Case Study: Intentional Customer Experience as North Star
As you celebrate CX Day, emphasizing that customer experience is a team sport, encourage your senior leadership team to define and embrace "intentional customer experience".
"Intentional Customer Experience takes typical notions of CX up a notch", explained Krista Sheridan from the Canadian telecom company, TELUS, in my talk show. Instead of treating customer experience as interactions with customer touch-points, treat CX as a lens for decisions by all functional areas, to prevent hassles for customers and to generate greater value for customers. (To take your notions up a notch, see 21 Tips for 2021 Customer Experience Excellence.)
Intentional Customer Experience means you know what you do, and more importantly, why you do it, and you bake the what and why into all aspects of your business — policies, processes, how you hire and review and reward, how you build products and send invoices, and so forth — very deliberately.
The importance of very deliberate customer context for all aspects of your business was explained in Chief Executive magazine by Greg Shepard, Chief Strategy Officer of Pepperjam:
In business, the North Star represents a company’s unwavering definition of its purpose. Nearly all pitfalls, which include loss of focus, lack of passion, and disharmony among team and investors, can be avoided if a company has the proper sense of focus: if it establishes and aligns its strategies with its ‘North Star.’
Investor and customer interests are balanced by intentional customer experience. Sheridan explains: “What customers experience is built many steps upward from customer touch-points, from the way you designed and built and launched the product/service. So you have a lot of solving to do on the other end when your product doesn’t deliver. When your customers are getting what was promised, you’re much more productive — it’s like ‘measure twice to cut only once’. By preventing the need for remedial efforts you gain more time to be creative. From a shareholder perspective, right the first time provides a financial reward.”
“At TELUS, our customer experience efforts were going well, but we wanted to perform better than industry norms. A higher level of customer experience excellence is ‘a team sport’, and to achieve that, everyone needs to know how to put customers first through deliberate behaviors by each individual.”
“We asked team members, end to end, top to bottom across our company: What are things we can all do everyday to bring our Customers First promise to life? Through forums and workshops across the country, we asked what each function can do to put the customer first.”
“With those thousands of ideas we summarized the key things relatable to everybody. This established our 4 Customer Commitments. We wanted to get really specific to help each role know what behaviors and activities they should adopt day-to-day, so we repeated the forums and workshops across the country. Using the collective genius of the organization, we turned this into training and a practical, simple toolkit.”
“Intentional Customer Experience is so much more than a number. It’s hard for people further away from the customer to get excited about a customer score. Our CEO sends out stories about what people are doing toward Intentional Customer Experience. For most things requiring approvals, employees must specify in writing its contribution to customer experience and employee experience.”
“In the first 15 months we saw double-digit increases in employee engagement and customer experience results. I’m proud we’ve been able to maintain that Intentional Customer Experience over many years since we started on this path.” Here's more evidence that Intentional Customer Experience as North Star yields stellar results:
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With today’s dynamics, Intentional Customer Experience is your crucial, customer-centered North Star.
See the rest of this article, Intentional Customer Experience as North Star, for practical steps to take to setup intentional customer experience as your north star!
Send this article to your senior leadership team and board of directors:
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To help you bring your whole team up to par, ClearAction Continuum is offering you one $21 live 90-minute class during October 2021, in honor of CX Day 2021. Use code cxday21. (regular price $89; actual value is $500) Interested in finding great training for your executives? This is the perfect opportunity to sample a class you can recommend to them. Do you like this idea, but prefer a different day of the week or time of day? Send a suggestion to success@clearaction.com. Want customized sessions for your group? Send me a request. Interested in advice? See clearaction.com/cx-coaching.
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