Customer Experience Improvement Program Challenges

Big and small companies have different challenges when it comes to implementing a customer experience improvement program, but there are things each can learn from the other.

That’s why this podcast and blog range from last week’s episode with small business owner, Marie Soprovich, whose company has 20 employees, to today’s interview with Benjamin Easaw, Senior Director, Customer Experience at Thomson Reuters, which has about 50,000 employees in 100 countries.

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Thomson started as a holding company, which had acquired hundreds of different companies. A few years ago it decided to bring them all into a common brand: no easy task!

Just think of all the different systems, attitudes, and customer expectations! How the heck do you bring all that together?

Should You Even Take the Job?

There’s not much hope of developing a successful customer experience improvement program in that situation if you don’t have some pretty serious commitment from management. So if you are thinking of taking a position like Easaw’s, before you accept it, ask some tough questions to find out how committed the company really is.

Where to Start With the New Customer Experience Program?

You’ve accepted the job. Now what?

To start on the right foot, you need to do a few key things:

* Get to know the players. Who’s who in each department, and what are their goals. (We discussed this a bit in episode 16, with Reginald Chatman on how to win internal support for a customer experience program. You may want to go back and listen to that one.)

* Develop common terminology. Easaw found that “everybody seems to have a different definition of customer experience.” Depending on what your department does, you’ll see it in different ways. So you need to develop a common definition and words to work with.

* Assemble a team. No customer experience improvement program succeeds in a vacuum. You need representation from across the organization, and you’ll need an executive level sponsor or champion. While some people put on such a team will start off skeptical, Easaw found that one on one conversations to understand what makes them negative can often turn them around. And having some skeptics on your team is actually a good thing: it’s a reality check as you make plans.

* Dig for data. Find out what data exists, and start drilling into it for insights. Try connecting different sources of data across the organization to help you get a view of the overall customer experience, not just one department’s part of it. Often there are plenty of people within the organization who know the key problems customers experience, but without the data assembled and organized to tell a convincing story, there is no way for them to prove their hunches.

Next Steps?

Hang in there. In a company that large, customer experience improvement is a marathon, not a sprint.

In Other News – Upcoming Events

Hope I’ll see you at some of these!