In the era of customer focus and fierce competition, a natural step for you will be to implement a customer experience (CX) management program—but it’s crucial that you set yourself up for success internally first.
A robust CX program should start together with a robust internal change management plan.
While you might be able to connect the dots correctly as far as customer experience management is concerned, the real challenge lies in managing the human side of change – Not just your customers but your internal team as well.
Customers are getting more comfortable with the knowledge that they are now empowered to provide feedback at the same time employees need to be empowered to act on the feedback.
The next question is how
1. Leadership buy-in
As a first step, senior leadership buy-in is a must – not just to roll out any CX program but just so that the momentum is not lost as we progress to CX maturity phase due to internal friction.
Senior leadership can be instrumental in making sure the right processes and KPIs are set and they can help bring about changes based on the insights. Executive buy-in will also help create an environment of model behaviour. Imagine a CX program in which the CEO gets involved in reading and responding to feedback, other teams are bound to focus on it!
2. Employee involvement
Employees play the pivotal role of taking in the feedback, changing processes and behaviour and ultimately changing the customer experience. Everyone should bring ideas to the table and contribute to enhanced customer experience which, in turn, will lead to increased revenues and reduced customer churn. Employee involvement serves many purposes
- An employee who plays a part in feedback management either through closing the loop or by recommending changes to processes based on insights from the feedback, will feel empowered
- You might also get a different perspective from someone on the ground to interpret the insights in another manner
- Eventually, you will need champions within your system to tell the CX success stories internally and ensure that this exceptional customer service becomes the norm.
3. Customer empowerment
Customers go through a transformation process as they feel more empowered by having an opportunity to provide feedback. When you make changes to the customer experience, customers may feel disrupted. There might be a resistance from your customers to accept the changes or growth in negative sentiment. Hence, it is equally important to engage customers in your ecosystem at various touch points and gather feedback as you go and continuing to have conversations. This will ensure that they continue to power up you CX insights program for the long term.
Overall, get the leadership team, employees and customers involved from the beginning of the program. If you do, not only will they add value, your CX program will be able to keep momentum for the long run and continue to deliver business benefits.
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