Customer Experience Awards
Introduction
What is the purpose of customer experience awards? What is the purpose for the organizers, and what is the purpose for the participants? Start with the why, as the great author Simon Sinek always advises. In this article, I’ll discuss the topic of excellence awards neutrally and objectively, focusing on participants in CX excellence awards. I’ll start with the questions and discuss them in the rest of the article: Has the service provider made tremendous efforts that deserve recognition from a specialized body? Or do they want to market their brand through the publicity that follows announcing a win?
Do customers really rely on news of this kind to make purchase decisions? I don’t think so. Outstanding products or services market themselves through their users (word of mouth). Putting aside the questions of utility and impact, I want every practitioner to think about the purpose and to answer the question: why do we want to participate in an excellence award?
What’s the Current State of Excellence Awards?
From what I’ve seen of current practices among CX award organizers, most fall between two schools:
The First School
Purely commercial, with no goal beyond profit. Even participants are aware of this reality, and their goal is often to achieve media publicity (something to “make noise”) — but the reality of their customer experience is bitter. Some of these organizers are biased toward sponsors and may help them win one of the top spots. If the organizer belongs to this school, I do not recommend participating or sponsoring them, because the purpose isn’t noble and this kind of school tarnishes the industry’s reputation. In short, it promotes illusions.
The Second School
It has detailed methodologies and frameworks that anyone wishing to participate must go through — and they may not be qualified to enter the competition in the first place. This school is for those who want to make a real, tangible impact for their customers and who believe that winning is just a stage reached after great effort, and that the next stage (maintaining the same level) is the bigger challenge ahead. These schools usually assess the current state in more than one way, and some help participants build a roadmap and improve their maturity level — making the competition idea a sideline on the agenda of both parties (organizer and participant). The goal here is loftier than just rankings and top spots; the goal is to spread awareness and inspire others around leading practices that demonstrate the benefits of customer experience.
Between the two schools above, there are other hybrid schools that try to be profitable while delivering something tangible and impactful — and there’s no harm in that, since sustainability is ultimately needed for any entity running such initiatives.
Back to Purpose — The Impact on the Internal Customer
I mentioned in the introduction that customers don’t really care about CX awards; they aren’t among the primary drivers behind their decision. Now I want to talk about the internal customer (the employee) and the impact of participating in such awards on them. If the organization’s leaders talk about the importance of customer-centricity in an effort to spread this culture, and (most importantly) their actions align with their words, then participation will have a positive impact on employees — regardless of which school is organizing. But if company leaders say one thing and do another, and their decisions contradict their words about customer-centricity, I advise against participating, because the impact will be negative on employees.
A quick example: the same applies to employee experience and workplace excellence awards. Since some weak companies want to attract talent, they go to the first school — or perhaps to even worse entities that can be bribed to win the award. The moment results are announced, the whole thing becomes a source of ridicule because their actual workplace conditions are poor and don’t deserve an excellence award. This causes a drop in employees’ trust in their employers and may increase the tendency to badmouth their workplace to those around them. On the other hand, when the goal is genuinely to promote, raise morale, and motivate employees, these activities should be sustained to ensure the best outcomes at the organization and individual level.
What About Statistics Published by Regulators — Supposedly Done by a Neutral Party (the Regulator Itself)?
The devil is in the details. If it’s, say, a statistic on beneficiary satisfaction, the question is: what’s the sampling methodology, and how did the regulator reach the customers of the entities being evaluated? If it’s a complaints statistic, the question is: did the regulator take into account the size of the customer base and the volume of operations of the entities they publish complaints data on? Is the published data normalized? In other words, has it been recalculated to account for the multiple variables that affect the raw number?
And if it’s a methodology that ranks providers in a sector from best to worst, is that methodology open-source with published details, or is it a black box? I raise all these questions not to point fingers at any party, but to open eyes and say that we shouldn’t believe everything that is published — even from official bodies. Unfortunately, CX practitioners may grasp these details, but customers (beneficiaries) of services may not, and their next purchase decision may be based on such statistics. If the statistics are sound and scientific, the customer will have made a good decision; if they’re impressionistic and unstudied, the customer will be a victim of a wrong decision — and over time the impact will be negative on customer experience, on the company’s revenues, and on its customer base, making it harder for the company to retain customers.
In the end, I urge participation and the neutral dissemination of practices that help companies and CX specialists deliver their best to customers — which in turn reflects on the Arab customer’s experience.
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