This document outlines key elements of a successful customer experience strategy. It discusses appointing a senior customer experience leader to develop the strategy and ensure accountability. The strategy should define the company's mission, vision, and annual plans. It also recommends mapping the customer journey, simplifying processes, assessing maturity levels, and sharing accountability across functions. Regularly capturing customer feedback through programs like voice of the customer is important. The overall goal is to gain a competitive advantage by pursuing a superior customer experience.

1. Customer Experience Strategy:
A Deliberate Path to Excellence

2. THE VALUE OF THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
“Strategy is about competitive advantage. Without Competitors, there would
be no need for strategy, for the sole purpose of strategic planning is to enable
the company to gain –as effectively as possible– a sustainable edge over its
competitors.”
-Kenichi Ohmae
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3. THE VALUE OF THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
The single most important focus a company can have is the unrelenting
pursuit of a superior customer experience supported by a crystal clear
strategy and transparent performance accountability at every level of the
organization.
How do you get there? It starts with a customer experience leader who drives
the creation of strategy that defines future targets required to be successful,
followed by unwavering, flawless execution. Customer experience strategy
enables companies of every size to live up to their brand image, maximize
their revenues and optimize costs.
This presentation covers seven key elements of successful customer
experience strategy and a few examples of companies who are getting it
done.
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4. SENIOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE LEADER AND STRATEGIST
This executive has the authority and responsibility to create and ensure
customer success both as an individual and in partnership with their peers,
which, in turn:
• Creates a service culture that supports performance accountability and
proven profitability across the organization
• Provides organizational transformation that disrupts chronic service
issues, drives customer profitability and establishes competitive
advantage
• Leads the development and implementation of strategic direction and
tactical execution of initiatives across the organization
HOW IT’S BEING USED: In this video, Jeb Dasteel, SVP and Chief Customer Officer at Oracle, highlights how
customer feedback is used to enhance products, services and relationships.
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5. MISSION, VISION, AND ANNUAL PLANNING
Defining a mission, vision, and annual planning process helps firms achieve
the benchmark success they aim to provide through their service offering. To
achieve this,
• The Mission is in place to clearly describe the reason why your company
exists
• The Vision is used to detail the longer-term future objectives required to
drive the superior customer experience. The Vision makes priorities clear
to everyone, presents a clear picture of what success looks like, and
identifies which individuals are accountable
• Finally, Annual Planning sets clear near-term objectives within every
department. Yearly Plans are used to support the achievement of
longer-term Vision objectives.
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6. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE JOURNEY MAPPING
Customer Experience Journey Maps are designed to:
• Detailed journey maps of the customers’ end-to-end service experience and
analyzing them cross functionally to understand customer frustration and service
complexity sets the stage for service simplification
• Mapping a customer’s complete journey with an organization’s people, process,
policies, technology and key intersections in mind can make customers issues crystal
clear
• These outside-in maps track the customer experience lifecycle within every service
channel, from phone and self-service to online and social media, providing a
comprehensive picture
• Journey maps set the stage to layer in key performance metrics and most
accountable responsibility around the entire customer experience, working to
ensure internal clarity, accountability and performance at every stage of the
customer journey
HOW IT’S BEING USED: This video explores how to use customer journey mapping to build an extraordinary home
delivery customer experience. Michelle Gloder, the head of customer experience at UK's Comet, a leading appliance
retailer, talks about how she increased the loyalty of her customers, their satisfaction, and precious word of mouth by
providing the "Father Christmas moment”.
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7. SERVICE SIMPLICITY: SIMPLY PUT
Simplified processes eliminate complicated methods that create an
environment of increased errors and mistakes, which ultimately creates
dissatisfaction for both employees and customers.
• Simplicity enables a faster, more direct one-time quality experience at a
lower cost
• Less complex systems and processes enable better compliance and reduce
exposure
• Easy channel access—especially when using self-service and social media,
makes customers happy and reduces support costs
• Customers need, want, and deserve to have an easy experience when
doing business with you. No exceptions!
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8. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE CAPABILITY MATURITY MODELING
Customer Experience Capability Maturity Modeling (CEMM) uses a structured
set of levels to describe how well the practices, processes and technology of an
organization can reliably and sustainably produce required outcomes in the
customer experience process.
• With deeper customer insight into capabilities, CEMM results can be used
to understand and compare a company’s customer experience maturity
with leaderboard companies within or outside their own industry
• Capabilities – when used effectively within a strategy – significantly improve
a company’s competitive advantage through the development and
execution of short and long-term initiative roadmaps to increase
performance in specific areas
• Using a roadmap approach, iterative capability improvement will produce
steady, long-term gains while leapfrog improvement produces breakthrough
results
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9. SWIM LANE ACCOUNTABILITY
Responsibility and accountability for the customer experience needs to be
shared by leaders and staff across the entire organization.
• Customer experience is impacted positively or negatively across different
functions including product, branding, pricing, sales, billing, and service, as
well as across processes, policies, and technology
• Shared responsibility establishes partnership between departments for
shared results: a powerful prescription that increases teamwork,
effectiveness and performance
• Journey maps can be used to layer performance responsibility and metrics
over the mapped experience and to assign a most accountable owner for
each area
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10. VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER
Effective Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs are designed to employ an
ongoing and systemic process that captures customer perspective over time
but also includes continuous listening, for example, via social networks, call
centers, forums, blogs and other venues.
• VoC focus is to listen to customers, interpret and analyze their feedback
cross functionally and to take action to eradicate dis-satisfiers across all
customer channels
• Avoid silo creation by sharing customer data and developing solutions cross
functionally when appropriate
• Mature VoC organizations reserve a budget used to specifically address
prioritized issues as they arise
HOW IT’S BEING USED: Watch this video of EMC Vice President of Customer Quality, Jim Bampos, talking about VoC
programs that drive billions of dollars of revenue, and how listening generates innovation and market awareness deep
into the organization. EMC executives focus on what customers really value to ensure competitive advantage, and VoC
helped them to recognize that they didn't understand the entire lifecycle of the customer. "CE matters to the company
today and in the future. I'll share an example of how one small communication change within professional services led to
a 30 point increase in NPS within 18 months and a 20% increase in revenues."
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11. A MESSAGE FROM LORI CARR
I am excited to see the powerful impact as the importance of customer
experience emerges, expands and finally proves its value within companies of
every size. The ability to champion the customer experience and anchor it as
part of an integrated organizational strategy has always been crucial to
retaining, expanding and acquiring profitable revenue.
Having been responsible for leadership, strategy and change within customer
service and sales organizations in both medium and large size firms for my
entire career, I’m delighted to share my experience and invite you to call me
for a complimentary consultation.
- Lori Carr
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12. YOU HAVE QUESTIONS. WE HAVE ANSWERS.
You CAN grow revenues and increase loyalty by implementing a customer
experience strategy.
Call today to schedule a complimentary
30-minute customer experience strategy consultation
with
LCA’s President Lori Carr
+1 617.879.0793
lori@loricarrassociates.com
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13. ADDENDUM: ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
• Lori Carr & Associates
• Forrester Research
• Thrive Analytics
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