How To Transform the CX Culture in Your Organization

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The following article contains the first level from?the?CX maturity playbook: Culture , a guide with actionable insight to uplevel and transform the CX culture in your organization, written in partnership between?GetFeedback ?and Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CEO of?Experience Investigators .

An organization has a?customer-centric culture?when all employees and leaders see the customer at the core of everything they do. This means that customer happiness, and not just satisfaction, is the driving force for all strategic actions and communications, both internally and externally.?

Customer-centricity frees leaders from the “inside-out” thinking that occurs too often in organizations. Instead of assuming they know the best for the customer, leaders put in the work to listen and understand their customers’ needs and wants. And it pays off—customer-centric businesses are?60% more?profitable than their product-focused counterparts. That’s in part because customers see and feel that customer-centric culture. What happens inside the organization, shows up on the outside to customers.?

A mature customer-centric culture has the customer woven into every aspect of the organization, reinforcing and rewarding great customer experiences. Employees are empowered to?listen to customers, understand their needs and act on behalf of them, and as a result, customers trust in the organizations’ consistency and quality.

Such a state is achievable through strategic action, which you can start taking today with the help of this playbook.?

The levels below are defined based on general processes, rules, and expectations of a customer-centric culture.

ACTIONABLE STEPS

Level 1???

What it looks like?

At this stage, culture within the organization is not intentionally defined or nurtured. Customer experience is not a focus, so culture is not aligned with a CX mission or strategy.?

Culture is felt by employees based on how leaders and others treat one another. Standards, best practices, and recognition are ad hoc and not centralized along with the values of the organization. This often leads to communication challenges and questions around priorities, especially as it pertains to managing customer experience.

You might hear employees make such statements:?

I sell customers what we promise, but then the product team doesn’t deliver on time. So customers get confused and call me, which isn’t really my job. But it’s just the way it is here. — Sales Leader?

Priorities to advance to the next level???

Moving from Level 1 to Level 2 happens when certain leaders understand and express the importance of customer experience as a strategy.

To move forward, focus on:?

• Leaders invested in CX strategy?
• Organizational values?

How to take action

To advance to Level 2, identify those key leaders in the organization who are working toward customer experience improvements for their own teams and parts of the?customer journey. Then leverage their alliance to educate their teams on CX best practices and bring organizational values to the forefront of team culture.?

Step 1: Find your CX champions

These leaders intuitively know the importance of customer experience for your organization. They work with their teams to improve individual touchpoints along the customer’s journey within their responsibilities.

Often, at Level 2, these leaders work in silos—they are focused on specific outcomes for their parts of the journey. For instance, the leaders of Marketing, Digital and, Product teams see the connection between their own deliveries and results, like higher conversion rates, increased positive customer feedback, and improved retention rates.

To find and build an alliance with these individual CX champions, try these ideas:?

• Host “lunch and learn” sessions on CX topics:?Invite leaders to attend and present at these lunches and you’ll quickly find out which leaders are proactively taking steps for a better customer experience, even if they themselves don’t?yet see it that way.
• Communicate about CX best practices:?Work with your internal communications team to share customer stories, provide direction on how to measure customer experience success, and highlight those leaders improving specific touchpoints.??
• Look for customer comments:?If you are collecting customer feedback, pay attention to the specific touchpoints, phases of the journey, or even employee names that are mentioned. These can point you to the leaders and teams who are delivering on their part of the journey.

Once identified, invite these leaders to start nurturing the future customer-centric culture you want to see. Encourage these champions to share their successes not just with their teams, but also with their fellow leaders.

Step 2: Communicate how your organizational values connect with customer experience?

At this level, your organization’s vision, mission, and values may be documented but aren’t necessarily internalized and lived by employees.

Your company’s values will shape the culture—and whether it’s customer-centric—as well as impact your business strategy. So ensure these existing values are not just documented somewhere but also communicated throughout your organization.?

Instead of just including the organization’s values on a poster in the office, try incorporating them into decision-making. In doing so, you’ll demonstrate how these values influence the customer experience.

To help guide you, ask questions like:

• Does this new service/product/improvement align with our values?
• Are we living up to our values in the way we communicate and work together inside the organization??
• Would our customers see how this aligns with our values as an organization?

Lead with these values and questions. Encourage other leaders to do the same.

And if you don’t know or can’t find the organizational values, then that’s a challenge unto itself. It’s worth taking the time to identify and document them to improve your culture and better serve your customers.?

Lastly, if your organizational values do not prioritize the happiness of customers?and?employees, work with leaders to consider what customer-centric values should be incorporated in future goals.?

For Levels 2 - 5, visit the full playbook here.

If you have yet to evaluate your CX maturity, we suggest you?take GetFeedback's assessment now ?to?identify your current level for?CX culture.

This article contains the first level from?the?CX maturity playbook: Culture , a guide with actionable insight to uplevel and transform the CX culture in your organization, written in partnership between?GetFeedback ?and Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CEO of?Experience Investigators .

Read the full playbook here.