#23 | DCX - Perspectives and insights on digital customer experience
5 Ways to Organize Your CX Team for Success; How to become a CX master - 9 skills for growing your career; Links to Industry news, ideas, insights, and DCX Thought Leader Linkedin Profile of the week
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5 Ways to Organize Your CX Team for Success
Customer experience is more than just delivering quality service to your customers. It's the entire picture from start to finish. One poor interaction can leave a bad impression on potential and existing customers. That's why it is essential to have a solid customer experience team that can prepare for everything.
So, how do you make sure your CX team is organized for success? Here are my five tips for creating a strong, successful CX team.
1. Create a culture of accountability
Culture starts at the top. The CEO needs to be clear about what CX is, why it matters, and how it fits into the broader organizational strategy. Without top-down clarity and accountability, other teams won’t know where to focus or how their work contributes.
With CX, it’s not enough to have a team that reports to the CEO—you need leadership at every level of your organization actively working towards a shared goal. In addition, your company needs to understand the importance of customer experience and that CX is a strategic pillar for driving growth.
A culture of accountability is the foundation for incredible CX. It’s about holding each other accountable and ensuring we all work together toward the same goals.
Accountability starts with clearly understanding what success looks like and how your team will get there. You can start by creating a team charter that outlines your goals and responsibilities, then share it with everyone on your team, so they know where they fit into the picture.
2. Align your efforts to customer objectives
CX is about meeting your customers' needs, which means you need to understand those needs. An excellent way to do that is by creating a customer journey map. This will help clarify how your customers interact with your brand and show you where opportunities exist for improvement.
A well-defined customer journey map is a great way to get everyone on the same page and ensure that your efforts are aligned with what matters most to your customers. In addition, it’s an opportunity for you to identify gaps in your current processes, define clear outcomes and responsibilities, and then work together as a team to improve them.
Your team also needs to be aligned with your company’s goals, including those related to customer experience. One way you can do this is by ensuring the CX strategy and associated KPIs measure progress toward meeting company objectives. Another way is by aligning your team’s activities with each other, so they know what everyone else on their team does and how it contributes toward achieving the team’s goals.
3. Give yourself the right tools
You can’t be expected to succeed if you don’t have the right tools to do your job. That goes for customer experience as well. A good CX strategy isn’t enough; you also need the technology and data to plan, measure, manage and improve your customer experience efforts.
The best way to improve your customer experience is to measure it. You can’t know what changes are working and which aren’t if you don’t have data on how customers perceive your company today compared to yesterday.
This includes everything from software that can help you collect, analyze and visualize data in real-time to training resources that will enable employees at all levels of your organization to understand how they can contribute to improving customer experience.
So what are some of the essential tools that CX professionals need? Here are a few:
1. Customer feedback surveys
2. Voice of the customer analysis
3. Journey analytics
4. Customer experience dashboards
5. Social media listening
6. Help desk ticketing
7. Customer journey mapping tools
8. Text transcription and analysis
9. Chatbot technology
So invest in analytics software and processes to help you track performance across every channel where customers interact with your brand, from website visits to phone calls to social media posts.
4. Recruit and retain top and diverse talent
A great customer experience is built on a foundation of people who are empowered to deliver that experience. This means hiring the right people and training them in the skills they need to succeed.
Your employees are your company’s most valuable asset. They do the work, help create your culture, and ultimately make or break your customer experience. So if you want to improve how your customers feel about interacting with your brand, start by improving how your team members feel about working there.
Hire people who have a passion for delivering extraordinary experiences; train them so that they understand what this means and why it matters (from an ethical perspective); promote those who do an excellent job of delivering on this goal, and give everyone in the organization opportunities to contribute their ideas for making improvements.
It also means building a diverse workforce that reflects your customers so that every employee can bring their unique perspective and perspective to bear on any situation. Diversity is critical for CX's success. A diverse workforce will help you better understand your customers by bringing different perspectives and experiences into the fold to build a customer-centric culture.
5. Make continuous improvements to customer experience events
A customer-centric culture is more than just a set of values. It’s also about making continuous improvements to the way you deliver on your promises to customers. It means being open to feedback from your employees and customers and taking action on that feedback.
Organizations that focus on continuous improvements to customer experience events have higher customer loyalty and satisfaction than those that don’t. This means they are more likely to retain customers, attract new ones, and increase revenue.
Continuous improvement is the key to improving customer experience and creating a culture where everyone in your organization understands that you’re always looking for ways to improve. So how do you make continuous improvements?
To make continuous improvements, your organization needs to have a strong culture of experimentation. This means having processes in place for learning from experiments, failures, and successes so that you can build on the knowledge gained.
By tapping into these five tips, you and your team will be better equipped to deliver CX solutions that get results. And that, in the end, is what matters. Don't let a lack of structure or planning slow down your efforts. Instead, align your team around a shared vision, provide them with the tools they need to excel in their roles, and you'll be ready for success.
How to become a CX master - 9 skills for growing your career
When customer experience (CX) becomes your responsibility, you're in charge of one of the most significant areas of customer success. If you are reading this, it's likely that you already showed leadership quality, interest, and commitment to CX within your team. However, if you want customer-focused leadership development, in addition to continuous improvement of your own skills in this challenging area, the 9 key skills below will give you a hand on the path to customer success.
Links are merely suggestions, not an endorsement𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗽𝘀𝘆𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 - The 10 Best Online Psychology Courses of 2022 - Intelligent
𝗗𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 - Foundations in Design Thinking Certificate – IDEO U
𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 - Free Online Course: Storytelling and influencing: Communicate with impact from Coursera | Class Central
𝗘𝗺𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵𝘆 - Empathy and Concern - Compassion | Coursera
𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀 - The Best Free Online Data Analytics Courses [2022 Guide] (careerfoundry.com)
𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 - Online Course: Service Design User Journey Mapping from Pluralsight | Class Central
𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 - What is the Voice of the Customer (VoC)? - Qualtrics
𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗱𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗲𝘀 - Software Development Processes and Methodologies | Coursera
𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 - 11 Best Online Sales Training Courses 2022 [Free + Paid] (skillscouter.com)
Always Be Learning
Etc.
Links to Industry news, ideas, insights, and the DCX Thought Leader Linkedin Profile of the week
Great expectations: Customer experience in the metaverse (fastcompany.com)
Customer Experience Teams In 2023 Thrive Or Wither (forrester.com)
The challenges of 2022 will create an inflection point for customer experience (CX) programs in 2023. CX programs that help their organizations achieve their brand aspirations will thrive despite belt-tightening. Differentiation has already narrowed in at least one industry in eight of the 11 countries for which Forrester has year-over-year Customer Experience Index data. To stand out from this tightening pack, companies must embrace customer obsession and pursue CX innovations that differentiate their brand, rather than relying on CX strategies that consumers perceive as similar.
The 5 Biggest Business Trends In 2023 Everyone Must Get Ready For Now (forbes.com)
Futurist, Bernard Marr, shares his perspective on top trends for 2023 - Focus on his predictions for two, in particular, Accelerated digital transformation (Ai, 5G, Blockchain, and more), Immersive customer experience (AR, Metaverse, Avatars).
This week’s DCX Newsletter is Supported by:
DCX Thought Leader Linkedin Profile of the week
Every week, I share a person's profile from Linkedin that I think will benefit your life and career.
This week, I’d like to introduce you to, Adrian Swinscoe, from Edinburgh, Scotland
Adrian’s been in the CX game for a long while, helping companies of all sizes including Apple, Diesel, Freshworks, KFC, Pearson, Shell, etc… plus lots of smaller brands and SMEs to deliver better Customer experience outcomes.
He helps build internal teams and leadership capability via mentoring, thought leadership (whitepapers and keynotes for internal/customer/public events), and master classes.
In addition to being a CX thought leader, Adrian is a best-selling author, Forbes contributor, blogger & podcaster, frequent conference speaker, panel participant, and Chari. His best-selling book in 2016 is called: How to Wow: 68 Effortless Ways to Make Every Customer Experience Amazing.
Check out his Punk CX Podcast and reach out to say hello!
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