Presented By: Strativity Group

Forrester just released their 2011 projections for the Customer Experience market.. one of their projections for 2011 is the expansion of customer experience to new function in the organization that were not initially engaged. This is great news.

In Customer Experience 1.0 a group of partially empowered (some will say minimally empowered) well intentioned managers were trying to change mutli thousands employees organizations. It was a quixotic effort that resulted with very little change. If anything, it produced mostly exhaustion and frustration. It also caused loss of momentum and belief in the organization’s capacity to change and become customer centric.

The core mistake that those well-intentioned managers operated by was that they can actually change a well ingrained siloed organization ALONE. This mistake was followed by the flawed assumption that customer experience is common sense and everyone will follow just because they said so (and demonstrated the abysmal customer satisfaction scores). At best they were known as the customer scores people. At worst they annoyed the organization, remiding everyone that we are not as good as we think we are. No offence, no like this message.

Customer Experience 2.0 usher in a new era of disciplined execution. The renegades are being replaced by operational officers. At one client, the Chief Customer Officer actually own all channels and does not operate as a chief evangelist. This CCO has the power to make the required changes and does not have to beg for favors as other CCO often do.

Another important characteristic of Customer Experience 2.0 is the power of the story. If the underlying story of customer experience is our NPS is low, it will not inspire people to action. If the story is an inspiring story about making a difference on customers’ lives, then you have a shot at capturing attention and ultimately performance of employees and executives alike. Develop a story that capture their imagination and make them WANT to do it. Make employees and executives be proud of taking part and volunteer to join the efforts. Test your story, if you do not get volunteers, you are less likely to get results.

The customer experience team can not do the hygiene job of everyone else. Let me repeat that. The customer experience team is not here to do the job of everyone else. This was a fatal mistake that lead to wasted time and disappointments. Customer experience practitioners should be the providers of tools, vision and measurements. But every function and employee need to take their own responsibility and address their customer issues. They each need to aspire to deliver the desired experience and exceed customer expectations.

Customer Experience 2.0 need to clearly answer the following questions

• What is the cause? – Tell an inspirational story of customer experience
• Who does it ? – demonstrate direct, actionable task to each function and employee
• How will we do it? Provide tools and vision to enable employees to take ownership
• Why do we do it? – develop clear business case

Customer Experience 1.0 left us with the understanding of what customer experience is and why it is important in general. It also crwated unquenched thirst for “now what?”.

It is time to leap to the next phase and turn the promise into a profitable reality. We will do so by providing the organization with an actionable blueprint for success.