Chapter 11

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How to equip and support teams for success

It happens all too often that those charged with responsibility for the delivery of customer experience programmes are inadequately equipped to carry out the task. This chapter looks at the root cause of failure and the way to reverse this by creating conditions to thrive for both the people and the strategies. Think about these questions:

• Why do customer-based transformations nearly always fail?
• Where does the customer sit on an organisation chart?
• Do we need a chief customer officer?

Few, if any, senior executive training courses focus on equipping leaders to manage the customer component of their balanced scorecard. The resulting lack of confidence at a leadership level creates problems at an executional level in the company. We will look at how leaders can absorb the customer component and effectively lead their teams without even breaking step with the rest of their work. The issue of this being new and additional in an already full diary will be explored and examples of how the customer can be integrated into everyday activities illustrated.

Increasingly the customer experience is featuring in job adverts so what can be done to set up a chief customer officer (CCO) or customer experience lead for success and avoid the early pitfalls of integrating this new customer management discipline into your organisational design?

In the last 20 years we have seen the importance of the customer rise in the consciousness of the business world, even if at times it might have happened unconsciously! So, more and more senior executives quote the customer experiences as one of their top three strategic drivers for the next financial year. The problem is that this has been the case for the last 10 years but nothing has actually changed. Back in 2003 Lippincott Mercer research described customer experience as the next ‘business tsunami’; well 13 years on we are still waiting! Yes there have been a few small waves but if we ask the question ‘how many successful customer experience-based transformations can you name?’ the answer is close to if not zero. This begs the question, ‘why?’ Against a backdrop of strong strategic imperatives, why have businesses singularly seemed to have failed to deliver long-term change? Twenty years ago there was little by way of an expert support base or network available and few tools to support the internal external customer agenda. Today there are specialist businesses that have grown in what was initially a niche area: customer journey mapping is regularly deployed as an outside-in customer view, measurement frameworks have evolved such as we have covered earlier and they are supported by a growing software capability (like SuiteCX). Yet the almost-weekly launches of laudable programmes targeting improvements to the way businesses look after their customers remain doomed to failure.

It could be claimed that the global financial crisis brought the customer question into the boardroom in a way never previously experienced. As global corporations previously thought impregnable failed day after day, the survivors launched an unprecedented wave of slash and burn to try and rescue balance sheets and profit & loss statements (P&Ls) – who can forget the scenes of office workers leaving buildings carrying cardboard boxes containing the remnants of a career? The maturity of social media has further added to the backlash. Of course this was no more than a temporary stitch in place – the smarter businesses began to realise that cutting costs is a blunt instrument and if you don’t know where to cut in the first place it can leave you with lower costs but haemorrhaging customers, sales and of course profits. The deteriorating customer experience added further weight to an increasingly negative customer sentiment towards some brands that converted into ‘customer flight’ and a vicious downward spiral.

Every cloud has a silver lining and this was to some extent the case for the nascent customer experience discipline: the need to retain customers was now an urgent boardroom matter that embattled CEOs needed to take control of. If it wasn’t there before, the mission and vision now clearly stated that customers are important, usually expressed in colourful language like ‘passionate’, ‘love’ or ‘customers first’!

One of the biggest causes of failure for customer experience activity is of course that the words are very easy to say and many thousands of CEOs will have stood up at conferences and told the assembled leaders that the customer is their driver or something similar – indeed the customer agenda is perfect for corporate sound bites for use internally, with investors and the media. To understand why these statements can be made by the most senior figures and yet continue to fail to deliver we need to consider the DNA of customer experience transformation programmes (CETPs) – how do they start, how do they grow and how do they fail?

What usually follows a conference announcement is the initiating of a company-wide transformational programme – let’s call it ‘customer first’ with the accompanying ‘we are in it together’ sign off. The Herculean task of transforming the company to one driven by its customers is then ‘gifted’ to an executive who in most cases handles this ‘honour’ in the same way that you might handle an angry king cobra by then passing this honour down the line to a programme team. So we have already passed the true accountability down to a level where the individual or team are very constricted in terms of their ability to make changes and those who should be accountable will be in review and critique mode next time the subject comes across their desks.

Your deployment then follows a familiar and depressing format:

• establish a major programme complete with massive and stifling governance and reporting;
• continue to transfer responsibility downwards;
• create a two-year timeline where the deliverables will solve ‘world peace’;
• review the current state, typically focusing on IT, processes, and infrastructure, not because they are the key components but because that is where businesses are most comfortable;
• create business cases;
• try to get onto your executive-crowded agendas in order to justify the need for change to the very people who initiated it;
• kill other positive ideas for change on the grounds that the programme has or will have this covered and all will be delivered in two years’ time;
• deal with executive sponsors that have more important things to do than work on your customer agenda and instead turn up for a 30-minute opening address at important meetings and perhaps to have findings reported back to them (of course what this subliminally tells the team is that there are more important things to do than their work);
• ‘enjoy’ and endure the constant chipping away by unconvinced colleagues who as they don’t have line responsibility feel free to undermine the agenda and feel threatened by change they don’t understand (‘we are already running a profitable business, tell me why we need to change?’);
• watch your original sponsor be promoted or leave and see the customer agenda reduced to the ‘angry teenager in the basement’ again – and worst of all watch the CEO leave and wait for the notification to stop as the new CEO conducts a ‘strategic review’.

This may seem an unnecessarily dark picture, but it is the reality for many customer-based programmes around the world today. The impact is to set back the customer agenda by years inside the business as it is seen as a failure and other options are then given priority – in many ways it would have been better never to start on such a journey.

These problems begin as soon as the proverbial genie is out of the bottle, which is when the CEO stands up in public and says we are going to focus on our customers – of course what he or she means is you are going to try and focus on your customers until something more short term and important comes along.

No one will ever argue with the sentiment or even the business logic, but nothing in an individual’s career to date has prepared them to answer the question ‘how will I/should I contribute to a customer agenda?’ – in many cases they then take the view that on analysis this ‘customer piece’ does not affect me so I will carry on as normal until I have to engage in my role as chief financial officer, sales director, legal counsel, IT director, operations director, logistics director; the list goes on. This could not be further from the truth: customers impact on everyone and everyone impacts the customer. In the world of business, the customer is unique in that it has the capability to bust silos – it is hard to argue with what your customer says about your business and its failings, hence the challenge and the threat it poses.

Here are just a few examples of what you can do to educate the wider team, reduce the fear factor and instil confidence that improvements are deliverable:

• Provide senior leaders with support through coaching, mentoring, awareness sessions that will equip them to actively engage with the customer experience with confidence.
• Review the current training and development courses that you run or buy in. See where you can inject customer experience into these existing programmes.
• Introduce a customer experience module into your senior executive training programmes – look to inject the customer into other components of these established programmes.
• Engage in CJM work.
• Provide opportunities to introduce the customer voice into the business at different levels.

This becomes a matter not of strategy but of culture, behaviours and capability and we all know that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. The often prevailing but unspoken view that ‘I’m not going to sacrifice my career over this’ is revealed through a passive-aggressive response from those in positions of power and influence that transmits deep into their teams and gives the tacit green light to a range of negative and blocking behaviours. In effect the body rejects the new ‘organ’ and slowly but surely defuses it, usually through a slow but inevitable death by a thousand cuts. Interestingly, when I operated in China this was not allowed to happen as a direct consequence of CEO-level leadership and intervention throughout the activity. Not only does this cultural smothering mean that the original-perceived benefits would never crystallise, but also, as mentioned earlier, the customer agenda is damaged for the future and huge amounts of emotional energy have been wasted in the attempt.

We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, scared of the unknown and the management of the customer component of a strategy sits firmly in the unknown or limited knowledge box. Individuals almost always look after number one and take short-term views, responding to the last order given – so should we really be surprised that CETPs are doomed to failure?

If we look at the average tenure of a CEO as three years and then follow the formula: year one, stop everything and have a strategic review; year two, make some changes and hope market conditions favour you on the stock price; year three, what is my legacy project?; year four, ‘reset to year one’ for the new CEO. It is against this backdrop that a customer revolution is attempted – not exactly conditions to thrive from the top.

If we accept that this scenario is playing out around the world – and my personal evidence is conclusive that it is – then consider that one definition of madness is ‘doing the same thing and expecting the outcome to be different’ and we have to ask the question, ‘can businesses improve their chances of success in the customer component of their strategy?’

Can we find a different approach that might have an improved chance of success in engaging businesses with their colleagues and customers for mutual benefit? Twenty years of experience of watching this happen and experimenting with different approaches suggests ‘yes we can’.

Remember that at the heart of the issue is that business leaders, often unintentionally, miscommunicate the goal – the challenge is how to articulate and describe what you are setting out to achieve and then to manage our human reaction to it

At the outset, language is critical – so, for example, what does ‘transformation’ mean? According to the businessdictionary.com it is ‘a process of profound and radical change that orients a business in a new direction and takes it to an entirely different level of effectiveness’ – that is enough to scare away even the most seasoned of executives.

As we have seen, the subconscious reaction to this is negativity driven by fear and lack of understanding. What does the sound bite ‘we are going to be passionate about our customers’ break down into in terms of concrete actions and therefore practical relevance to an accounts clerk? In the absence of immediate relevance, individuals wait to be told what to do and the changes rarely seep down to that level before the programme is pulled or replaced with another business priority. This question of relevance is significant in the early stages of any customer activity – the sooner that individuals can see how they can or are going to be required to contribute through their day-to-day actions will impact on the ability to evolve the culture. It must be noted that teams usually receive initiatives that seek to improve the customer experience very well, but they simply don’t believe that the will is there to actually follow through and deliver. Imagine if the same CEO not only produced the sound bite, but also backed that up with some concrete examples of how they personally would be contributing to the customer component of the business strategy.

Remember that for change to happen it has to be relevant at a local and individual level

All managers and most of the staff in a company that has been established for many years recognise that even if the words are said, the reality is that the company will not place the customer as the overarching arbiter of decisions and strategy in the company. Sitting in the audience there is therefore a heavy dose of well-founded cynicism about what will actually happen. The myriad of metrics, targets, programmes and strategies in business as usual precludes such a change.

Remember what is actually needed is to elevate the customer to a position of at least parity with the other strategic and cultural influencers – pricing, product, infrastructure, etc

The objective is to equip the business and its people to use the customer view as another lens or prism through which to consider strategy, review business decisions and engage with colleagues.

As we have noted, when a major IT investment comes before the company investment appraisal group, the customer question is what is the impact on me during the install and during ramp up? – this needs to be understood and it may be mitigating actions need to be costed and put in place.

A similar view can be taken on the impact on colleagues and what is required to equip those colleagues in the front line to handle customer issues that may arise and could cause significant brand equity damage.

At the other end of the spectrum should I answer the ringing phone that may be a customer, or should I ignore it and finish the time-sensitive report that my boss wants on her desk by 2 p.m.? The former may only occur a handful of times a year, but the latter can occur hundreds of times a day around the world.

The solution is not to create a programme and effectively ring-fence ownership and accountability – you can almost feel the palpable sense of relief once a colleague has the ball and others can get back to their day jobs. This also allows the sniping from the sideline to begin as collective responsibility is abandoned. In effect, the programme becomes a target to be shot at and inevitably the programme focus tends to be on the easy bit to work on – the process – rather than the hard bit of evolving the culture (how many programme objectives have cultural change as a critical objective?).

Drawing the customer into the culture of the business impacts on all, and all have to be engaged.

With programmes come governance: ask yourself the question, ‘is that governance there to protect the customer or is it there to protect the company’s interests?’

The solution is not to announce major customer programmes but rather to set a hundred small challenges, then a hundred more, and engage people at local levels with small-scale, easy to execute changes without the labels of transformational change. If colleagues don’t feel threatened then the defences will not be raised, and once small changes begin and confidence grows the momentum will be self-generating.

From a senior leadership perspective there needs to be subtle evidence of behavioural changes: questions being asked and targets being either adjusted or given different levels of focus.

For example, imagine as the CFO asking the question, ‘when was the last time we reviewed the wording on our standard letters to make sure they are customer friendly and in line with our brand?’

Or as the CIO, ‘what were the impacts on the customer experience of our recent systems outage and what plans do we have to mitigate that in future?’

To achieve this the company needs to engage in equipping its entire people to ‘think differently’: to consider a customer lens when reviewing both issues and opportunities. Senior executives need to know how and when to challenge and question colleagues to drive and underpin the behaviours needed to engage with the customer agenda. Managers and frontline staff need to be equipped with the, often new, tool of a customer view to manage both the day to day and the evolution of the business over time. The business can then grow muscle to evolve and embrace the customer as a part of its decision-making processes.

The mantra is a hundred tiny changes . . . then a hundred more . . . and then a thousand, and so on – delivered by a wide range of individuals throughout the business. With this approach comes the perhaps shocking but very pleasant revelation that these hundreds of changes which together, over time, amount to real change often cost nothing and may even reduce cost – impacting positively on both sides of the balance sheet.

A board or a customer experience team cannot change a business on their own; they can create the platform from which change can happen, but for the culture to evolve you will require the active engagement of the majority of your staff – whether they realise that they are involved or not. Just consider a team of 10 tasked with managing customer-based changes and how much they can achieve when compared to having 5,000 colleagues each doing one thing differently. The critical people to have engaged are your middle management layer that both engage upwards and have real day-to-day control of most of the functions of your company.

You must avoid being seen as a burden: someone layering on another task onto already stretched and busy people. If you can incorporate a customer focus into my daily routine then that is manageable – it must also be relevant to me, my role and potentially be measurable too.

From an organisational design perspective there remains an issue of how to integrate an emerging management discipline into the existing organisational structure. Currently there remains uncertainty around where it best fits: is it a commercial role; does it sit within brand or marketing; is it a standalone business function? Where should this report in line terms – direct to the CEO, the COO, or perhaps the sales and marketing team? My view is that this should be a partnership with the CEO with the authority to influence across business functions.

In time we will see the discipline as a function in the same way as sales or marketing, but it does have a business-wide influence, given that the experience impacts everyone and everyone impacts on the experience. What has emerged is a trend towards the deployment of chief customer officers and senior customer experience leads – this has been explored in great and practical detail by Jeanne Bliss in her leading work on this subject, Chief Customer Officer 2.0 – a book well worth reading!

The problems facing chief customer officers or customer experience leads

Has the appointment of the chief customer officer, or perhaps the senior vice president customer experience, taken over from the setting up of a customer service initiative as the quick fix to becoming more customer focused, and thereby neatly addressed the whole issue of how the company and in particular senior executives need to engage? What better than to put it all into the basket of a named individual and let them get on with the accountability and responsibility, but usually without the authority! It certainly sends a signal to the organisation and potentially to customers that you are serious about the importance of your customers, but if the appointment and the implications are not thought through the result is, in the medium and possibly short term, that little more than a thin veil is drawn over the area and both staff and customers very quickly see through it – this is like putting a sticking plaster on a huge wound. Deployed well, the appointment can be the catalyst to real action and the nucleus around which true customer focus can aggregate.

The key problem facing these new appointees is that they are often in a team of one and vested with little or no executive authority, and they have to work what magic they can through force of personality and influence. It is also key to note that the role should go through some transitions, typically from front running, ‘tub thumping’ motivator with much attention centred around the individual but moving to a position where the energy, enthusiasm and day-to-day activities are taken up by a growing variety of individuals inside the business at all levels and in all areas, making the customer agenda business as usual and then the lead becomes more of the conscience of the business and the facilitator who ‘greases the wheels’ to make things happen. This does not happen by accident and requires a plan and a clear approach from the individual charged with the task, and clearly articulated support of different types, over time, to assure the execution and the business benefit.

To add to the difficulties posed by the roles being relatively new, the appointees are often asked to write their own job descriptions and to provide proposed scope, or at the least to define what their business objectives might be. Uncertainty tends to exist at all levels of the business about what this new lead role is responsible for delivering – colleagues are happy to be supportive as long as the new role does not impact on or try to unduly influence their plans in their clearly defined areas of responsibility. If this situation arises, and it is almost inevitable that it will, disputes will result and the default decision on what takes precedence is a reference to financial objectives, and unless the customer experience lead has direct P&L impact the chances are that they will be the loser or the one to compromise. In a worst-case scenario, in a large corporate it is easy to stifle one individual by ‘ganging up’ or insisting on a whole series of approvals – in political circles this would be classified as ‘filibustering’. So making the link between experience and the bottom line is business critical early in any tenure in such a post.

From the other end of the telescope the new lead often has to try to balance out two agendas internally: a need to exert some central authority and demonstrate added value, while gaining the trust and support and often budget from the operating units. The result is slow progress and no one party particularly satisfied. This situation is not helped by the way in which customer experience lead roles tend to be both born and then sourced – either a high-level recognition that customer experience is important and that the way to recognise this is to create an executive post, which often leads to an external appointment as no one on the current team knows what they would do; or the alternative route is that a highly motivated individual who has had commercial success executing a customer experience programme in a localised area, region or business unit, often driven by their own passion but always having some authority to deliver, is elevated to a centre-based role and asked to replicate their success on a wider scale across the business. In the case of the former there is often a credibility gap and a lack of knowledge about ‘how to get things done’; and in the latter there is often resistance from colleagues back in operating units to the newly elevated individual rather than what they can achieve.

The challenge then is to think about the logic that leads to the view that there is a need for a customer experience lead and then to consider how that may be executed to maximise the probability of success for both the individual and the company. A simple approach to this is to step through the key stages of analysis of a business problem – why, what and how?

Why appoint a customer experience lead?

There are a number of possible reasons why thoughts turn to the area of customer experience and in particular to the executional option of appointing a lead for the business. As we noted earlier these can often be necessarily based on business negatives – for example:

• because more and more companies now realise that the customer experience is the next competitive battle ground;
• because if you don’t give your customers a better experience someone else will;
• because you need someone to represent customers, in the boardroom and across the whole organisation;
• because you need to understand customers’ wants and needs and to make sure that you deliver against them;
• because you need to understand customer value and how to allocate resources to increase that value; and overall
• because you need someone to bring this all together and be an agent for change.

What are the benefits of having a customer experience lead?

• it will improve business results, by focusing on what will increase revenue and reduce costs;
• it makes the customer experience visible and gets the whole organisation behind it;
• it raises the customer experience to a strategic rather than tactical level;
• customer issues get more attention and people understand their role and the contribution they can make;
• it makes it easier to identify and allocate the right resources;
• it will help to prioritise activities and to make the business case for new initiatives, and to identify and exploit the quick wins;
• it will help to increase customer loyalty and advocacy, leading to increased customer value and increasing returns; and finally
• this will be the catalyst and person who leads the transformation towards a more customer-focused organisation.

What sort of person do I need?

• You need someone who has the confidence of the senior team, especially the chairman or CEO. It is likely that they will already be performing a key role in the business or have a significant customer experience management discipline in either a consulting or line management capacity in a similar role in another company.
• You need someone with a passion for customers and customer service – and who can instil this passion in others.
• You need someone with a broad functional knowledge, for example in:
  • managing people;
  • operations;
  • project and programme management;
  • marketing and design.
• You need a strong leader with highly developed communication skills, diplomacy, persuasiveness and determination.
• They need to be a good negotiator, a good networker, with the ability and energy to be a beacon for others to follow.
• They need to act and think differently – if you need a chief customer officer it is because the company needs to rethink how it operates in relation to its customers, not do more of the same.
• Above all they need to see things from both the commercial and the customer’s point of view, balancing those drivers to spot the opportunities that others may miss.

What are the main goals and activities for the customer experience lead?

The customer experience lead has four main goals:

• To increase revenue – by attracting and retaining more valuable customers and getting them to stay longer and spend more and by doing more of what works and less of what does not work for customers – this can provide a commercial component to the role even if there is no direct line authority.
• To bring balance to decision making – by focusing on customer value rather than traditional revenue and cost containment considerations.
• To grow customer equity – by managing customers as an important business asset.
• To drive and lead organisational change – by using customer insights to reveal the priority activities.

The main activities of the customer experience lead to deliver against these goals are:

• to take overall responsibility for leading the design of the customer experience and to guide others in this;
• encourage development initiatives and get the buy-in and resources from across the organisation (the CCO will not have direct responsibilities but will champion, guide and lead);
• encourage all internal divisions, partners, third-party agencies to each embrace the joint importance of the customer experience;
• identify and exploit best practice from inside and outside;
• encourage sharing, learning, feedback and continuous improvement;
• ensure that all customer-focused internal and external communications are developed with a clear understanding of the internal and external audience;
• champion deployment of customer- and employee-related measures that provide lead indicators for better forecasting and targeted actions;
• work closely with the HR team to connect the customer and employee propositions.

How do we make the customer experience lead successful?

There is a range of ways in which the lead can expect to be successful, but key will be the quick and positive engagement of the maximum number of people throughout the company. Some examples of tactical activity to deliver include:

• ensure that the CCO or Senior Vice President has a support team from day one;
• provide executive authority through the CEO or most senior executive director including joint communications;
• locate ‘beacons’ who will act as the first stage catalysts inside functions – managers who have a like view;
• introduce a CEO-endorsed secondment programme to the customer experience lead team making it ‘the place to advance your career’, so attracting the top talent;
• seek to add value early, provide support and assistance linked to commercial targets;
• focus hard on understanding current capabilities internally;
• focus early on understanding what customers value most and least today;
• generate high-profile, quick-win opportunities to stimulate interest and support;
• provide frameworks that help colleagues to deliver quickly on customer-related activity;
• push for a balanced scorecard and don’t be afraid to take on financial targets;
• run ‘sheep dip’ learning sessions to get a quick increase in awareness.

Key focus areas for the new customer experience lead

Organisationally to develop and secure employee engagement by:

• defining key customer-related attributes for frontline staff;
• ensuring that staff know how important they are to delivering the brand promise and what their own contribution is – provide a feedback mechanism so staff know how to improve;
• empowering staff to be confident to do the right thing for customers.

Delivering a step change in the recruitment and development of frontline staff by:

• recruiting and developing frontline staff according to their service-oriented personality – technical and industry knowledge can be learnt;
• using existing staff to recruit the ‘right people’ – helps to build communities and reduce staff turnover;
• putting in place motivation and incentives to encourage the right behaviours – this can be team or individual – rewards should be based on outcomes rather than outputs;
• ensuring that senior managers demonstrate commitment to customer care, through leadership, performance management and active involvement with customers.

Ensuring that the service and product proposition matches customers’ (and prospects’) wants and needs by:

• developing a customer segmentation framework, based on customer-type attributes (life cycle, demographics, interests, etc.) and based on customer value, according to a decile split of value;
• using segmentation to tailor appropriate personalised service offerings through the development of customer personas to humanise the work of a segment team;
• focusing acquisition, retention and loyalty strategies on value-based segmentation;
• developing a structured approach to gathering customer (and employee) feedback and use to improve – customer panels have been shown to work well;
• asking customers ‘what is the single thing we could do to improve?’

Ensuring that the experience compares favourably with that of other providers that customers deal with by:

• using customers and staff to provide feedback;
• undertaking research and using the knowledge to drive improvement.

Ensuring that the delivery of the customer experience matches the strategy and brand promise by:

• researching key service stages (welcoming, getting to know, upgrade, problem resolution, etc.) by mapping the customer journey;
• articulating the ‘service personality’ and making it easy for staff to know how to bring this to life.

Maximising existing knowledge and good practice by:

• developing a ‘resource centre’ to gather and spread best practice in customer care;
• rewarding best practice behaviour and using inspirational staff to help develop colleagues;
• ensuring that the customer experience delivers value for customers and business by segmenting the customer experience according to different customer preferences and drivers of loyalty.

Facilitating business change and business alignment by developing a focused customer-based strategy by:

• testing new initiatives against how well they contribute to this strategy;
• developing strategies for customer retention and development (cross-sell and upsell) based on a value-based segmentation strategy;
• getting to grips with ALL the committees and forums that either claim to be there for the customer or don’t have a customer in them, in order to bring clarity and connectivity to the different groups.

Developing an understanding of what is working and the impact on business performance by:

• focusing measures on customer-based outcomes and outputs, rather than on operational inputs and processes;
• encouraging a continuous improvement and feedback loop by developing action plans from satisfaction, NPS and other survey results;
• putting in place channel measures to understand which channels perform best and most effectively;
• using 360º periodic assessments to check what is working and what needs to improve.

These actions will provide a powerful indicator, linking customer- and employee-related actions to increased commitment and improved business results.