New customers
Clarify measures, metrics, and value:
CX Measures measure the customer experience
CX metrics/outcomes measure customer attitude or behavior
CX benefits translate the outcome to value
Pose questions to customers and associates; reinvigorate vision and tie to personal and organizational outcome; change your perspective to step outside your organization.
Discover the emotion in your journey. Look for stories to share.
Influence: Change management.
Essential transformation: New ways for organization to work; involvement and resources for everyone; skills and competencies; the lens of customer experience on associates; the human lens on everything.
“The employee engagement piece is the biggest opportunity,” Magers said. “If we change that, the rest will come.”