CX Club – Round 2 – Agenda – Setting out the subject matter topics for #CXClub – 1st will be CX Principles

CX Club is a series of videos designed to stimulate interactive discussions around the subject of the end-to-end Customer Experience transformation process, from the identification of individual customers, through understanding the wants and needs of those customers, right to the transformation of the business in order to better deliver against those wants and needs.

However we cannot start doing this until we have laid down an agenda, picking out the subject matter areas and selecting the first of these to expand upon. These subject matter areas are as follows:

1. CX Principles – this are the fundamental truths that underpin every Customer Experience programme I have ever been involved in; and perhaps you know of others not mentioned here

2. Leadership Immersion – No Customer Experience programme will be successful without the buy-in of the senior management team. In order to achieve this, you may need to immerse them in the problem, highlighting the importance of Customer Experience to the business

3. Strategic Planning – to bring about transformation change, you need to set objectives and deliver them via a strategic plan

4. People & Culture – to deliver a transformational change programme, bot only do you need to get the people on board, you also need to keep them on board, not simply by using ra-ra and employee engagement ‘cheap tricks’, but by setting and delivering against a concerted and meaningful cultural change agenda

5. Profiling – you need to understand who your individual customers are by combining disparate data sources to create a single view of individual customers that provides meaningful information about each customer that is consistent, useful and easy to maintain

6. Segmentation – given the advent of personalisation, many people are now questioning the validity of segmentation. However, as well as the difficulty of delivering an effective and cost-efficient personalised customer experience, organisations are also finding that segmentation is important in driving branded customer experiences, with customers only able to recognise and acknowledge their own experiences by relating and reflecting them against the experiences of other similar customers

7. Personae Building – segments are built from data, however need to be evolved into personae to ensure that the organisation has a complete picture of the customer, including both rational and emotional data

8. Customer Journey Mapping – this is a central tenet of Customer Experience Transformation and Management, helping the organisation build a strong chronological understanding of the customer’s end-to-end experiences, including the identification of pain points, moments of truth, commercial opportunities and wow opportunities

9. Tactical Alignment – Once these issues and opportunities have been identified, the organisation then need to go through the process of getting different functional areas of the business to own and co-own each of them

10. Transformation – The organisation then needs to organise itself around this change agenda

11. Branding & Communications – Customer Experience isn’t just about changing, it is also about making a corresponding promise to the customer about what the experience is going to be like, delivered via branding & communications activities of the organisation

12. Measurement – There is a great deal of talk around Customer Experience measurement, including Customer Satisfaction. NPS, Voice of the Customer, CES & NetEasy. Building an effective CX Dashboard and closed-loop feedback system helps the organisation measure and maintain the ongoing experiences of its customers, supporting an ongoing change agenda to meet the evolving nature of customer needs and wants

The first area we will be looking at in the next video is CX Principles. Here are some common truths we will be discussing, but we welcome your suggested subject areas as well as your questions and comments relating to these:

CX Principles

A. Customer Experience isn’t something you do – the business has to deliver activities to support CX transformation & management, but whereas the other areas of the business contribute to the delivery of the product/ service, CX is about what the customer experiences and isn’t functional

B. Customer Experience is not “Customer Service on acid” – we explain the differences between CX and Customer Service

C. CX, journeys & stories – are inextricably linked

D. The role of the brand – CX is about both making a promise and delivering against it

E. Customer Experience is the gap between what the customer gets and what they expect

F. The connection between Customer Experience & profit – their is a direct correlation between the two

I’m tagging everyone who has been involved in the discussion so far and will be producing another video to discuss CX principles once you’ve had an opportunity to comment on this video.

Speak soon!