Do your company leaders care about customers? Here is how to know for sure

How often do you read or hear statements like the following from your company leaders?

“Our customers are our top priority.”

“Everything we do, we do for our customers.”

“Customers come first.”

Internal and external corporate communication is full of statements like these. Do they actually mean anything? Here is how to know, at least for your own company.

How to know

It is quite simple, really. There are three steps:

1. ?Go to your corporate intranet. Your CEO and senior leaders should each have descriptions of their objectives and strategic initiatives. (If they don’t, your company has a different sort of problem.) Do any of those objectives mention customers? Will any of the formal initiatives and investments that are listed do anything to improve customer experience? Or do you only see things like “Reduce operating costs by 15%”, “Move our travel expense administration to Poland”, “Move our HQ building to a less expensive part of town,”, “Migrate our manufacturing systems to SAP version x.x.”
2. Read the emails sent to all employees by the CEO and the leaders of each business and function. When talking about quarterly results, do they mention things done for customers? Where the leadership team members set out the priorities for the coming months, do they mention investments in areas that customers have requested? Look for statements like, “Our customer research has told us we need to reduce hold times and let more people bypass the IVR system to talk immediately to a human, so we are investing there.”, “Predictive CX analytics tell us that customers want us to cut our delivery times from three days to one.”
3. Examine the formal job objectives for your team and for yourself. Do you see anything based on predictive CX analytics, or other forms of customer research and feedback?

The theme here is really one of ownership. Other than service functions such as your contact center, who is actually accountable for improving customer experience and customer retention? That accountability can be formally designated, or indeed simply taken on by someone who cares.

OK, so what you have found is disappointing

Companies that have to report quarterly results have an understandable tendency to concentrate communication on things that will take just a single quarter, or at least produce clear financial results in the short term. Things like brand marketing and customer experience improvement work have their effect over time, usually taking 12 to 18 months to make a real difference. If you find your company in this situation, you should make it as easy as possible for executives to communicate on customer experience. Find out who actually writes the leaders' all-employee emails. Find out who prepares the material for their intranet sites. Supply those people with short paragraphs that describe customer feedback and what is being done with it.

Make the communication gap your problem, not theirs

If you are in charge of customer experience or customer success, find out when each leader has to set their formal annual or quarterly priorities and how they will communicate them. Give them a single fact-based customer priority as a starting point. Try to think about it the way I thought about language the first time I visited a country where the people around me could not speak any language I spoke. I considered it to be my problem, not theirs. I had to fit into their way of communicating, not the other way around. Yes, I needed an interpreter in China.

You may need a friendly interpreter to help you fit your thoughts into your senior executives’ metrics and communication styles, particularly if you use traditional surveys as your only way of identifying customer needs. It has to be said that if you already use predictive CX analytics software like Customer AI, you already have customer needs expressed using the operational metrics and trends each leader uses for their everyday reporting.

Conclusion

The mid-term nature of customer experience improvements make them challenging for executives to communicate in a short-term world. Customer experience leaders need to internalize this and make CX work and initiatives as easy and memorable to communicate as possible. This month of December is a particularly important one for getting the 2024 customer-centric objectives set and communicated correctly. If you lead CX or Customer Success, please make sure you consider this to be your problem to solve.

Webinar: Customer AI for Customer Success teams

Our CEO, Richard Owen, is leading a great series of four webinars on the benefits of Customer AI for various teams in your company. At 8:30 a.m. US Pacific Time on December 12th, Richard will consider it from the perspective of Customer Success teams. One core concept that will be covered in detail is the improvement in revenue coverage from the average we see of about 20% with Customer Success teams today, to an almost-incredible and absolutely realistic 100%, via implementation of Customer AI. Essential watching for Customer Success professionals. Please click on the image below to register.

Notes

OCX Cognition predicts customer futures. Our breakthrough Customer AI solution lets enterprises transform what’s possible in customer experience. Reduce your customer risk, break down silos, and drive speedy action – when you can see what’s coming, you can change the outcome. Building on more than 100 years of CX-focused expertise in our small team and thousands in teams we have led, we’ve harnessed today’s advances in AI, elastic computing, and data science to deliver on the promise of customer-driven financial results. Learn more at www.ocxcognition.com.

Maurice FitzGerald is Editor-in-Chief, Content at OCX Cognition. He retired from HP where he was VP of Customer Experience for their $4 billion software business and was previously VP of Strategy and Customer Experience as well as Chief of Staff for HP in EMEA. He and his brother Peter, an Oxford D.Phil in Cognitive Psychology, have written three books on customer experience strategy and NPS, all available from Amazon.