Integration of Strategy and Customer Experience

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• Integrated strategy framework. A strong customer experience strategy integrates corporate strategy with customer lifecycle insights and ensures alignment across all departments.
• The role of leadership. Senior executives must take ownership of customer experience initiatives and incorporate them into core business strategies for sustainable success.
• Engaged employees are important. Linking employee experience to customer experience increases engagement and ensures employees understand their role in providing exceptional service.

Despite its centrality to the success of every business, customer experience is rarely implemented so effectively by leadership teams. This is because customer experience is still not fully integrated into the core of strategy planning, development and execution.

The challenge for customer experience practitioners is to ensure that senior executives take fundamental ownership of the customer experience. customer experience.

Customer experience applications have two important problems.

The first problem is that the design process of “empathizing, defining, ideating, designing, testing” is never explicitly placed within a broader strategic methodology. For this reason, many design and innovation teams never manage to gain traction at the board level for their ideas, and therefore never gain acceptance and support for the ideas they try to implement.

The second problem is that traditional strategy approaches do not explicitly include the customer lifecycle. By placing the customer lifecycle at the center of its corporate CX strategy, an organization can deliver better value to customers and buyers by aligning every person, activity, and process, ultimately achieving its higher vision and purpose.

When customer experience strategy is developed and effectively communicated within an organization, everyone understands their role in achieving strategic goals. Transforming the customer experience requires alignment and coordination across the organization. To achieve this, leadership teams need to start by: customer lifecycle.

Why Is Customer Lifecycle Important in Your Strategy?

The customer lifecycle traditionally falls under marketing, with core activities focused on sales and retention. But this is much more than a high-level statement. customer journeys. Its importance goes beyond customer relationship marketing, which serves as the foundation on which a customer-focused organization is built.

Customer focus is the formal way of focusing on customers. It places the customer at the center of strategy by aligning all aspects of a company’s operations, including product development, marketing, sales and customer service, around delivering value to the customer. This concept goes far beyond the specific topic of personalization. customer experience strategy It is based on tailoring a business’s services and products to fit each customer’s unique needs and preferences.

Therefore, customer experience strategy needs to be integrated into an organization’s three main strategic activities (strategy planning, translating and implementing).

Related Article: Blueprint for Customer Focus: Aligning Teams with the Vision

Key Elements of Customer Experience Strategy

Strategic planning is concerned with analyzing socioeconomic, technological, political, legal and environmental factors to prepare for future challenges and opportunities. The results of this stage include:

• Identifying an organization’s strategic drivers, which are the key factors or elements that influence the overall strategic direction and decision-making process.
• A clearly stated value proposition.

The Customer Centric Strategy Framework kicks off the strategic planning process with the New 4Ps framework, which helps senior leadership teams systematically analyze their most pressing strategic questions across all four dimensions:

• Platforms: How will digital technologies, architectures, functionality and platform-based business models change the way the organization works, develops and interacts with customers and collaborators?
• Aim: How can the overall purpose of an organization be expressed in a way that clearly explains why the organization exists and what differentiates it from its competitors? What needs does it meet and how will it meet those needs?
• People: How can the organization develop better quality relationships with people, both with customers and the communities in which it operates and has an impact?
• Planet: How can the organization develop a systematic understanding of its positive and negative impacts on our planet?

We use the new 4Ps framework to facilitate dialogue between people across functions and levels to help them understand how their roles need to evolve to ensure their organization continues to thrive in the future. In helping leadership teams develop a more systemic way of thinking, answering customer-related questions can begin to influence strategy at the earliest stage and before strategic drivers are formally established.

Turning Your Vision into Strategy

Strategy translation is the process of translating high-level strategic vision and strategic drivers into goals, objectives, and initiatives that can be understood and executed by various departments and teams.

Once a customer experience strategy is developed, it is implemented through strategic projects and organizational processes. Projects and processes are necessarily carried out by people. This means that leadership teams must ensure alignment across all three elements: people, projects, and processes.

The success of a new customer experience initiative goes beyond implementing new processes and customer marketing systems. People in every field need to be prepared for significant change. The Customer Centric Strategy Framework is explicit in placing leadership activities related to communication and change management at the beginning of the strategy translation phase.

At this stage, leadership teams need to spend time preparing people to help them understand the strategy in a systematic way, starting with the value proposition (the description of how the organization provides value to its customers). The most effective way to do this is to turn the strategy into a map so that people understand not only its individual elements but also the causal connections between its parts.

Implementing Your Customer Experience Strategy

Implementing strategy is the execution of the strategic plan, which includes implementing projects and processes, deploying resources, aligning activities, and monitoring progress. There should be no surprises at this stage. Everyone in the organization needs to be ready for change and fully participate and align through the communication of goals, indicators, objectives and initiatives.

Strategic projects related to customer experience at this stage depend on the customer experience maturity level of the organization. Examples of project objectives include improving customer experience ratings, uncovering new customer needs, researching new market segments, understanding the lives of typical customers, planning customer journeys, and designing business processes to support the customer experience.

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Related Article: Surviving the Customer Journey Mapping Journey

The Role of Leadership in Customer Experience

The Customer Centric Strategy Framework includes a new concept we call “leadership experience” that we use to help leaders explore how they make sense of the world and how others perceive them. Leadership experience (LX) is about the inner psychological world of people, complementing employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX).

We developed the concept after being struck by conversations with presidents and CEOs who lacked a customer-focused mindset. For example, one told us he didn’t have time for customer experience because he was “focused on results.” When leadership experience is recognized as important to improving customer experience, teams become more open to overcoming challenges. This shift encourages mentoring and training for those responsible for managing team performance.

The Role of Employees in Strategic Success

A. Customer Focus Strategy Framework It visually connects the employee lifecycle to the customer lifecycle. While it is important to structure an employee’s development and career path throughout their time in an organization, it is also customer experience design expertise to think about how employees understand and experience strategy.

For example, gamification and storytelling can help senior leadership teams communicate strategy maps to employees who may not have sufficient training to understand the technical terms used to describe strategy more formally. By writing a story that explains the complex relationships between the parts of a strategy, leaders can make sure everyone understands the purpose of the strategy and where they can contribute to its implementation.

These efforts can get people excited about the customer experience strategy and involve them in its processes, from planning to execution. It also provides a pathway to place more designers and customer experience practitioners in positions of authority within their organizations. The goal here is to position and elevate organizations to achieve transformational results. customer focus It’s at the heart of everything they do.

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