It's all too easy to pay lip service in a customer experience workshop without making any sustained changes in your business. We've also seen a number of companies who have run customer experience improvement initiatives and then stopped because they've 'done it'. In truth delivering the customer experience programme only helps to give you the route map to better CX.

Crafting a great enduring customer experience requires significant collaboration across different parts of your company.

It can require a shift in your strategy to deliver products, services and processes that are based on meeting customer needs; or it can require a culture shift so that employees reflect customer-centric values, and are motivated to deepen customer relationships.

It can also require organisational change to break down silos and allow your business to work cross-functionally in teams or task forces that live and breathe your customer needs, and are change agents to make them a reality.

We believe that an effective change management approach helps to identify and minimise issues, providing clear communication and faster speed to benefits for your organisation.

Change needs to consider the 'hard' and 'soft' processes, systems, structure and people and personal change. All of these should be underpinned by insight -understanding the readiness, willingness of individuals and underlying root causes of behavior and ways of working. Delivering change through your customer experience programme should be no different, except that it can be even more complex as end to end experiences touch different functions, teams and systems across your organisation.

Here are some more quick tips for you to consider:

Build capability

Whilst a customer experience programme built around specific improvement ideas and prototypes will deliver value to your customers, it is worth considering how a pervasive customer focus can become embedded in your organisational culture. This might include your strategy, structure, systems, capabilities and business processes.

Maintain a compelling case

Keep your customer experience transformation focused on value and a compelling case for change. Make sure that enough time is available to support the change and that management expectations of results and outcomes are realistic.

Role model management commitment

Your customer experience change must be managed and modelled from the top of your organisation. Willingness of senior staff to change demonstrates its importance. In order to show that the management team is in favour of the change, the change should be notable at this level first. At the same time don?t solely focus on your senior management. Get the balance right between top-down focus and bottom-up initiatives run by your employees.

Modify your organisation to make the change a reality

You will need to demonstrate systems, policies, procedures and business rules that may need to be changed in order to align with the new values and desired customer-centric culture. Send a clear message to employees that the old system and culture are in the past.

Incentivise customer focus

Encourage employee motivation and loyalty to your target customer culture. Help your organisation to articulate the value (to the business and to your customers) of the changes and support buy-in to the change process. Training might need to be provided to employees to clarify new processes, expectations, systems and ways of working. Improving the lives of customers should matter personally to your employees.

Deliver something usable

You will need to deliver outputs that are meaningful and resonate with the teams who will be receiving and adopting the new ways of working. Consider the best way to get your story across and the media to use to do so.

How we can help

Leadent Digital helps organisations to achieve transformational change. We love developing apps that transform customer experience and help you deliver a more frictionless service experience across all of your contact points and channels. Why not get in touch to tell us more about your current CX priorities?