Do you want to be a general or an insurgent?
So, says my friendly client, we need to get serious about focusing on the customer experience. Customer Experience needs to gain status; it needs a budget in its own right.
Well, of course it does. Like government ministers, corporate executives need budgets. And few executives ever got promotion by giving their budget away. Size may or may not matter, but budgets do. This may sound cynical, but in most organisations you spend your way to importance. Vision and goodwill are great, but without a seat or a voice at the top table they won’t get you – or the organisation – far. As a rule.
So, says my friendly client, we need to get serious about focusing on the customer experience. Customer Experience needs to gain status; it needs a budget in its own right.
Well, of course it does. Like government ministers, corporate executives need budgets. And few executives ever got promotion by giving their budget away. Size may or may not matter, but budgets do. This may sound cynical, but in most organisations you spend your way to importance. Vision and goodwill are great, but without a seat or a voice at the top table they won’t get you – or the organisation – far. As a rule.
So, what lines of expenditure should be bundled into a new Customer Experience cost centre? The obvious approach is to gather together all the spend that used to sit in a ‘customer service’ or ‘contact’ operational budget and re-assign it. Largely in-house or mostly outsourced, that will account for a lot of the obvious ways the organisations spends money and effort communicating with and responding to customers.
Back in the real world, the people in charge of improving Customer Experience aren’t likely to seize total control of the organisation anytime soon. In which case, for the brave few their choice may be to not build a conventional corporate army, but a small guerrilla force. But surely that’s not all? Letters are sent, service appointments are kept, content is written, beds are made, items are wrapped, websites confound and crusts are cut off (or retained); ok, it varies massively according to the type of organisation, but the Customer Experience is as broad as your touch-points. It may be a 1990s urban myth, but it used to be said that in Japanese the post-WW2 Kaizen total quality / continuous improvement mantra was “we are quality”, as opposed to the Western adoption “we do quality” *. So, on that basis, a true focus on Customer Experience should be organisation-wide. Its reach should encompass nearly everything short of the corporate HR department – and if you throw in Employee Experience and that’ll be included too.
Focusing on a clear vison, allied to a pragmatic approach and a relentless willingness to engage and persuade stakeholders, a small group could spark massive changes in a way they probably never could if they were tied to a ‘day job’, managing a large headcount and big operational budget.
The ‘Customer Experience Insurgents’ approach wouldn’t work – or even pass initial scrutiny – in many traditional organisations. But if you have gained the buy-in and support of enough people from the ‘top table’ and feel sufficiently confident of your abilities to influence and propagate a vision, it might just work and deliver that elusive goal, a customer-centric organisation.
*this inevitably prompts the thought, how many former Total Quality Management consultants have re-invented themselves as metric-driven customer experience gurus? But that – as they say – is a question for another day
