Editor's note: This is the first article in a three-part series that explores the primary pillars of new global CX standards that Bain & Company, the creator of the NPS score, released alongside Kantar and Qualtrics. You can read about the standards here.
Customer experience is shaped from the top down, starting with the highest executives. Companies that lack buy-in from their leaders often struggle to make CX a priority.
As a result, responsibility for experiences runs deeper than the CX team alone, creating an imperative to build a customer-centric culture across an organization. This is one of the key themes behind the first of three primary mandates in the Global Standards for Customer Experience released last month by Bain & Co., Kantar and Qualtrics.
The standards aim to create a common language CX leaders around the world can use to guide their efforts and benchmark results against their peers.
The mandate to create a customer-centric culture examines how well the company’s purpose lines up with best practices for customer and employee experience. The 16 standards under the umbrella call on CX teams to take the lead — but also demand that leaders across the enterprise develop their own personal plans while listening to employee input.
Measurements are the best educator
CX teams may struggle getting outside leaders onboard with their goals.
Enabling great experiences and driving high profitability can seem at odds with one another at first, according to Stan Swinton, EVP at Bain and the principal author of the standards.
Profit-driven cultures often focus on specific performance metrics that directly impact the bottom line, Swinton said. This can stifle CX development because while experiences can be a major contributor to sales growth, the impact tends to be over the long term.
However, there is a deep connection between experience and performance, particularly when taking a longer view. The standards call on CX teams to create a scorecard that measures both customer experience and business goals, which can help win over other departments.
“What you're trying to do is set up a scorecard that encourages your executives and your business to deliver on both mandates at the same time,” Swinton told CX Dive. He encourages companies to balance cultivating relationships with customers and generating profit, without one taking precedence over the other.
Great CX starts at the top
The standards call for all executives to have a personal plan in place for improving customer experience. There's also a push to start executive committee meetings with a focus on the customer.
This part of the mandate seeks to measure whether companies truly consider CX a core part of the business. It’s not enough for executives to understand the power of experience — they need to understand their role in driving it as well.
“The culture and the tone is set from the very top of the business, which is what the standards try to lean towards,” Peter Aitken, senior director and head of customer strategy and insights at Kantar, told CX Dive.
The standards offer guidelines, but “there's no secret sauce or secret formula for inspirational leadership,” according to Swinton. It’s up to each leader to determine how they will inspire the company to find CX success.
The call for personal plans is designed to make leaders’ commitments to CX more than lip service. If executives don’t follow through on their promises, their inaction can hinder efforts across the business. Some companies tie CX to compensation for leaders, though this is often tied specifically to NPS.
“Where it most often falls apart is when the leader says that we are going to be customer centric, measures whether we are customer centric, but does not act any differently than they did before they made that statement,” Swinton said. “Nobody believes it. Then it all falls apart.”
Voice of the Employee can enhance CX
It’s no secret that employees play a vital role in creating a memorable customer experience. The standards that delve into employee experience take this into account by looking at how well companies listen to their workers by collecting Voice of the Employee data and offering support.
VoE data is collected the same way companies examine Voice of the Customer data through surveys and unstructured feedback. This can help leaders understand how employees feel in their roles and guide EX efforts.
Companies who wish to excel at CX can take it further and use VoE as a way to measure customer satisfaction as well, according to Aitken. After all, workers on the frontline have a direct connection to where experience strategies succeed or fail.
“They're the ones getting frustrated at the organizational processes which may inhibit delivering a great experience, so having a system in place for those employees to be able to escalate or raise issues as part of the design and focus of the new CX initiatives is vital,” Aitken said.
The connection between EX and CX flows both ways, and the standards look at whether employees have easy ways to raise and escalate any issues they may find.
“Your employees live and breathe the business and the customer all the time,” Aitken said. “They're your best resource for information, aside from the customer, to understand what you need to do to improve the experience.”
What a great CX culture looks like
Aitken brought up a prominent automotive brand as an example of a company that excels at the standards for creating a customer-centric culture.
The company’s director of U.K. operations spends a lot of time on the frontline with dealers and looking at customer feedback.
“For him, it's just his way of life, of doing business, and that permeates every aspect of the organization,” Aitken said.
The executive sets an example for his business from the top, and his actions have an impact on the rest of the organization, according to Aitken. As a result, the company is set up to collaborate and share data — all with a focus on the customer.
This strategy paid off 18 months ago when the company underwent a rebranding exercise. Two leaders collected feedback from employees across the company to develop a positioning statement about how the brand meets its customers’ needs.
The director of U.K. operations and the head of the marketing and communication teams each came back with similar positioning statements emphasizing that customers trusted the brand and felt proud to be different. Aitken attributed the unified message to the leaders' top-down approach to understanding customers.
