- The foundation of your customer experience success: Governance, Organizational Adoption and Accountability
- Driving customer experience change
- The essential elements of Customer Experience in organizations
- What works very well when it comes to driving Customer Experience change?
- Want to grow your Customer Experience competences?
- Customer Experience Framework and about this blog series
***Update: Curious to learn how Wolters Kluwer has successfully executed the CX framework during their CX transformation journey from 2014 to 2019? Find out more in this guest blog post: Wolters Kluwer CX Transformation journey by Elena Brambilla, CX and Strategy Director at Wolters Kluwer LR***
The foundation of your customer experience success: Governance, Organizational Adoption and Accountability
Moving your organization towards customer centricity, which values the happiness of your customers as a top priority, could be a tough change. This change needs to be supported by a majority in the organization and colleagues need to be held accountable for their responsibilities in making it happen. Sure, such a change might bring a lot of uncertainties and insecurities across all disciplines, but it will pay off in the end.
Driving customer experience change
Of course, models are just a simplified representation of the real world, but they do provide a good insight into how complex processes, such as organizational change, could be carried out. So, the roadmap to make your organization a customer-centric one should roughly look like this:
- Determine where you want to have an impact
- Determine the key stakeholders
- Find out what their most important KPI’s are
- Know who makes the decisions; what is the governance structure
- Know what other projects are in place that may impact on your success
- Make a proposal/project plan/business plan
- Get agreement on your plans
- And continue to work on improving the customer experience, tirelessly.
It may sound easy enough, but anyone who tried to make any change within a large organization knows that this process is a very tedious one. Especially when the essential elements of CX organizations are not yet in place.
The essential elements of Customer Experience in organizations
Every organization that has a customer-centric focus needs to have 5 essential elements, to let customer experience play a central role in everyone’s day-to-day life:
- CX Core team. These are the men and women who are dedicated Customer Experience professionals. They define a CX strategy and roll it out throughout the rest of the organization.
- Reporting executive. This person builds the bridge between the CX core team and the C-level suite. They report the results from team to management and give input to the team based on their comments.
- Steering committee. These are the senior leaders from the different silos in your organization. They review metrics and methodologies and give their advice to the core team.
- Working groups. Although they may be a level lower in the hierarchy than the steering committee, these people really drive the customer experience change in their respective silos.
- CX ambassadors. These are the people that work on project teams to drive customer centricity forwards. They can be from any level, but are mostly mid-level and/or frontline.
However, as said before, the maturity of your organization has a huge impact on how these roles should be set up. If customer experience and a customer-centric mindset have just been introduced in your organization, setting up these elements won’t do you any good. Being customer-centric is not a decision you make overnight and certainly not one that is implemented quickly. By continuous improvement and a strong focus on customer happiness, you can make any organization customer-centric.
What works very well when it comes to driving Customer Experience change?
Customer Experience is a business principle. So working with metrics and proving growth and success always works. Finding buy-in with important stakeholders and aligning Customer Experience metrics, i.e. NPS, CSAT, CES. Make sure your most important metric is in the top 5 of your company. An easy check could be the balance score card or the year report. How is customer centricity represented? Find your way to the C-suite or the leaders of your company and find alignment on metrics. Create accountability at the top with metrics. But not only metrics are of importance.
Try to find a way to the heart, the belief that customer centricity is a very effective way to go. Because loving your customers, is the start in customer experience success. To reach the hearts of leaders within companies, evangelizing and storytelling come in.
Customer Experience Managers and their teams are often small and have to influence entire organizations. Find smart alignment strategies, use shared co-ed accountability for metrics, a broader range of groups and steering committees and change will be your result. But know, this 5th strategy of the CX Framework is your fundament to success. Think and work hard on your governance and organizational alignment. If you want to learn more?
Want to grow your Customer Experience competences?
These are only some of the highlights Milou took away from attending the Customer Experience Masterclass. Would you like to know more? Find out more about our CX Masterclass options here.
Customer Experience Framework and about this blog series
This post is part of a wider series about all the 6 CX disciplines that represent the CXPA Framework around which the CCXP exam is structured and that we cover in the CX Masterclass.
Find here the complete list of the other posts in this series:
- CX Strategy
- Customer Understanding
- Design, Improvement and Innovation
- Measurement
- Governance
- Culture
Extra: CXPA exam & Becoming CCXP
Curious to learn how Wolters Kluwer has successfully executed this framework during their CX transformation journey from 2014 to 2019? Find out more in this guest blog post Wolters Kluwer CX Transformation journey by Elena Brambilla, CX and Strategy Director at Wolters Kluwer LR.
Follow Rosaria Cirillo on Linkedin or complete the form below to be notified as soon as a new blog post is published.
*This post is part of the CX Framework series by Rosaria Cirillo and Nienke Bloem. The foundations for these blog posts are written by Milou van Kerkhof following the June 2017 CX Masterclass given by and Rosaria Cirillo and Nienke Bloem. Milou attended this as a newcomer in Customer Experience. These blog posts are slightly edited and reflect the highlights of the content of each module.*
Accelerate your HCX Transformation
Are you relentlessly trying to improve Customer & Employee Experience to ensure business growth? Perhaps your initial efforts are paying off, yet not enough and there is still something missing. How can your company achieve “remarkable” results while your employees feel that they make a meaningful contribution to a better world? Would you like to know how you can thrive and blossom while generating profits thanks to high retention? Check out our Training Programs based on the Happiness Driven Growth Model.
Nurture your well-being and flourish
The last 3 years have been tough! Working from home has taken a massive toll on all of us with reduced physical and social activities, increased stress, loneliness, and burnout. Chances are, you often ask yourself “how do I take care of my well-being with the limited time and resources I have? And where do I even start?”. Would you like to know how you can thrive and blossom in life and in business? Check out our Open Programs to nurture your well-being and increase your customer & employee experience knowledge.
A (little Italian) sunshine of energy, enthusiasm, and passion, with a mission to bring more happiness in the world one interaction at the time, the business world being my chosen playground!Â
I inspire and empower conscious leaders to nurture their happiness (moving from depleting to enriching emotions) and to move from depleting to enriching experiences, choosing, designing, and delivering WOW life-enriching interactions that contribute to everyone’s HAPPINESS, so they can achieve business and personal prosperity, making happiness their competitive advantage 
