“It’s important to work with your boss and key stakeholders who will directly impact the work,” says Christopher McShane, the senior vice president of customer experience at Serta Simmons Bedding. When it comes to starting the customer experience transformation at Serta Simmons Bedding, Chris knew that he could not conduct this process in a silo.
Many of you may be familiar with Serta Simmons Bedding, a B2C and B2B company which offers sleep products – with their most well known items being their mattresses. In this conversation, Christopher and I chat about the ways in which he was able to help his team understand weak points in their operations and develop a plan to improve both the employee and customer experience.
Christopher shares that while in his various roles throughout his career, he has taken on issues that others may shy away from because he wanted to be a part of the problem solving process. When he became the VP at Serta Simmons Bedding, he wanted to offer customer-focused solutions while also improving company operations and processes.
Develop Your 90-Day Plan
When Christopher initially stepped into his role as the VP, he developed a “90-day sprint,” to assess what work needed to be done in order to start making improvements. In putting together this 90-day plan, he worked with teams across the organization so he could have a clearer picture on how to approach the transformation.
Christopher’s 90-day plan also included a state assessment of where Serta Simmons Bedding stood as an organization, its technology, and its people process.
He explains that he conducted the following steps:
- Listen and gather feedback from customers and employees to understand where the gaps were.
- Identify silly rules and pain points within organization policies and make improvements.
- Assess the state of your technology. Are you fully utilizing what you’ve paid for? Are you maximizing the users? Are you getting enough out of your systems and are they even talking to each other?
Work with your boss and key stakeholders who will directly impact the customer experience work. Don't conduct the process in a silo. --Christopher McShane, @SertaSimmonsBed #CX #leadership Share on X
Relationships Are Key for Implementation
Since customer experience requires that we unite different operations under one mission, Christopher needed to ensure leadership and colleagues were on the same page. He shares that he knew he needed to gain people’s trust and build relationships. He conducted pulse surveys and town halls to understand employee sentiments and experiences.
Once Christopher gathered his information, he was able to enact systems that improved some of the issues that the frontline members were dealing with. It was important to him to showcase the small wins so that the teams could see that the feedback was being heard and implemented when appropriate. “We’ve closed that feedback loop, because it’s so important to earn the trust from the frontlines who are dealing and working through the issues on a daily basis with our customers,” says Christopher.
After Christopher’s initial 90-day sprint, he worked with his teams to implement bigger projects. The 90-day sprint helped provide a foundation; then he started developing a high-level customer journey map to identify the moments that matter. Additionally, they created a voice of the customer listening program to continuously monitor feedback.
When it comes to your CX transformation, you need to gain people’s trust and build relationships before enacting major implementations. --Christopher McShane, @SertaSimmonsBed #CX #leadership Share on X
What Do You Know Now That You Wish You Knew Then?
Christopher says:
“The main thing I’d say is that managing the disparate systems, and the employee experience around that is, is something that I wished I had known beforehand. When you think about being able to have a great employee experience that drives the customer experience, limiting the number of systems and the types of systems that employees have to live in every day, is extremely important. I think that I would be even more aggressive about identifying what those are, and how to consolidate them and make the individual’s job easier on a daily basis.”
About Christopher McShane
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