Editor’s note: Jeannie Walters is the CEO and founder of Experience Investigators. This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared under the title “5 Ways to Lead Customer Experience – Even If It’s Not In Your Job Description.”
It’s easy to toss around phrases like “Customer experience is everyone’s job!” But saying it’s everyone’s job is permission for it to be nobody’s job. It really is up to everyone in an organization to own and deliver great customer experiences. The dirty little secret is that even if there is no leadership, no investment and no strategy around customer experience in your organization…you are still delivering a customer experience. Yet that experience is:
Great customer experiences are built on many things including:
Yet organizations rarely organize themselves around these ideas.
Instead, customer experience is tossed around as an ill-defined concept. Employees are encouraged to be “customer-obsessed” or remember how the customer signs their paycheck. But really, those are just ideas that can be interpreted differently from one well-meaning employee to the next. After a few months, leaders shrug and ask why people talk so much about customer experience when they haven’t seen the results.
That’s why CX change agents are sometimes the real leaders in the organization. They not only talk about CX, but they also lead by example. They show up, make waves and get results. And that’s when leaders really pay attention. If you’re trying to get others in your organization to get it and are begging for buy-in from those at the top of the org chart, this is for you.
1. Understand the language and use it right.
One of my personal pet peeves is hearing “customer experience” described as a buzzword or jargon. But I get it. Customer experience is seen as something to add on to the business, not part of the business. Instead, it should be seen as a wa...