What is Walking the Customer Experience Talk?

Walk the Talk Prerequisite #1: Double-check Your Priorities

1. What do your strategy and objectives imply about your priorities?
2. What do your job roles and responsibilities imply?
3. What do your ops review and staff meeting agendas imply?
4. What does your formal and informal recognition of employees imply?
5. What do your compensation and benefits imply?
6. What do your daily decisions imply?

Walking the customer experience talk requires ongoing evidence that you believe all your needs will be met by aligning all you do with what’s important to customers.

Walk the Talk Prerequisite #2: Double-check Your Alignment

1. Is customer-centered management at the top of the list of your corporate values?
2. Is your entire C-team unified in their definition, vision, and respective ownership of customer experience excellence?
3. Is any part of your structure or ecosystem at odds with customers’ priorities?
4. Are new assignments and endeavors designed to prevent or bridge customer experience silos?
5. Are all customer experience management efforts driving a hand-in-glove experience?
6. Are business unit, department, team, and individual goals synchronized with customer-centered enterprise goals?

Walking the customer experience talk requires inherent evidence that customers are at the center of your thinking.

Walk the Talk Prerequisite #3: Influence Everyday Thinking

1. Does customers’ well-being trump financial and personal forces in decisions?
2. Are customer inputs top priority in annual operating plans and development of products and processes?
3. Do performance reviews at the organization level and employee level emphasize improvements for customers?
4. Do recognition and incentives emphasize prevention and teamwork for customers’ well-being?
5. Is customer experience excellence (e.g. customer issue prevention, customer reaction anticipation, mutual value creation) woven into every department’s rituals?
6. Are employees entrusted to make on-the-fly decisions to solve customer needs?

Walking the customer experience talk requires constant evidence that customers are at the center of your doing.

Walk the Talk Prerequisite #4: Influence Everyday Doing

1. Are originating departments of issues causing customer dissatisfaction:
   • Promptly resolving each issue with each customer who requests it?
   • Preventing recurrence of poorly performing key drivers of loyalty for your entire customer base?
2. Does voice-of-the-customer capture insights that inform every part of your company about customers’ expectations and perceptions, without being burdensome for customers’ VoC participation?
3. Is no functional area exempt from improving internal and external customers’ well-being?
4. Do customer experience action plans address root causes of customer needs, with frequent scrutiny?
5. Does every department ask their internal customers how they need to improve, and educate their internal/external suppliers about their needs?
6. Can every employee describe how their role impacts customer experience?

Walking the customer experience talk requires behaviors congruent with customers’ expectations.

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Walking the customer experience talk means customers’ well-being overarches your list of corporate values, and is the reality for what gets people ahead or not.