Move from ‘Commit’ To ‘Unite’: Four Tactics to Engage Your Leadership

As you assess the maturity phase of embedding the five competencies, moving your organization from ‘Commit’ to ‘Unite,’ here are four tactics to engage (or reengage) your leadership and organization:

1. Establish Consensus on Managing Customers as Assets

This is an important step to earn the right to do this work. Achieving this can only occur when there is consensus on how to measure this growth or loss, and that leaders start to use the language in a united manner to shift from survey score focus to customer asset growth.

2. Build a Foundation in Each of the Five Competencies

The first generation of your five-competency engine will focus on customer experiences that are blocking customers from getting the most out of their experience with you. This is what is hindering your customer asset growth. The workout of these initial issues get identified through the journey framework (competency 1) and the customer listening path (competency 2).

3. Align Leaders to Focus on a Few Critical Reliability Areas

Aim leaders to focus on experience reliability and a few priorities. I can’t tell you the number of companies who start with grandeur. Executives have been to a conference or read a book and they want to get to the ‘wow’ moments. Don’t fall into that trap. And don’t try to improve the entire experience. Establishing a one-company framework for identifying and improving experiences is an alien practice, so go slow and take on a focused few initially to learn. Then expand after learning is embedded. Otherwise, the weight of the work will cause it to cease to exist.

4. Resist Waiting – Take Action Now (Don’t Wait Until Everything is Perfect)

Your first Customer Room will feel ‘clunky.’ I’m good with “clunk.” I always say to my clients, “That just means you’ve begun!” Because these are competencies that will have impact only when they are built as sustainable, make sure people know that they will evolve and constantly improve. Take a bite out of each of the competencies as you can, but don’t expect or try to do it all right away.

Conclusion

With these four actions, clarity for the work of the Chief Customer Officer as the facilitator of the customer-growth engine process will become clear. The process of building the initial actions will give leaders the clearest understanding they have had regarding customer experience, what it is, and their active role required in the transformation.