The Dirty Little Secret Behind CX Initiatives, and Why They’re So Hard
Don Peppers
Customer experience expert, keynote speaker, business author, Founder of Peppers & Rogers Group
In my last post I reviewed several factors that all contribute to the difficulty of pursuing a long-term customer experience improvement initiative, even though improving CX seems to be on every company’s wish list.
But in addition to inattention, drifting priorities, overloaded managers, inadequate data and lack of tools, there is one additional, quite significant factor I didn’t mention, and this factor explains a great deal about why most companies’ efforts to improve their customer experience prove so difficult to pursue over the long term. It has to do with what is actually revealed to a company when it actually does manage to see itself through the eyes of a customer.
Socrates’ admonition to “know thyself” might well be the most famous advice in philosophical history, but as a corporate dictum it is fraught with risk, because any good customer journey mapping process will inevitably reveal a great deal of dirty laundry.
Nothing will expose a company’s internal dysfunctions, conflicting data silos, and political turf wars as completely and efficiently as a successful CX improvement initiative!
I’ve seen a lot of embarrassed executives and senior managers run for cover once a thorough diagnostic review of the entire customer experience at their company exposes gaps and gaffes that are due not just to inattention or lack of capability, but to rank incompetence, empire building, data hording, petty political squabbles, or all of the above.
And while senior executives may encourage their middle managers and customer-facing workers to give customers the best possible experience, the firm’s internal contradictions and political conflicts make it nearly impossible to make any real progress. But that’s alright because most of these middle-management folks aren’t likely to know much about what CX improvement really entails, anyway. It would be as if a marching band leader were instructing the band members to “march out on the field now and create some great figures for the halftime show!”
The right tools will let you identify, rank and prioritize the actions and initiatives most important for success, not just to address immediate pain points but to continually identify more opportunities to improve your CX and maintain a competitive edge. Just be prepared to wash a lot of dirty laundry in the process, and maybe even get rid of a few old shirts.
At the risk of repeating myself, my suggestion is that with the right analytical and visualization tools, you should be able to paint a picture of the WHY behind all those customer problems, dead ends, hiccups, and missteps. But a word of caution: This kind of holistic effort will inevitably expose poor cross-company communications, counter-productive policies or rules, conflicting organizational goals, and probably a few hidden political traps, as well.
Frankly, I think this is one of the major reasons consulting firms are so frequently called in to dissect these kinds of problems – because it will be easier if an outsider is called in to lance the political boil.
Still, whether you use consultants or not, if you want to make real progress, rather than just using CX as a cover slogan, then start with Socrates’ dictum:
Know thyself. Through thy customers’ eyes.
Strategic Customer Experience and organisational leader, with experience across automotive, financial services and telecommunications sectors.
5yCould not be more true. I regularly caveat my work with "be careful what you wish for".
Retired!
6yWe're all customers. Rather than getting bogged down in analytics, lets take our own likes and dislikes and apply them to our company. Lots of companies have employees that don't know basics like how to greet customers, what the mission statement is, how to deal with errors, where to get answers to customer questions, etc. Driving customer saisfaction by relationship building is key. It starts in house by how we work with our colleagues, they're our customers too. Training, training and more training in the basics will solve CX issues.
Head of Support at FINBOURNE Technology
6yVery good points raised in the article thank you Don. When you do want to make the change from within and not use consultants I notice that the first step usually cripples the entire process with internal squabbles and no one open to accept criticism or responsibility in regards to what is going wrong and, worse of all, possibly further silo'ing departments within the company. The ideas are simple and obvious, implementing them never are. I do like the quote "Know thyself. Through thy customers' eyes", I find the best way to do this is call your clients and ask them candidly. Where do THEY see us falling over, what can we do to improve THEIR experience. It is a very difficult conversation and may even be embarrassing but how else are you going to be sure the changes you are implementing in your CX journey are what your client wants? The only negative feedback is one you don't react to.
Very well said Don. This is the ONE reason that even top management does not want to see it. This has to be a top driven approach. It is very difficult to get acceptance to initiation of the customer experience improvement initiative. Many a times, in my experience, the top tells you that 'they know' and 'they are doing it' and do not encourage more conversation.