Whether you’re a seasoned Customer Experience professional or only just getting started, you’ll probably need some help along the way. Time, resources, specific skills, or knowledge, usually CX projects are not something you can do all by yourself.
It can be difficult to convince other people of the added value of Customer Experience, especially with their own calendars filling up and their to-do lists getting longer. We’ve compiled some helpful tips to help you get others excited about Customer Experience projects. This way they can’t wait to help you with yours, or better yet, suggest some own initiatives.
What is Customer Experience and Why does it matter?
Customer Experience, or CX, is your customers’ perception of their experience with your brand or organisation. It is made up of different interactions, and these different moments impact the impression your customer has of your business.
These moments or touchpoints are connected to different parts of your organisation, from your products and services to your employees. Did they receive helpful and friendly advice from one of your customer service representatives for example? Or was your product quality even better than they anticipated?
Regardless of the industry you’re active in, delivering a positive experience for the people that interact with your business has several benefits. Increased satisfaction, higher retention rates, better word-of-mouth marketing, and numerous other results are known benefits of great CX. These results can be beneficial when applied to different business models, so delivering great experiences can really help any type of business.
How to get people excited about Customer Experience
Even though the added value of delivering great CX might be clear to you, it can still be difficult to get other people on board. Especially when this involves team members or people outside of your team investing time and effort into Customer Experience.
To get other people as excited about delivering world-class experiences as you are, here are some tips:
- Talk to your customer regularly
- Share customer insights
- Highlight some wins
- Find sources of inspiration
- Involve them in a customer journey project
- Talking to your customers regularly
We’re well aware that quantitative feedback can provide valuable input for your Customer Experience efforts. But even with input from customers in the form of CX metrics, it can be difficult to figure out their wants and needs. Figuring out their pain points or moments that delighted them will be (nearly) impossible.
That’s why we recommend talking to your customers on a regular basis. Not from a sales or account management perspective, or just when your customer is experiencing a certain issue. No, we mean really talk to them.
This can happen one-on-one, or even in a group setting such as a panel discussion. The most important thing is to actively listen to your customer, find out what drives them, what keeps them up at night, and if they can remember the last time your organisation pleasantly surprised them.
Challenge your team members and make it a goal to speak to customers twice a quarter for example. Or better yet, even put the challenge out to people outside your team. The department or job title shouldn’t matter. If they find it difficult to speak with customers, joining conversations others have with customers can be a great step too! You’ll see that by listening to customers, the importance of Customer Experience can come to life.
2. Share Customer Insights
This brings us to our second recommendation. Though we believe letting people speak to customers directly is beneficial, learning about your customers indirectly through different insights can help as well. Aim to create a culture where sharing customer insights is celebrated.
To do this, we have two additional tips. Tips within a tip, or meta tips. Number one: find new and creative ways to share these insights. A nice visual of a customer journey, an engaging video, or a great PowerPoint presentation will certainly do the trick. If your team or organisation needs a bit more excitement, why stop there? You can make lifesize cardboard cutouts of your company’s personas or organize an inspiration session, as long it matches your target audience within your organisation.
This first tip within a tip will naturally transition into the second one: encourage others to share their insights. By showing your excitement about sharing customer insights, other people will be more likely to join in. By setting a strong example, you’re creating a more customer-focused culture.
3. Highlight Some Wins
In addition to sharing customer insights, it can be helpful to highlight the benefits or gains of delivering great customer experiences. These wins can vary in size and impact. Big projects or impactful business cases are great and should be shared, but quick wins can be inspirational too.
Are there any recent hypotheses, ideas, or improvement projects that were sparked by talking to a customer? Definitely share these with your team or other departments. It can be helpful to remind people of the value Customer Experience can bring to your organisation. Their past involvement and future investments will be validated by these outcomes, big or small. Keep in mind: confirming an assumption or validating the way an existing process is structured can still be a win.
4. Find Sources of Inspiration
Though customer insights and wins from your organisation are likely already inspirational, we recommend looking for varied sources of inspiration. If you’re looking to inspire and excite other people, try out different formats and see what works best for your team or organisation. Linking information to something they know well can help ideas seem more attainable, but adapting ideas from a completely unrelated field to fit your organisation can make people feel inspired to think outside the box.
Blogs, videos, and thought leaders within the CX field are some of our favorite sources of inspiration. But it can be helpful to speak to people in other organisations and see how they manage customer experience as well. Search for different sources of inspiration that really get you and your team going.
5. Involve them in a customer journey project
Our last tip to turn people into ambassadors for your Customer Experience efforts is to involve them in a customer journey project. This might sound difficult, but with the first four tips listed above, we believe you can spark enough interest to get involved in a customer journey project. The best team for these kinds of projects is multi-disciplinary, so try and involve people based on their specific skills and knowledge.
Once they’ve agreed to be part of the project, make sure to involve them every step of the way. Gaining customer insights firsthand, coming up with improvement ideas, implementing them, are all going to contribute to their understanding of customer experience. Ultimately it’s this level of understanding that will likely make them excited to be involved, involve other people, or even better, launch their own initiatives.
Getting Started
With these five tips, the people around you will hopefully become as excited about delivering amazing Customer Experience as you are. To get started with CX, the most important thing is to keep your customer in mind. It doesn’t rely on the kind of projects you’re typically involved in, and the improvements in their overall impression of your organisation can be small or big.
But knowing your customers are happy is very satisfying and exciting, and that kind of excitement will energize just about anyone. When you’re able to focus on delivering great value to your customers, the people around you will most likely want to join in.
If you do require some help setting up, or taking the next step in your Customer Experience, please get in touch. We’re also happy to show you our platform during a free demo.