Ahead of the 2nd Annual Chief Customer Officer Sydney, we asked our CCOs for their best practice tips on driving customer centricity in their organisation, as well as how to avoid the most common pitfalls in some of the more critical aspects of CX.

This is what they had to share:

Service Design 

1. Understand the business. The service revolves around the customer but the solution has to be feasible and viable. Too many service designers get carried away with a sole focus on desirability.
2. Fake it before you make it, prototyping is as critical for service experiences as it is for products.

Leadership Engagement 

1. Make the customer real. Get beyond NPS metrics and create an emotional response. It may mean forcing a leadership team to sit through a poor customer service call recording or simply leaving and empty chair in meetings to represent the customer.
2. Get the language right. Terminology familiar to service designers and CX professionals often make no sense to a traditional business. If you can’t translate to their lexicon you’re fighting an uphill battle (and it’s hard enough anyway).
3. Speak their language, don't be a native to your profession understand their world and relate your message to it and you'll get the cut through.
4. Engaging Leadership and Staff in the development of the CX strategy will create a great deal of awareness and ownership of customer experience and the specific experience you intend to deliver. This is crucial for success.
5. Start with outlining the unifying vision that the organisation seeks to achieve and understand how leaders interpret the vision in their own area
6. Encourage leaders from different parts of the organisation to work together on advocating the CX vision and principles at team meetings, presentations etc.

CX Strategy 

1. Must define who you mean by “our customer(s)”.
2. Need to be backed by the right organisation culture (or the strategy to get there).

Journey Mapping 

1. Must have a purpose (as it takes some effort to create and frequently then remains static).
2. Must be the journey from the customer perspective, rather than a journey map of “our process”. Should describe the entire journey, before and after the interactions with you organisation. Critically, it must include customer sentiment (how the customer feels, not just what they do).
3. It is often that the Customer Experience and Customer Journey Mapping areas have to justify their existence within the Projects/Portfolio/Investment domains. CX Journey mapping and design process as per the Global Best Practices (of which there are many), reveal some interesting and great insights but they are often not communicated in tangibles (Money and Time). Adding Time and Motion analysis to Customer Journey design/redesign, can reveal a new paradigm in the CX Space which is in tune with the OPEX Reductions (Reduced Staff effort and Customer Effort) KPIs and measurements that leaders are more accustomed to.
4. Journey mapping is a valuable tool when you know what question you are trying to solve for in the organisation
5. Start with mapping one journey and seek feedback from stakeholders on how they value the map and how they will use it in their work

Contact Centres and Customer Feedback 

1. We have achieved significant increases in customer response rates to Contact Centre satisfaction surveys by imbedding a survey question in the invitation email – 48% completion rate for single question survey, 13% response rate for 4 question survey.

Staff Engagement 

1. Purposely encourage staff to experience the organisations product/service as a typical customer (what did they learn)? Develop a simple reward and recognition program that provides ability to thank colleagues/ staff for providing great service (internal and external)– and ensure it’s fun.
2. Leaders must demonstrate the “new normal”.
3. Give them permission (to play, to think differently, to take accountability). It’s culture first and strategy second. If the culture is oriented towards customer outcomes, more than half the job is done.
4. Find practical hands-on ways to actively involve teams at frontline levels – e.g. competition for the best CX ideas to engage customers
5. Find local champions in different areas of the organisation who will advocate and encourage others around them to be involved in the CX change

Technology Investment

1. With the end result of this investment what customer problem is it actually solving? This could be solving a staff problem in turn giving staff more time with customers but if you can't clearly articulate the customer problem it's solving then it better have a off the charts ROI to be worth the investment.

Artificial Intelligence 

1. Start with the key business questions

Artificial intelligence solves problems within its boundaries through exact science. These boundaries need to be distinct and clearly specified. Companies need to start with the key business questions where artificial intelligence solutions are appropriate and could deliver best incremental revenue. These questions need to start small such as "which customers would respond to this X offer?" before going into areas such as Next-"Best"-Action.

2. Start simple

Companies go "all-out" with hiring multiple data scientists to boost their artificial intelligence journey. This will usually lead to 2 problems: over-budget or over-engineering. A good starting point is to build a small cross-functional talent team that covers data operations, data architecture, data science and reporting. This team needs to start from "simple" business problems before leveraging this knowledge into artificial intelligence.

Join us at the upcoming Chief Customer Officer Sydney, taking place on the 1-2 November, where our top CCO’s join forces and cover these critical aspects and more during our roundtable session. For more information visit https://www.chiefcustomerofficersydney.com/day/day-one/