Guest Blogger Bruce Temkin: What's Your Customer Experience Plan for 2011?
Hopefully you're already developing customer experience plans for 2011. If not, it's time to get going.
In a Temkin Group survey earlier in the year, we found that 63 percent of large companies have ambitions to be customer experience leaders over the next few years. We also found that two thirds of customer experience "laggards" identified the lack of a customer experience strategy as a major obstacle -- more than twice the level of customer experience "leaders."
There's no way that companies can achieve these lofty customer experience ambitions unless they have solid plans. So here are some recommendations for your 2011 customer experience plans:
Understand your customers' journey. If you haven't done it already, then plan to map your customers' journeys. You need to uncover the motivations, goals, and needs of your customers -- and understand how that translates into when, where, and through what channel they interact with your company. This effort will highlight the places where you should be investing your time and energy. To gain the full insight, you need to go through this exercise for all of your key customer segments.
Define goals for customer segments. Don't fall into the trap of saying that you want to make every interaction with every customer memorable. First of all, it's not possible. And even if it was, it's not practical. Your plan should identify the behaviors and attitudes you want to engender for each target segment. Attack the experiences that have the most impact on those goals.
Identify your organizational strengths and weaknesses. Customer experience is an enterprise-wide capability; so you need to understand where your organization needs work. Complete Temkin Group's customer experience competency assessment, which examines four areas of capabilities: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness. Use this information to identify changes needed in your organization in 2011.
Embed customer experience in the rhythm of the business. In order for customer experience change to "stick" it needs to become a part of the everyday business. Look for ways to get the efforts included in regular business reviews, existing communications, and quarterly performance evaluations. Here's a slightly altered quote from Philip Crosby, author of Quality Is Free: "Customer experience is the result of a carefully constructed cultural environment. It has to be the fabric of the organization, not part of the fabric."
Don't underestimate the power of leadership. The number one obstacle to customer experience success across all segments we've examined is "other competing priorities." It takes a clear and unwavering commitment from the senior executive team to sustain customer experience efforts. I find that senior executives are often willing to help, but aren't sure about what they need to do. So be clear in your planning cycles about what you will need from the executive team in 2011.
Stay relaxed, and have fun. It's clear that there will be a significant uptick in customer experience activity in 2011. While that's great news for most customer experience professionals, it also means that they will be asked to do even more next year -- since I anticipate that staffing levels will not keep up with these increasing demands. Just remember to relax, have fun, and don't get burnt out. We can (and will!) collectively make a huge difference in customer experience in 2011.
This is my last post on the 1to1 blog this year, so I want to wish everyone a happy holiday season and a wonderful 2011!
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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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