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Achieve the next level of CX
Expanding CX leading practices instills customer-first into the day-to-day lives of your employees.
Look to see what is working, and replicate it to deliver each phase faster and cheaper. For those aspects not achieving desired results, incorporate learnings and continuously improve.
Some projects that help with CX expansion include:
Software and tools – While much of your business can be managed through a single spreadsheet when you get started, eventually you will need to adopt software and tools as you scale.
Often times, businesses implement software hoping to solve a problem...a problem that is not even software related.
Then, they wind up with thousands of dollars worth of software subscriptions that are not used to the fullest potential, but still generating expense.
Before you buy, be sure you understand exactly the problem you’re trying to solve with and how a particular software or tool will help solve it.
We recommend conducting a root cause analysis to determine the business problem. Often times, you will find that the latest and greatest enterprise applications are not even necessary to resolve your situation.
However, if you need a new tool, be sure to conduct exhaustive research on the types of software out there.
Also, be sure to test out various types of tools, as some solutions could be free or very inexpensive depending on what you need.
Finally, be sure to tightly manage cost versus to use to confirm you are receiving the intended ROI from that tool, and drop it if you are not.
Process Improvement/Honing the Value Chain – Upon understanding some areas for improvement discovered during the organization assessment, prioritize no more then three projects for immediate process improvement.
This activity will require some process design skills to map the current and future state processes, implementation skills to the desired future state, and finally confirming the impacted stakeholders understand and have the tools available to achieve the improved processes.
Of course, you’ll need to identify metrics at the onset of the process improvement project to ensure your achieving the desired outcome.
Customer “success” – By this, we mean ensuring your customers are getting the most bang for their buck.
You’ll want to incorporate numerous ways to identify this, such as collecting continuous feedback via surveys, forums, and roundtables, tracking feedback trends, deploying a customer journey mapping exercise, identifying customer personas, and tying these data all together to ensure you are delivering your best product or service possible and hitting your renewals targets.
Performance Management – The best way to track if you are really performing as well as you think you are, is by having clearly documented and widely shared metrics.
Be sure to include a baseline of performance (how you are performing today), incorporate metrics very early when you embark on a new project, program, or organization development, and include only a few in each category you want to track.
It is recommended not to have too many metrics, or else you'll lose site of what it is you're attempting to track. Perhaps start with fewer than 10. You can always add more later, but do not overly complicate your performance management from the onset. Too many metrics is just as bad as having none at all.
Secondly, focus your metrics on the customer need. While internal processes should be tracked, make sure the items your tracking are actually delivering the most value to the customer.
Drawing upon specific customer feedback when talking with your customers, seek to understand what matters most to them, then develop your internal performance management around that.
Metrics should be actionable and measurable. That is, you should design metrics based on data you can capture, and then be able to make business tweaks based on the metrics output.
Also, align metrics to business goals. This will make it much easier to track success of your actions on business performance.