Is it time to make changes to your business processes? First, you’ll need to get executives and employees alike to accept these changes. Read our top tips on gathering CX support in this article!
Many eXperience professionals – CX, UX, EX, et al. – agree that getting leadership support for their initiatives is the hardest part of their jobs. There are many reasons why, ranging from willing-but-cash-strapped organizations to executives that simply don’t see the need to change what appears to be working.
And yet, according to stats compiled by CMS Wire:
- 77% of brands believe CX is a key competitive differentiator.
- 83% of executives feel unimproved CX presents them with considerable revenue and market share risks.
- 85% of brands believe they offer personalized customer experiences, but only 60% of consumers agree.
As people who are passionate about Customer Experience, what can we do to get leadership to give CX a chance? And when you finally sail over that hurdle, how can you get employees behind changes that can improve CX?
We’ll tackle these twin problems today, starting with getting executives onboard with CX changes.
4 Tips for Getting Executive Buy-In for CX
In preparing this article, we consulted our own experience – and did a lot of research. The following three pieces of advice tend to be fairly widespread:
- Tie CX to financial and business goals. If you want your C-suite to get onboard with CX, show them the money. It can be cost savings, increased revenue, or greater efficiency. Often, a good CX program will have all three. As the people who have their finger on the financial pulse of the company, leaders will want to know the bottom line.
Back up the financial info with facts on how CX can tie into or support other initiatives the company may be considering. This can boost the sense of urgency related to CX. - Have stats. There’s a business adage that says leadership loves numbers. Focus the broad outcomes mentioned above with carefully researched and verified statistics. Without quantitative data, any initiative can be a hard sell. But when you can assign real values to the outcome, expense, and timeline, you’re moving from an idea to a feasible plan.
- Take execs on the customer journey. Decision-makers are usually experts in their domain. As such, it can be hard for them to understand what customers – especially new customers – might experience. The customer journey may have changed since these experts served on the front lines. Getting them to walk through the customer journey and understand the friction points can be revelatory.
We agree with all of these tips. But we’d add one more: research your decision-makers like you would your customers.
Build Empathy for Decision-Makers
We spend a lot of time looking at things from our customers’ perspective. When we’re trying to get CX buy-in, why not spend some time trying to understand the execs’ perspective? Sharpen up your empathy skills and ask:
- What is this person’s background? Where are they coming from, and what do they most care about?
- What other projects are they involved in? How might CX further those projects?
- What information will they need to get behind CX?
- What can I do to remove some of the friction from the decision-making process?
Remember, execs are people too. Numbers and logic are important, but so is their experience and background. In CX and in business, a truly logical decision works with emotion. It understands the human experience and includes its impact as a factor in the decision.
So, never overlook the human element in pitching CX. Bring your emotional intelligence and your empathy for your leadership, and use these to craft how you present the facts and figures of your CX plans.
5 Tips for Getting Employees Onboard with CX
So, you finally got your boss (and your boss’ boss) to sign off on your CX initiative. As your organization’s CX leader, you now have another challenge: Driving adoption among non-CX employees whose jobs will be impacted by your changes.
How you promote employee adoption will depend on your organizational structure and culture as well as the type and scope of changes you’re implementing. The following tips will help you build a framework for a more successful CX adoption strategy:
- Understand the obstacles. One of the very first things you need to do to promote CX is to understand what will change, who will be affected, how it will impact them, and how they will feel about it. Then you can anticipate and prepare for any challenges that might arise. It’s also important to note that some unforeseen obstacles will probably pop up. While you won’t know what they are, you can plan for the time they’ll take.
- Give them reasons to believe in CX. “Because I said so” is the most frustrating phrase in the English language. If you want to get employees onboard with CX, explain why you’re making the change. Share how it will benefit the employees as well as the customers and the organization.
- Lean on your CX champion. Often, there’s someone in company leadership who’s excited about CX. This person can help you build enthusiasm and momentum, and their opinion matters. Enlist their help to get employees excited about CX too.
- Establish a shared CX vocabulary. It’s hard to get everyone to pull together if they can’t communicate clearly. Make this easier for teams by establishing a shared, customer-first language that they can use to talk about CX.
The Most Important Part of Employee Adoption
Before you do anything else, listen. In the CX world, employees can also be customers. So go out and get some employee feedback on how the CX plan might work (or is working). Talk to team leaders and individual employees; bring a sense of empathy and curiosity to the conversation. You will probably find some helpful insights on what and how to improve.
Fostering enthusiasm for any change can be difficult. But when employees understand the reasons and benefits behind CX, they’ll be more likely to adopt new tools and techniques. We CX professionals can do our part by showing empathy as well as excitement about new initiatives.
Bringing Empathy to CX Obstacles
If you’re spearheading a CX initiative, you may be asking people to change how they do their jobs. They may see the change as an improvement – or they may see it as a step in the wrong direction. Make it a priority to find out. Ask the following questions and talk to the people involved to get the answers:
- Which employees will be primarily impacted by this change? How will it affect their daily work?
- Who will be secondarily affected by this change? How?
- How will this make them feel about this company and their role in it?
- What can we do to make the transition less stressful?
- How can we show we value their efforts?
So, our fifth and final tip is to listen to fellow employees and treat them with respect and consideration. Remember, engaged and happy employees are the backbone of a great customer experience!
For Getting CX Support, Empathy Is Your MVP
For customers outside of the company, CXers know research, listening, and empathy are essential parts of the process. For our internal customers, we can say that these qualities are the most valuable parts of the CX growth process – our MVPs.
From a Human-Centered Design perspective, this is a simple equation: you’re trying to meet human needs, whether that’s inside the company or outside of it. Leading with empathy and open-minded curiosity will always help you solve these kinds of problems.
If you’re stuck on a particularly tricky CX challenge – or if you need some help streamlining or improving your business process – reach out to CX by Design for a free 30-minute consultation. We’re always happy to share our expertise!
