#89 | DCX - Perspectives and insights on digital customer experience
Why Companies Keep Failing Their Customers (And How to Fix It); Unlocking the Power of Delegation for Stronger CX; DCX Poll; Links to Industry news and the DCX Thought Leader Profile of the Week
FREE to DCX Readers: DCX Ultimate CX Notes Templates - Tools to help keep your CX operation organized (The link includes the promo code “DCX”)
Why Companies Keep Failing Their Customers (And How To Fix It)
Customer obsession. User centricity. Design thinking. Journey mapping. These have become buzzword staples in modern corporate vernacular. Leadership teams expend no small amount of lip service, extolling the virtues of customer intimacy. Yet, in their quest to digitally transform and garner marketplace mindshare, many companies have ironically lost touch with the living, breathing humans they serve.
So let's cut to the quick - does your organization truly know its customers? Not personas, segments, or platonic ideals of a target demographic, but their hopes, dreams, unarticulated needs, evolving priorities, and jobs to be done. Would your employees recognize them if they walked side-by-side in the real world? Can you actively delight them with preemptive value, or do you have to guess what might please?
If the answer is no - if there exists a gap between notion and reality - rest assured you remain in good company. However, all is not lost. While deeply understanding customers is simple in principle, it requires rewiring institutional habits and culture from the root.
This lack of genuine customer understanding stems from several interlocking issues baked into corporate culture:
Metrics That Value Speed Over Substance
In the race to appear agile and iterative, many companies have adopted frameworks that celebrate output efficiency over customer delight. Leaders assess utilization rates and velocity rather than teams' ability to create lasting value and emotional connections with users. They focus on moving fast at the expense of building substantive relationships.
Dehumanized Processes
Conceptual approaches like jobs-to-be-done and design thinking have become jargon rather than ingrained practices. Roadmaps reflect icy analytics without on-the-ground empathy. The result is that despite teams going through the motions of customer-centric workshops and intelligence gathering, the emotional dimension is stripped from their decision calculus.
Tribal Mentality Over Truth
Ingroups often monopolize direction-setting based solely on internal beliefs and assumptions. This intellectual arrogance causes companies to ignore outlier voices that likely grasp shifting user needs. Groupthink rewards echoing the party line rather than uncovering raw insights that may disrupt the status quo.
Breaking Free Of The Bubble
The antidote to closed-mindedness is simple in theory but difficult in practice: embedding customer connectedness into an organization's structural DNA – not just secondary processes. This facilitates true empathy that cuts across divisions to align mindsets with the people behind transactions.
Leaders must spark institutional soul-searching to break ingrained patterns. Transforming to a customer-led culture requires asking:
What sources of truth do we genuinely cherish? Which do we give lip service to but ignore when inconvenient?
What metrics and KPIs reinforce speed over substance? Should we redefine success?
Do our teams exhibit intellectual curiosity through unfiltered conversations? Or defensive posturing?
Who are our most empathetic employees? How can we harness their talents as an example?
How could we rethink workflow, from the C-suite to the frontlines, to immerse people in the customer experience?
This level of deep questioning is crucial. Culture stems from repeated behaviors – which themselves trace back to institutional values. Only in reexamining underlying assumptions can breakthroughs emerge.
The goal is to push leaders to go beyond surface-level fixes to confront deeper root causes behind the lack of customer centricity. This highlights the need for systemic change versus incremental tweaks, getting teams to take an honest inventory of cultural barriers to pave the way for creative solutions.
Other Concrete Solutions
- Implementing customer advisory boards and user conferences to gather real-time, unfiltered feedback. Train internal teams on how to probe beyond surface-level complaints to understand emotional underpinnings.
- Conducting diary studies by equipping select customers to self-report experiences in the moment. Analyze the qualitative data to highlight gaps between assumed vs actual needs.
- Establishing an independent Customer Truth group, separate from business units, that conducts ethnographic research analyzed through an interdisciplinary lens to spotlight insights that numbers alone miss.
- Launching a Shadowing Program for leaders and frontline employees to immerse themselves in customer lives, across demographic and psychographic ranges. Synthesize their observations to rehumanize processes.
- Tying executive compensation to metrics like customer lifetime value, retention, satisfaction, and share of wallet rather than short-term financials or output velocity.
The question for executives is - are you ready to transform for true customer-centricity?
The future belongs to those who can transcend persona-based guesswork and forge radical user partnerships. But it requires moving beyond entrenched ways of working and intolerant cultures. With open minds and fresh eyes, fixing the customer's problem may unlock new sources of sustainable differentiation.
Importantly, truly committing to knowing your customers also unlocks immense value creation and growth opportunities, including:
Deeper customer intimacy leads to higher lifetime value and wallet share
The ability to preemptively delight customers by anticipating unmet needs
More resonant innovation versus ivory tower guesses
Reinforcing competitive barriers to disruption from those lacking customer obsession
Uncovering expansion opportunities like new products, services, and segments
Building a customer-led culture that top talent is magnetized towards
With open minds and fresh eyes, fixing the customer-knowing problem may spearhead new phases of growth and sustainability.
The Roadmap To Customer Intimacy Starts With Soul-Searching
Imagine a future where teams across your organization share an intrinsic grasp of customer needs - where empathy and foresight drive growth—a future where innovation stems from authentic insights unlocked through trust-based partnerships with the people you serve.
This customer-led vision is achievable, but only by looking inward first. Ask the tough questions with honesty and courage to reshape deep-rooted assumptions. Set aside egos to listen - truly listen - to outlier voices you may be ignoring. Follow the lead of teams at the edge who already orient their day-to-day jobs around users’ unspoken hopes.
Moment by moment, interaction by interaction, let customer intimacy organically blossom into every nook of workflow. Don’t force change; seed and nurture cultural change through everyday behaviors. Stay grounded in why you exist.
This is your North Star. Transformation won't happen overnight, but the journey of a thousand steps begins now in your soul. Know who you serve. And let everything flow from that source of truth.
The market rewards organizations anchored to their customers like bedrock. With vision, guts, and compassion, will you answer the call to step up and lead? Will you turn inward to spark lasting outward success? The power lies in your hands. How will you use it?
And now a word from our sponsor
Dojo Partners are uniquely positioned to help you realize your transformation goals at a fraction of the time and cost of your existing options.
Unlocking the Power of Delegation for Stronger CX
As a CX leader, the crushing pressure to optimize every customer interaction can leave you stretched ruthlessly thin. But an underutilized weapon lies directly within your team.
I’m talking about delegation - not used for task dumping but properly unleashed to transform leadership and ignite phenomenal experiences. Envision a squad overflowing with purpose, actively co-creating standout CX moments. The possibility is real when you reframe delegation as potential unlocking.
From Task Offloading to Ownership Cultivation
Shift your perspective. Rather than a workload divvying tactic, see delegation as unlocking hidden talents across your team. Delegated tasks become vehicles for genuine accountability to advance CX priorities when matched to individual strengths and passions. Team members intrinsically drive outcomes when they clearly see their impact on customers.
Pinpointing the Prime Targets
Look to delegate bandwidth-hogging tasks that do not require your specialized expertise. This frees up mental space for strategic leadership while providing growth opportunities for others.
Some sweet spots:
Repetitive administrative tasks
Data analysis, visualization, and reporting
Breaking down sizable CX projects into aligned chunks
The key is being selective so you set up your team for accountability and meaning.
Mastering the Art of Delegation
Barking orders without context is not effective delegation - it’s still task dumping. True empowerment requires artful leadership:
Achieve crystal clarity on expectations and outcomes. Leave no room for ambiguity.
Ensure that you are properly equipped with tools, knowledge, and adequate autonomy to determine how to reach outcomes. Don't assign responsibility without authority.
Coach, don't crack the whip. Guide collaboratively, not through micromanagement. Focus on progress over perfection.
Close the feedback loop continually to accelerate individual development for higher-complexity contributions.
Overcoming Control Fears
Understand that delegated execution will never be exactly how you would do it. And that is OK. The enormous benefits of empowerment outweigh conformity.
Actively invite opportunities to delegate tasks slightly out of your comfort zone to stretch capabilities and spur tremendous collective growth. View any setbacks as learning springs rather than failures so innovation and resilience flourish.
The outcomes? A squad fully unlocked to driver customer delight.
So, are you ready to delegate your way to the next level? Let’s keep the conversation going!
DCX LinkedIn Poll of the Week
This week, I asked our colleagues in the Customer Experience Professionals Group on Linkedin, What is the biggest barrier to delivering exceptional customer experiences?
This illuminating poll uncovered the primary obstacles that stand in the way of delivering exemplary customer experiences. Organizational silos topped the list, with leadership support and customer insights following closely. Surprisingly, legacy technology was deemed the least of concerns.
Vasilis Tsialtus hit the nail on the head with his comment: "Of course its the freaking silos. Most orgs have huge problem with it, other factors deriving are limited will, point of view, time , teams bonding of the employees."
Dissecting the Challenges:
Organizational Silos (38%): Standing out as the most significant barrier, these silos indicate a trend of compartmentalization that disrupts a seamless customer experience journey. Leaders need to foster a collaborative environment that encourages a holistic approach to customer satisfaction.
Leadership Support (32%): It's clear that without enthusiasm and endorsement from the top, customer experience initiatives tend to lose momentum. Convincing leadership about the tangible benefits of investing in CX is crucial for gaining their support.
Customer Insight (21%): A fifth of the professionals acknowledge that truly grasping the customer's perspective is a game-changer. To make strides in CX, it's essential to invest in understanding the customer through rigorous research and open feedback loops.
Legacy Technology (9%): Interestingly, outdated tech is no longer seen as the main barrier it once was, suggesting a shift in focus from tech reliance to strategic application. This perspective recognizes that while technology is important, strategic deployment counts.
The poll serves as a diagnostic tool, highlighting the critical areas where CX professionals should focus their strategic efforts. By bridging the gaps within organizations, advocating for leadership support with a solid business case, and deepening customer insights, companies can move the needle on customer experience. As technology continues to evolve, its role in enabling these initiatives is acknowledged but not overestimated.
Industry News, Ideas, and Insights
Introducing the ArenaCX Events Calendar, a global central resource for customer experience (CX) professionals, offering a curated selection of CX events such as conferences, conventions, webinars, and more.
TfL's AI Tube Station experiment is amazing and slightly terrifying (jamesomalley.co.uk)
AI technology has advanced significantly in the past decade, allowing for image recognition and other capabilities that were once science fiction. Transport for London (TFL) used AI cameras to improve station safety, security, and staff efficiency. The system can detect a variety of incidents and alert staff for assistance. It also collects statistical data for management purposes. Orwellian oversight or CX and EX mastermind?
Apple's Vision Pro headset, offering virtual and augmented reality capabilities, has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by allowing healthcare workers to display medical records and improve precision and efficiency in tasks. Sharp HealthCare in San Diego is currently exploring the use of the technology in healthcare settings. The headset's advanced eye-tracking technology could be useful in conducting eye exams and monitoring multiple patients at once, while virtual reality has also been shown to have benefits in therapy and medical training.
Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot | Ars Technica
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DCX Thought Leader Profile of the Week
Every week, I introduce you to another inspiring professional from LinkedIn who has the potential to make a significant difference in your life and career.
This week’s thought leader is Chad McDaniel, President, Co-Founder, and Chief Community Leader at Execs in the Know
Chad McDaniel, through his company Execs In The Know, has built a global community of customer service professionals to collaborate and push the industry forward.
With Execs In The Know, Chad created a hub for executives to learn anticipatory approaches exceeding customer expectations in an evolving marketplace. His influence also extends through webinars, speaking engagements, and forums where he translates industry trends into actionable strategies.
At his core, Chad is driven by a belief in exceptional service's transformative power. His commitment has yielded a repository of best practices and innovative methodologies to empower companies to thrive through customer loyalty.
Chad’s efforts are increasingly vital in connecting leaders to facilitate meaningful exchange. His work promises to inspire new generations to prioritize customer satisfaction as essential for success, helping shape the future standard.
Execs in the Know’s next event
Customer Response Summit - Tucson 2024 Execs In The Know is coming up March 12-15. Chad has assembled a world class group of speakers. You won’t want to miss this one. Register now
Join “Know it All”, a Private Online Community for CX Leaders
The Know It All (KIA) online community, from Execs In the Know, was built for CX leaders and is the perfect place to get your niche CX questions answered by like-minded peers. KIA is free to join, and it gives you instant access to more than a thousand other like-minded CX professionals, and you can take part in the rich conversations taking place. It's the perfect place to network, learn, and share with your peers in a sales-free space, and on your own time.
You can also see a sneak peek of the KIA community in their short tutorial videos located in the KIA Orientation Video Hub.
Thank you for reading this week.
Please share with others you think would benefit.
One More Thing
I want to share some of the exciting content and programs that I have created for your personal and professional growth:
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I hope you find these programs useful. Let me know if you have any questions or need any further assistance.
-Mark