Who fuels your enterprise’s growth?
— Customers fund salaries, budgets, and dividends
— Employees provide what customers need
— Partners deliver what customers need
Accordingly, anything your enterprise is doing that’s out of alignment with customer, employee, and partner needs (CX+EX+PX) is waste!
This waste shows up in very expensive ways: turnover, lost expertise, lost opportunities, lost productivity, morale, reputation, escalations, remedies, enticements, slower sales velocity, extensive remedial staffing and remedial technologies, and extensive remedial programs.
What about non-profits, government, politicians, insurers, and causes that don’t have clarity in “customers funding salaries, budgets, and dividends”? It’s the same principle: whoever benefits from your solutions and whoever funds them both must see your enterprise as “in alignment” with their needs, or they interpret waste and they seek alternatives.
What are remedial programs? Separate efforts within your enterprise to turn around churn and negative word of mouth, by making up for things that weren’t in alignment with customer, employee, and partner needs (CX+EX+PX).
Remedial programs are necessary, yet they actually intensify the vicious circle of CX+EX+PX misalignment throughout your enterprise.
I call this Jenga management.
Jenga is a party game where players remove a block from a stack, then place it on top of the stack with the aim of not allowing the stack to tumble.
This is a great analogy for remedial programs and managing out of alignment with CX+EX+PX.
As corners are cut, and as misalignment waste occurs, burdens are placed on the customer touchpoints, and on employees and partners to make amends for those mis-steps.
Today’s great reshuffle, great resignation, and other trust-based crises in business are the result of Jenga management.
When CX, EX and PX are programs, it tends to excuse accountability among the people who are causing burdens on customers, employees, and partners!
Instead, make CX, EX and PX a way of life among all groups in your enterprise.
Making CX+EX+PX a way of life means you’re educating everyone about the needs of customers, employees, and partners as performance standards for every group in your enterprise.
Influencing enterprise-wide adoption and accountability of CX+EX+PX performance standards is the secret to becoming a well-loved brand in every dimension.
The goal is to close the gap between what’s delivered vs. what’s promised.
It’s the secret to significant, sustained financial gains from CX, EX, and PX. It’s the key to almost-automatic experience excellence.
I call enterprise-wide alignment to CX+EX+PX expectations this: Experience Leadership.
It’s better than touchpoint management (service, loyalty, CRM, etc.), because it’s proactive: preventing recurrence and even occurrence of issues.
It’s better than experience management (journey mapping, human-centered design, Net Promoter System, etc.), because it’s scalable and culture-changing.
You’ll still need touchpoint and experience management, but you must dedicate a greater percentage of focus on Experience Leadership to stop Jenga management and its very expensive consequences.
How can YOU make CX+EX+PX a way of life? Learn influencing, trust-building, internal partnering skills. Position your role as a facilitator of company-wide progress in CX+EX+PX-centered thinking and doing.
These 6 A’s are your key to stopping Jenga management!
Every role that collects insights about customers, employees, and partners is pivotal to the realization of CX+EX+PX as a way of life in your enterprise.
Make the shift today from managing CX+EX+PX programs to facilitating CX+EX+PX as a way of life.
Make the most hot opportunities in re-engineering of processes and policies by sharing CX+EX+PX insights with those managers, to maximize alignment with these key stakeholders’ needs.
Download the CustomerExperienceJenga and share it with your colleagues and management chain.
Images licensed to ClearAction Continuum by Shutterstock.
