Customer experience is the latest buzz word, as popular as … a cold beer on a hot day… and rightly so, delivering what your customers want in a saturated market place is a smart way to stand out and compete, that’s exactly why I created Emotional Based Design… a tool for everyone to do just that.
But…
I am worried about this focus. I advise many companies on CX, some have declining revenues, some have falling CSats, some just want to offer great customer service. What I am worried about is the focus is on the external customer.
Since the 1980’s staff have been included in the definition of ‘customer’ so why are they being left out of the scope of so many CX Strategies?
With everyone focusing on grabbing market share and increasing revenues through customer service and customer experience it is becoming harder than ever to remain competitive. Remaining competitive requires constant change in service offerings, execution, operations, markets and culture.
Companies that are remaining competitive and are clawing their way to the top of the revenue pile, who are eating the biggest slice of the pie, are focusing their transformational efforts on the internal customer as well as the external customer.
Great customer service starts with great staff. Great staff are created by a great culture. A great culture has to be created, it does not just happen.
We start customer transformations by creating ‘as-is’ Customer Journey Walls of both the internal and the external journeys. We dig out the pain points and the opportunity points, we even capture the ‘meh’ points… bland day to day tasks that don’t invoke any emotion at all. All of these are opportunities to improve your CX.
The ’sprinkles’ and the real power of these emotion based design journey walls comes from identifying and capturing the emotions that each touch point creates, the emotions that the customers expect at each touch point and highlighting the emotional delta between these… then setting hypotheses to try and close these emotional delta gaps.
These walls are very confronting to most executives and department heads. They show many more pain points and ‘meh’ points than are expected. They clearly show the pain and the low emotional engagement that the processes are stimulating. For most, this creates the burning platform to drive change.
Smart leaders create a burning platform to drive change – There can be no going back.
The rest of our process works through co-design with internal and external customers to improve, define, test and capture the initial ‘to-be’ journey. This includes cultural, business and technology changes.
The uplift in internal customer emotional engagement we have seen has been amazing. The flow-on uplift in external customer experience has been so large in some clients that we have had to ‘dumb the results down’ because no-one would believe the stats until they actually saw the changes themselves!
The tools to improve internal CX are available, they are the same as you are using for your external CX improvements, all it takes is leadership empathy to add internal CX to the scope and focus.
This post was never meant to be a detailed explanation of how to uplift CX through Emotion Based Design (EbD), it was designed to make you think about the internal customer as well, as this powerful lever in external CX is often over looked. If you would like to know more about EbD drop me a line and we can have a chat.
Internal CX is a powerful lever to uplift your internal culture and increase customer experience. Internal culture is one of your most powerful competitive advantages, the benefits include talent attraction, customer retention, talent retention, innovation, customer experience… the list goes on and on.
It is within your control – work on it every day.
Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.
Find yourself in this situation? Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.
Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861
#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.