Understanding the drivers of CX and CS, and evolving and adapting to these insights, is what lays ground for churn reduce, profit increase and loyalty growth. Easy, no. The way to go to in 2020 and after, for sure. With a specialization in propositions from mid-to top management level, and an extensive network of specialists, managers and leaders in the field of Innovation and Change, there is a lot to learn about the potential impact of both success and failure of customer centricity attempts. In our experience, the engine of customer-centricity is fueled by two groups of people. The people on leadership level who will design and drive the transformation, including change programs for cultural and operational shifts across all units (and their roll out). And the people whom execute – adding their functional analytical, research, design and development skills, bringing outside-in perspectives. Here´s what we learned about them.
Competences.
Leaders need to be customer centric at heart – customer happiness is their why, rather than an indirect how that benefits commercial results. Leaders create an overview on the end-to-end customer experience and define preferred customer-centric behaviors, driven by the true orientation on the customer insights and concerns. This behavior should be translated to tactics, clear goal sets and measurable KPI’s to guard successful execution on both tactical and operational level. Part of this behavior focusses on sharing information and collaboration cross-functionally, which should be put at the center of the organizational governance and structure. This requires true group leadership, in order to be able to guide people through the transformation of what they do and mostly, how they do it. Of course, it’s the role of the leader to be an exact role model of customer-centric behavior to motivate the rest of the organization to follow. This is only possible if a leader passionately performs by a strong customer-orientation him- or herself.
The people whom execute are the ones to design, develop and drive customer-centricity across channels and touchpoints. There is no blueprint for the best organizational structure, with an overview of the best set of functional profiles for an optimized CX. Given the maturity of CX and the level of performance, the first face of transformation will have to focus on setting norms, rules and values followed by a second face of CX redesign, digitalization and innovation. While literally bringing the customer in trough research, industry best practices and cross-sector insights, CX specialists are high result-driven to continuously improve the quality of each touchpoint, as well as generating new ideas from customer feedback and insights gathered along the way.
To support you in assessing these competences during interview or evaluation processes, we have developed some easy to use tools including example areas to explore and example questions to ask regarding considering the competence Customer Orientation, Group Leadership and Drive for Result.
In the year 2020, organizations across all markets also (must) have covered “Digital Transformation” as one of their key strategic agenda topics. Read more here!