Planning + Activation

While most organizations clearly articulate their core values and purpose to their employees, imparting their customer-centric vision often doesn’t hold similar weight. To legitimize and be effective in their roles, employees crave a single point of truth to rally around. Defining the vision is an essential part of the process, yet activating on it can fall short due to lack of clarity and personalization across teams. Through a collaborative and cross-functional effort, creating and socializing your vision in a way that clearly connects it to stakeholder realities results in a meaningful guidepost for organizational clarity and empowerment.

Organizations can get in the habit of putting the cart before the horse. Competing priorities and short-sighted incentives can easily come into conflict with a customer-centric vision if long-term strategies are not translated into tactical action plans. Alignment of internal resources, well-defined stages of the process, cogent messaging, step-by-step accountability, and tangible metrics are all crucial steps in creating a blueprint for success. Persistent and disciplined approaches to planning ensure all parties understand their roles and are marching forward in the same direction.

Organizations are coming to grips with the reality that a key barrier to operationalizing customer centricity lies in internal silos. Insights, Analytics, Customer Experience, Strategy, and even Operations teams serve varying agendas. In fact, the more established an organization, the more functional areas were not set up for purposeful collaboration. Organizational leaders must acknowledge this and adopt a willingness to change and adapt. Beyond coalescing work streams, a chief integrator who comprehends and translates consolidated outcomes will bridge the language gaps among teams, communicate upward to decision makers, and establish an imperative that all stakeholders, no matter their charge, be grounded in the customer perspective.

While closest to customers, frontline employees are at times disempowered to take actions that ladder up to growth strategies. This not only requires strong two-way communication channels, but the democratization of knowledge. And although employees may believe in a well-articulated vision, it takes discipline to align beliefs with behaviors. A customer-centric culture that incorporates reward systems ensures cross-functional adoption and activation on the vision. Only then can employees at all levels both advocate on behalf of customers and help put customer-centric strategies into action.

In an era where customer experience will soon overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator, organizations are challenged with how to optimize their CX measurement programs. Most organizations intuitively know methods of improving KPIs, such as loyalty, overall satisfaction, and NPS. However, fractured database ownership and siloed communication often prevent a rigorous consideration of the entire CX ecosystem or a connection to the bottom line. Through a unification of touchpoints into a single, integrated framework, it becomes possible to evaluate the ROI on high-level strategic initiatives all the way down to tactical, frontline changes, giving leadership the confidence that investments were well spent.