Getting CX right with CTMA (hosted by Paul Linnell)

You can’t help noticing today that some organisations seem to have “stopped bothering about customers”.  Perhaps it’s an indication that some in our “throw-away society” now consider that an existing customer is no more than a passing encounter that can be simply cast aside, and easily replaced with a new one.

In the past few weeks I’ve been personally reminded several times, how rare it has become for customers to experience good service, and there’s a danger that some organisations are simply taking advantage of that fact and simply not bothering anymore.

• Not bothering to return calls,
• not bothering to provide quotations when they promise to
• not bothering to provide an after-sales service for their products,
• not bothering to tell their account holders that their bank branch has closed down
• not bothering to provide comprehensive operating instructions for their products, or...
• not even bothering to provide a number to call if they need help

Incredibly, all of these have happened to me in the past three weeks, and I know I’m not alone.

But what it does reveal, is that there's now an incredible opportunity for organisations to differentiate themselves by simply paying attention to the needs of their customers.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

In this episode I’m going to tap into our customer experience research again, and give away the secret of how you can make your organisation incredibly successful at what it does, by getting CX right.

It’s how a business can out-perform its competition, and how a public service can build incredible public support.

But first I want to take a look at what NOT TO DO.

I’m going to look at three key things our research confirms about:

“How to lose customers – without really trying!”

Also mentioned in this episode

• Establishing a customer experience baseline
• Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA
• Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

 

At the time of recording this episode, many businesses and public services are finding it a great challenge to satisfy customers.  It has particular relevance while many parts of the world are recovering from a global health crisis, and suffering from disrupted international supply chains, travel disorder, economic instability, domestic and geo-political tensions.  (Huge kudos to all those involved in travel, hospitality, health, energy, food distribution and retail – and all the other industries suffering from current uncertainty and turmoil).

But being ready to “get CX right when everything seems to be going wrong”, is just as important when everything seems to be going well.

With Murphy’s Law stating that: “Anything that can go wrong - will go wrong”. and Finagle’s Law stating that when it does go wrong, it’ll happen, at “the worst possible time”, and with so many variables at play when you’re dealing with real live customers, you must always be ready for Murphy’s and Finagle’s Laws to strike.

All it takes, for your systems, processes, customer journeys, and desired customer outcomes to be thrown off course, is for a customer or member of staff to take a small step in an unplanned direction, or an unplanned event to occur.  And it can be a challenging and expensive task to get things back on track.

Even a simple incident can seriously undermine productivity, customer satisfaction, and staff wellbeing.  In other words, in “Getting CX Right”, you always need to be ready for everything to go wrong.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

I’m afraid I can’t help with the prevention of unplanned events, but in this episode I'll be looking at a selection of some of the guiding principles we use in our customer experience transformation programmes to help our clients to be in a much better position to respond to their customers when problems do occur.

These guiding principles can be used to underpin your business-as-usual strategy, and also relied upon to support how your organisation responds to unplanned events or a crisis.

They can help you to reduce costs, reduce reputational risk, and recover faster from unplanned events or a crisis, whilst improving productivity, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, and improving staff capability and wellbeing. 

Workshop: “Guiding Principles for getting CX right - even when everything seems to be going wrong!”

We’ve created a workshop to help you get a jump-start towards “Getting CX Right, when everything seems to be going wrong”

Delivered live and online directly to your organisation, we review a series of key Guiding Principles and discuss how they might be applied to your organisation to help you to continue to satisfy and impress your customers - even when everything seems to be going wrong. 

Please click here to schedule a call to discuss when your organisation would like to take part in this event: www.CTMAworld.com/murphy

Also mentioned in this episode

• Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA
• Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently about how hard it is for customer experience professionals to get buy-in for investment in customer experience improvement programmes.  This, at a time when business, public services and customers are all experiencing so much change and so many challenges.  It’s almost as though the huge efforts and sacrifices that so many made during the global health crisis, to keep responding to their customers, has been forgotten.

During the global health crisis, customer service functions needed to duck and weave to keep their organisations afloat.  In record time, they had to change their operating procedures, adopt new practices and new technologies, and many moving to remote working.

There wasn’t time to go through a lengthy business justification and an ROI calculation.  It was a case of survival for those who could adapt the fastest and best to do whatever was needed to serve their customers. 

But now, as the world slowly returns to normal, many organisations have moved on to what they see as a new crisis of change. It’s one driven by a cascade of issues like increased prices, limited finance and resources, and problems of shipping and supply.

But there’s a risk, that the customer is now being missed out of the equation and that organisations may have forgotten that their success is, and always has been, driven by their ability to satisfy the needs of their customers.

For customer experience professionals to succeed in the current environment, they are having to rebuild the rigour of disciplines and frameworks to describe and justify where customer experience investment is needed to support this, and future crises of change.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

So, I’d like to turn to one of the diagnostic frameworks we use in our customer experience transformation programmes to help demonstrate the role that positive customer experiences have on an organisation’s success, and the cost of getting things wrong.  In this episode we look at the four alternate realities of the corporate-customer universe.

By the end of this episode you should have a better insight into the dynamics at play that undermine value, add unnecessary costs, and the steps you need to take to get the information you need, to make the best decisions, to set the right priorities, and take the right actions, for your organisation to succeed in these challenging times.

Practice guide

We’ve prepared a CTMA Practice Guide “The Four Alternate Realities of the Corporate-Customer Universe” that summarises the key points in this episode. Request your copy here 

Also mentioned in this episode

• Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA
• Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

Many big businesses and public services today have adopted an approach to customer feedback and measurement that only produces a proxy performance score that’s hard to translate into dollars, and often fails to identify what went well and where things went wrong with customer experience. You know the scene - someone will ask “What’s the score?”  Then someone else will announce that it’s “28”, or “82%”, or “93”.  Then everyone checks to see if it’s higher or lower than last month, and then they all move on.

No wonder they find it hard to take actions to make sure the good things keep happening and the bad things stop.

If “customer experience” and “ways to improve it” isn’t a scheduled leadership and board-room topic in your organisation, it may be because it hasn’t yet been given the vocabulary, metrics or agenda to make it measurable, accountable and actionable.

In this episode I want to close that gap by offering a set of baseline questions your leadership team needs to get answered – even if they haven’t yet asked!

And indeed, if you are a member of the leadership team, these are the key customer experience questions you should be asking.

The answers to these questions will empower your leadership team to give your customer experience improvement programme the energy and support it deserves.

Practice guide

We’ve prepared a CTMA Practice Guide “Baseline Questions your Leadership Team needs to get Answered” that summarises the key points in this episode. Request your copy here 

Also mentioned in this episode

• Establishing your customer experience baseline
• Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

The world changed in 2020 and it forced businesses, their staff and their customers, to each recalibrate the needs, the value, and the loyalties of their relationships. We’ve been seeing businesses, public services, staff, and customers, all coping with EXTREMES - and many, stepping into unknown territory to go the extra mile to HELP one another. In this episode, I want us to look at THE BIG PICTURE of why customer experience has become so important today, and why - “It’s time to stop juggling, and start creating value” It’s taken a global crisis to re-focus businesses and public services on creating genuine value instead of the old way of simply juggling the needs of the business, against the needs of customers and against the needs of staff - a situation, where in the end – NOBODY wins! It’s time to start creating genuine value with organisations adopting deliberate outward-facing strategies, that provide valued products and services, delivered by engaged and knowledgeable staff, empowered to meet and sometimes exceed the needs, wants and expectations of customers - resulting in mutually assured success. As the world embarks on a protracted journey of recovery, this shift towards value-centred relationships has created a new urgency for organisations to build a more sustainable environment that aligns the needs to the business, with the needs of customers, and the needs of staff, to create more genuine relationships – focused on creating mutual value and driving mutual success. Organisations, that will do well in the future, will be those that have learned from this change and avoid falling back into the ways of the past. In this episode we draw a big picture to represent this change, and consider a five step transition programme to “stop juggling, and start creating value”. Practice guide We’ve prepared a CTMA Practice Guide “Exploring the Keeping Improvement Continuous challenge” that summarises the key points in this episode.

Request your copy here 

Also mentioned in this episode

• Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA
• Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

The need to keep up the momentum of continuous improvement, and keep pace with the changing needs, wants and expectations of customers, never ends. The drive to improve what customers experience has been around for so long that by now, most organisations have “given-it-a-go” several times!  Over the years, these projects and disciplines have been know by many names: “customer service”, “customer satisfaction”, “customer loyalty”, “service quality”, “customer first”, “customer centricity”, “first choice” and “CX” to name but a few! Each time a new customer experience initiative is launched, very often with another new name, there’s typically a mix of: interest, suspicion, enthusiasm, mixed benefits, and eventual disappointment. The cycle seems to take between 18 and 36 months, to wax, and then wane.

• So what goes wrong?
• Why don’t they last?

Why do they so often, need to be re-started over-and-over-again?

What you’ll learn in this episode:   In this episode, I want to look at why, once they do start, they often seem to fizzle out and come to a STOP.  I’ll be looking at number six, in our series of BIG “BOULDERS” that often block the path to sustainable customer excellence.  It’s the one I call the “Keeping Improvement Continuous Challenge”.  Practice guide We’ve prepared a CTMA Practice Guide “Exploring the Keeping Improvement Continuous challenge” that summarises the key points in this episode.

Request your copy here 

Also mentioned in this episode

• Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA
• Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

The ultimate success of a customer experience improvement programme, depends on the successful involvement, development and nurturing of leadership, skills, collaboration and the engagement of all the people who work in an organisation, and its suppliers and business partners.

So many customer experience improvement programmes, underperform, get stuck, or fail to start, because they are not treated as a significant business transformation, and they didn’t place enough attention on involving everyone in the transformation process.  That’s why, when it comes to Getting CX Right, we put so much emphasis, on the importance of conquering the People Engagement challenge. 

Yet another reason why so many organisations seem to have a history of multiple attempts to launch projects to improve “customer service”, “service quality”, “customer satisfaction”, and “customer experience”, with each ending in eventual frustration and disappointment.

What you’ll learn in this episode:   In this episode, I look at how to get, and keep, everyone “on board” and actively, willingly and effectively participating in driving the CX mission. I discuss how the prospect of “change” and the “unknown” can be oppressive and damaging and often triggers a defensive response, especially if it’s seen as a potential source of loss. For example, a loss of status, comfort, familiarity, control and perhaps power.

Conquering the People Engagement challenge involves intensified communication, consultation, collaboration and co-development in the transformation process.

Practice guide We’ve prepared a CTMA Practice Guide “Exploring the People Engagement challenge” that summarises the key points in this episode.

Request your copy here 

Also mentioned in this episode

• Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA
• Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

It’s a major challenge to transform an organisation, its departmental and hierarchical mindset, its processes and disciplines, its expertise, talent and creativity into a successful, unified and adaptive, Customer-Driven Enterprise.

But organisations that don’t treat their customer experience programme as an enterprise-wide transformation, are typically hindered by a lack of strategic purpose, limited cooperation, and an absence of measurable benefits.

It’s no wonder that so many organisations seem to have a history of multiple attempts to launch projects to improve “customer service”, “service quality”, “customer satisfaction”, and “customer experience”, with each ending in eventual frustration and disappointment. What you’ll learn in this episode:   In this episode, I look at three key elements that should be included in a customer experience improvement programme to help make it become an enterprise-wide, self-sustainable and successful transformation that truly embraces customer excellence, and gets everyone involved with a shared sense of purpose, collaboration and accountability in the process of customer-driven continuous improvement, innovation and value creation. Practice guide

We’ve prepared a CTMA Practice Guide “Exploring the Enterprise Engagement challenge” that summarises the key points in this episode.

Request your copy here 

Also mentioned in this episode

• Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA
• Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

A staggering finding from one of our benchmarking studies of top 200 companies showed how few organisations effectively use data from customer feedback and surveys to drive improvements and take action.

Many seem to have their CX improvement “take action switch” set to a default setting of “INACTION”, instead of a setting of “LET’S TAKE ACTION”.  They’re almost stuck in a groove, looking for reasons and excuses for “WHY we CAN’T do anything about it” instead of actively looking for “WHAT CAN we do about it”.

The “INACTION” setting often comes about because people think they are far too busy to take action, or they think there’s nothing they can do to improve it.

But INACTION invariably means that they waste far more time dealing with the problem over-and-over again, than if they had taken action to address it in the first place. The reoccurrence of the problem will continue to have an impact on staff, customers and the organisation, until eventually some type of action IS taken.

What you’ll learn in this episode: 

In this episode, I want to focus on a key technique you’ll need to call upon, over and over again, as part of your customer experience improvement programme.

I’m going to talk about “Strategies for Taking Action” and how to keep INACTION completely “off the table”.

We’ve also prepared a CTMA Practice Guide that summarises the “Strategies for Taking Action” that we discuss in this episode.

Request your copy here 

Also mentioned in this episode

• Leadership training and coaching programmes
• Benchmarking for better service

There seems to be something very wrong with the way many businesses, and public services, measure their customers’ experience.  Their customer experience metrics seem to mask potential failure, mystify effective management, absolve accountability, and do nothing to drive actions to improve.

There’s no shortage of metrics used to measure customer experience, but decades of measuring it has left the boardroom, and entire businesses, spending more time debating “what NUMBERS to use” to MEASURE it, than “what ACTIONS to take” to IMPROVE it.

Many organisations seem to suffer from this same frustration. They say they get regular scores from their measurement programmes, but they’re still left wondering:

• How those scores really relate to business outcomes?
• How can they measure the impact it has on the organisation’s success?
• How can they identify what actions to take to improve it?
• Who should be responsible for taking those actions? and
• How can they measure the effectiveness of the actions they do take?

So, if you’re investing in voice-of-the-customer and measurement programmes, and not yet seeing many improvements – you are NOT ALONE.

What you’ll learn in this episode: 

In this episode I want to focus on the second of our “Six Key Reasons why Customer Experience Improvement Programmes Underperform, Get Stuck or Fail to Start”.

It’s the one I refer to as: “The Measurement and Accountability Challenge” 

Specifically, it’s about:

• The way organisations measure their customers’ experiences,
• What they learn from this, and
• Where accountability rests for taking action to improve it.

I’ll be looking at how so many organisations waste a great deal of time and money doing no more than chasing trends and scores, whereas a few manage to achieve a very positive return on their investment by using good measurement wisely, and by assigning accountability for customer experience to drive continuous improvement, innovation and value creation.

We’ve prepared a Practice Guide called: “Exploring the Measurement and Accountability Challenge”.  It lists some of the typical symptoms an organisation may be experiencing, the risks it may suffer, and the three action points I discuss in this episode to help you devise a plan to master it.

Request your copy here 

Also mentioned in this episode

• Leadership training and coaching programmes
• Establishing a customer experience baseline