Make Customer Experience Development as Important as Product Development

Today, leaders in just about every industry understand that improving customer experience is essential for ease of customer interactions, reputation management, business efficacy, and overall success. Customer experience is already a core focus for many retailers, but diverse organizations including governmental bureaus, grocery stores, and financial service institutions are implementing CX changes to better accommodate customer needs.

In order for customer experience to be considered a core competency of the business—one as important as product development, finance, marketing, or sales—CX needs to be built and honed as a skill.

To build your CX skillset, you must have:

  • Rigor and discipline for how cross-functional teams explore and understand emerging issues and opportunities.
  • A clean and clear process for evaluating and understanding what customers need and value in improved or redesigned experiences.
  • A method for building shared processes and metrics to deliver one-company priority experiences.
  • Rigor in identifying the key priority experience metrics that are elevated to leaders for regular review.

A CCO Determines How Customer Experience Development Looks Within an Organization

Most organizations have a rigorous process and discipline for how they develop a product. But there is not the same discipline established towards developing and bringing customer experiences to life. The ability to improve or innovate experiences starting with customer requirements is not an inherent skill in most organizations.

The role of the CCO is to work with leaders to determine how to bring the competency of the customer experience development and innovation into the organization. What we find works well with many clients is to establish a small center of excellence for facilitating these work groups. An expert (either employee or contractor) in experience and human-centered design works as the facilitator to make every team effort successful and consistent.

The role of the #CCO is to work with leaders to determine how to bring the competency of the customer experience development and innovation into the organization. #CX #leadership Click To Tweet

An External CX Facilitator Can Work With the CCO to Integrate Competencies Across the Organization

Each team follows the same process, beginning with a united leadership review of the customer experience where a project and applicable team members are identified. The customer experience facilitators take each team through a one to six-month cycle of investigating, developing, proposing, and implementing. With this cycle, team members learn the skills they can eventually bring to their functional areas.

The five-competency customer-driven growth engine provides you with an evergreen cycle to know, care about, and diagnose what is causing the growth or loss of the customer asset. Once customer experience priorities are identified, this work is to embed the process for evaluating and implementing customer-driven solutions and new standards for operational performance that leaders care about and hold people accountable for.

New work groups will constantly be assembled as issues are put to rest and new ones emerge. Over time, as the most unreliable issues are tackled, the work will mature to focus on experience innovation, beyond experience reliability improvements. What’s important to consider in this competency is that it is an ongoing resource requirement that needs consideration. Customer experience and human-centered design facilitator skills will be necessary on an ongoing basis to earn the right to customer-driven growth.

Customer experience and human-centered design facilitator skills will be necessary on an ongoing basis to earn the right to customer-driven growth. Click To Tweet

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