I often hear this comment from clients and colleagues, “Our customer experience transformation is so slow”.
From my conversations I get the strong sense they feel frustrated and unsupported in their efforts and in many cases the responsibility for the transformation is in their charge.
When I ask for a progress update their strategy sounds solid, however, ask a few questions on implementation and an obvious gap appears.
They’ve undertaken the vital first stage of the work to understand their customers’ experience by talking to customers about their experiences and then mapping their end-to-end journey.
In the mapping process they have rightly identified what their customer are ‘thinking, feeling and doing’ at each interaction; enabling them to identify customer painpoints, gaps and moments of truth across their journey.
Their presentation of the work to be done has created a strong sense of anticipation and support from across the business, however months down the track, there’s still a lack of momentum in the work needed to make improvements.
Most often the gap is a lack of sustained communication to bring and keep focus on customers. Good communication on customer needs and expectations is central to customer-centric decision making and many don’t formalize their internal customer communications program.
An internal customer communication program means developing a ‘marketing it internally’ strategy and sustaining the effort for the long term. Internal marketing on customer, needs not only to be front and centre in digital and physical materials, but critically, part of decision-making conversations.
This is about finding ways to share the evolving customer journey and telling customer stories; how the work that’s being done is improving experiences for customers to sustain focus on momentum in delivering your customer experience goals.