Customer Experience Ambassadors — Almohannad Alsbeai

Introduction

Many practitioners in customer experience (the target audience of this article) face various challenges in their journey to drive change in the company’s culture and its outlook toward customers. Although many companies don’t invest seriously in customer experience, the size of the investment or the team won’t help this function clap with one hand — meaning, it won’t be able to improve all the company’s services and products and change procedures, because in the end, it doesn’t own those services or products and isn’t, in most cases, the primary decision-maker in changing or improving them.

An example to bring the idea closer: if you brought in a battered car — let’s assume this car represents the maturity level of customer experience in a company — would it be enough to feed it the best oils, change its tires, and fill it with the purest fuel for it to work? Of course not. It won’t move an inch, and that’s what will happen to a company that has set up a customer experience function. Without sufficient empowerment and authority, they won’t be able to change the situation much, because this battered car needs many rusted and broken parts changed. Forming a customer experience ambassadors team helps accelerate this car’s repair and renew it piece by piece until it returns to its former state. That team is what I’ll discuss in this article.

What Is a Customer Experience Ambassadors Team?

Some practitioners have started a practice of forming a team that includes at least one person from every department in the company. This team is called in English:

CX Champions

This team serves as internal supporters who believe in the importance of the customer and the value of investing in customer experience — and even if they don’t meet that condition initially, it can be built after the team is formed. Tangible wins become easier to produce through this team, and organizational change may start here.

In one inspiring article 1(https://www.cx-journey.com/2018/08/amplify-your-transformation-with-cx.html?m=1) on the same topic, I quote the following (translated with light adaptation, with permission from the author to republish): “Changing an organization’s DNA to become more customer-centric isn’t a journey one person takes on alone; it happens through this team, which can be considered an extension of the customer experience team — because the customer experience team is by nature small and can’t reach every corner of the organization and do everything. The customer experience team also doesn’t possess knowledge spanning all the company’s departments and their expertise, and may not have the relationships and connections that enable them to achieve their goals.”

How Should Team Members Be Selected?

Members should be role models in living the company’s values. They should be the first to drive change among their peers. They should ideally have strong communication skills and deep knowledge of their department’s services/products — because you’re not in the business of creating heroes; it’s better to have heroes on your team from day one. From a political angle, members should ideally have a good relationship with their department managers. If you can’t find someone with these traits, I suggest choosing a new hire — the most recently hired person in the department — because they’ll bring a different perspective and haven’t yet been shaped by the organization’s culture. Some organizations rely on a volunteer-call approach, which works if the call comes from the top of the pyramid to give it weight. But it’s better when the invitation comes from the top with prior agreement on members, then the chosen person is given the option to volunteer or not.

Some specialists prefer team members to be at the highest levels of the organization — those whose direct manager is the head of the institution. This is feasible if the customer experience manager reports to the same person and if the maturity level of customer experience in the company is high. Otherwise, I don’t recommend this practice.

Before sending the invitation, don’t forget to get verbal approval from the targeted members — and before that, from their direct managers — so no misunderstandings arise after invitations go out. Make sure your answer to “how much of each volunteer’s time will you need?” is ready, because they’ll certainly ask.

What to Expect From Team Members

The most important role expected of the team is to play the customer’s defense attorney. They attend periodic meetings, contribute to improving the service and its procedures (based on outputs of the voice-of-customer program), transfer knowledge from those meetings to their colleagues, help spread customer-centric culture in their department, help raise the readiness of existing services/products, ensure the readiness of services/products about to launch, share and exchange ideas regarding all current customer problems and discuss possible solutions, and last but not least, take part in workshops devoted to customer journey mapping and to root cause analysis exercises for current problems and the issues customers complain about.

What Topics Will Be Discussed in the Periodic Meetings?

The same article author advises that the first meetings “should educate members on the role of the customer experience function — what they do, why they should do what they do, and the desired state the customer experience function hopes to reach.” [2] I agree, because many companies — especially those where a new customer experience function has just been set up — don’t know its role and may hear inaccurate information from friends at other companies. So misconceptions must be corrected from the start. It’s also important in the first few meetings that every member understands the benefit they’ll gain from volunteering on this team and how it will affect their department, their colleagues, and of course their customers. Answering that question is a key factor in the success and continuity of future team meetings, because knowing the benefit raises engagement, enthusiasm, and the motivation to participate and take initiative.

This team will be a role model through their actions, so each meeting should have a dedicated portion to educate the team on the most important customer experience principles and concepts. Since one of the goals of forming this team is to drive a cultural shift across the organization, a portion should also be dedicated to discussing one toxic cultural element in the organization and how it can be resisted to reduce its impact over time. The most important part of the meeting is the one related to improving the company’s services/products based on voice-of-customer outputs.

In subsequent meetings, we mustn’t lose sight of following up on agreed-upon improvements — what’s been accomplished in each and whether escalation to the head of the organization is needed to accelerate certain items. Don’t forget that these meetings are by nature two-way communication; the facilitator shouldn’t be the only one talking. The door to discussion and questions is open to all. If time permits, you can add certain exercises to each meeting to increase engagement.

Over time, after educating the team on the fundamentals of customer experience, you can begin holding individual meetings designed for specific roles — for example, meetings with the HR representative to go deeper into employee experience, or meetings with representatives of shared services like Finance and Procurement to educate them about their customers, both external (suppliers) and internal (the company’s own employees).

Recognizing and Honoring Members

Senior leadership must consider the importance of honoring customer experience ambassadors — whether employees or customers (I’ll discuss customers as members in the next section). Recognition can take place at an important event such as the annual company gala or as part of an annual Customer Experience Day (if it’s on the calendar) in the company’s events calendar.

Recognition comes in many forms — material and intangible — and the idea of recognizing and appreciating effort is essential for ensuring this team’s continuity and ongoing contribution. One of the best ways to recognize them is to give them the opportunity to speak about the wins they’ve created in front of organizational leaders in the context of customer experience council periodic meetings — which are separate meetings at the level of company leadership to review and discuss customer experience initiatives and improvements being made to the company’s products/services.

Finally, don’t forget to institutionalize this team. Governance is essential to ensure the continuity of the team’s meetings and to ensure champions execute their tasks. I don’t recommend assigning a manager over team members, because no employee likes to have more than one manager.

Make every presentation, discussion, and meeting minute documented in a shared folder accessible to all, because knowledge will accumulate over time, and you don’t want it accumulating only in the heads of the customer experience ambassadors team — some will eventually resign, you might too, and I’m sure you don’t want this team to die after you.

The other goal of this folder is to make it easier for team members to access content at any time, rather than asking them to request it and send it via email.

Not Just Employees — Customers Too

After ensuring the team’s continuity, you can form another branch that includes customers. How and from where? An established practice in the customer experience industry is the Customer Advisory Board.

Customer Advisory Board

This board deserves a standalone article and I’m not going to detail it here. Briefly, it’s a group of customers the company recruits and meets with periodically to seek their input on its products/services, work procedures, and certain policies. They get early access to test new products/services. You can leverage some customer members of this board to play a role in becoming ambassadors for your brand and promoters of the positive stories and experiences your company delivers — among their colleagues and acquaintances. Facilitators of this board are often very careful to choose members who embody the company’s values.

You can also recruit other people from online communities.

Online Community

This is a company-specific group of brand consumers or service beneficiaries. The platform offers an interactive forum and weekly or, in some cases, daily discussion topics. This relationship is directly tied to developing services/products or launching new ones that meet needs identified through the platform. Setting aside the details, the most active members can be selected as they tend to share their views and won’t miss an opportunity like this to become official brand ambassadors.

Conclusion

I ask esteemed colleagues in the profession to share their opinions on this idea and their experiences in forming such a team and facilitating its meetings, so we can benefit from your collective thinking. No matter how small your addition, don’t hold back — share it to enrich this content. Perhaps later I’ll follow this article with another after going through the experience of facilitating such a team with my colleagues in the customer experience function at the organization I currently work in.

For related work, see Voice of Customer (VoC), Customer-Centric Operating Model, and CX Maturity Model.

Sources

[1] https://www.cx-journey.com/2018/08/amplify-your-transformation-with-cx.html?m=1 [2] https://www.cx-journey.com/2018/08/amplify-your-transformation-with-cx_8.html

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