Customer Experience Vision and Strategy.
In pursuing organizational change for the way your organization provides services to its customers, customer vision and strategy is the first and most important step your organization should go through.
A customer vision is basically an aspirational statement which clearly articulates how the organization intends to offer services to its customers. It is with this statement that employees should use it as a guide with anything customer related from decisions to problems that affect customers. On the other hand, Customer Strategy is simply a plan put in place to deal with customers. This plan is ever-changing to suit the demands and needs of customers. Included in this plan will be:
How the organization intends to deal with customer complaints and feedback
How the business tends to offer its products and services to its customers
The way the organization will get to collect data from customers.
Simply put, Customer strategy is basically the subset of customer vision.
To be successful at creating great customer experiences, the organization needs to work as one organizational collaboration is required. This is where the vision helps to guide everyone in the same direction.
Four key attributes of a customer experience vision
There are four attributes that are consistently mentioned by our clients as the most important to craft a compelling customer experience vision:
It makes an emotional connection with customers and employees.
It provides a compelling value proposition that differentiates the company from competitors and shows the organization understands what its customers want.
It is simple and intuitive - it needs to concisely state the purpose and be easy to understand.
It demonstrates commitment and sets customers' and employees' expectations.
Bring your customer experience vision to life
Once you have a vision for customer experience in your organization, it must be understood internally to have any impact. Communication is the key. Your vision becomes the employees' common purpose when they are able to associate it with real-life examples and personal feelings.
To make that happen, you need to:
Make it real and believable: Communicate the vision using stories. Link the vision with the question, "What is in it for me?" People feel passionate about things that have a personal impact, and passion will drive employees to go the extra mile to exceed customer expectations.
Paint a picture of the journey: Tell your employees and partners why they should embark on the journey and where they are going. Also make it transparent to customers.
Find champions: An organization needs to find champions to "walk the talk" and be passionate about the vision. The leaders of the organization are not the only ones who need to be the champions, so do the employees, who are the role models and strong influencers in the customer service teams. They need to be identified and made visible.
Communicate value, purpose and impact: Formalise a strong message. Organizations need to tell their customers, employees and partners about the compelling value proposition differentiating their companies from their competitors. Communicate (externally and internally) the progress of the implementation of the customer experience vision, and the impact on customers.
Form active communities of practice: The purpose of these communities is to synthesize employee insight about the customer experience and funnel it back to management - the community should have direct access to a senior leader to create the feedback loop.
Here are some inspiring CX vision statements to get you headed in the right direction:
“At American Express, we have a mission to be the world’s most respected service brand. To do this, we have established a culture that supports our team members so they can provide exceptional service to our customers.” – American Express
“In-store or online, wherever new opportunities arise, Nordstrom works relentlessly to give customers the most compelling shopping experience possible.” – Nordstrom
“We believe that buying glasses should be easy and fun. It should leave you happy and good-looking, with money in your pocket.” – Warby Parker
“Deliver exceptional experiences with every single interaction creating lifelong clients that not only stay with Hagerty but tell their friends about.” – Hagerty
