So, you and your company are ready to begin the journey of taking CX seriously – it’s a well overdue strategic move, you know how important it is to consider CX, and your company is in prime position to begin the change! So how do you do it? What steps are needed to be taken to begin the cultural shift around CX?
The worst step to take is spending big money on one-off, third party solutions. As an immediate, Band-Aid solution, you might get some interesting insights into your customers’ expectations and interactions, but this doesn’t solve the real issue – cultural and systemic ignorance around a customer centric culture. We’ve seen this happen time and time again. So We’ve come up with 4 strategies that can support and encourage a customer centric culture in your company, in long-term and effective ways:
1 – Prioritise Employee Experience (EX)
There is a proven link between CX success and EX importance. If your company creates a culture where your employees understand that their voice is important, the client’s voice will also become a priority. The real benefit to prioritising EX is developing a ‘Feedback’ culture. Whether it is an Employee or a Customer, placing importance and priority on Feedback and dialogue has a mutually beneficial effect for both Employees and Clients as it starts to showcase the value and power of feedback. If you are looking to prioritise CX, why not start with EX and see what happens.
2 – Give Feedback It’s Own Space
We have all sat in one of those meetings: its 10 minutes overtime, you missed lunch, you’ve got 100 things on the to-do list to complete and all you need right now is for the next agenda point to be over and done quickly. All too often the agenda point you want to breeze over is customer feedback. This disempowers the customer in several ways. Firstly, it demonstrates a lack of strategic importance – the idea of feedback from users or customers is seen akin to noise, not strategy. Secondly, it creates a sense within your employees that feedback is dealt with in a quick and easy fashion. Instead of running the gauntlet of finding enough time within a meeting to go over feedback effectively, try and carve out time to have a separate meeting regarding feedback. Is there enough time in the day? Probably not – but where you put your time, you put your priority. When there’s space to really dig into customer feedback, you’ve made it of cultural and company importance. Encourage a weekly feedback huddle where nothing else but customer feedback is discussed and the customer is given the centre seat.
3 – Pass On Feedback To All levels Of Employees
It’s rare to receive an email from the CEO. When your inbox gets graced with a message from the leader of the company, you know its important. Knowing this, imagine what message is sent when the C suite send company-wide emails regarding feedback. Using your position creates a sense that all levels of employees should find feedback important. Instead of the retail assistant copping the brunt of an angry shopper and feeling no one else will feel the effects of it, they know that their manager, executives and C suite will also have heard and seen the same feedback, and are in positions to action business outcomes to in accordance with the feedback received. Having all levels of employees hear feedback from customers demonstrates that it is an important element of your business, and therefore should be taken seriously by all employees
4 – Adopt a CX Platform
Changing a culture to include feedback as a defining element of its nature won’t come one-off research. Cultural change won’t even come when that research comes regularly! To make CX an important part of a companies culture, it needs to be a daily task. This is why it integral to adopt a CX platform that scales and fits. Checking feedback from customers should be as regular as checking emails. For employees to truly prioritise CX, the feedback needs to be provided in easily accessible, easily readable and easily actionable ways. Using a CX platform opens up the ability for employees of all levels to individually prioritise feedback.
Resonate solutions provides an integrates CX and EX platform that allows companies to spend time changing to a customer focused culture, rather than spending time operationalising feedback throughout the organisation.
