master experience leadershipExperience Leadership is the next horizon for growth:

  • Bigger margins: preventing issues from recurring or occurring.
  • Faster payments: increased trust and value, less burden on customers.
  • Greater efficiency: CX insight-guided processes, policies, and behaviors; no need for shrinkflation or skimpflation, etc.
  • Bolder expansions: CX insight-inspired roll-outs, business models, mergers.
  • Expanded market penetration: stronger relationships generate more referrals and stem negative word-of-mouth.
  • Richer return on assets: more value-creating versus value-rescuing, less dysfunction, more collaboration, better productivity among employees and with partners and suppliers.
  • Increasing lifetime value: less mercenary me-centered actions and policies, less pressure on people of all types, less remedial efforts, more magnetic attraction and retention of employees, partners, customers, and investors.

Now is the time to embrace Experience Leadership as your primary focus. It maximizes lifetime value by preventing value roadblocks. This is in contrast to Experience Management maximizing brand allies via referrals and quick wins, and Touchpoint Management maximizing revenue (or productivity for employee experience or nonprofits or governments) by reversing and offsetting churn.

Master Experience Leadership Now: LEADERSHIP VS MANAGEMENT
‘Experience Leadership’ is a phrase coined by Lynn Hunsaker to rise above narrow/reactive tactics/programs.

50% of your CX, EX, and PX (customer, employee, partner) efforts should be dedicated to Experience Leadership as your foundation, splitting the other 50% among Touchpoint Management and Experience Management. This way, you’re reducing pressure on touchpoints and increasing traction and scalability for XM.

Experience Leadership is straightforward sensibility. It proactively aligns financials, customers, employees, and partners (including suppliers). It does not add to your workload, but rather, it course-corrects what you’re already doing. Accordingly, it minimizes waste and maximizes value.

Automatic experience excellence is the aim of Experience Leadership. Automatic? Yes, by prevention of issues. Excellence? Yes, meeting or exceeding what you promised. Not unreasonable. When it’s hard to close this gap, then manage expectations better. This is brand integrity.

Now is the time to face realities: unacceptable competencies, trust, waste, performance, and value. Globally, 58% of people buy based on shared values: are they feeling your values? 45% of people do not trust companies: are you removing trust inhibitors?

Master Experience Leadership Now for NEW 2020s needs

A drop since 2017 (5+ years!) in US customer experience is the lowest level now since 2006: are you rising above this trend? No industry has ever ranked in the good nor excellent category in a major CX index: will yours be the first? Only 8% of firms are in the top 2 of 5 CXM maturity stages: will you aim for top maturity in 2024?

80% (!!) of CX practitioners are weak or very weak in 6 CX ROI competencies: among everyone leading experience of customers, partners, and employee, are you ensuring expert competence? You rely on them to generate what you and investors need. Customers fund salaries, budgets, and profits — what on earth is a higher priority than that?

Experience Management and Experience Touchpoints are clearly insufficient for employee experience as well as customer experience and partner experience. Compounding this gap is the fact that a LOT has changed since 2019 — EXCEPT for practices in experience management.

This is an imperative to master experience leadership now. This is why CEOs must drive the charge to rise above outdated mindsets.

The 2010s were kicked off by the global economic crisis, shaping CX obsession with revenue and customers as brand allies.

The 2020s were kicked off by pandemic hardshipsshaping customers’ and employees’ ongoing outcry for trust, values, and value.

To-date, CX ROI (as well as corporate financial performance!) is squandered by narrow focus in inside-out journey mapping, micro moments in marketing, impure data in VoC, and failure to use customer insights to guide wiser cost containment, growth, and work groups’ performance standards.

While of course a lot of good is underway, it is quite far from what’s needed to master experience leadership now.

Now is the time to shift gears from practices of yesteryear to a much higher level of prevention, collaboration, integrity, trust, and growth in many dimensions.

Insist on Experience Leadership Mastery this year at all managerial levels (Board to new college grads) and in every area that manages the experience of the 3 stakeholders who generate value for all: employees, partners, and customers. This foundation will make all their specializations and tactics far more influential in shaping bigger margins, faster payments, greater efficiency, bolder expansions, expanded market penetration, richer return on assets, and increased lifetime value of all 3 stakeholders plus investors.

Please send your deputies to my presentation on 13 July 2023 at 15:00 GMT (= 16:00 CET = 11 a.m. US ET):

Are 2010s Practices Shrinking Your CX ROI?

ECXO 13 JULY
Facilitator: Ricardo Samuel Saltz Gulko, co-founder of European Customer Experience Organization (ECXO)

Get 5 take-aways in this illuminating session — guides to:

1. Shifting your C-team’s vision of CXM purpose

2. Calculating CX ROI in 5 practical ways

3. Getting started in trust, values, value

4. Taking a page from the HR, IT, and Finance playbooks

5. Engaging non-customer-facing groups

For a clear vision of Experience Leadership Maturity, here’s an overview video:

As it gives you many layers of super-rare wisdom, this is e-consulting, rather than typical ‘training’ or ‘courses’. It’s a resource you’ll revisit many times as your career evolves. It’s flexible for customer, employee, and partner experience enthusiasts and professionals to benefit universally, regardless of organization type, size, etc. This makes it a rich cross-pollination opportunity for use cases and companywide wisdom.

 


 

Author Lynn Hunsaker started her career in the strategic planning department at Sonoco Products Company. She was Head of Corporate Quality at Applied Materials. She was first in the world to conduct a global study of B2B CX practices, and first in the world to benchmark marketing operations practices.

This article is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery. Yes, all these points are included in it, and MUCH more!

See a 5-minute demo:

5-MINUTE DEMO
ClearAction.com/mastery-demo

ClearAction = engage everyone in walking the talk. This is e-consulting . . . far more value than “training”. It’s high-powered super-rare advice. In place of an expensive consult, we avoid invoice rigmarole and boost thousands of businesses globally. It saves your individual time, continuity, and resources. It boosts your influence, reputation, efficiency, capabilities, and growth!

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session for your progress in any area.
  3. Set up a 2-hour C-Suite Guide to XM Growth working session.
  4. Redirect your CX / EX / PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateAdvanced.
  5. Make your whole department more influential: Experience Value Exchange.