My clients often feed back to me that delivering consistency across the customer journey, day-in and day-out, is much harder work than they expected.
Customer experience consistency requires alignment of employee behaviour across the journey to ensure each interaction meets customer expectation and needs.
In the early days of customer-centric cultural change undertaking deep customer understanding by mapping the end-to-end journey and unpacking customer problems is interesting and exciting work.
Connecting the wider business by sharing the customer journey and taking the first steps towards cross-functional alignment for the work of improving experiences can re-energize and galvanize positive action.
The first sign of ‘this is hard work’ comes when embedding accountability. Problems such as competing initiatives, declining revenues, politicking etc. begin to arise and can impact with a loss of momentum.
More than just improving touchpoint customer experiences, customer-centric transformation focuses on shifting employee behaviour.
Efforts need to be connected to the customer experience vision and principles and supported with communication, training, performance measurement and recognition.
I like to think of the customer experience principles as a CX compass that helps employees stay focused on the intended experience.
Principles help your people deliver experience consistency. They are standards that are developed from the customer journey map framework and define agreed employee behaviours that set the standard of customer experience across the business.
The enhancement of customer value and business growth we seek from improving customer experiences comes from consistency across each interaction. Consistency is dedicated, hard work – but when enacted well delivers rewarding experiences across the entire customer journey.