What is Customer Experience Leadership? Customer experience leadership is organization-wide alignment to core-growth customers’ expectations. This is automatic CX excellence. The goal is maximum lifetime value by improving prosperity of customers, employees, and partners. Your value increases as theirs does, whenever mutual productivity and trust are at the center of your efforts.
Experience leadership is measured by prevention of issue occurrence, or what was delivered vs. what was promised.
Your highest growth comes from Experience Leadership, because it minimizes costs and maximizes success of every growth initiative.
“Experience Leadership” is a phrase coined by Lynn Hunsaker at ClearAction Continuum.
Consider how the Experience Management discipline parallels the evolution of the HR discipline. It started out as Personnel, then Employee Relations, and eventually, end-to-end Human Resources with Organizational Development and Employee Experience. Similar parallels can be found in IT, Safety, etc. Value evolved by shifting from reactive to proactive modes, from control to empower, and from standalone function to working through ALL managers.
Here’s what this looks like for Customer Experience, Employee Experience, and Partner Experience value evolution:
1) Touchpoint Management
- Technical Support, Customer Success, Loyalty Programs, CRM, . . .
- Set of practices to retain and expand revenue.
- One-by-one guidance and programs.
- To reverse churn and drive cross-sells and up-sells.
2) Experience Management
- Journey Mapping, VoX, Human-Centered Design, Net Promoter System, . . .
- Set of practices to meet (or exceed) expectations.
- Interaction-based, programmatic.
- To engage customers, employees, and partners as brand allies for revenue growth.
3) Experience Leadership
- Brand integrity: company-wide alignment to core stakeholders’ expectations.
- Set of practices to empower full productivity. (internal and external)
- Culture-based, strategic, most profitable and scalable.
- To engage your ecosystem in preventing roadblocks to lifetime value growth.
- Balance among these 3 tiers, with emphasis on Experience Leadership, is vital for today’s crisis of trust among employees, partners, and customers as the 3 hands that feed organizational success.
Experience Leadership is a Team Sport
- A team sport means every player is essential to winning.
- A mis-step by any work group in your enterprise can spoil CX, EX, or PX.
- Pebbles in customers’ (or employees’ or partners’) shoes hold them back from full productivity with your brand.
- Preventing and resolving pebbles requires customer-centered proactive mindsets and cross-organizational collaboration.
- Customers pay for salaries, budgets and profit sharing. Their needs are the context and joys for EX and PX.
- Making CX a team sport means you’re making customer-centered thinking and doing a way of life for all.
- Automatic experience excellence is ironically, far more than AI, apps, and automation.
- For employee experience, it means people who are unified, appreciative, competent, respectful of inter-dependencies, and contributing to your values and goals.
- Likewise, automatic CX excellence means your whole company is unified in its appreciation of customers’ preferences and values and goals — and everyone is competent and coordinated toward customers’ values and goals.
- Core-growth customers are your near-future high-revenue, high-margin customers. Get crystal clear about their expectations for your brand’s magnetic attraction to these customers. Make their end-to-end customer experience at or above their expectations. What you learn by doing this will benefit all your customers. Expand your excellent performance to next-level/all customers as your bandwidth allows.
- In contrast to “management” controlling performance toward a goal, “leadership” influences and aligns (de-silo-izes) performance.
- Shift from the 2010s to the 2020s! Trust and value are based on alignment. The goal is lifetime value.
- From 2009 to 2019, the global economic downturn put revenue as top customer experience focus.
- For 2020 to the future, the global pandemic affected every individual, family, and organization: everyone is hungry for TRUST and VALUE.
- Bonus #1: Revenue is included in lifetime value. AND you get MUCH more than revenue!
- Bonus #2: Trust, value, alignment, and lifetime value apply equally to employee experience, customer experience, and partner experience.
101 ways exist for YOU to shape automatic CX excellence. It’s all in how you collect, communicate, and champion customer insights!
See also: Customer Experience Playbook
