If it’s time to build a better customer experience, you need to do something first: define what customer experience means to your organization. Find out more in this article.
Are you interested in creating a better experience for your customers? With CX as a key competition point for nearly all businesses, we bet you are. But there’s something you need to do before you start drafting any CX improvement plans:
You need to define exactly what CX means to your company and the people in it.
Here’s why.
We all know CX, right?
If you were to ask four people in different departments to define Customer Experience, you’d likely get four definitions. The answers might go something like this:
- Marketing Lead: “CX is all about getting the customer outreach right.”
- Sales Manager: “CX is building a strong, personal relationship with clients.”
- Customer Service Manager: “Good CX is providing great support to our customers.”
- UX Design Lead: “CX is about delivering a great user experience.”
All of these answers are right, and all of them are a little bit incorrect. Confused? A good definition of Customer Experience will make it all clear.
A Better Definition of CX
Our fictional team leaders were not precisely wrong. As far as their definitions went, they were right. But each definition was limited to one area, that’s the problem. The definitions are narrow because each team sees CX within the confines of their goals and roles.
McKinsey defines Customer Experience this way: “CX refers to everything an organization does to put customers first, managing their journeys and serving their needs.”
You might also say that average CX teams see CX in the siloed way described above, but great CX teams see CX in a holistic, cross-functional way.
Everything the customer touches is involved in CX; the customer experience directly includes all customer-facing departments and personnel. And that’s why it’s important to have a unified, company-wide definition of CX. Without it, you’ll have teams working towards different (albeit related) goals.
Defining CX Within an Organization
Great CX requires commitment, coordination, and communication. There has to be a mutual definition of what good, great, and outstanding levels of CX are in your company.
It would be easiest to simply declare, “Our CX goal is this, and our plan is that.” But these one-sided definitions rarely work; they don’t take into account what every team and team leader needs from CX. To build an effective CX strategy, you need buy-in. And buy-in starts with finding out what people want.
In short, CX strategies start with conversations. Only when you’ve discovered what your customers and your team really need can you build a framework to deliver it.
3 Questions to Define CX in Your Organization
If you need to get the ball rolling on defining CX for your organization, contact each department leader and ask these 3 questions:
- How would you define Customer Experience?
- What does a good customer experience look like for you?
- How can CX help your department?
This will give you the framework (and background information) you need to build a definition of CX that everyone in your company understands and can support. Once that’s done, you can start examining how to build a better customer experience.
If you get stuck on establishing CX in your organization, finding bottlenecks and pain points, or at any other point in CX process improvement, reach out to the CX by Design team. We love sharing our insights, and the initial 30-minute consultation is free! Contact us today to get started.
