Uno Jüngling-Colic
Customer Experience Consultant
Eckart & Partner
Let's start with an everyday example for customer orientation...
The transformation into a customer-centric organization goes far beyond implementing a strategy or optimizing processes. It represents a profound cultural shift in which every employee—regardless of their position—must understand the importance of delivering positive customer experiences.
Gaining deep insights into your customers, proactively addressing their needs, and personalizing their experiences can result in significant benefits for business metrics such as revenue, loyalty, efficiency, and growth. Achieving this requires a company-wide mindset and a strong focus on the customer—challenges that simultaneously unlock immense value creation potential.
In this article, we explore the elements of a successful strategy for more customer orientation and highlight the internal challenges CX teams should be prepared for to tackle during the implementation.
To provide some context, let me start with a example from one of my consulting projects. The focus was on a comprehensive CX program involving stakeholders from every part of the organization. As is often the case, the initial enthusiasm was immense—even the executive board was fully engaged. Together, the team finalized a new strategy, celebrated its completion, confident that all the plans would be executed as agreed.
Fast forward a year: when you check in on the program’s progress, it becomes clear that only some of the plans have been implemented.
So, what went wrong?
A closer look reveals that one of the biggest obstacles to achieving customer-centricity were organizational silos. The challenge wasn’t the strategy itself, but rather the difficulty of mobilizing a large organization to work cohesively toward a unified approach.
With that in mind, let’s explore the three key components of successful customer-centric strategies.
1. Controling
One of my key insights from similar projects is that implementing a specific governance philosophy marks the first crucial step towards a customer-centric organization. This philosophy should embody autonomy and efficiency. Teams should have the freedom to determine how they achieve defined goals. The governance philosophy must foster initiative and autonomous action, guided by shared principles.
How does a governance philosophy work for Customer Journey Management?
Imagine your customer experience strategy rests on these three guiding principles:
- Contact
- Time
- Place
This approach aims to enhance customer experience in service branches. Our goal might be that all customers with an inquiry speak to only one person (one contact), resolve their issue in the same conversation (one time), and avoid visiting multiple branches (one place). Our key metric could be the number of issues resolved during the first visit.
The implementation of such improvement measures would vary across teams:
- Sales team: “One product – one offer – one hour”
- Call center: “One call – one agent – one solution”
Thanks to these simple guiding principles and improved customer focus through Customer Journeys, teams can act autonomously while still delivering a consistent overall experience.
2. Customer Journeys
Customer Journeys are like roadmaps, showing organizations where they need to become more customer-centric. When visualizing Customer Journeys, we must distinguish between different levels. Not all journeys are equal, and understanding this hierarchy can make a crucial difference. Visualizing the most important Customer Journeys across the entire customer lifecycle demands a different approach than concetrating on “User Journeys” for specific tasks.
To boost your teams’ effectiveness, you need a unified approach to Customer Journey Mapping. Different teams might use their own methods to capture Customer Journeys, which can lead to inconsistencies.
Journey management platforms like cxomni offer this standard out of the box. The software uniformly documents project standards of a Journey Management Framework, such as taxonomies and terminologies, ensuring all project participants work with the same guidelines. Additionally, the software’s collaborative approach ensures that even distributed teams always work on the same Customer Journey, giving them access to the same information.
3. Customer Journey Management
Customer Journey Management means to coordinate the entire organization – from sales and marketing to the call center – to collectively work towards a positive customer experience. Imagine the impact when every department aligns its activities based on a unified view of the Customer Journey. This empowers companies to understand all interactions and requirements of buyers, from inspiration to after-sales.
Journey management solutions like cxomni excel at monitoring, capturing, and continuously optimizing Customer Journeys for customer orientation. Unlike one-dimensional whiteboarding tools, these solutions can transparently manage multiple Customer Journeys, personas, and insights due to their architecture. The integration of data and business metrics provides a holistic, real-time overview of the customer experience, making the business impact of working with Customer Journeys transparent. CX teams can track CX metrics, identify problem areas, and manage the effects of their improvement measures.
Becoming a customer-centric organization: How to handle the challenges
Let’s take a closer look at the most common challenges and how to overcome them:
- Resistance to change: To address resistance, you have to communicate the benefits of a customer-centric approach and involve employees. Show them how their work directly impacts the customer experience and the company’s success.
- Siloed departments: Foster a culture of collaboration and open communication. Create cross-functional teams to work on Customer Journey initiatives and establish standards to ensure everyone shares a common understanding of the customer experience (e.g., through Customer Journey Mapping).
- Lack of accountability: Even the best strategies fail without ongoing accountability. Assign dedicated owners for each Customer Journey. These individuals should drive continuous improvement and ensure changes are effectively managed and updated.
- Embedding Journey Management into organizational processes: For Customer Journey Management to succeed, it must be fully integrated into your organizational processes. Regular workshops and ongoing communication are critical to maintaining focus on customer orientation.
- Aligning metrics: Measure the right metrics to ensure your efforts align with customer-focused goals. Traditional business metrics are important but should be complemented by customer-centric KPIs.
- Prioritizing improvements: Once you have a clear understanding of your Customer Journeys, focus on prioritizing improvements. Target key touchpoints and areas that need immediate attention. Ensure resources are allocated effectively to drive meaningful change.
- Iterative approach: Customer preferences and market conditions shift rapidly, so your organization must remain adaptable. Regular reviews and audits of your Customer Journey processes will help you stay ahead of these changes.
Customer Journey Management as success factor
Aligning your organization towards greater customer orientation requires commitment, collaboration, and a willingness to embrace change.
Implementing Customer Journey Management, fostering a customer-centric culture, leveraging technology, and addressing common challenges are effective measures that can help you, as a leader and team, make a lasting impact.
cxomni and Eckart & Partner support leaders and teams in implementing powerful Journey Experience programs and deploying the leading Journey Management platform cxomni. We have developed a flexible and cost-effective approach that enables companies to create a solid strategic foundation for Journey Experience.
Feel free to contact us for a non-binding discovery talk!
