Customer Experience Solutions

Six Steps to Better Customer Experience

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Without a clearly defined and understood Customer Experience (CX) strategy in place, organizations will continually find themselves re-defining their goals and objectives. Typically, organizations develop and implement CX in piecemeal fashion from an a la carte menu, picking and choosing parts of CX like Voice of the Customer, Persona and Journey Mapping, Contact Center or Digital Technology to suit a particular need or fill a void. This approach ultimately wastes resources and results in additional spending. When a comprehensive CX strategy is developed, it’s often done in a silo or vacuum, where people across the organization don’t fully understand what the strategy is, how they fit into it or the type of experience being delivered.

In order to be successful and avoid the many pitfalls, it’s important to develop a CX strategy that is holistic, customer-informed, and understood and embraced by the organization. With a clear CX vision and strategy, refined stakeholder input and metrics analysis, organizations can create a CX-engrained culture and implement a successful, sustainable CX program. By incorporating the following six building blocks into any CX initiative, both the public and private sector will see an increase in customer and employee satisfaction.

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Develop a Clear Strategy and Vision

To be truly successful, CX must be a strategic initiative, not an ad-hoc directive. By embedding CX into the overall enterprise strategy, it aligns people across the organization and signals that CX is just as important as all the other initiatives. When it isn’t embedded into an organizational strategy as a pillar, it is easy to ignore. It’s not enough to have CX be a strategic initiative, leadership needs to clearly define a CX vision identifying what the intended experience should look like. The vision should be developed around customer needs, wants and expectations, as well as be something employees are able to deliver. Without a clearly defined vision that is informed by customers and embraced by employees, a strategy will fall apart or become fragmented.

Embrace Customer Insights

In order to understand a customer, an organization must ingest various forms of data. It is more than using the data already on hand, as this doesn’t tell the whole story. Organizations need to recognize the “why” behind the “what” by using both quantitative and qualitative information from various sources, not just numbers and data points gathered from annual feedback surveys or operational metrics. Additional tools, such as focus groups and customer panels, observational analysis, voice and text analytics, and social sentiment allow organizations to really see the full picture. Specific insights garnered from listening to the customer can help shape solutions, products and processes that improve their experiences. Leaders must also encourage an open organizational culture that embraces both positive and negative customer insights. It is human nature to focus efforts on the negative, but don’t forget to acknowledge and accentuate the positive to help maximize what customers like and magnify those across the organization. This openness enables organizations to quickly identify and respond to customer pain points and changing needs, as well as take advantage of opportunities to improve CX.

Align CX with Technology and Processes

When designing new technology and processes, it must be standard practice to incorporate CX. Organizations often strive to develop the latest and greatest technology or make process improvements to save time and cost, but to implement technology the customer will use and find valuable, organizations must design and develop with them in mind. Similarly, it is key to consider the employees using the technology, since employee needs are often ignored or excluded in developing more user-friendly and beneficial technology. While this might save time, it is a huge oversight and will result in spending more money and effort fixing the problems. By leveraging real (not hypothesized) data, personas and journey mapping as a guide, organizations can better understand customer and employee needs to bridge the gap between business and IT.

Refine Through Measurement and Analytics

A CX strategy needs to be actionable and allow for adjustments based on how well an organization is or isn’t doing. Unfortunately, people don’t always measure success or they collect a ton of data that can’t be operationalized. Instead, organizations need to identify metrics that will help them gauge how well they are performing, pivot where necessary and understand if specific refinements have resulted in progress. In addition to operational metrics (e.g. service level agreements, web downloads and average handle time), it is important to measure customer perception, the expectations and the quality of what is being delivered (e.g. ease of locating information and/or help), and the value of the service provided. True CX measurement shouldn’t stay at the top, it needs to cascade to the business and employee levels. Having this linkage allows for accountability throughout the organization and identifies levers that can be pulled to optimize CX. Plus, metrics are a clear indicator to the business and employees of what needs to be done to affect CX performance. Measuring CX at a leadership, department and employee level is an important step in fostering an overall culture focused on delivering leading CX. By giving the business access to data through dashboards and reports, they can make further improvements over time.

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Create an Empowered CX Organization

To help shepherd CX throughout an organization, it is vital to put an empowered team with sufficient, dedicated resources in place with executive support. Also critical, is giving the team autonomy and a defined budget to avoid negotiation and competition with other initiatives and jockeying for resources. For long-term success, determining how best the CX team fits within the greater organizational culture is imperative. Treating CX like a “tiger team” or having a dedicated project manager, rather than a centralized or dedicated organization, is a disservice. Following these two paths diminishes the importance of CX, turning a strategy into a tactical exercise. A CX organization should be a centralized, stand-alone team with collaboration from the business to avoid splintering and duplication of efforts. This takes many shapes and forms with centers of excellence and/or matrixed teams around key CX initiatives. Both help to increase adoption and provide additional resources. It is extremely important for the CX organizational structure to have executive support. Reporting into a high-level decision maker proves CX is a priority and is just as critical as other initiatives. When fundamental decisions are being made, the CX team needs representation to provide insights into implications from the customer’s perspective, to avoid push-back and signal from leadership that CX is important.

Transform Culture for Organizational Change

One of the most important ways to make CX sustainable is to focus the same energy on employees as the customer. The employee experience is closely tied to the customer experience. How well are employees engaged in design or process improvements? Are they prepared with the right skills, tools and technology to deliver the intended customer experience? Are they motivated to want to deliver the intended customer experience? An organization is only as successful as their team. If the employee experience is not a focus, cracks will start to show to customers during support and delivery. There are four key tactics an organization can implement to help become more customer-centric:

• Communication: Necessary not only from the CX organization, but by executives and other leaders, communication should cascade down and be consistent. Employees must understand what CX is, how to deliver on the CX vision and how they fit into the overall strategy through consistent messaging via various formats (e.g. newsletters, town halls, emails, social media).

• Training: As CX is often a new concept that comes with a lot of new terminology, employees need to be given the right skills and tools to succeed. It is key to provide training to help employees understand what CX is, how to better understand their customers and how to deliver positive CX. Like communications, using various training formats and engaging content is important to making the concepts stick. Go beyond static, one-dimensional training with roadshows and face-to-face hands-on, experiential training to reinforce desired CX behaviors tailored to specific roles.

• Hiring: Similar to training current staff to be more customer-centric, CX also needs to be included in hiring practices. Recruiting and hiring employees to support CX includes understanding the skills needed in the organization. Partner with human resources and hiring managers to include CX in requisitions and learn how to identify individuals with CX skills and experience.

• Rewards and Recognition: Regularly rewarding and recognizing employees helps motivate staff by demonstrating what good CX looks like and providing accountability. Rewards and recognition need to be consistent throughout the year and engrained in the organizational culture. Incentives can be varied and don’t always have to be tied to money or performance measures. In addition to these mechanisms, leverage other methods like employee of the month programs, admission into a coveted leadership program, specialized lunch with an executive, a thank you note from a leader or access to additional training.

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About General Dynamics Information TechnologyAs a trusted systems integrator for more than 50 years, General Dynamics Information Technology provides information technology (IT), systems engineering, professional services and simulation and training to customers in the defense, federal civilian government, health, homeland security, intelligence, state and local government and commercial sectors. Headquartered in Fairfax, Va., with major offices worldwide, the company delivers IT enterprise solutions, manages large-scale, mission-critical IT programs and provides mission support services. General Dynamics Information Technology is one of two business units that comprises the General Dynamics Information Systems and Technology business group.

10/18/17 General Dynamics Information Technology is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer – Minorities/Females/ Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities. ©2017 General Dynamics Information Technology. All rights reserved.

Though step five and six take the longest to establish, they can make or break a CX strategy. An empowered CX organization and strong culture are essential for CX success. Without internal buy-in and employee understanding there will be dissention, lower adoption and ineffective execution of the desired customer experience. To drive CX success, organizations must define and stick with a strategy, listen to the customer, refine tactics based on metrics analysis, ensure the right technology and processes are in place, and create an empowered team and strong CX culture.

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Develop aClear Strategyand Vision

STEP 2

EmbraceCustomerInsights

Align CX withTechnology and Processes

STEP 4

STEP 1

STEP 5

STEP

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Refine ThroughMeasurement and Analytics

Create an Empowered CXOrganization

Transform Culture forOrganizationalChange

STEP

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