The Golden Rule, Your Mother and Customer Experience

As many companies undergo customer experience transformations, it’s increasingly common to forget the reason you’re embarking on the challenge in the first place—the customer. In our efforts to improve or create new processes, services, and products, we sometimes lose sight of the human element. And this includes internal team members going through major mindset shifts and change management as well as our customers, who are the end consumers of the business transformation.

In my recent webinar “5 Customer Experience Requirements For Business Growth,” with customer experience expert, Chief Customer Officer pioneer and practitioner Jeanne Bliss, we delve into the essential elements for any business to realize a successful customer experience transformation. Here are some key takeaways to help you through your transformation to customer experience maturity.

Building Blocks to Customer Experience Business Results

All companies want to be sure they provide the right type of experience for their customers. But taking on a corporate customer experience transformation can be daunting; you need to know where to start, create actions that are meaningful to customers, and then unite internal leadership and team members. It’s critical for organizations to articulate the customer concept into a process and, most importantly, into actions.

The five leadership competencies are a framework that helps you build and connect to business growth. You can determine and drive priorities to focus everyone on your united mission. The framework also builds an improvement process that’s centered around the customer; it must be adaptable to a common language and make use familiar metrics within your organization. This allows you to go from reactive and siloed problem solving and survey-score chasing to proactive measures that are aligned around the experience and a passionate culture that will grow with the customer.

As you build your framework, guideposts show you where you’re going and keep you honest in your efforts. Both Jeanne and I are big on accountability as the main guidepost. It’s the cornerstone for building trust and is critical to the success of your customer experience transformation. At Genesys, this starts with me and my peers at the executive level; when we show our teams how we’re accessible, how we empower and how we enable, our employees can translate that to the work they do with our customers.

Making Your Mom Proud

In Jeanne’s latest book, “Would You Do That to Your Mother?” she advocates to make business personal and treat every customer as if they were your mother. That means you should create simple practices and processes, giving your customers the treatment they desire and enabling your employees to deliver on that vision. It boils down to making it easy for customers to do business with you. You wouldn’t make your mother sit through an endless and complicated IVR tree, just so she can ask you a question. And you wouldn’t first point her to an FAQ list before helping her. So, don’t do this to your customers.

Every interaction and moment a customer has with your organization—whether its accessing documents online or engaging with a representative on a call—is an opportunity to create a memorable and impactful experience. It’s being able to get out of our own way (i.e., bureaucratic red tape-style processes) to ensure you assist customers down their desired paths. It’s about empowering and enabling your frontline employees with the tools, training and confidence that leadership has their backs, so they can focus on moving the experience from basic and baseline to differentiated and desired.

The Golden Rule and Customer Experience

One of the first things we learn as children is the Golden Rule—the basic principle of treating others as you want to be treated. As we move from customer experience transformation to customer experience maturity, don’t build processes based on our own selfish internal lens.

Design for your external customer emotions, priorities and needs. You need to realize you’ll achieve business goals by helping customers achieve theirs. And you must step back and view the world from the outside-in. Consider using service design concepts to shift your business mindset to be more customer-centric.

Just the Beginning

It’s easy to think your work is done after building a customer experience framework. But the customer experience transformation doesn’t stop there—that’s just the beginning.

As leaders, we must have clarity to know what we’re willing to do to earn our customers’ revenue—and what we aren’t willing to do. We must be able to stand behind these decisions and be transparent enough to willingly answer questions about these actions. As you move your business into customer experience maturity, make continued efforts to level the playing field for your customers. And make your mother proud.

Get the customer experience resources – Jeanne Bliss webinar, journey mapping, infographic, CX customer stories – at our CX Day. CX Week. CX Life. resource page.