How to Battle Customer Experience Fatigue

Here are three actions (and the need for a lot of responses) to help you pull the customer experience work into focus:

1. Know Where You Are In the Process

• You have assembled many groups of people in the company to identify customer touch points.  Yes____ No ____
• You have brought in customers to validate and course-correct our findings. Yes ____ No ___
• You have now held numerous sessions and people are starting to wonder what you are going to do with this mapping. Yes ___ No ___
• You have identified and the organization has agreed upon the end-to-end customer experience.  Yes ___ No ___
• If you walked the halls of your company and asked ten people to define our customer experience, would most give the same description? Yes ___ No ___
• You have identified the key touchpoints most important to customers and to customer growth. Yes ___ No ___

Now the Evaluation:  Review how wide you’ve made your customer experience project.

• Are you trying to map every customer segment or scenario?
• Is it getting overwhelming?

If it is, narrow the scope immediately.

→ Critical Checkpoint: Gain agreement on one segment or one part of the business.

Many times, this work is abandoned because it becomes overwhelming and starts to stall.  Move rapidly to the identification of the top 10-15 touch points that will have the most impact on the business.  Stay focused there. Success in one area will earn the right to expand. (And focus will drive collaboration, which leads to #2.)

2. Level-Set Your Ability to Collaborate

Your ability to collaborate is the real testing ground for the customer experience work.

• There is agreement across the organization of your top 10-15 customer touch point priorities. Yes ___ No ___
• You have identified the different operating areas that impact each key touch point. Yes ___ No ___
• You have agreed to map, define and identify all of the metrics that contribute to the current experience of these key touch points. Yes ___ No ___
• You are willing to align new teams of people working together to resolve/improve those key moments. Yes ___ No ___
• You have committed to assign new cross-company metrics to the delivery of those experiences. Yes ___ No ____
• You will reward these teams when complaints are reduced for the priority issues. Yes ___ No ___
• You commit to working together to resolve these issues and rebuild key touch point experiences. Yes ___ No ___

Now the Evaluation:

Count up the No checkmarks. A number higher than three reflects a serious lack of collaboration.

If you are not willing to take the time to assemble cross-functional teams to go through the processes that drive customer experience, you can’t get into the nitty-gritty of understanding operational metrics.

→ Critical Checkpoint: Review how you build out solutions to customer issues.

Are they assigned by operational leader to go fix?  Change this cycle and identify the entirety of the customer issue – then create a consistent cross-functional process for experience improvement.  As part of that process, begin to build shared operational metrics (where the multiple silos that count the experience are held mutually accountable).

Reviewing, mapping and being open to change operational metrics to shared metrics will test your collaboration muscle.  Delivering a unified experience requires patience and an upfront agreement by leaders that acknowledges they are willing to change what constitutes “score!” and what is on their score card.

3. Examine Your Communication: Are You Bringing the Organization along with the Work?

• You have connected the dots for the organization on how each part of your operation’s communication impacts the experience. Yes ___ No ___
• Everybody is still doing their own work.  You find this “interesting” but don’t know what to do with it.  Yes ___ No ___
• You have made an inventory of all the projects going on around “customer.” Yes ___ No ___
• You have made a “stop doing” list of projects and investments. Yes ___ No ___
• You have actually stopped doing projects and are rigorously managing this process. Yes ___ No ___
• You have created a roadmap that is being actively communicated as you progress. Yes ___ No ___

Now the Evaluation:

Marketing back progress inside the organization and with customers is often the weakest link of executing customer experience work.

In the absence of being updated and engaged, internal folks will view the customer experience meeting as the latest flavor in customer focus.

→ Critical Checkpoint: Before you go any further, make a simple roadmap of the different parts of your customer experience journey.

Be dogged about showing that roadmap each and every time someone talks about the customer experience work.  It will become a visual that people continuously reference. Use it to discuss actions, progress and challenges. The roadmap gives you the communication consistency required in these long-term projects.

Download PDF: Three Actions to Battle Customer Experience Fatigue