Hello folks! Welcome to our 9th part of Customer Experience Series. Extending our understanding of governance in a company, we are going to learn today about the Influence of Culture on Customer Experience. Customer experience (CX) has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past four years. From being promising to help companies delight, convert and retain customers to where it is today, a business discipline, focused on aligning culture, strategy and processes to audiences’ life-cycle expectations.

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Company’s Culture Defining The Bar For
Customer Experience
Hello folks! Welcome to our 9th part of Customer Experience Series. Extending our
understanding of governance in a company, we are going to learn today about the Influence of
Culture on Customer Experience.
Customer experience (CX) has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past four
years. From being promising to help companies delight, convert and retain customers to where it
is today, a business discipline, focused on aligning culture, strategy and processes to audiences’
life-cycle expectations.
Christine Crandell writes in Forbes, “Customer experience is about all-inclusive strategic
alignment between the customer’s engagement expectations, brand promise and the company
culture behind the brand. To win, CEOs must be maniacal about that alignment.”
What is company culture?
Every company has its own culture, whether by design or by default. The culture is the sum of a
company’s beliefs, ethics, expectations, goals, values and mission.
How does it affect Customer Experience?

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Any company that wants its customers to be more satisfied with their service experience needs to
treat its employees as they would their customers. Because when you have happy and respected
staff, it rolls over to how they treat the company’s clients.
Richard Branson of Virgin Group says to “put staff first and customers second”, because “if the
person who works at your company is 100 percent proud of the brand and you give them the
tools to do a good job and they are treated well, they’re going to be happy.” Branson’s
philosophy goes unmistakably as happy employees = happy customers.
Understanding the Challenge
Every industry is competitive and has a high-stakes game. Every interaction with customer
presents an opportunity to earn business as well the possibility of upsetting the customer.
The time is to educate and arm yourself and your workforce to create customer-first cultures that
position you for the greatest, longest-term success.
Cultivating higher engagementto build an exceptional customer experience
Simple actions of leaders go down a long way in creating a sound effect in the entire
organizations leaning and workingmethodologies.
Creating a customer-first culture means something different to every organization. The key is to
clearly define what elements make up your version of being “customer first,” and then adjust or
create processes, operations, culture, and behaviors that make it a reality.
Here are three things to help make customer-first culture a reality:
Senior leaders setting the example.
 Embrace the mantra that your customer experience will never exceed your employee
experience.
 Engage the hearts and minds of your people by developing a “story” with big-picture
visuals that illustrates your brand promise and the optimal customer experience and
people’s delivery roles within that experience.
 Identify and address the barriers inhibiting a customer-first culture.
 Engage your people in your desired culture, specifying “how we work together” to
deliver a great customer experience.
Managers need to take the initiative.
 Identify and showcase how one can emulate the “bright spots” of what the best managers
are doing to drive the customer and employee experience.
 Underscore the importance of managing transparency around key measures and drive
ownership of the results of the entire team with tools like Customer Experience
Scoreboards.

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 Fosterthe growth story about the journey to becoming a customer-first organization.
 Implement feedback loops so managers can provide insight on how well initiatives are
working and ways to optimize the customer experience.
Employees creating authentic customer experiences.
 Make sure employees at the frontline understand your brand promise, as they will be
delivering on it most often.
 Engage employees in the company’s big-picture approach to customer experience and
give examples of behaviors that support it.
 Make sure individual contributors have the skills and knowledge needed to deliver on the
customer-first vision including setting clear service standards.
 Prepare them to anticipate customer needs in order to exceed expectations.
The fact is, in larger companies that people are dying to work for, like Google, the salaries are
not particularly high. But still, many people would give their right eye to work there.
Amazon appoints “Customer Experience Bar Raisers” to maintain excellent standards.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos leaves one seat open at the conference table and states that the seat is
occupied by the “the most important person in the room – the customer”.