How culture and operations drive Customer Experience (CX)

I think of culture as a combination of an organization’s personality and how that personality affects its actions. It is the behaviors, processes, policies, procedures, expectations, ethics, values, attitudes, goals, and how the people in the business conduct themselves and operate the day-to-day of the business.

An organization’s culture serves as a goalpost for your associates and how they interact and react to your customers. It determines your associates’ behaviors, the way they communicate, and how they interact with their (and your) customers. Without a well-thought-out and managed culture, your associates are left to their own devices. The delivery of good customer experiences is left to luck. Without it, your associates tend to be more transactional and don’t create interactions that grow into relationships.

That’s why culture is a key driver for customer experience (CX) outcomes and why organizations with great customer outcomes focus on it. Strong CX initiatives can build your culture to one that is focused on the customer and can drive your business outcomes and become a significant competitive advantage. 

Competing on product, service, and price is difficult and can create stress on profitability. After studying businesses that perform best financially, I’ve learned focusing on customers, what matters most to them, and defining your business operations through that lens leads to great customer experiences and better financial results. 

Successful customer experience companies seem to focus on four principle categories in creating a culture and operating their business. They are Leadership, Associates, Partnerships, and Experience Management. Let’s explore each one.

Leadership

No other group of people has a greater impact on the customer experience than your leaders at all levels of the organization – from the boardroom to the front-line supervisor. Their ability to; create a customer-centric culture, commit to the betterment of the customer experience, embrace the competencies required of today’s great leaders, and possess the strength to hold themselves and their teams accountable to a balanced scorecard of success metrics.

It starts with the CEO and their executive team. Many executives tell themselves, stakeholders, and associates that they want to “make the customer the center of activity” and “create value and lifetime loyalty.” Sadly, this is often empty rhetoric not backed up by their actions. Let’s look at key focus areas that strong leadership contributes to delivering great customer experiences.

• Executive Attitudes–the personality, leadership characteristics, and outlook on customers and associates
• Associate Centricity -putting more emphasis on your associate experience compared to your customer experience.
• Customer Centricity – Going from lip service to making all decisions by understanding its impact on customers.
• Outcomes& Continuous Improvement - Measuring outcomes/KPIs from a balanced scorecard and striving for constant betterment.

Associates

There is a lot of ground to cover in the CX foundation of Associates. Your team members’ relationship with your organization defines their level of engagement leading to a level that is fully absorbed by and enthusiastic about their work and so, takes action to further your reputation and interests. Simply put, engagement is not satisfaction. Engagement is an associate's willingness to do “more” - for themselves, their peers, the business, and their customers.

Engaging associates at all levels means rethinking the way we lead, how we collaborate with our teams, our employment practices, our policies, processes, and the overall environments that we create for our team members and our customers. Let’s look at some key components of successful associate management.

• Hire only the right person for the job.
• Onboard new associates like your business depended on it (because it does).
• Train always and provide growth and development opportunities.
• Engage don’t incent.
• Communicate, listen, inform  and involve.
• Fully empower team members to immediately resolve customer issues including making financial decisions.
• Constantly gather meaningful associate feedback and celebrate successes and failures.

Partnerships

Think about those you might call “your other customers” – the vendors, suppliers, stakeholders, legal partners, and clients. A great partnership requires mutual understanding, listening, empathy, and trust, which can take time. Think about recent supply chain issues and how you were desperately seeking sanitizer and toilet tissue not too long ago. I know organizations whose procurement goals with their suppliers began and ended with “getting the lowest cost in all ways possible.” 

" Your culture and how you operate your business set the stage for executing great customer experiences. You can’t become an industry leader – or even keep up - without it. And just focusing on CX management programs, practices, and initiatives or creating a CX department won’t get you there either. "

They may still be looking to stock the shelves with these items – because they didn’t have good relationships with their suppliers which meant their suppliers weren’t going out of their way for them.

Establishing win-win partnerships with these groups is a foundational element of a great CX culture. Win-win partners help organizations to achieve a competitive advantage. The win-win works only if each group has a similar mindset, and each will gain something from the partnership.

Consider these key factors in managing your partnerships.

• Make the relationship one that is Win Win
• Vendors and Suppliers – Don’t bully them for short-lived gains. Costs will rise. Quality will suffer.
• Client or Customer Engagement – measure if your partner feels you deliver on promises, are proud to be your customer, and if you feel you’re the perfect company for them.

Customer Experience Management

Through the duration of their relationship with an organization, customers’ perceptions are built upon the totality of their interactions from the moment they begin to explore purchasing to the point at which they reach their goal or complete a task and ultimately the creation of brand advocacy and loyalty. 

Customer experience management is what we often think of when we speak of CX. It is how we manage the touchpoints of the customers’ journey. Which should be managed like products — by people and teams with specialized, journey-dedicated roles who continually listen, research, measure, optimize, and design the touchpoint experiences to improve the customers’ satisfaction and promotion along with business outcomes.

In a recent Bain & Company survey, 80 percent of companies believe that the experiences they provide for their customers are “superior.” However, just eight percent of their customers describe their experiences with the same company as “superior.” That means that 92 percent do not feel they are having superior experiences.

What is clear, is that organizations that are ranked by their customers as leaders in customer care perform better financially. Studies of public companies’ financial outcomes demonstrate that companies that are customer experience leaders grow revenues four percent to eight percent above their market.

Your culture and how you operate your business set the stage for executing great customer experiences. You can’t become an industry leader – or even keep up - without it. And just focusing on CX management programs, practices, and initiatives or creating a CX department won’t get you there either.