Guest Blogger Bruce Temkin: Can You Be a Customer Experience Leader?
In a Temkin Group Insight Report called "The Current State of Customer Experience," we surveyed more than 140 large North American firms. It turns out that 11 percent of those companies think they are customer experience leaders today, but 65 percent want to lead within three years. That's a lot of ambition!
So what does it take to be a customer experience leader? A lot more than just focusing on a few customer-facing activities like website usability, retail store layout design, and call center quality monitoring. Customer experience leadership requires companies to reorient the entire fabric of their organization.
No, that is not easy. And, yes, that will take a lot of commitment.
To understand what it really takes to become a customer experience leader, I recently published a report called "The Four Customer Experience Core Competencies" that defined four competencies that companies must master if they want to build and sustain customer experience leadership:
- Purposeful Leadership: Operate consistently with a clear set of values.
- Employee Engagement: Align employees with the goals of the organization.
- Compelling Brand Values: Deliver on your brand promises to customers.
- Customer Connectedness: Infuse customer insight across the organization.
These competencies can be summarized in one statement: Customer experience needs to be everyone's business.
If you really want your organization to be good at something (like customer experience), then you can't just focus on the superficial areas. You need to build the culture and capabilities that enable everyone in your organization to consistently make the right decisions.
Consistency is a critical concept. Unfortunately, one bad experience can offset a lot of your brand's goodwill with customers. It's not easy to equip your organization to successfully adapt to a myriad of different customer situations and interactions.
Interestingly, when we looked at the data from 141 companies that took our competency assessment, only 3 percent ended up at the highest level -- what we call Customer-Centric Organizations. At the opposite end of the spectrum, one third of the companies earned our lowest rating.
Is this all doom and gloom? No. Customer experience leadership requires a multiyear journey, so it's not surprising that few companies have mastered all of the competencies.
Like any journey, you need to start with a strong will and a clear vision. But even that may be a problem with many companies. Our survey uncovered that that the top two obstacles to customer experience success were "other competing priorities" and a "lack of a clear customer experience strategy."
If you want to be a customer experience leader, it's time to really get started.
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About the Author: Bruce Temkin is customer experience transformist and managing partner of Temkin Group. He blogs at Customer Experience Matters
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