What does a business leader need to do to achieve exceptional customer experience results?
New ways of thinking are required to be successful at improving customer experience
Classical management approaches, with a reliance on rigid structures, prior experience and linear thinking are counter-intuitive to the customer experience discipline. To shift an organisation to consistently and sustainably deliver exceptional customer experience and exceptional business results The Customer Experience Company, who represent inQuba in Australia, has adapted inQuba’s Tribe X thinking and the 5 P’s of Customer Experience improvement to meet the local requirements of the Australian market.
These are:
Purpose – Important in two ways. Firstly, you need to align your CX objectives within the core purpose for your organisation. Your purpose drives your identity and this drives behaviours of your leadership and staff. Purpose is also fundamental to your Customer Experience aspirations. As a leader, you need to deeply believe and show that you see CX as a priority.
Passion – Passion is the rocket fuel that sustains the energy that drives Purpose into results. Individuals who are passionate about CX must be prepared to engage over the long haul and directly champion their CX aspirations. They become Tribe leaders and gather like-minded members until their Tribe becomes a movement.
People – Not only do you need the soft-skills side of getting people organised around Purpose, but you also need to have a strong operational capability. As a leader, you won’t have the capacity to do this yourself so get the right people around you. inQuba’s “Me” Model effectively answers the question, ‘Why do people join tribes?’ It provides a framework for understanding these drivers because they are key to aligning individual behaviour to the objectives of the tribe. An effective Customer Experience operation involves having Customer Experience results that are correlated, analysed, shared and propagated across the organisation and at all levels.
Program – Insights you have from customer experience need to be correctly interpreted and need to be converted into hard programs in order to fix things. Your end-to-end operational process needs to be systemised and this involves a systematic continuous improvement capability in order to build capability or make the change happen and stick. inQuba is clearly the thought leader in systematising this Program.
Platform – A Platform for customer experience should include Business Intelligence, Customer Feedback Capture, Data Sciences including Propensity Modelling, Social Media (unstructured data) analysis, Operational Data Integration, Alerts to drive pre-emptive customer contact. An integrated platform is fundamental to your customer experience maturity, which is why The Customer Experience Company utilises inQuba’s CX platform for our clients specifically as a leverage platform using VoC content to accelerate change.
The Customer Experience Company has recently been working with an organisation (total employee size of 5,000 and 800 staff in the division we are working with) that started formally adopting the above approach. We started with Purpose (Passion was already there) and used Simon Sinek’s work as inspiration. The results after 9 months of the Program are outstanding; A substantial increase in staff productivity with 900,000 outstanding cases now reduced to a few tens of thousands, Employee Engagement scores rising substantially, and substantial revenue increases within the same timeframe. The work with this client shows the power of Purpose, Passion and People and how culture can significantly improve business performance.
With the inner workings of organisations becoming more complex due to rising customer expectations, a plethora of new channels and ‘big data’; it is increasingly difficult to operationalise improvements to a business and in customer experience without a systematic approach like the 5 P’s of Customer Experience. Leading practice has evolved quickly; how do you rate across these 5 P’s?
Raj is the Founder and Managing Director of The Customer Experience Company. He is a seasoned executive having built a career in management and technology consulting with organisations including Accenture, Ernst & Young and Capgemini.
