Decoding the Customer

Josh Dodson is the Vice President of Marketing & Innovation at VisionPoint Marketing. Josh doesn’t just strategize, he delivers results. With his uncanny ability to author strategy, execute nuanced, technical tactics and leverage big data, Josh has helped countless institutions modernize their enrollment and marketing programs. His expertise with digital marketing, analytics and SEO for higher education has made him a sought-after thought leader in the industry. Before joining VisionPoint, he led digital marketing efforts at Bentley University, Southern New Hampshire University, Eastern Kentucky University, and Lincoln Memorial University. His experience both inside the university and partnering with them from the outside gives him a unique perspective that clients find invaluable.

While Josh doesn’t have “CX” in his title, his work is very much focused around helping higher education institutions deliver better customer (i.e. student) experiences. As a marketer, Josh’s work with schools might start with exploration into how to improve the sales funnel and engagement with prospective students, but he’s not shy about pointing out the importance of managing the full student lifecycle. He notes that most institutions regard the student lifecycle with a siloed view of the student as a prospective student, student or alumni, though he’s working to change this.

Josh Dodson, Vice President of Marketing & Innovation at VisionPoint Marketing

The numbers of college students in the US have been on the decline over the past decade. A decline in the pool of high school graduates paired with concerns about the cost of college and changing attitudes towards higher education since the 2008 financial crisis have led to a 2 million student drop in enrollment during the last decade. This has hit for-profit schools the hardest, along with public 2-year schools in the US. And the bad news is that it looks like the same trends will persist through the mid 2020s.

Adding to the challenge of dropping enrollment is a rise in alternative avenues for education. Josh notes that students are increasingly turning to “bootcamp” style learning over multi-year degree programs, meaning that a larger pool of organizations are now competing for the same (shrinking) pool of prospective students.

In response to these changes, US colleges and universities are turning to student experience as a way to stand out and differentiate. From the enrollment side of things, schools are becoming more clever and streamlined about they way that they engage with prospective students, aiming to provide a frictionless experience that integrates digital engagement and personalization a la Amazon.

To realize these changes, schools have had to completely change the way they think about the student journey. 

Schools historically have tended to look at [the student journey] from the perspective of the school and not necessarily from the perspective of the student. And I think that that’s also a shift that a lot of schools are really having to reckon with at this point.

Just like their business counterparts in the for-profit corporate world, schools are needing to switch their thinking from inside-out to outside-in. This requires customer experience leadership, which isn’t necessarily a skill set that school administrations are traditionally equipped with.

Enrollment, retention and revenue are all key indicators used by higher education institutions to measure their success. Traditional CX metrics like CSAT and NPS seem like less of a feature in this industry, and perhaps that’s to their advantage, as these can become a distraction from the bigger picture.

Josh points out that most schools don’t currently look at student lifetime value or at the ROI within the student journey, but he’s trying to change that.

One of the things that we’re working on is trying to get more schools to go deeper into the funnel and actually look at metrics like cost for enrolled students and whether that value is in the right area for getting return on the investment.

Josh stressed that there is untapped opportunity for schools to use predictive analytics and regression models to become more sophisticated with their marketing approach and how they unite the silos to engage students throughout their journey. 

Josh also provided his perspective on the future of CX education. Josh sees opportunities to integrate the principles of customer-centricity within marking programs, MBA programs, general business and specialized degrees like a masters in analytics. There are a multitude of ways that customer experience can be applied to different fields, and with a decline in MBA enrollment, it will be important for schools to look at how they can include these concepts in other courses, broadening exposure to CX principles and encouraging the next generation of customer experience leadership. 

To learn more about Josh, be sure to check out his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter, where he often posts news and insights about digital marketing in higher education. If you’d like to learn more about VisionPoint Marketing, they’ve got a great website with details about their services.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business define customer experience strategy that delivers results, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email. To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here.

If you’re a CX professional, you’ve probably felt the pressure to prove your worth in terms of metrics and scores. But there’s a much richer picture of how to measure customer experience impact — one that speaks directly to business outcomes. Here are the key ideas covered in this episode, and if you want to take things further with the numbers, my Ultimate Guide to the ROI of Customer Experience is a natural next step.

CX professionals are constantly looking for ways to demonstrate their value and worth to the business. Sometimes it seems like all roads lead to metrics and measures. Often, this results in score chasing. CX thought leaders, such as Jeanne Bliss, have famously raised the flag about the dangers of score chasing, as it’s a surefire way to have everyone take their eye off the prize. When CX professionals become obsessed with Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction or other metrics, they can easily lose sight of the bigger picture: how customer experience helps brands thrive and grow.

Of course the classic CX metrics serve an important function. There is plenty of research showing that happy customers are good for business, but when it comes time to have conversations about things like business budget allocation, “happy customers are good for business” has an uphill fight against “we’re going to save the business $2 million dollars next year”. Executives are, after all, beholden to their own performance metrics, and most of these are related to classic business indicators like market share, profit and loss.

It’s up to CX leaders and their teams to share stories about the business impact of CX, in a way that will resonate with decision-makers. 

What’s good for the customer experience is often good for the business. When a customer experience involves a lot of hurdles or extra steps, it probably means there are the same hurdles and extra steps going on from a process perspective. If a CX initiative simplifies or cleans up the customer journey, there is an opportunity to look at how that translates into business efficiency. If a simplified journey means less behind-the-scenes processing time, that’s an efficiency gain. If experience changes proactively address an issue that is linked to a high volume of customer calls, that’s also an efficiency gain.

In the business world, time is money. If journey improvements result in time saved, that can be quantified as a cost savings or as time that can be diverted into a more productive activity. For example, if a journey improvement results in a reduction of 10 calls per day at an average of 5 minutes per call, that means 50 minutes per day of time saved. This could translate into money saved through more efficient resource planning or revenue gained by diverting those 50 minutes of agent time to some outbound revenue-generating customer interaction.

The more that organizations know about their customers, the more precisely they can interpret customer needs and tailor interactions. Often these insights emanate from a CX team, so CX leaders should not be shy with highlighting the results.

So how do we measure customer experience impact? One way is to look for how improved accuracy of understanding customers might drive efficiency. For example, if a sales team is armed with more accurate information about their customers, it might reduce the initial back-and-forth with customers, enabling them to save time when providing recommendations. It could also streamline the process of making a sale. In these examples, improved accuracy of information about customers translates into an efficiency gain for the sales team, much as a reduction of calls meant an efficiency gain for the call center team in the previous example.

Improved accuracy can also drive improvements in customer lifetime value (CLV). And if you aren’t familiar with customer lifetime value, be sure to check out episode 22. If CX efforts to better understand customers translate into improved revenue per customer, higher conversion or better retention rates, these results can easily be linked to CLV. For example, if tailored communications are being sent out on the back of more accurate information about customer, this might immediately translate into repurchase, or lower churn. 

Impact on customer lifetime value isn’t limited to improved accuracy of understanding customers. Any place where the customer journey has been improved, there may be an opportunity to investigate if this has catalyzed an improved revenue per customer, better retention or reduced churn (aka the key ingredients of CLV).

It’s easiest to make the cause-and-effect link when CX professionals measure customer experience impact on as micro a level as possible, e.g. looking at how a single change in the journey impacts immediate behavior. The micro links are easier to find within highly transactional journeys like retail or travel. Subscription-based journeys like banking or utilities are a little trickier because the time horizons are longer and the repurchase transactions are few and far between. That doesn’t mean CX professionals can’t still make an argument for the aggregate impact of journey improvements on customer lifetime value over a longer period of time.

In a world of abundant choice and overwhelming information, consumers are increasingly turning to friends, family and colleagues as a primary source of information about when and where to spend their money. We also know that happy customers are more likely to recommend brands to others, so customer referrals are a great way to connect customer experience to market share growth.

If improvements to the journey catalyze an increase in referrals from the affected customers, this should absolutely form part of the story about CX impact. New customers mean larger market share and the value of customer base growth can be quantified by multiplying the number of new customers by the average customer lifetime value.

If you really want to speak the language of your CFO, take your CX business impact measurement one step further by incorporating a CX ROI calculation. If you’ve figured out how to measure customer experience impact as outlined above, you’re already 99% of the way there. Check out my Ultimate Guide to the ROI of Customer Experience to delve deeper into the topic of CX ROI calculations, including an overview of popular methodologies and expert guidance on how to pick the right approach.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX mini masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

This is episode 73, the fourth episode of February 2020. Today, we’re going to talk about ideas for measuring the impact of customer experience. It’s easy for CX professionals to get wrapped up in a world of metrics and scores, but at the end of the day, we need to be demonstrating our value to the business bottom line. To do this, we have to find ways to link customer experience to business impact at a level that is quantifiable.

From time savings to market share growth, I’m going to share several practical ideas for just how to do this. If you are tired of being a slave to your CSAT or Net Promoter score, and want some inspiration on how to demonstrate the business impact of customer experience, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

Whenever I speak to CX professionals, it seems like all roads lead to metrics and measures. We are constantly looking for ways to demonstrate our value and worth to the business. All too often, I see this take the form of score chasing. Others in the field, notably Jeanne Bliss, have famously raised the flag about the dangers of score chasing.

When we become obsessed with net promoter score, customer satisfaction or other metrics, we can easily lose sight of the bigger picture. How customer experience helps brands thrive and grow. Of course, the classic CX metrics are important, and there’s plenty of research showing that happy customers are good for business. But when it comes time to have conversations about things like business budget allocation, it’s difficult to put happy customers are good for business up against we’re going to save the business $2 million.

Executives are, after all, beholden to their own performance metrics. And most of these are related to classic business indicators like market share, profit, and loss. If CX professionals want business leaders to prioritize customer experience, because we all know it’s good for the business in the long run, then we’re going to need to show our impact in the short run. So today, I’m going to go through several ideas for measuring the impact of customer experience efforts.

Nine times out of ten, I’ve seen that what’s good for customer experience is also good for the business. When a customer experience involves a lot of hurdles or extra steps, it probably means that there are the same hurdles or extra steps going on from a process perspective. If your CX initiative is simplifying or cleaning up the customer journey, look at how that translates into business efficiency. Does your improved customer experience save time in terms of behind-the-scenes processing?

Are you proactively addressing an issue that used to result in a high volume of customer calls? Both of these things translate into time saved. And in the business world, time is money. If journey improvements are resulting in time saved, then calculate the value of that time to the business, either as a cost savings or as time that can be diverted into a more productive activity.

For example, if a journey improvement results in a reduction of 10 calls per day at an average of five minutes per call, that’s 50 minutes per day of time saved, which can translate into money saved through either more efficient resource planning or perhaps diverting those 50 minutes of agent time to some sort of outbound revenue generating customer interaction. Improved accuracy is another area where CX professionals can look for ways to measure and demonstrate impact. The more that we know about our customers, the more precisely we can interpret their needs and tailor our interactions with them. Often, these insights emanate from within the customer experience team, so we should not be shy about highlighting the results.

From an impact perspective, there are a couple of ways that you can measure this. One is to look at how improved accuracy of understanding customers might drive efficiency. So, for example, if we can provide the sales team with more accurate information about their customers, does this reduce the extra back and forth, enabling them to save time when providing recommendations, or does it streamline their process of making a sale? If so, then the improved accuracy of information about customers translates into an efficiency gain for the sales team.

Improved accuracy can also positively impact customer lifetime value. And if you aren’t familiar with customer lifetime value, I’d suggest that you check out Episode 22, which covered this topic in detail. Have your customer experience efforts to better understand your customers translated into improved revenue per customer, a higher conversion rate, or better retention? If so, there’s a story to be told about impact to the business.

For example, if tailored communications are being sent out, has this translated into better sales or lower churn? If so, definitely build your story about impact to customer experience. Impact on customer lifetime value is definitely not limited to improved accuracy of understanding of customers. Any place where the customer journey has been improved, there could be an opportunity to investigate if this has catalyzed an improved revenue per customer, better retention, or reduced churn.

All of these are the ingredients of customer lifetime value. It’s easiest to make this cause and effect link when we can get as micro as possible, looking at how a single change in the journey impacts immediate customer behavior. I’ll openly admit that this is a lot easier when we’re looking at transactional journeys, things like retail or travel. Subscription-based journeys like banking or utilities are a little bit trickier because the time horizons are longer and the repurchase transactions are few and far between.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t still make an argument for an aggregate impact of journey improvements on customer lifetime value over a longer period of time. Finally, customer referrals are a great way to connect customer experience to market share growth. In a world of abundant choice and overwhelming information, we know that customers are increasingly turning to friends, family, and colleagues as a primary source of information on recommendations about when and where to spend their money. We also know that happy customers are more likely to recommend brands to others.

So, if your organization tracks referrals, be sure to add this to your arsenal of ways to measure customer experience impact. Where customer experience improvements result in market share growth due to recommendations, this should absolutely form part of the story about customer experience impact. For example, if you’ve made improvements to the journey and you see that this catalyzes an increase in referrals from the affected customers, be sure to quantify that. New customers mean a larger market share, and the value of customer base growth can be quantified by multiplying the number of new customers by the average customer lifetime value.

So just to quickly round up what we’ve covered today, don’t limit your view of customer experience impact to just the usual suspect metrics. Be sure to connect your efforts back to business results. Where journeys have been improved, or the accuracy of understanding of customers enhanced. Explore if this has also translated into business efficiency that could be quantified as a time savings with a monetary value behind it.

The same thing goes for investigating how journey improvements have translated into better customer lifetime value, getting as granular as you can with the cause and effect relationships. If you have a way to track customer referrals, leverage this as a possible avenue for demonstrating impact. And so you see, we have so many options for proving our worth to the C-suite. We just need to be smart about it and tap into these.

Have you come up with a novel or innovative approach to measuring the impact of customer experience at your organization? I’d love to hear about it. If you’re looking for help demonstrating the business value of your customer experience efforts, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help.

You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast.

I’ll be back next week with another episode. See you then.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services  (including journey mapping, CX strategy development, experience innovation, leadership workshops and CX ROI measurement) or get in touch via email. 

Episode 39 explored the concept of Voice of Customer, how this differs from CX metrics and measures, and why understanding customers is key to business success. The thing about Voice of Customer is that there are many different approaches. Some of the most popular include surveys, focus groups and interviews, but there are many others, including the customer advisory board (or customer advisory council).

A customer advisory board is organized by a product or service provider and usually consists of a group of customers who convene with the service provider on a regular basis to discuss their experiences, provide feedback, and even participate in innovation or co-creation. Most traditional VOC efforts like surveys or interviews rely on once-off interactions with customers to garner their feedback, but a customer advisory board is an ongoing thing. With the benefit of time and follow-up, one can have deeper conversations with customers.

Customers who participate may also gain an appreciation for the service provider’s business and therefore be able to be collaborative partners in things like troubleshooting and innovation. Customers who contribute their time and energy to participating are also likely to develop a vested interest in the success of the service provider’s business and may become vocal promoters. For these reasons, some companies specifically select industry influencers to be part of their customer advisory bodies.

Customer advisory bodies are more common in the B2B context where the customer journeys are often complex, needs are ongoing and the product in question may be an integral part of the customer’s business operations. That’s not to say that you can’t apply this concept to the B2C space as well. Kraft Foods’ Velveeta cheese brand very effectively engaged with a council of its “super users” to reinvent how it engages with customers and positions its product in the marketplace. Read more about their approach here.

A customer advisory council is not to be confused with a customer council or a customer experience council, which is something else. A customer experience council is usually an internal governance body or cross-functional steerco that meets to discuss customer experience management, journey improvement, etc. Even though the names are similar, the concepts are totally different. To keep the two straight, one can remember that a customer advisory board advises the business based on the external customer perspective.

Customer advisory boards or councils can be useful for nearly any type of product or service provider, whether that’s B2B or B2C. There are a couple of key ingredients that make a customer advisory board successful.

A clear purpose – an advisory body can provide insights that will be useful for business strategy, product development, service improvement, marketing, account management, and many other things. Customer participants need to know the objectives of the council, and the engagements should work towards these. The purpose will also inform who should participate.

Selecting the right customers to participate – B2B customers are actually a village of stakeholders. A customer’s CEO, the primary contact for account management, and the end user within the business may all bring different perspectives. Their perspectives and resulting inputs should align to the purpose. It may also be beneficial to select participants from similar levels of seniority to facilitate peer-to-peer idea sharing. In the B2B context, service providers would also be wise to carefully select participating organizations that aren’t direct competitors of each other. The optimal group size will vary, but should strike a balance of diverse perspectives and a manageable group conversation. Participation in a customer council isn’t a small ask, so organizers can also consider how to appropriately encourage participation without skewing the feedback (i.e. tread carefully with incentives). It is also worth considering that some organizations specifically select industry influencers for their advisory bodies. Participants who develop a genuine interest in the service provider’s success often become vocal promoters of that brand, which amplifies the value of the council well beyond internal insight gathering.

Establishing a consistent structure – Organizers shouldn’t walk into this without an agenda and expect to come out with insights. Objectives, timeline and approach should be clear. Where the stakes are high, it’s not unheard-of for organizations to bring in a professional facilitator. In larger groups especially, skilled facilitation helps ensure all voices are heard rather than the loudest ones dominating the conversation. A regular cadence to the council meeting will also be needed to keep customers engaged and the flow of information going. As with group size, the frequency can vary. Some councils meet semi-annually, while others meet quarterly or more often. A regular cadence enables service providers to follow-up on issues or questions previously raised and to circle back with participating customers to let them know how their feedback is being implemented. 

Closing the feedback loop – What separates a thriving advisory council from one that quietly loses steam is demonstrating that participants’ input actually influences decisions. A regular practice of circling back with council members to share what changed, what is in progress, and what will not be addressed (and why) builds the trust and mutual investment that makes an advisory body genuinely valuable over time. As CX professionals, we know that closing the feedback loop is non-negotiable with customers. The same logic applies here.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

This is episode 72, the third episode of February. Today, I’m going to dive into the topic of Customer Advisory Boards, or Customer Advisory Councils, as they’re also called. A Customer Advisory Board is a voice of customer methodology that can yield incredibly rich insights and strengthen relationships with influential customers. These councils are more prevalent in the B2B space, but I think there’s a case to be made for these councils in the B2C space as well.

As with all things, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, so I’m going to take you through an overview of the concept, when and where they’re appropriate, and some practical tips if you’re considering starting one for your organization. If you’re looking for a quick yet comprehensive overview of customer advisory councils and some practical ideas that you can take back to the office, then this episode is for you. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

I was recently presenting a case study on an organization that had implemented an innovative approach for identifying customers that were at a high risk for churn and then intervening with a customized wow moment to disrupt the cycle of churn. There were two key components to their success. One was identifying the customers who were at the highest risk for churn. To do this, they used some machine learning backed predictive analytics, which was pretty cool.

The other component was the wow moment. And to define this, the organization turned to its customer advisory council. It was yet another example of how customer advisory councils, also known as customer advisory boards, and I’ll use those two terms interchangeably throughout this, can be a powerful asset for organizations that are looking to differentiate through customer experience. Not everyone out there has had exposure to a customer advisory board, so I thought it would be an apt topic for a mini masterclass.

Let’s start by defining what a customer advisory council or board is. The council or board is organized by a product or service provider, and the council itself usually consists of a group of customers who meet together with service providers on regular intervals to discuss their experiences, provide feedback, even participate in innovation and troubleshooting. I’ve also heard of customer advisory boards that include representation from the customer facing teams within the service provider, though that’s not always the case and probably not the norm. A customer advisory council is not to be confused with a customer council or a customer experience council, which is something else entirely.

A customer experience council is usually an internal governance body or a cross-functional steerco that meets to discuss customer experience management, journey improvement, etc. Even though the names are similar, the concepts are totally different. To keep the two straight, you can remember that a customer advisory board advises the business based on the external customer perspective. What makes a customer advisory board different from other Voice of Customer channels like, say, a survey?

Most traditional Voice of Customer efforts, like surveys or interviews, rely on once-off interactions with customers to garner their feedback. A customer advisory council or advisory board is an ongoing thing, and that’s what makes it special. With the benefit of time and follow-up, you can have deeper conversations with your customers. Customers who participate may also gain a deeper understanding for the business and therefore be a collaborative partner in things like troubleshooting and innovation.

Customers who invest their time and energy in participating are also likely to develop a vested interest in the success of the service provider’s business and may gradually become vocal promoters of the service provider’s products and services. It’s for these reasons that some companies specifically select industry influencers to be part of their customer advisory bodies. Customer advisory councils can be useful for nearly any type of product or service provider, whether that’s B2B or B2C. Personally, I’ve seen this voice of customer approach gain the most momentum in the B2B space, where the customer journeys are often complex and the customer needs are ongoing.

And the product in question may be an integral part of the customer’s business operations. Now that’s not to say that you can’t apply this concept in the B2C space as well. Kraft Foods, for example, has very successfully engaged with a group of its consumer super users of its Velveeta cheese product. The outputs of this collaboration have led to innovations that might just have saved the fate of this key ingredient for Super Bowl Sunday cheese dip.

If you’re interested in learning more about that, I’ll post a link to an article about this in the show notes for this episode. What makes a customer advisory council successful? There are a couple of key ingredients. The first is a clear purpose.

Do you want the advisory board to provide insights that will be useful for business strategy, product development, service improvement, marketing, account management, or something else? Customers need to know the objectives of the council, and the engagements need to work towards these. The purpose of the council will also inform who should participate. Which brings me to my next point, picking the right customers to participate.

I mentioned the influencer factor earlier, but customers should be representative of the target market. If the context is B2B, the service provider would be wise to carefully select participating organizations that aren’t direct competitors of each other. Remember, you want to establish open and honest communication around needs and usage, and that won’t happen if participants feel like they need to have their guard up. Keep in mind that B2B customers are actually a village of stakeholders.

So you’ll want to think about who you should invite to participate. Do you want your customer CEO, the primary contact for account management, or the end user within the business? All of these stakeholders will bring different perspectives to the party. I’ve read some research on this topic, which suggests inviting participants from similar levels so that you can have peer-to-peer idea sharing.

And as with all parties, we also need to think about how many people to invite. I don’t have a hard and fast answer for this one. It seems to vary quite a lot. Everything from a small, intimate group of half a dozen customers to 25 or 30 total.

My suggestion would be to think about the optimal group size for your situation that will yield a balance of diverse perspectives and a manageable group conversation. Participation in a customer advisory council isn’t a small ask. So think about how you can appropriately encourage participation without skewing the feedback. Incentives can be effective, but do tread carefully.

The third ingredient is a consistent structure. Don’t walk into this without an agenda and expect to come out with insights because you won’t. Make sure that you’re clear with your objectives, timeline, and approach. Where the stakes are high, it’s not unheard of for organizations to bring in a professional facilitator.

Make sure that you set up a regular cadence to the council meetings so that you can keep customers engaged and the flow of information going, whether it’s annually, semi-annually, quarterly, or something else. Doing this enables you to follow up on issues or questions raised and to circle back with participating customers to let them know that their feedback is being implemented. As customer experience professionals, we all understand the importance of closing the feedback loop. I think that customer advisory councils are a fascinating concept.

Given the rich insights that can be derived through this type of engagement with customers, I’m surprised that they aren’t more prevalent. Do you use a customer advisory council in your organization? If so, I’d love to hear about it. If you’re looking for help evolving your organization’s customer experience through a customer advisory council or other Voice of Customer efforts, please get in touch.

I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I hope that you’re enjoying the show.

Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others discover the show. All right. I’ll be back next week with another episode.

See you then.

If you’d like to check out more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email. 

Sue Brady is the the Vice President of Marketing and Customer Engagement, HUGHES Networks Systems. Sue is a strategic and results-driven marketing executive with a proven ability to grow revenue and profits through online and direct marketing channels. In addition to her marketing duties, in the last two years she has been co-leading a newly created Customer Experience Team. The goal of the team has been to spread the practice of always putting the customer first.

Hughes Network Systems, LLC (we’ll refer to it as HUGHES from here on out) is the global leader in broadband satellite technology and services for home and office. Its flagship high-speed satellite Internet service is HughesNet®, the world’s largest satellite network with over 1.4 million residential and business customers across the Americas. Headquartered outside Washington, D.C., in Maryland, Hughes operates sales and support offices worldwide, and is a wholly owned subsidiary of EchoStar Corporation

Like many CX professionals, Sue comes from a marketing background, though she has been involved with customer experience for many years. HUGHES’ parent company EchoStar has always emphasized customer experience, and when the leadership team decided to formalize a CX function, Sue was a natural fit for the role. Her skills have been complemented by those of her CX co-lead who hails from a customer service support background. They both had CX-related responsibilities already as a part of their ‘regular’ jobs, but this shift put more focus on CX. It sounds like HUGHES has found a way to bring together the best of both worlds to great a CX powerhouse in their organization.

Sue Brady Vice President Marketing and Customer Engagement, HUGHES

To learn more about Sue, be sure to check out her LinkedIn profile or follow her on Twitter, where she often posts nuggets of insight about CX And digital marketing. If you’d like to learn more about HUGHES, they’ve got a great website with details about their products and services. 

Customer journeys are works in progress. As customer wants and needs or the technology underpinning the experience evolves, so should the journey. But how do CX teams gather ideas to improve customer experience? One approach is to go straight to the horse’s mouth and ask customers what they want. Most organizations with a CX program do this, and it yields tons of insights, but it can also be difficult or time-consuming to manage customer listening on an ongoing basis. That’s why many organizations also turn to their employees as an additional source of ideas for journey improvement. Since employees have a unique perspective about what goes on behind the scenes, they are well-positioned to combine this with things they have had to troubleshoot in the past. 

HUGHES CXNow! program does just that. The program was designed to encourage employees, service center contractors and installers to start thinking about ways that the company could improve customer experience. Ideas are submitted through a centralized email inbox, where they are reviewed, vetted and actioned by a cross-functional team on a weekly basis. Team members who submit ideas are recognized through posters, video reels and badge pins. This campaign aspect of the program helps create a sense of ownership and sustain organization-wide energy around the program. 

CXNow! was selected as a finalist for the CXPA 2019 Innovation Awards, a prestigious recognition for Sue and her team. The essence of the CXNow! program is probably best summarized in their award finalist submission video:

Of course, a main aim of the program has been to solicit and consolidate ideas to improve customer experience, but an added benefit has been the element of employee (and stakeholder) engagement. 

We wanted to let employees know that we value their ideas. Plus, our Customer Care Centers talk to our customers every day, and we wanted to make sure we had a way for those contractors to contribute as well. And, we opened it up to our installers too, since they are in our customers’ homes when our product gets installed. – Sue Brady

Sue stressed the point that this stakeholder engagement was probably the biggest “win” from the program. Getting cross-functional teams to think about customer experience has been key to customer-centric culture change. At their last annual sales meeting, Sue was impressed by how many software and hardware engineers, along with service delivery employees and others organically mentioned the focus on customer experience. CX is clearly something everyone at HUGHES is now thinking about.

Sue’s efforts to engage all stakeholders with their connection to the customer journey dovetails perfectly with where she sees the future of the profession. She, like many others, believes that CX will gradually evolve into a distributed model of ownership for the customer mandate.

The Disney approach makes the most sense to me, where they don’t necessarily have a separate group focusing on CX, but CX is integral to every employee’s job. I think that’s the future and the big win. – Sue Brady

To remain relevant and lead this transition, CX teams and leaders need to be champions for customer advocacy. During meetings, Sue often finds herself asking “how will that benefit the customer?”. As CX professionals, we need to continually ask that question, encourage other leaders to do the same and guide all stakeholders to “think customer”.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business define customer experience strategy that delivers results, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email. To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here.

Organizational rituals are one of the most underestimated levers available to CX leaders. While much of the focus in customer experience management falls on strategy, metrics, and technology, the informal patterns that shape team behaviour — the rituals — quietly determine whether customer experience truly becomes a competitive advantage or remains an aspiration. Understanding how rituals work, and how to influence them, is an emerging frontier for CX professionals who want to move from good intentions to lasting cultural change.

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Episode 66 covered the link between HR strategy and CX culture. HR strategy is the foundation of team culture, whether that’s a customer-centric culture or not. But there are many other things that influence attitudes and behaviors in the workplace. Rituals come from the culture, but also reinforce the culture, and for this reason, rituals are an emerging topic in CX management. It’s a particularly important area of focus in terms of how leaders can ensure that team culture supports business objectives, like the customer promise (see episode 69 for a detailed explanation of the customer promise).

Rituals haven’t been a major area of focus of CX professionals, so there is limited coverage and thought leadership on the topic. Business management academics have been pondering the role of rituals in the business context and, not surprisingly, this research sheds light on how this aspect of business management might be applicable to CX management.

Intuitively, we all probably understand what business rituals are: ongoing actions or interactions that reinforce norms. This interpretation is correct, but a duo of academics from the US and Brazil have come up with a definition that really puts things in perspective. 

Ritual action, it is proposed, is a form of social action in which a group’s values and identity are publicly demonstrated or enacted in a stylized manner, within the context of a specific occasion or event. – Gazi Islamro and Michael J. Zyphur

Examples of this might include a dinner for employees, a speech welcoming a new hire or a manager’s weekly team huddle. It’s important to note that many scholars use the words “rite” and “ritual” interchangeably. In practice, people often refer to specific types or examples of ritual action as “rites”, and the term “rituals” as a broad generic descriptor (Islamro and Zyphur’s research goes into more detail on the background of this definition, should you wish to jump down the rabbit hole on this topic).

Not all rituals serve the same purpose, and understanding the difference between the types of rituals clarified how these might be applied in a business context.

Rites of passage serve to “socialize” participants as an accepted member within the broader community. Rites of passage would include things like new hire onboarding.

Rites of enhancement are public celebration of commendable behavior, intended to showcase model behavior and recognize individuals. An example of this would be a CEO shout-out in a monthly team newsletter.

Rites of renewal are a stabilizing function within an organization. These rituals rejuvenate and reinforce values over time. A Manager’s weekly huddle is a great example of a rite of renewal.

Rites of conflict resolution are just what they sound like, how an organization deals with a dispute between stakeholders within the community.

Rites of integration work to establish an emotional unity or community bond. An example of this might be an annual team building offsite or even something less formal like a greeting ritual or how team members vents their frustrations at the water cooler.

Rites of degradation are less common, but serve an important role and they may be a consideration during change management. Rites of degradation happen when an organization is going through a major change or possibly shutting down. These rites often involve reflection on what went wrong and serve to reaffirm the bonds between members of the community during a time of uncertainty. 

It’s important for CX practitioners to be aware and vigilant about how elements of employee engagement, including rituals, influence culture. Culture can either support or detract from organizational objective. CX leaders want to ensure that rituals serve to fortify customer experience as a competitive advantage, otherwise they could find themselves permanently fighting an uphill battle.

For rituals to stick, they need to be organic, not manufactured. CX professionals should engage with executives and team leaders about the importance of rituals. They would also be wise to take stock of any company-wide rituals that are already in play, and understand what behaviors or norms these reinforce. Where rituals support customer-centricity, there may be opportunities to share these with an even broader audience (remember that many rituals start at team level and grow from there). Where rituals possibly undermine customer experience objectives, CX professionals may identify a need to gently redirect these.

If leveraged correctly, rituals can support CX culture and possibly even an organization’s ambitions to use customer experience as a competitive advantage, but not if left to chance.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

This is episode 70, the first episode of February. Regular listeners will know that the first episode of the month is usually an interview episode. And I do have one coming later in the month. But for February, I’ve just switched the order around a little bit, and I’m starting with a CX mini master class.

Today, I’m going to explore the topic of rituals in the workplace, and the role that these play in influencing organizational accountability and CX culture. Rituals are sort of an invisible force within the workplace. We often don’t think about them, but they play a crucial role in reinforcing beliefs, expectations, and behavioral norms, which are as important to a professional team dynamic as they are to a family or another community dynamic. I’ve only seen the topic of rituals pop up a few times in the context of customer experience, so it’s not something that’s a buzzword yet.

But I believe it’s something that we, as customer experience professionals, should be cognizant of so that we can play a proactive role in shaping how rituals support, and hopefully don’t detract from, the organization’s customer experience objectives. As we’ll discuss in a minute, rituals come from the culture, and they also reinforce the culture. So if your organization’s rituals are driving things in the wrong direction, it’s something you might want to change. If you’ve been looking to delve deeper into an emerging topic for customer experience culture and organizational accountability, and are keen to hear what the researchers say about it, then this episode is for you.

As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com, or decodingthecustomer.com. My interest in the topic of rituals started when a client asked me about best practices on the role of rituals in shaping customer-centric culture. Intuitively, I knew that rituals were repetitive, ongoing actions that reinforced norms, sort of like Jeff Bezos’ famous gesture of leaving an empty chair in meeting rooms to symbolize the presence of the customer as an important but silent stakeholder in business conversations.

Over the years, I’d heard some CX thought leaders refer to rituals, but it wasn’t a headline topic in the customer experience world. This sent me on a journey to research and dive into a bit of academic research to more completely understand rituals and their role in customer experience management. And today, as well as some ideas for how customer experience professionals can leverage rituals to support their customer experience management objectives. First, let’s start with the definition of rituals.

Ritual action, it is proposed, is a form of social action in which a group’s values and identity are publicly demonstrated or enacted in a stylized manner within the context of a specific occasion or event. Examples of this might include a dinner for employees, a welcoming speech for a new hire, or a manager’s weekly team huddle. This definition is straight from one of the most useful business management academic papers that I found on this topic. I’ll be sure to include a link in the show notes so you can reference this definition and see where it came from.

It’s important to note that many scholars use the words rite and ritual interchangeably. In practice, I find that most people refer to specific types or examples of ritual action as rites, and the term rituals is used more as a broad, generic descriptor of rites. Speaking of types of rites or categories, this is where I think things get really interesting because we have different types of rights for different types of things, and it’s important to understand the distinction between these. We have rites of passage, which are some of the most common in organizations.

Rites of passage helps socialize participants to be an accepted member within a broader community. Rites of passage would include things like new hire onboarding. We also have rites of enhancement, which are public celebration of commendable behavior, intended to showcase model behavior and recognize individuals. An example of this might be a CEO shout out in a monthly team newsletter.

Rites of renewal are another type of rite. These are a stabilizing function within an organization. These rituals rejuvenate and reinforce values over time. A manager’s weekly huddle is a great example of a rite of renewal.

Rites of conflict resolution are just what they sound like. How an organization deals with disputes between stakeholders within the community. Rites of integration are another type of rite. These work to establish an emotional unity or community bond.

An example of this might be an annual team building offsite or something less formal like a greeting ritual or how team members vent their frustrations at the water cooler. Finally, we have rites of degradation, which happen when an organization is going through a major change or possibly shutting down. These are much less common, but worth mentioning as they may be a consideration during change management. These rites often reflect on what went wrong and reaffirm the bonds between members of the community as they move forward.

Side note here, I worked at Washington Mutual Bank during the 2008 US financial crisis. And when WAMU was acquired by JP Morgan, it catalyzed a time that was filled with rites of degradation. As team members reflected on what happened, leaders gave talks reassuring team members about the future, and everybody made plans for what they were going to do next. Considering rituals in the workplace, it’s clear that we can think of a ritual as something that comes from the culture and also reinforces the culture.

So if your organization has rituals that reflect and reinforce customer centricity, these will help align the organization towards customer experience goals. For example, if the new hire onboarding rite of passage incorporates a special event, bonds a new team member with the community, and emphasizes the shared objective of customer centricity, it will reinforce customer centricity and help all new employees connect their new responsibilities to the customer mandate. If, on the other hand, for example, the CEO’s speech at the end of year function, which is a rite of renewal, always praises sales and efficiency achievements with no mention of customer experience objectives, it would reinforce the belief that these things are more important than customer centricity. In episode 66, I explored why the foundations of HR strategy need to be aligned to support customer experience.

And we can look at rituals in much the same way. As customer experience practitioners, it’s important that we’re aware of and vigilant about how the elements of employee engagement, including rituals, influence culture. Otherwise, we could find ourselves permanently fighting an uphill battle. So how do we change or influence rituals?

For rituals to stick, they need to be organic, not manufactured or contrived. The empty chair ritual works for Amazon, but it doesn’t mean it will resonate with every organization out there. Take stock of the big company-wide rituals that are already in play. What rites have been established and what do they reinforce?

As CX professionals, we need to encourage the correct rituals and maybe position ourselves to gently redirect the others. For that CEO speech at the end of your function, perhaps he or she isn’t even aware that they’re skipping over customer experience. So, see if you can get your CEO to realign their message. I’d also suggest that you share insight on what you’ve learned about rituals with the broader executive team.

Help get them thinking about how these things influence company-wide objectives, including customer centricity. Now, not all rituals happen at a company-wide level, and influencing team or department level rituals is a slightly trickier proposition. To do this, I’d suggest helping managers or department leaders become aware of the impact of rituals, much as I suggested you do with executives. You might also find ways to stay abreast of new rituals when they pop up so that you can encourage sharing information about the ones that work, while gently redirecting any rituals that appear to do more harm than good.

If you have a customer experience council or a cross-functional CCX meeting, that could be a good opportunity to talk about new rituals and highlight success stories. I’ve also seen a global organization that’s geographically dispersed take videos of rituals that started at a team level so they could be shared with the global organization. Look for the green shoots and share news about best practices. Maybe they’ll catch on elsewhere.

Perhaps there’s even an opportunity to make a little competition of it. Rituals are an exciting, emerging topic in the field of customer experience. So if you’ve already been working on rituals in your organization, I’d love to hear about it. And if you’re looking for help, evolving your organization’s customer experience culture through rituals or otherwise, please get in touch.

I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website. juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another episode. See you then.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy and culture change) or get in touch via email. 

Episode 67 covered how and why organizations should internally and externally market CX. This, of course, hinges upon having a clear definition of what experiences customers can expect and how teams should deliver these experiences. Most brands don’t cover this in the company vision, mission or values. All of those brand statements are important, and they should support customer-centricity, but they’re not the same as a customer promise.

A customer promise is a single statement outlining the experience that a brand intends to provide to its customers and prospective customers. It should be clear, simple and actionable, ideally no longer than one sentence. You could almost think of the customer promise as a vision or mission statement focused exclusively on the experience and how this is delivered.

The car brand Hyundai has a great example of a customer promise statement for their service team.

At Hyundai, we put all our efforts to provide customers with the best after sales service.

This statement lets us know that Hyundai takes after sales service seriously, that they’re willing to put some muscle behind providing a great experience, and that customers can expect a best in class WOW experience, one that possibly competes with service experiences from different consumer categories all together.

This statement indicates to teams that the service experience is a major strategic priority. When they say “we put all our efforts”, this signals to Hyundai’s teams that everything they do should contribute to a journey-defining after sales service experience.

It should be noted that it’s not best practice to create a customer promise that is so specific to one aspect of the journey (in this case, after sales service). Hyundai could (and should) have just as easily made a customer promise that was applicable to the entire customer journey.

If Hyundai’s example promise statement still feels a little vague to you, that’s OK. Remember it’s tough to be overly specific with a single sentence. A customer promise should be backed up by customer experience principles, which unpack the next layer of detail. Experience principles are the “how-to” details behind the customer promise, linking the vision to behaviors or outcomes. Hyundai has defined 8 of these:

Listen carefully and actively follow up on your request

Schedule an appointment that is convenient to you

Attend to you promptly on arrival in a friendly and professional manner

Provide you with an accurate time and cost estimate

Obtain your authorization before commencing any additional work

Thoroughly explain all repairs performed and review all costs

Ensure the vehicle is returned at the time agreed in a clean and tidy condition

As you can see, the experience principles are where things can get a little bit more prescriptive, while still supporting the overarching customer promise. If you’re curious about how experience principles are put to use, guest expert Ben Motteram spoke about the role of experience principles in CX strategy during episode 29. I’d highly suggest that you check out that episode if you haven’t already.

So why do we care about a customer promise? We could ask the same about a company purpose, vision or mission. The short answer is that organizations need a strategic Northstar when it comes to customer experience. Without this, teams can and will action customer experience in terms of their own individual interpretation, which nearly always leads to teams driving their efforts in disparate directions.

If your organization hasn’t established a customer promise, it’s almost guaranteed that teams will be chasing different CX targets. When it comes to rallying teams around a cohesive customer experience, it should come as no surprise that a shared understanding of “what is great experience” is a crucial place to start.

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

This is episode 69. Episode 67 covered how and why organizations should internally and externally market CX. Today I want to explore the concept of the customer promise, which is a foundational element for the internal and external marketing of customer experience. Specifically, I want to cover what a customer promise is, what one looks like in practice, and then why your organization needs one.

As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Right, so let’s get started. Most of us working in or adjacent to the field of customer experience will have encountered the term customer promise before.

But I find that there is quite a lot of confusion about what a customer promise actually is, so I want to kick off this episode with a clear definition. A customer promise is a single statement outlining the experience that a brand intends to provide to its customers and prospective customers. It should be clear, simple, and actionable, ideally no longer than one sentence. You could almost think of the customer promise as a vision or mission statement focused exclusively on the experience and how it should be delivered.

And I know what you’re thinking. We already have a vision, mission, and values. Why do we need another statement? That’s a great question, and the answer is twofold. First, most visions, missions, and values statements are not specific to the customer experience. They are broader in scope and reflect where the company is heading and how the company wants to operate.

Some companies are lucky enough to have really customer-centric visions and missions, in which case these could double up as a customer promise. But most brands don’t have a vision or mission focused on the experience. And secondly, while a company’s vision and values might support customer experience management, they are not the same as a customer promise, which is a specific commitment of the experience that can be expected by customers. Now I should mention that a customer promise is related to, but different from, a brand promise. Brand promise is more of a marketing term and describes what a brand promises to its customers in the broadest sense, encompassing all aspects of the relationship.

We could look at Apple’s brand promise of innovation, simplicity, and elegance. These brand attributes underpin how the brand interacts with its customers across all facets of the brand. Whereas a customer promise specifically focuses on the experience that a customer can expect when interacting with the brand. To bring a customer promise to life, I’d like to walk through a simple example of one. Let’s look at Hyundai’s customer promise for their service teams.

At Hyundai, we put all our efforts to provide customers with the best after-sales service. Now, I like this customer promise for a few reasons. First, the statement is simple and clear. Second, it communicates the importance of after-sales service as a strategic priority for the brand. And third, it sets expectations for what the customer experience teams should aim to deliver.

The statement signals to Hyundai’s teams that the service experience is a major strategic priority. When they say we put all our efforts, this signals to Hyundai’s teams that everything they do should contribute to a journey-defining after-sales service experience. But Hyundai’s customer promise alone is probably not specific enough for customer-facing teams to understand how to consistently deliver on this promise. So in their case, the customer promise is supported by eight experience principles, which are commitments to more specific things like listening carefully and actively following up on requests, maintaining a clean, safe and friendly environment, attending to customers promptly on arrival in a friendly and professional manner, and so on.

Experience principles are the how-to details behind the customer promise, linking the vision to behaviors or outcomes. They are a great way to unpack the next layer of detail behind the customer promise and can be incredibly helpful for specific departments or teams. They can also be very useful for defining how an organization should manage experiences delivered through specific channels. Now, this example from Hyundai is specific to the after-sales journey. It should be noted that it’s not best practice to create a customer promise that is so specific to one aspect of the journey.

Hyundai could and should have just as easily made a customer promise that was applicable to the entire customer journey. But this is a great example of what a customer promise looks like and how it should work in concert with more specific experience principles. OK, so we’ve covered what a customer promise is and what one looks like. Now let’s look at why it matters.

Most of us working in the field of customer experience will have had the experience of working in an organization where teams are running in different directions when it comes to customer experience management. Sometimes teams don’t even agree on what constitutes a good customer experience. Without a customer promise, different teams within an organization are likely to interpret the customer experience in different ways and may end up pursuing disparate targets. Your sales team might prioritize fast turnarounds, while your operations team might prioritize thoroughness.

Your marketing team might emphasize innovation, while your customer service team emphasizes consistency. Each team is trying their best, but they’re each working from their own interpretation of what great customer experience looks like. And without a North Star to guide them, they’ll struggle to come together and deliver a cohesive experience. It should come as no surprise that a shared understanding of what is great customer experience is a crucial place to start when it comes to rallying teams around a cohesive customer experience strategy.

The customer promise is that shared understanding. It’s the thread that connects all of the different teams and their efforts to deliver great customer experience. But defining and communicating a customer promise is only the first step. Once you have a customer promise, you need to operationalize it. This means that every team in the organization needs to understand how they contribute to delivering on the customer promise and what their specific responsibilities are.

This is where experience principles and customer-centric KPIs can be incredibly powerful, because they bridge the gap between the high-level customer promise and the day-to-day activities of each team. So that’s a quick overview of the customer promise concept. I hope you found this helpful. The key takeaways here are that the customer promise is a single statement outlining the experience a brand intends to provide, it is related to but distinct from a brand promise, it should be supported by experience principles that unpack the more specific detail, and it plays a critical role in aligning teams around a common definition of great customer experience.

If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show. I’ll be back soon with another CX Mini Masterclass, so tune in then or subscribe to the show for updates when new episodes go live.

I’ll catch you next time. But if you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy and culture change) or get in touch via email. Julia’s work on customer experience strategy and CX leadership has been featured in CMSWire, BusinessLive, Mail & Guardian, and other publications. See Julia in the Media for a full record. 

Episode 66 explored the foundations of HR strategy and how this in turn influences customer-centric culture. Reward and recognition programs are one of these foundations. Over time, how behaviors are recognized and celebrated will influence culture. Celebrated actions become the model behavior and what people aspire to. And over time, these behaviors and norms take hold and turn into what people expect from each other. Obviously, the foundations of culture are multifaceted, and based on more than just reward and recognition programs, but these are an important component (be sure to check out episode 66 for more about the key components of HR strategy).

Reward and recognition programs come in all shapes and sizes. These programs are defined by 2 key features: public vs. private recognition and peer-to-peer vs. senior recognition.

Each organization is unique, so there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for recognition programs. It’s probably a good idea to have a variety of different types of recognition structures, but it’s not necessary to have a program for each of these categories. As always, it’s important to think about the end user. When collaborating with HR teams to plan recognition structures, think about how teams interact. What interests the group of employees in question? A program that resonates with frontline team members might differ from what’s needed to impact the behavior of senior managers.

Rewards can be linked to any of these recognition programs. For example, a senior leader could give a gift card or some company swag to an employee they’re recognizing for customer excellence. Company award programs often include a prize for the winners. Team leaders could also have a discretionary budget to give customized rewards to their team.

It’s also popular to structure peer-to-peer “badge”-type programs with rewards attached. My advice on this is to take the approach of surprise and delight rather than gamification. Give people the latitude to recognize the desired attitudes and behaviors with appropriate rewards, but be wary of anything that encourages team members to chase the prize rather than live the mantra.

If you’re wondering where incentives like bonuses fit into things, don’t worry, this hasn’t been overlooked. Incentives linked to CX KPIs are important, but that’s a big topic, possibly for a future CX Mini Masterclass. *Watch this space*

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

This is episode 68. The fourth episode of January. 2020 has been slated as the year that customer experience will overtake price and product as the key competitive differentiator. So here we are.

In month one of a new decade, and CX professionals need to be ready to face the challenges of helping businesses become more customer centric. Last week’s Mini Masterclass provided practical tips for internal and external marketing of customer experience. And the week before that, we took a deep dive into the foundations of CX culture and the importance of aligning CX and HR strategies. Today, I’m sticking with the topic of organizational alignment and culture, exploring reward and recognition strategies.

If we want team members to stay rallied around the customer mandate, we need to reinforce the right behaviors. As discussed in episode 66, reward and recognition programs are an important building block for culture. So if CX professionals want to see an authentic customer-centric culture within their organization, they have a vested interest in getting the right rewards and recognition programs going. So if you’ve been looking for clarity on how to structure rewards and recognition to support your organization’s customer experience ambitions, then this episode is for you.

As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com, or decodingthecustomer.com. In episode 66, we explored the foundations of customer-centric culture. Reward and recognition programs are one of those foundations.

Over time, how behaviors are recognized and celebrated will influence culture. Celebrated actions become the model behavior and what people aspire to. Gradually, these behaviors and norms take hold and turn into what people expect from each other. Obviously, the foundations of culture are multifaceted and based on much more than just reward and recognition programs.

That said, these programs are an important component and what we’re going to focus on today. Reward and recognition programs come in all shapes and sizes. I like to think of these programs as having two determining features. The first is public versus private recognition.

The next is peer to peer versus senior recognition. If you were to plot these on two axes, you’d end up with four types of recognition. Senior recognition that is public, senior recognition that is private, and peer to peer recognition that is both public and private. Don’t worry, if you’re having a hard time visualizing this, I’ll post an image of the quadrant and the show notes for this episode.

So let’s go through these one by one, starting with senior recognition that is public. An example of this would be an executive giving a shout out to a team member in a public forum like a company newsletter or a team call. Company awards would be another great example of this. These are examples for leaders to highlight attitudes and behaviors that support the organization’s objectives.

If you’re looking to apply something like this in your organization, think about opportunities for leaders to identify and elevate examples of customer centricity, and then ways to publicly shine the light on these cases. Senior recognition as private can be just as powerful. A personalized note or a quick call thanking a team member for going above and beyond can make an incredible impact on morale. It also demonstrates leadership connection to shared values and that all contributions to customer experience make a difference.

Back in episode six of the podcast, I interviewed Clint Payne and Lindy Way Chowka from MultiChoice. They shared insights from their hashtag 99 problems campaign in which team members from across their organization volunteered to tackle the top 99 problems with the customer journey. Upon solving these problems, the resolvers, as they were called, received a handwritten thank you letter from the CEO. When I interviewed Lindy Way, she still had hers at her desk.

Senior recognition can also be as simple as a manager thanking an employee for something they did. It doesn’t have to be super fancy. This recognition isn’t about having your name and shining lights on a billboard. It’s about knowing that you’ve made a difference and that the leadership team really cares.

Leaders play a special role in rewards and recognition, but they’re not the only ones who can and should recognize and celebrate the right behaviors. So let’s move on to peer-to-peer recognition. As with senior-leader recognition, that which comes from peers can be either public or private. Public recognition is about providing kudos and recognizing others publicly, just what it sounds like.

Over the years, I’ve seen lots of Service Badge and Customer Experience Champion programs. Sometimes these are managed through an intranet where colleagues can nominate others. I also recently heard an example of an innovative program at an accounting firm that had established a sort of pay-it-forward recognition structure, enabling frontline teams or those who are client-facing to publicly recognize and support the teams that help them deliver great experience. This program referred to the behind-the-scenes teams as the unsung heroes.

And what I love about this is that it actively engaged team members who might have otherwise felt removed from the customer or been totally unaware of how their contribution to the customer journey made such a profound impact. Finally, we have private peer-to-peer recognition. This could take the form of a private badge or kudos program, or it could be as simple as an informal thank you from a colleague. Depending on the context of the company and the team, a private recognition program might be better received.

It’s easy to imagine a public badge-based program really taking off at a customer service center, for example. But it might not be the best approach for a team of, say, middle management engineers, or perhaps it would be. When structuring these programs, think about your audience. How do they interact?

What interests them? What are the team dynamics? My personal philosophy is that it’s important to have a mix of different types of recognition and rewards programs. I’m not going to say that each organization out there needs to have all four of these rewards and recognition programs, but different types of recognition will resonate with different audiences.

So figure out what’s appropriate for your context. If you can link these programs to career development and people’s professional profiles, all the better. Who wouldn’t want an endorsement from their CEO on their personnel file or their LinkedIn profile? We’ve spoken quite a bit about recognition, but what about rewards?

That’s the other half of this discussion. Well, rewards can be linked to any of these recognition programs. For example, a senior leader could give a gift card or some company swag to an employee they’re recognizing. Those company award programs often come with some sort of prize attached to them.

Team leaders could also have a discretionary budget and give customized rewards to their team based on individual actions throughout the course of the year. I’ve also seen plenty of these badge programs with rewards attached. My advice on this is to take the approach of surprise and delight rather than gamification. Give people the latitude to appropriately reward the right behaviors, but be wary of anything that encourages team members to chase the prize rather than live the mantra.

You’ll notice that I’ve not included incentives in this discussion. Incentives do play an important role in influencing behavior and culture. Back in episode 66, I spoke about the importance of establishing CX KPIs for all team members, and where appropriate, linking these to financial incentives like bonuses. I don’t want to downplay the importance of financial incentives, but it’s a big topic, and probably one for a CX Mini Masterclass all on its own.

If you’re looking for help rallying teams around customer experience or embedding a culture of customer centricity, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another CX Mini Masterclass. I’ll see you then.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX culture change) or get in touch via email.

Most major brands spend loads of time and resources marketing their products and services, so shouldn’t this be enough to draw in customers? The short answer is no. Most marketing emphasizes the CVP, products and promotions. Few brands dedicate much of their marketing budget to helping consumers understand what kind of experiences they can expect. And to be honest, I’m not sure why. Perhaps they think it’s a waste of marketing spend or they’re afraid of putting a promise out there that the business won’t be able to deliver on. I see it as a huge missed opportunity. If you don’t help consumers know what they can expect, it sets the stage for a mismatch between expectations and reality…something that often ends up with an unhappy customer.

If your organization has established a customer promise or experience principles, these should be shared this with consumers. T Mobile in the US has focused quite a lot of external marketing on experiences, such as their unique Team of Experts support team.

If your organization has already mapped the customer journey, you’ll know that there are many, many touchpoints. Each of these channels of interaction can become an avenue for marketing customer experience and sharing the good word about what sets your brand apart from the others. Marketing teams are normally very organized with messaging via traditional above the line advertising, newsletters, etc., but remember to look for opportunities to weave the customer promise into less obvious touchpoints like statements, contracts, and sales/support support teams.

If you are wanting to learn more about touchpoints and journeys, be sure to check out Episode 16.

If customers know what kind of experiences they can expect, then naturally employees need to be rallied around the same mantra. This is where internal marketing of your CX program comes into play. Internal marketing of CX is important because it helps establish a cohesive understanding of your company’s customer experience ambitions.

Internal marketing of customer experience generally takes two forms:

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

Welcome to Decoding the Customer. A podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program.

Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome. If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX mini masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer.

These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-sized overviews of key customer experience concepts… …and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics… …this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

This is episode 67, the second episode of January. 2020 has been slated as the year that customer experience will overtake price and product as the key competitive differentiator. So here we are in month one of a new decade, and CX professionals need to be ready to face the challenges of helping businesses become more customer-centric. Last week’s masterclass was a deep dive into the foundations of CX culture and the importance of aligning customer experience and HR strategies.

Today, I’m sticking with the topic of culture, exploring why it’s important to market your customer promise internally and externally… …as well as what it means to do this. Customer experience values, service principles, brand promise—all of these things are great, but only if your customers and employees know about them. If you’ve been looking for some ideas about internal and external marketing of your organization’s CX program, then this episode is for you.

As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website… …julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Let’s start with a quick minute on why this topic is even worth focusing on.

Most major brands spend loads of time and resources marketing their products and services. So shouldn’t this be enough? The short answer is no. Most brands focus their marketing around their CVP or their customer value proposition… …along with their products and promotions.

Far fewer brands dedicate much of their marketing budget to helping consumers understand the kinds of experiences that they can expect. There are definitely some exceptions out there. For example, T-Mobile in the US is a brand that focuses quite a lot of external marketing on experiences, such as their unique team of experts support team. But most brands out there just miss the boat on this, and to be honest, I’m not really sure why.

Perhaps they think it’s a waste of marketing spend or maybe they’re afraid they’ll be putting a promise out there that the business won’t be able to deliver on. In either case, I see this as a huge missed opportunity. If you don’t help consumers know what they can expect from you, you’re just setting yourself up for a mismatch between expectations and reality. Something that usually ends up with an unhappy customer.

So what does it mean to externally market your customer experience? If your organization has established a customer promise or experience principles, it means intentionally sharing this with consumers. You can achieve this by weaving this messaging into traditional above-the-line marketing—things like billboards and TV advertisements… …as well as through integrated messaging into other touchpoints.

If you’ve already gone through the exercise of mapping the customer journey, then take another look at this and review it through the perspective… …of when and where your customer experience values are communicated. But an important first step in all of this is defining what your experience principles or your customer promise or your customer experience values are. If you haven’t done this yet, make sure that you have clarity on the message before you go around worrying about how to market it.

If your customers know what kinds of experiences they can expect, naturally your employees need to be rallied around similar messaging. This is where internal marketing of your CX program comes into play. Internal marketing of customer experience is important… …because it helps establish a cohesive understanding of your company’s customer experience ambitions. I see this as taking two different forms.

One being consistent messaging about the long-term vision of customer experience… …and two, short-term efforts to rally and energize teams. It’s important to craft an enduring, cohesive message about an organization’s customer-centric aspirations. Usually, this takes the shape of customer experience principles or a customer promise, as mentioned before. Like a vision, mission, or purpose, these are things that should remain relatively constant, maybe with occasional refreshes as the business or brand evolves.

It’s important to share these messages with teams and make sure that they feature in the organization’s cornerstone employee engagement… …and rituals like onboarding. Things that everybody experiences that remain fairly constant. Think of this as marketing and awareness for the long haul. You want everyone to know your customer promise or your customer experience principles or your customer experience values…

…like they know their favorite brand’s slogans. Then we have shorter-term employee engagement and internal marketing. These communications and engagements are of the moment… …often intended to encourage specific behaviors or catalyze change.

Rather than act as kind of a philosophical North Star for customer experience. If an organization is looking to drive customer-centric change… …they might investigate launching a branded campaign with an inspiring call to action. One of my favorite examples of this is at MultiChoice, the South African media company, where the customer experience team spearheaded a campaign… …called hashtag 99problems.

To engage all staff in helping to resolve the top 99 customer pain points within the customer journey. +Theirs was a great case study on how to create and execute a branded internal CX engagement campaign. And they won several international awards for their work. I happened to interview their head of customer experience, Clint Payne, in episode six of the podcast.

If you’re interested in checking that out, I’ll include a link to that episode in the show notes for this one. In sum, if customer experience professionals want to see their organizations leverage customer experience as a selling point… …and effectively rally teams around the cause, they need to remember to put their marketing hats on… …and get the message out there, both internally and externally.

If you’re looking for help strengthening brand engagement with customers or rallying teams around customer experience, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is @juliaahlfeldt and my full contact details…

…are also listed on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I hope you’re enjoying the show. Please share it with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another CX mini masterclass.

See you then!

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX culture change) or get in touch via email.

When we think about the leading customer centric brands of our time. Companies like Disney, Netflix and Airbnb, it’s no coincidence that strong company culture is a common thread. These organizations’ cultures support their brands’ visions, missions and customer centric aspirations through the realization of their respective values. When those values include a brand’s customer promise or experience principles, culture can become a powerful enabler of customer experience. But these unified force-of-nature organizational cultures don’t happen by accident. Culture is the manifestation of “how we do things around here”. It’s what we can expect from each other and how people will act, even when no one is watching. While the concept of culture can feel “fluffy” and intangible, the drivers to culture are definitely not. HR/People strategy sets the direction for all of the key areas of HR, including hiring, performance appraisal, development, and compensation. This is the bedrock on which culture flourishes.

CX professionals need to understand HR strategy as a driver of culture and how to link this to the organization’s customer-centric goals. If the linkage isn’t clear, it’s quite possible that an HR strategy can create the foundation for a high performance culture that is everything but customer-centric.

There isn’t a singular template for HR strategy, but most cover at least 4 key areas. These components of the HR strategy should support business objectives, including customer experience, though it’s often up to CX professionals to drive the alignment to CX.

It’s easy to see how HR strategy contributes to the evolution of an organization’s culture. Over time, who you hire and how you engage with employees will shape the way people behave and what they expect from one another. If this strategy is linked to the company’s customer-centric vision, it can help support these efforts. If not, it can drag behavior and culture in a totally different (and possibly un-customer-centric) direction.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

This is episode 66, the second episode of January, and the first CX mini master class of 2020. Welcome to a new year of great learning content. I took a little break from publishing new episodes during the month of December, but I’m recharged and excited to be back. Back in 2013, Walker Research famously published their findings that executives believed that 2020 would be the year the customer experience overtook price and product is the key competitive differentiator.

So here we are, at the dawn of a new decade, and ready to face the challenges of helping businesses become more customer centric. The customer experience profession has come a long way in the last 10 to 20 years. And I think that all of us working in this field have gained a healthy appreciation for the importance of organizational culture as a key dependency for customer experience management. I’ve always said that you could buy the Ferrari of CRM systems but if your team and the rest of the organization isn’t on board with the customer centric vision, then it’s all for not.

Culture is a major driver of this. And it’s also a tricky topic, one that many of us as CX professionals are not always comfortable with. So I’ve decided to kick this year off with a mini masterclass that dives deep into the building blocks of CX culture. So if you’re looking for clarity on the foundations of customer centric culture and would like to learn a little more about exactly how HR strategy underpins customer experience management, then stay tuned.

As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com, or decodingthecustomer.com. When we think about leading customer-centric brands, companies like Disney, Netflix, and Airbnb, it’s no coincidence that strong company culture is a common denominator and that these organizations’ cultures support their brands’ visions, missions, and customer-centric aspirations to the realization of their respective values. Culture is the manifestation of how we do things around here.

It’s what we can expect from other people. It’s how we expect they’ll act even when no one is watching, or perhaps especially when no one is watching. I find that business leaders are often uncomfortable with the concept of culture because it feels fluffy and intangible. And while culture can feel quite intangible, and that’s probably quite normal and natural, the drivers of culture are everything but.

Great culture does not happen by accident. In absence of an HR strategy or plan, toxic company culture can definitely develop. At best, it’s unlikely that a large organization will have a cohesive thriving culture if things are left to chance. Your organization’s HR team probably or hopefully has an HR strategy in place to support the organization’s culture.

This human resource strategy sets the direction for all key areas of HR, including things like hiring, performance appraisal, development and compensation. These items are also the bedrock on which culture flourishes. If your organization does have an HR strategy, it’s likely even molded around the vision and mission, as well as some tangible organizational goals. The challenge here is that we all know how these tangible organizational goals, things like growth targets and market share, often need customer-centric goals as a counterbalance to keep things in check.

So it’s entirely possible that an HR strategy can create the foundation for a high-performance culture that is everything but customer-centric. In this kind of scenario, a customer experience professional could paint the halls red with messages about customer centricity, but everything else will be driving team behavior and the resulting culture in a different direction. So what do you need to do to ensure that the bedrock of your organization’s culture is also supporting your customer experience goals? To start, engage with the HR team and ensure that the HR strategy is aligned to the CX strategy.

And what I’d like to do now is break down exactly what that means by exploring each of the key components of the HR strategy and exploring how these need to be aligned to customer experience. Let’s start with hiring. Back in episode 37, I did a deep dive into how talent acquisition needs to support customer experience. So if you missed that episode, be sure to check it out for more detail.

But in essence, organizations must ensure that new hires walking in the door are aligned to culture. We can train new skills, but it’s difficult to teach things like empathy, and even more difficult to change deeply held beliefs. If a candidate’s core values are at odds with the brand’s core values, or the brand’s customer experience principles, that’s not something you’re going to change with training. As a result, organizations need to ensure that they’re including customer-centric attributes and job specs for all new hires, and that marketing to prospective candidates includes these values, and that candidates are screened accordingly.

Many organizations, like Airbnb, do a values-fit screening interview as part of their candidate vetting process. Check with your HR team, and if your customer experience principles don’t currently feature in the hiring process, see if you can help change this. We all know that ongoing employee development is an important feature of employee engagement. Personally, I think that training has been used for far too long as the default switch for customer-centric culture change.

Yes, training is important, but it’s not a fix-all. And we need to look at how else organizations help the development of employees. Do things like onboarding and skills development reflect the brand values and the customer experience principles? Are we treating employees as we would expect them to treat our customers?

When it comes to on-going development, don’t just get mired in the detail of service training. Remember to ask the bigger questions about how development supports your organization’s delivery of its customer promise. If you see a gap, try to align it. Next, let’s look at performance management and appraisal.

Someone recently taught me the phrase, what’s measured is treasured. And it’s true. People will modify their behavior based on what they believe they’ll be measured on. So make sure that your organization’s customer experience goals and principles feature here.

In episode 53, I explored the connection between KPIs and customer experience management. And yes, KPIs are definitely important. But you may also want to appraise people on behaviors that aren’t so easily quantified. It’s also important that the link between performance appraisal and customer experience goals isn’t limited to customer facing teams.

And this is something that a lot of organizations miss. Everyone in the business contributes to customer experience. Everyone. So, you want a customer-centric culture that extends from the most senior executive right down to the newest hire in their first job out of school.

And across all departments. Companies like Amazon have made customer-centric behaviors a feature of their performance management for all employees, regardless of where they sit in the organization. Finally, we have compensation and recognition. These two need to be aligned to customer-experience objectives.

If compensation is linked to performance appraisal, and that’s linked to customer-experience goals, then you’ll have your bases covered there. But recognition can and should extend beyond what’s deposited into an employee’s bank account. People are motivated by more than just money. Recognition should be a mix of public recognition, the stuff that goes into employee newsletters, and private recognition, the type that happens between a manager and an employee.

It should also be a mix of senior recognition and peer-to-peer acknowledgement. People should feel empowered to recognize their peers. And senior leaders can also use their positions to elevate and emphasize examples of customer centricity and action. The key is that these recognition efforts should support your CX principles and company values.

What these things look like in practice will vary a lot from organization to organization. And I can just see a future topic for a mini masterclass brewing here. Reflecting on the key components of an HR strategy, things like hiring, performance appraisal, development and compensation, it’s easy to see how they contribute to the evolution of an organization’s culture. Over time, who you hire and how you engage with employees will shape the way that people behave and what they expect from one another.

If this strategy is linked to the company’s customer centric vision, values and customer promise, it can only help support these efforts and foster customer centric culture. But if not, these things can drag behavior and culture in a totally different direction, one that might be decidedly un-customer centric. If you’re looking for help with customer centric culture change in your organization, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I could help.

You can reach me via email, tweet or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. If you’re enjoying the show, please share with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcasts. This helps others discover the show.

I’ll be back next week with another CX Mini Masterclass. I’ll see you then.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX culture change) or get in touch via email. 

Diego Gabathuler has been the CEO of the dental company Ivoclar Vivadent AG, headquartered in Schaan, Liechtenstein, since 1 July 2019. The Swiss native initially joined the company as a member of the Global Product Management in 2002. He then went on to work for Logitech and several other companies until he rejoined Ivoclar Vivadent in Schaan as Senior Director Europe West & South, Near & Middle East and Africa in 2016. Since October 2017, he has been a member of the Corporate Management. Ivoclar Vivadent is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of innovative material systems for high-quality dental applications. The company has wholly owned subsidiaries in 29 countries, and it employs about 3,500 people worldwide. Diego views customer experience as a key strategic imperative for the success of any business today…and one that should be led by the CEO.

It’s in my title. For me CEO means Customer Experience Officer. – Diego Gabathuler

Diego has taken on customer experience as one of his core strategic imperatives. He sees a customer marketplace that is increasingly complex, both for companies and for consumers. With more technology and a faster flow of information, products can also quickly become commoditized. Amid this landscape, customer experience becomes one of the few ways that businesses can stand out. These changes haven’t happened overnight, and Diego highlights that as one of the challenges. Without a “big bang” push towards customer experience, it means that many companies have been too slow to respond. 

Diego highlights that he sees customer experience and brand as one in the same. A brand, from his perspective, is the sum of the experiences provided by that brand. That’s a progressive view on the concept of branding, and one that many CX professionals would like to be more widely used within the marketing community.

Early in our interview Diego pointed out the importance of understanding customers and integrating their perspectives into the customer journey, product innovation, and business planning. This is the foundation of customer-centric strategy. The dental industry has been largely product-led for many years, but Diego has pushed his team to actually listen to the customer, rather than relying soley on expert insights, which is often the default in his sector.

That said, not all voice of customer (VOC) insights are created equal. Diego spoke about the need to unify customer experience data from 3 different sources in order to provide a robust picture of customer needs: Field research, observation and big data. Asking customers what they want might sound like the best approach, but CX teams need to pair this with user data to see what customers are actually doing. For example, the Ivoclar Vivadent team conducted research to find out where customers wanted to get their product information. Customers responded that they referenced print materials (e.g. catalogs, and brochures) but user data suggested that most were actually getting their information online. Diego chalks this up to people reflecting on their past experiences and longstanding habits, rather than recent behavior. Had the team only listened to customer feedback without pairing this with behavior observations, they might have made the wrong decisions about which touchpoints to focus on.

Without leadership support, CX initiatives will never gain traction, yet this a continual challenge for CX professionals the world over. Diego suggests that CX professionals keep their message clear and tangible. Avoid death by PowerPoint and over emphasizing the business results. At Ivocalr Vivadent, they hired a full time CX manager to help analyze (and share) insights about the status quo of their customer experience. Without this “reality check”, it can be easy to sweep customer experience under the rug. It’s harder to avoid the importance of CX when leaders are faced with clear examples of where the journey is falling short of the brand’s customer-centric aspirations.

Don’t over think customer experience and spend too much time crafting the strategy or plan. You might end up with something that is too far out of reach. It’s easier for an organization to focus on small steps that add up. – Diego Gabathuler

When engaging with his leadership team, Diego has taken to sharing simple observations about customer experience, even if those examples are from his own personal consumer experience. This approach has helped keep the team focused on the customer and the execution of ongoing experience improvements. His approach has enabled the team to make many incremental improvements to customer experiences, resulting in a positive impact on the customer journey as a whole.

For more information about Ivoclar Vivadent and their customer-focused business, check out their corporate website or follow them on social media. They’re on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business define customer experience strategy that delivers results, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email. To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here.