When I started writing my latest #GrowthHack on Marketing-It Internally, I quickly realized there was way too much interesting content for just one post.
Part 1 & 2
In Part 1 of Marketing-It Internally I discussed Customer Rooms, personas and using a dedicated ‘customer chair’ in meetings. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos uses this tactic to symbolise the customer and help meeting participants reflect from the customer’s perspective. If you missed Part 1 here’s the link.
This week’s Part 2 #GrowthHack focuses on the internal communication effort. Marketing-It Internally (kudos to Fairfax’s CMO who coined the term Marketing-It Internally) is how your customer story is brought to life across the business.
The Challenge
Sustaining customer experience as a discipline is really hard work. This is because most of the time an organisation’s culture is geared for siloed decision-making; so aligning customer goals with day-today actions is challenging.
Context
Bringing your customer to life using internal communications or a marketing program helps build empathy for your customers. In the simplest of terms, empathy is feeling what another person is experiencing.
Creating empathy helps people in your business walk in their customer’s shoes; shifting their focus from solving business issues to solving customer problems by putting the customer at the centre of decision-making.
Customer-Centric #GrowthHack
One of the programs I use to help create cultural empathy is ‘Customer Connect’. The program gets people from right across the business, customer facing and non-facing, out from behind their desks to observe customers being customers.
Observing customer behaviour, seeing what they’re seeing, experiencing it through their eyes … their frustrations, joys, irritations, surprises, exasperations … actions and reactions.
They need to serve customers in store, ride in the delivery trucks, listen in on customer service calls, sit in on sales presentations …
Critical to the ‘Customer Connect’ program is telling and sharing the customer story and their experiences across the business. In the past we’ve used conferences, town hall meetings and client’s intranet; a low cost option is to use a cloud based collaboration platform.
Getting your company to formalise their customer storytelling like this enables deeper emotional connection; helping to galvanise via common purpose, language and understanding from the customer’s perspective.
The most effective method to bring your customer to life is with Customer Journey Mapping
Why customer journey mapping? A research based journey map framework serves as a powerful organisational alignment tool to understand the customer’s problem, the job they’re trying to get done and why.
Importantly, journey mapping delivers business ‘buy-in; uniting functional silos by connecting people, products and places to each stage of the customer’s end-to-end journey.
Learn-by-Doing with Alex Allwood
My one-day intensive customer journey mapping workshops are designed to develop your skills in customer research based journey mapping.
The day focuses on developing customer-centric capability and cx tools that you can begin to apply immediately.
In the workshop you will learn how to identify your customers’ unmet needs; their frustrations, service gaps and what they value when interacting with your business.
Find out more about the workshop and how to reserve your seat here