Customer Experience Strategy
Today’s article is about how to develop a customer experience strategy at any company. It’s directed at practitioners in the field, and I’ll lay it out in sequential sections to make the concept as simple as possible.
The Mission
Every strategy begins with a mission. Let’s agree from the start that the mission of any CX practitioner is: “to make the world a little better every day for both your customers and your colleagues.” This general mission won’t conflict with the mission of any company you work for; it complements it. Whatever the company’s mission, it serves everyone’s interest if the experience — for both employees and customers — becomes better, easier, more consistent, and memorable.
The Vision
The vision, in its simplest form, is that you want to move from point (A) to point (B). You won’t be able to do that unless you know where you are now and where you want to go. Even Google Maps will ask you to enable GPS. From the very beginning of the road, let me stress how important it is that your vision and strategy align with the company’s vision and strategy — diverging means certain failure. If there’s a flock of birds, learn to fly with them, not outside of them.
Assessing Current CX Maturity
At any company, you won’t be able to build a CX strategy without first understanding the current level of the company’s CX maturity, so you can know where you stand today to later define how you’ll get to your destination (the future state). This is done through a CX maturity assessment exercise. There’s no universally agreed methodology among practitioners because the field is still young, and some specialists have their own innovative approaches. Practitioners should benefit from peers’ frameworks and use their own personal experience to set the criteria against which they’ll evaluate maturity. This subject probably deserves its own article given the depth of detail. But I wouldn’t be exaggerating to say it’s the most important step in building the strategy — because it resembles a doctor diagnosing a patient. In short, failure to diagnose leads to failure in everything afterwards: you won’t identify the right illness, you won’t prescribe the right medicine, and the patient stays sick — and may get worse.
In this assessment, you’ll examine the company clinically: ask the patient where it hurts and run some tests and scans to diagnose the problem well. My advice: give this exercise its proper time and don’t let others rush you. You can also outsource it to a specialized third party, keeping in mind that understanding context may be a challenge for an external party — but it can also be a challenge for you if you’re new to the company.
The most important advice here: when discussing CX maturity at the company, do not minimize prior efforts, lest you create enemies. The exercise is for you more than for anyone else. Always remember to thank prior efforts and try to wrap shortcomings in a frame titled “opportunities for improvement,” and to present your solutions and initiatives as an extension of past successes, inspired by leadership’s direction and vision. I’m not asking you to be a sycophant — I’m helping you secure everyone’s buy-in. Even if you’re right and everyone else is wrong, think about your words before you say them, because you can definitely deliver what you want to say positively and still deliver the same message or achieve the same goal.
Assessing Available Competencies
If you didn’t do this in the previous exercise, do it now. Imagine you’re going to play a chess game — but not from the opening, rather mid-game. The first thing you’d do is assess the available resources (the remaining pieces), then their positions and the risks attached to where they sit. Without diving too deep into the analogy, remember the challenge lies in scarcity: chess wouldn’t be enjoyable if you had five queens or eight bishops instead of pawns. Assessment at this stage is about determining whether the key CX competencies exist at the company or within the CX team — so you can determine which areas to focus on in your strategy over the next 3 to 5 years. Remember, you can’t boil the ocean.
You don’t necessarily need a large team under your direct management. You can form a group of CX ambassadors if they have the required competencies. Your situation is like that of messengers spreading a new faith: the road is full of hardship, and they suffer a great deal until they convince people and create loyal, supportive followers. The point is that the matter isn’t as easy as some imagine — but once the concepts spread and you have committed believers in the thinking you’re putting forward, your job becomes easier.
Setting Strategic Objectives
Now that you’re done with the mission and vision, have assessed the current state, and know the available resources (competencies), you can set the strategic objectives that will help you reach the desired destination (the future state). I advise you not to have too many strategic objectives — under each will sit a set of initiatives that help achieve it. Beware the trap of getting into the details at this stage; your current goal is to set the strategy, not to plan its execution or detail every possible initiative. And here’s an important piece of advice that will help you win acceptance from company leaders or shareholders:
Achieving strategic objectives must be tied to one of two main outcomes that help every company grow: either reducing costs or increasing revenue. When I say tied, we’re talking about ROI on CX. You can do this either by proving the relationship scientifically and methodically, or by citing research and statistics about ROI on CX. I personally prefer the first approach, even though it’s harder and longer. The second is easier and faster but often misleading and imprecise, because the context of the research you cite may not match the context of your region or your industry. Remember also: if you can’t prove ROI for any strategic objective (for any reason), that doesn’t negate its importance or that there’s value in pursuing it. You may find someone who believes in it through intuition and experience, even without conclusive evidence.
Also make sure strategic objectives are clear, easy to understand, and simply named (don’t use complex technical jargon). Try to simplify them, because you’ll fall into the curse of knowledge: most of the people you’ll present the strategy to don’t know what you’re talking about. When you’re done, read your strategic objectives and ask: would this be easy to understand for a university student? If it feels complex, simplify further.
When setting strategic objectives, you can think about the outcome and then work backward through the things that must be done to reach it. In the end, it would be nice for your first draft of strategic objectives to be phrased as: “I want to do (A) to improve (B); this will cost me (C) in resources, and the result will be (D) as a return on investment.”
The most important advice here: don’t treat everything senior executives say as a given or an order to be executed directly. People in senior leadership are like residents of a skyscraper — specifically its upper floors. Even if they work in the same building as their employees, they aren’t necessarily aware of all the fine details. Look out of their windows and you’ll see people and cars as very small specks, and may not see smaller things at all because of the distance — unless you come down to the ground among them.
Listing Initiatives Under Each Strategic Objective
Under each strategic objective, you’ll have a set of initiatives, projects, or tasks that must be executed to achieve it. Make sure there’s a clear timeline, a budget, the resources required, and (if possible) the ROI defined for each initiative or project to be executed in the coming period. We’re now talking about planning to deliver the strategy. You may face challenges setting KPIs if they aren’t measurable, and another challenge in proving ROI — that’s normal, so don’t let it block this task. The important thing now is to set your priorities and the order of execution in a logical way. Knowing the unimportant things that can be deferred is no less important than knowing the important things that must be done quickly.
If you’re short on human resources, tools, or competencies, make that clear to company leaders — especially if you believe the initiative missing those elements is important. Convincing them may not be easy, but remember to link your initiatives to cost reduction or revenue growth.
Your initiatives and objectives will either help the company reduce costs or increase/generate revenue (top line), or increase net profit — which is revenue minus costs (bottom line).
If you succeed at this linkage, also think about choosing initiatives that will create greater value for your customers (whether customers or employees), and make these two criteria the approach by which you set priorities. You’ll succeed in narrowing the gap between success as defined by the customer and success as defined by the company.
When detailing initiatives or objectives, try to clarify the link between them and the nature of the business. You don’t want your proposals judged as generic — they should be viewed as designed specifically for the industry you’re in, to solve clearly defined problems for everyone.
Something that will help win stakeholder adoption of your initiatives is involving them and aligning with them while developing them. If you have enough time, meet with them and discuss your direction before sharing the strategy or presenting it to decision-makers. In the end, the goal of any practitioner in our field is to create movement across the company — not just work plans or project plans that gather dust on a shelf.
Finally, human nature tends toward what’s quick to implement and most effective in terms of impact. Think about a weight-loss project: we’re always looking for the shortest paths. They may be effective and impactful, but they’re not sustainable. Beware of quick wins — some don’t create sustained impact. But if you find opportunities that will lead to a quick and sustained win, don’t hesitate to act, because the buzz will spread quickly. At the same time, don’t forget the importance of long-term initiatives whose fruits can only be harvested when ripe. A pregnant woman can’t deliver the baby before nine months.
Setting Expectations for the Internal Team
Let’s assume the initiatives are now clear and you’ve secured senior leadership’s blessing to execute them. You now need to set the timelines and required resources for execution. You can plan to execute these initiatives over the course of a year, and it’s important to have final delivery dates for each initiative because that helps you stay committed. One good book on planning is The 12-Week Year, in English; an Arabic summary can be found here.
You now need to set expectations for your internal team (those directly reporting to you) or for colleagues on the CX ambassadors team. That’s not enough — you must follow up with them periodically to ensure execution is on track for each initiative. Offer support and request support for them if they need it. Just setting an end date isn’t enough.
Closing Advice
Building a CX strategy isn’t an item on a to-do list (it’s not a checkbox you tick) — it’s a task that evolves with time. Remember not to change the goal if you stumble along the way; change the road instead. Just like Google Maps: if it leads you to a dead end, do you stop moving? Of course not. You go back and find another route. As long as your North Star is clear, keep going toward your destination — and if you lose your way or find a dead end, look for another path to reach your goal. Finally, focus on what you can do, not on what you can’t. Thinking about what’s missing is misleading and creates fog on your road so you can’t move, while thinking about what’s there (what’s possible) lifts the mist and helps you press ahead. Last but not least: believe in your goals before anyone else does.
How can you expect them to believe in your goals when they see your own eyes denying them? — Aisha Al-Omran | Be Well p.38
To fellow practitioners — please share comments or critiques to enrich this article.
Related concepts: CX Maturity Model, CX ROI Model, Customer-Centric Operating Model, Customer Journey Mapping.
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