A Change Coalition with CX Champions Can Boost EX

Customer-facing teams live by the principle of customer-first. However, it can be challenging to convince other stakeholders to do the same.

Customer experience leaders have long been emphasising that employee experience (EX) significantly impacts customer experience (CX). Big brands like Starbucks have reported enhanced customer affinity (87%) resulting from delightful treatment from employees to customers.

Prioritising Employee Engagement

It is not just the customer-facing teams, like Starbucks’s, that impact the customer experience. Even non-customer-facing teams that work in the background to build the ultimate product affect the experience for the end customer.

Research shows that companies with a highly engaged workforce experience a 19.2% growth in operating income over a 12-month period. James Dodkins, CX Evangelist at Pegasystems, says, “I truly believe that if you want to put your customers first, you need to put your employees first, first.”

Dodkins says the common opinion is you can’t make happy customers with unhappy employees. “You can. It’s just a lot harder. You look at people like Amazon, for example. For a long time, Amazon created very happy customers but had a lot of unhappy employees.”

Dodkins explains how Amazon changed its culture to emphasise employee experience. “They’ve now realised that they can’t do that forever. Their old mission was to become the world’s most customer-centric company. Now they want to become like the world’s best employer or something like that.” He adds that if a business has a group of people that love the company and love work every day, they’re going to do better for the customer.

Customer-Centric Culture Is The Key

Customer facing teams live by the principle of customer-first. However, it can be challenging to convince other stakeholders to do the same. Many CX experts have defined the culture of a company as how employees act when no one is looking.

Most companies have realised the significance of moving from the aged brand-centric model to the futuristic customer-centric culture. Customer-centric companies put the customer and their best interests at the heart of all they do. Annette Franz, Founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc., defines prioritising the customer, ”No discussions, decisions, or designs without bringing in the customer’s voice, without asking: how will this impact the customer? How will it make her feel? What value does it add or deliver for her? What job does it help her achieve?”

Franz says businesses can start by getting the culture set, which requires defining the core values and the associated behaviours and ensuring those values are socialised and operationalised. “You’ve also got to make sure executives are committed and aligned to deliberately designing and maintaining a customer-centric culture,” she adds.

Culture is a subjective theme and isn’t easily quantifiable but to measure and track it, companies can use dimensions like periodical employee surveys, manager appraisals, and feedback for onboarding and exit interviews.

Breaking Down Organisational Silos

Businesses often find a sales team complaining that they performed their part of the job for the customer perfectly but the product team didn’t deliver. Or, the sales went perfectly as promised to the customer but the after-sale service lacked quality and pushed the customer away. These silos between different departments in an organisation can lead to fragmented customer experiences and slower decision-making. Additionally, it can also cause a duplication of efforts.

In fact, 54% of organisations report their customer experience operations are managed in silos, leading to significant losses in the journey of delivering pleasant customer experiences. When it comes to functional differences in departments, “the more complex and larger the organisation is, it makes sense that there will be some level of hierarchy inside the CX team so they can operate effectively together,” says Nate Brown, Senior Director of CX at Arise.

However, he further points out, “the more nuanced you become about your specialities with your role, the better.” Brown says a proven way to break silos for CX performance is having a team dedicated to the voice of the customer engine. This team is dedicated to change management capability, learning and understanding the employee experience and communication around CX, bringing CX principles to every organisation member effectively.

Bringing In Leadership

The guiding leadership body for a CX initiative should be a robust CX Change Coalition, says Brown, adding that simply having a CX team as a little circle trying to impact the giant circle that is the organisation – doesn’t work.

“We want to break down the work and bring CX to every organisation member. That’s what a CX Change Coalition is—a group of leaders across the customer journey that cares about CX as much as the CX leader does and is excited and capable of bringing the practical elements of the CX initiative – customise and implement it in a way that makes sense for their team because the CX strategy is going to look a little different for sales, training, finance, or HR.”

Franz, on the other hand, emphasises the role of CX champions as an essential part of the governance structure. “CX Champions are important to ensure the organisation has that grassroots groundswell needed to transform successfully,” she says. What can leaders look for when finding CX champions? These are employees who are well-respected, and are often recognised as role models when it comes to customer service and customer experience. They are team players, work well with others, and have – or can build – strong cross-functional relationships. They are excellent communicators. They are influential in their departments and, perhaps, across the organisation; they know the right people.

“CX Champions are leaders (not necessarily with a title), and add credibility to the transformation effort. They might or might not be managers, but they certainly have deep knowledge of their functional areas, and how they mesh with other areas of the business, and they can hold others accountable for the work that needs to be done,” adds Franz.

Wrapping Up

Creating a unified customer focus across the organisation is the key to building a customer-centric culture and an employee experience that drives customer experience. Empowering both customer-facing and non-facing teams helps contribute meaningfully to exceptional CX.