customer experience management strategyOver the past year, I’ve written quite a bit about customer experience management strategy, including a six-part series about keys to success in the future.

Shared vision, strategic planning, and governance are rarely discussed in customer experience literature. Collaboration, teamwork, and involvement of multiple functional areas in taking action on customer insights must be well-thought-out and institutionalized across your company for long-lasting results.

Here are customer experience strategy advice highlights to accelerate and maintain your success:

Customer Experience Strategy

Advice This Past Year Highlights
Customer Experience Strategy: Shared Vision “Sharing a vision across a company means there are common definitions of the current situation, the desired situation, and how to bridge the gap. Customer experience strategy is incomplete without shared vision.”
How to Make Customer Experience Strategy Integral to Corporate Strategy “Why do companies succeed? Follow the money. Pure and simple. The money comes from customers. When customers leave, investors leave, not the other way around. Hence, common sense says customer experience (CX) insights should be a determinant of corporate strategy . . . and certainly not an afterthought or altogether separate!”
Customer Experience Planning: Do This, Not That “In the spirit of the best-selling eating guide — Eat This, Not That — which spells out popular misconceptions about sensible choices, here are 3 recommendations for your customer experience planning: (1) Drive significant change in order to drive significant ROI, (2) Align methodologies with what customers want, and (3) Expand shared vision for customer experience excellence enterprise-wide and beyond.”
Customer Experience Governance: Do This, Not That “Customer experience governance is essential to ongoing success, especially in terms of enduring CX ROI (return on investment). It’s the ‘glue’ that holds all the pieces together, the standards, and most importantly, the mojo of CX progress. Here are 3 keys to getting it right: CXM infrastructure, CX champions, and CX momentum.”
Breaking Down Silos for Customer Experience Management “Since customers see their experience as a horizontal series of steps (journey), are silos of experts across the company negatively affecting customer experience? Yes. We’ve all been through the wringer in our own role as customers and found ourselves in a bewildering maze.”
Exploring the Elusive ROI of Customer Experience Management “It’s about getting it right the first time and every time — being easy to do business with, and offering hassle-free products, services, communications and interactions.”
Metrics for Customer Experience Management “The gravity of upside and downside to customer experience metrics selection cannot be overstated. There are two paths of metrics you should be monitoring in order to see clearly what’s predictive of the beloved end-results: (1) action plan metrics and (2) program metrics.”
Loving Customers for Customer Experience Excellence “Good etiquette says you could announce that in lieu of receiving any gifts yourself, you prefer that the giver gives to the charity, if at all. A corollary to customer experience management is this: do things for your customers, not to or from them.”
Loving Suppliers for Customer Experience Excellence “If every company has no intention of loving their suppliers, then what’s the point of B2B companies trying to be loved their customers?”
Customer Experience Journeys: Map for Actionability “Accelerate participants’ and readers’ attention toward ‘how do these insights change the way we should look at all of our existing efforts, processes, policies, business models, messages, handoffs, and mindsets?'”
How Human Resources Can Add Value to Customer Experience Excellence “Knowledge management, employee engagement, and cross-functional collaboration can be facilitated by HR to achieve greater connectedness, consistency and synergy both internally and externally. CX excellence is about people (suppliers) giving their best to people (customers) who are willing to reward that with their wallets and enthusiasm.”
Creating World-Class Customer Experience Teams “In sports, a great deal of thought goes into creating winning teams. Choosing the right players, getting everyone on the same page, practicing hand-offs and executing a clever playbook are how winning sports teams are created. In a recent #CXO tweet chat these same success factors were discussed as they apply to customer experience teams.”
Are You a Customer Experience Action Hero? “Everyone is doing case management, following up with low survey raters. That’s all very nice for a small percentage of your customer base. Those of us who have been doing this for a while realize it’s necessary yet insufficient. Here’s how 3 types of action heroes make sense — or not — for customer experience management.”
3 Types of Customer Experience Action Essential to ROI “If your recipe for customer experience ROI does not call for 3 types of action, it will probably flop. The 3 necessary action ingredients are (1) Micro Action, (2) Macro Action, AND (3) Cultural Action. Here’s the recipe.”
5 Keys to Customer Experience for the Future “When we buy something the farthest things from our minds are that it might not work as expected, or how it will be to call customer service, or the surveys we’ll be invited to answer, or recommendations we’ll be encouraged to make, and so forth. Yet, for customer experience (CX) managers in companies, these are the first things on their minds.”
Customer Experience for the Future — Key #1: Context is King “Customer experience excellence as context for every job means that it is always top-of-mind as the primary basis for the way we do our jobs.”
Customer Experience for the Future — Key #2: Outside-In Beyond Skin-Deep “In the quest for “outside-in” most companies have voice of the customer programs, loyalty programs, and high-touch service. Even so, these outside-in efforts are typically skin-deep. Outside-in is often only being brought into the customer-facing portions of the company. And the rest of the company is still behaving in inside-out mode.”
Customer Experience for the Future — Key #3: Brilliance by Pattern Discovery “Think of advances made in biology, psychology, physics, and other sciences: our wisdom stems from noticing that Y follows X, and A is connected to B, and whenever C and D are combined there’s a certain reaction. Most things in life are not linear, but more of a maze. Step back to see the patterns, and you’ll see brilliant truths, options, and solutions. In customer experience, there are data patterns, people patterns, process patterns, and more.”
Customer Experience for the Future — Key #4: Collaboration Earns Trust “What erodes trust? Incongruence with expectations. Mis-matches take a toll on relationship strength. The cost is high. Incongruence affects both employees and customers. And nearly every issue that creates surprises or hassles cannot be resolved without cross-functional collaboration.”
Customer Experience for the Future — Key #5: Momentum Drives Company Growth “Growth requires fuel. New customers and returning customers are the fuel of company growth. You can invest in inorganic growth: programs and technologies that entice renewals and evangelism. Or you can invest in organic growth: processes, products and culture that make your company irresistible.”

Wishing you the very best as you apply these best practices in your company!

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