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Organizations today are quickly realizing the key to future growth and the accompanying increase in revenues requires a laser focus by the entire company on one simple place, It’s The Customer Stupid! But how do we achieve that focus? There are many steps along the journey, here are the five most critical.

• Defined Customer Experience Strategy
• Organizational Role Clarity
• Business Intelligence (BI), Measurements – Key CX Indicators
• Customer Identification and Understanding
• Extreme Execution

1. Defined Customer Experience Strategy –

Emotional connections are stronger than logical connections. Customers that have a strong emotional connection with an organization are relationship loyal. They think of the organization as often as a 5^th grader with their first crush. They will pay a premium to do business with that organization because they feel the value. Before creating our CX Strategy we must fully define and understand the answers to these 3 simple questions;

• How do we want our customers to feel about us?
• When do we want our customers to think about us?
• How much to we value this?

2. Organizational Role Clarity

Perhaps one of the most difficult challenges for CEO’s in organizations of all sizes is to achieve and maintain cultural alignment at all levels. Unfortunately, there is no other path to becoming customer centric than complete cultural alignment on the customer. This is far more than a couple of additional lines added to everyone’s job descriptions. It’s also more than adding a few additional productivity measurements to scorecard. Each role in the organization must be at its core, focused on how the specifics role requirements contribute to the customer’s feelings about the organization.

“If there’s any activity taking place within the organization that doesn’t specifically improve the customers experience with us, we ought not be doing it.”                    

                                                          -Ken Goodnight, VP Express Scripts

3. (BI), Measurements –

If we don’t fully understand our numbers, we don’t understand our business. This is more than speaking to figures on a spreadsheet, it refers to an end to end understanding of the moving parts under the numbers. Once we understand the numbers and what they mean, we are ready to identify what to measure.

A well-defined CX Strategy with clear role definitions contains specific points of measure based on business intelligence and analytics. These measures are leading indicators of the effectiveness of the overall strategy, and is comprised two separate types of measures. Internal and External. Internally focused measures link to specific deliverables of identified performance indicators, an example in a call center could be the Average Speed of Answer (ASA).

Externally focused measures are the ultimate validation of our internal measures, confirmation we are measuring the right performance indicators, and headed in the right direction. Many organizations use some version of Net Promotor Score (NPS), the Customer Satisfaction Index, or other customer satisfaction tool.

No matter the tool or method that is selected, make no mistake, both internal and external measures are critical to success.

4. Customer Identification and Understanding –

If we have a million customers, we have a million individuals with a million unique expectations of their journey with us. Our chief objective is to identify, understand and exceed each one of those expectations. This is not to suggest a one size fits all model; in fact, it is that exact approach that results in the organizations failure to make emotional connections with its customers. This is where the alignment of culture, people, extreme execution and technology is critical.

5. Extreme Execution Stupid –

No matter how well thought out the strategy, no matter how detailed the planning, how accurate the measurements, or how aligned the culture, poor execution Trumps all.