6 Imperatives of Excellence in Your CX Initiative

Forrester Research has been busy in the customer experience management space. Their most recent wave report, the 2018 fourth quarter, defined the leaders in this space and how those leaders enable ROI for large enterprises. But technology is just the enabler — it is the organization that must take action.

One of our colleagues was recently asked by the CEO of a major retailer, “What does excellence look like in a CX initiative?” He quickly broke it down as follows:

C-Suite Commitment

You can think of a large club chain or a single location — it doesn’t matter. The person at the top of the food chain must articulate a customer experience vision that can be measured, tracked and broken down into its actionable metrics and pieces, with cascading objectives to every team and team member.

A CX Wired Enterprise

You must capture the voice of customers at volume across the entire enterprise, and infuse the metrics and feedback into daily operations in a manner that makes sense for every role. The metrics and feedback should support the coaching of the behaviors and skills your organization is depending on for delivering a great experience.

Intense Focus on Customer Irritants

You should have an “all hands on deck” focus on customer irritants, pain and friction points. The organization must take complete ownership of main irritants and have a discipline around annihilating the species.

Widespread Ideation and Innovation

Crowdsource ideas from all team members for experience innovations and improvements of all types across associates, at all levels. Quickly vet and test ideas on a small scale in order to fail fast and cheap, find what works, iterate when necessary and roll out across all customers.

Engagement “Selling and Operating” Models

These are associate engagement models (A.K.A. training programs) that are core to the CX initiative. Understanding the customer perspective on the behaviors and skills expected from these training models enables performance management, tuning, training and coaching in order to delight customers and drive desired customer behaviors that impact the business.  

Integrate Non-Feedback Data

Integrating operational, transactional, financial, customer and customer behavioral, segmentation, and other data systematically — versus manually via humans, added costs, time delays and static outputs — into the customer experience management platform delivers the WIIFM (“What’s in it for me?”) to users at all levels in real-time.

Here’s the breakdown: If you are the owner of one club or the CEO of a large club chain, make it clear that the battlefield is the member experience. Collect member feedback constantly across multiple touchpoints with metrics that matter to teams, get rid of the company behaviors that cause the most pain, scale the ideas that delight, use the feedback to train and coach individuals and teams, and blend your data for much better understanding of the business impact.

Blair McHaney is the president and CEO of MXM, Medallia’s partner to the health, fitness and wellness industry. For more information, visit mxmetrics.com, and Blair can be reached at info@mxmetrics.com.