by Shaun Smith
We generally prefer a more qualitative approach. Don’t build it around figures that the accountants may dispute, but create a compelling vision and narrative of what the brand could be like from a customer and employee perspective. This helps to create emotional buy-in and pride in the brand rather than bogging it down in debate about the numbers.
However, if yours is a financially driven organization, you may have to build the business case for the long term, highlighting the potential return on investment (ROI) over three to five years, and the potential negative impact of doing nothing on your market share or customer base.
For more on determining the ROI of your programme, take a look at our CEM calculator tool (see the On Purpose toolkit, www.smithcoconsultancy.com/cem-toolkit).
Watch out for… Fear of the big leap
CEM implementation can seem daunting. So dip your toe in the water with a small, relatively low-risk pilot to help demonstrate the benefits, learn what works and what doesn’t, and create a strong case for company-wide roll-out.
The CX Seven Step Guide INSIGHT
What drives loyalty in your business?
Defining the top three or four values that drive customer loyalty is key to defining your promise and designing your experience. Here are a few guidelines to help you:
Start with your most profitable customers. These are the ones you want more of because they represent the biggest returns.
Identify the key customer touchpoints. You will want to use these as a framework for your research.
Start with qualitative research. Focus first on a small group of representative target customers. Use focus groups or interviews to probe for likes, dislikes and loyalty behaviours. The main question to ask, however, is: ‘What do you value most from a supplier offering our type of service/product?’ Ask them to prioritize and rate your brand against these expectations. Now you are ready to move to the quantitative stage.
Focus on the top 20–25 expectations and use these to build a survey to validate with a larger group of target customers. Correlate the results with intention to return or recommend. This forms a core set of value drivers that will become the basis of your brand promise.
Create an expectation map to identify what customers expect at each key touchpoint with your brand. This will help with your experience design.
Hone your own instinct to help interpret the data. Step into your customers’ shoes and try to experience the same type of journey as your customers. A good way of doing this is to select a similar brand of which you yourself may be a customer, and then identify the different elements of the experience as you interact with that brand. This gives you understanding not only of a customer’s practical needs, but the emotional needs and the factors that influence them. For more on this, see our CEM guide on customer loyalty in the online toolkit.
Watch out for…
Slicing and dicing by every single customer segment. Focusing on multiple market segments is good for communicating your promise but useless for defining it. You will end up trying to be all things to all people. Focus on your primary target customers, what you stand for as a brand and the value you bring. You can always fine-tune the experience to suit other segments later, in the form of specific propositions.
The CX Seven Step Guide DEFINE
How do you ensure that your customer experience really differentiates your brand?
By starting off with a really clear brand promise, which defines the differentiated value that you deliver to your target customers.
A brand promise is an articulation of what target customers can expect from their experience with your brand. It reinforces your purpose; it replaces or aligns the numerous disconnected missions, visions, company values and customer charters evident in so many organizations that are often contradictory, confusing and of little practical value in running a business. And, as we said in Part Two of the book, it is the heart line that runs throughout your customer experience.
So how do you create it?
Here are a few guidelines
Bring together HR, Marketing and Operations. A brand promise is usually seen as being the Marketing Department’s baby. But if HR and other operating functions don’t buy into it, it becomes little more than an advertising slogan. All key functions need to own the promise and commit to doing whatever is needed for delivering it.
Start with your brand positioning. Be absolutely clear what your brand stands for and the value this represents for your target customers. Your brand positioning provides the context for your brand promise.
Next, go back to the value drivers you identified in your research. Define a brand promise that will deliver those values, differentiate you and align with your brand positioning.
Create a set of clear concise statements that underpin this promise. These must be actionable, ie able to be understood by employees and translatable into behaviours that deliver your promise. (See our CEM tool for more on how to define your brand promise. Go to www.smithcoconsultancy.com/cem-toolkit)
Watch out for… Copywriter seduction
It’s all too easy to focus more on the sizzle than the substance. Don’t let the effort default to creative copywriting rather than nailing the fundamental commitments you will make. Focus on content first, creativity second.
The CX Seven Step Guide DESIGN
How do you manage a seamless branded experience across an ever-increasing number of multiple channels?
You can’t.
Here’s what you can do
Experience is whatever the customer perceives it to be – and you cannot micro-manage it completely. But what you can do is influence that experience by being very intentional about where and how you deliver your brand promise – in a way that is absolutely consistent at every touchpoint. This is what we call designing the experience. Here is a simple summary of steps to take:
Map the experience from beginning to end, including social media. Use the customer’s perspective, not the organization’s. You could map one touchline covering the entire experience but if this is too complex, map a touchline for each key customer interaction.
Identify the pain points, inefficiencies, redundancies or inconsistencies in how customers experience your brand.
Consider your brand promise and how well you deliver it at each point in the touchline.
Ensure you think about your most valuable customers and their top expectations.
Identify opportunities to streamline and improve the experience. Look also for opportunities between existing touchpoints, such as the space between making a purchase online and actual delivery of the goods.
Identify hallmark touchpoints that will really differentiate your brand and emotionally engage your customers. These are the touchpoints that you need to over-index.
Create a blueprint for approval and identify implications for people, process and product/service and then move to implementation planning. For more on designing your customer experience, take a look at our CEM+ Survey tool in the online toolkit.
Watch out for… Design by committee
You need cross-functional input, but if you present a blank sheet to the team you will get bogged down in arguments and paralysed by too many voices wanting to go in too many different directions. So begin by creating a strawman design and then set aside a day with the cross-functional team to debate it, evolve it and plan to implement it.
The CX Seven Step Guide ALIGN
How do you prevent silos and politics from pulling in different directions?
Get cross-functional ownership, get board-level sponsorship and create an alignment framework.
Here are a few things to think about
Create work-streams led by members of the CX steering group, responsible for progressing the implementation. These work-streams should focus on the following:
People:
recruitment, training, performance measurement and rewards are essential elements in ensuring you have the right people to deliver the experience, that they have the know-how and skills to do it and that they are incentivized and rewarded against customer experience key performance indicators (KPIs). You will also need to prepare managers to lead the implementation. It seems obvious, but all too often these elements are not aligned.
Process: people need the tools and supporting processes and technology to help them deliver the experience, so get your team thinking about the internal changes needed to support them.
Products and service: think about how you will dramatize your brand promise, and what new propositions and service changes are needed to enable this.
Internal communication: many people resist change, so good and constant communication is vital – what is happening, when, how, who, why and the potential benefits to employees, not just the organization. Brand the communication. It should be engaging, both visually and in its content. Too often we see messages lost in corporate PR speak and dull uninspiring materials.
Measurement: design a customer experience scorecard so that you can measure pre- and post-implementation to demonstrate the results. For more on this, take a look at our CEM+ Alignment tool in the online toolkit at www.smithcoconsultancy.com/cem-toolkit.
Watch out for… Wimping out
It is at this point that many people focus on the easy things rather than deal with the ‘elephant in the room’. These are the big issues that will hold you back.
Here are a couple of things you can do to avoid backtracking on commitments. First, get the initiative on executive meeting agendas right at the beginning of the project, so that issues get addressed right from the start. Second, get your CEO to announce his or her commitment at the beginning, and use every opportunity to reinforce this to employees.
The CX Seven Step Guide MEASURE
How do you ensure that you demonstrate real results so that effort is sustained?
By focusing on the leading rather than the lagging indicators that drive your financial results.
Here are a few things you can do
Measure leading indicators. Profitability and EPS growth are vital measures of business performance but they are lagging indicators – the result of differentiation, and customer loyalty. You need to measure the leading indicators of customer experience and your performance on the key drivers of customer loyalty and advocacy.
Build an integrated scorecard to align your financial reporting, customer experience and other operational measures. Link KPIs to this to ensure you can measure and reward people for the right behaviours so that effort is sustained.
To do this, you will need to identify the critical measures for each part of the scorecard and identify the goal, metric and target for each. Test it. Validate the scorecard, with your executive team and stakeholders involved. Review often and test the relationship between metrics to identify the key leading indicators.
Continuously communicate results to embed the measures and hard wire this as the way you do business. For more on this, see our CEM+ Scorecard tool in the online toolkit at www.smithcoconsultancy.com/cem-toolkit.
Watch out for… Measuritis
The debilitating condition in which everyone is obsessed with capturing data on everything that can possibly be measured. Only focus on the few key metrics critical to success. Measure what matters and ignore anything that doesn’t – otherwise it will scramble your brains.
The CX Seven Step Guide INNOVATE
How do you keep innovating your experience to stay ahead?
‘If you want to remain number one, you have to think like number two.’ (Tom Fishburne, Where Complacent Brands Go, marketoonist.com)
Here are a few things you can do
Start with your vision or purpose and work back rather than starting from industry practice and working forwards. This helps you to challenge many of the beliefs and conventions that underpin your market.
Stand for something and be brave enough to stand up for it. That way, you’ll stand out.
Dramatize your customer experience. Dramatically over-index the key touchpoints where you want to really bring your brand promise to life. Forget timid tinkering. Make it memorable.
Make customers part of your brand. Use customer co-creation and social media tools to listen and engage. Marketing is no longer something you do to customers. Make them part of it. Make employees part of your brand.
Create social networks internally so that your employees can be part of your R&D effort. They are closer to your customers and therefore often better informed about the opportunities to innovate.
Look beyond your industry. Study comparators rather than competitors. Brands can often learn more from brands outside their sectors than within.
Continuously communicate results to embed the measures, and hard wire this as the way you do business. For more on this, see our CEM+ Innovation tool in the online toolkit at www.smithcoconsultancy.com/cem-toolkit.
Watch out for… Job done
There is a natural reaction to take it easy once the implementation phase has been completed. But customers are changing so fast, you can’t just stand still. So change your mindset now from managing the experience to innovating the experience. Take a look at how other brands are leading the way.
So, enough of the theory. How do these steps work in practice? Well, we thought the best way to show you would be to share a couple of case studies of clients that have followed these steps, or something close to them, and let them tell you in their own words what they did, how they did it and the results they achieved. They finish by sharing some of the things they learned along the way.
Throughout the case studies we have highlighted the key steps from the CX Seven Step Guide as a route map for the reader. We have also shown some real examples of the tools being used. Of course, projects are rarely quite as straightforward and linear as this, but in order to make the learning easy to assimilate we have written them to follow the steps we have outlined.
Chapter Twelve
Putting the principles into practice
Liberty Global Business Services – case study
As we go around the world speaking about customer experience we are challenged with objections or questions along the lines of, ‘Well, that is okay if you are in B2C but it doesn’t work in B2B,’ or ‘Well, that may work if you are part of a small company but not if you are in a large plc that is financially driven,’ or ‘You can do it if you are working for an entrepreneur like Sir Richard Branson but you try implementing it in a corporation.’ So, our first case study is the Business Services division of the huge Liberty Global group. Liberty Global is the largest international cable company with operations in 14 countries and nearly 28 million customers. You many not have heard of Liberty Global but you may be familiar with their operating brands. Business Services focuses on the B2B market across Europe, operating through local brands such as UPC Business, Telenet for Business, Virgin Media and Unitymedia. We had the opportunity to work with UPC Business on their customer experience journey, along with our Netherlands-based partner TOTE-M (http://www.tote-m.com). UPC based their initiative around the principles we have described in this book.
Let’s hear from Frans-Willem de Kloet, at that time the managing director of Liberty Global Business Services Europe, about why they embarked on their journey:
‘There are a couple of reasons why I started the customer experience initiative across our markets in Europe; one is because I strongly believe that this is the way to differentiate ourselves. If you look at our competition in the B2B market, and especially in small business, then there are two types of competitors. The first are the Telco incumbents and the second are what we call price fighters. In most countries the incumbents choose to compete through product innovation, that’s where they are most strong and
where for us it would be very hard to compete or differentiate. The price fighters compete through operational excellence. So that leaves a space for us to fill in the area of differentiating through customer intimacy. Our markets have, by tradition, been very local and close to our customers and they are often a result of acquisitions of smaller cable operators in local communities. For this reason it feels very natural for us, both from an internal culture perspective but also how customers define us already. They say we offer a very good service for a reasonable price; we’re not the cheapest, but we provide great value for money – and a lot of them mention that we offer a more personal approach. That is why we believe that our purpose is one that is authentic and rooted in who we truly are.’
Engage
Frans-Willem knew that he would need to have the expertise and resources to implement the strategy and so he appointed Soraya Loerts as Director of Customer Excellence and Operations.
Soraya knew that one of her biggest challenges would be to engage the leadership team to build a consensus and commitment. So Frans-Willem and Soraya decided to launch the initiative at their 2012 annual leadership conference. Having recently read Bold: How to be brave in business and win, they asked us to run a Bold masterclass focusing on the ‘stand up’ phase.
This was an important first step for Soraya, and she realized that answering the question ‘Why?’ was going to be a key success factor for this senior group of peers:
‘It became very clear that I needed to start on the ‘Why’ first, building and creating the belief that customer intimacy would be crucial in sustainable differentiation and therefore the way forward, which of course was a challenge in itself. Our superior network is very much a differentiator, and will be over the coming years, but B2B customers in the end are seeking a partnership – and customer intimacy is the only way to sustain that relationship.