Editor’s note: Based in London, Claire Sporton is SVP of customer experience innovation at customer experience and marketing research firm Confirmit. 

I’d like to think that by now we all believe that customer experience (CX) can be a true competitive differentiator when it comes to a company’s success or failure. But to deliver superior CX, insights teams and CX practitioners must help their companies approach it as a shared initiative across the business. If you can help your business to successfully embed CX values into all employees across every department, you’ll have much greater success in building a truly customer-centric culture. Companies that view CX as a single team or function will always struggle to improve. 

Whether you are a market researcher and CX professional, it’s likely that you’ll have the research skills and analytical mind-set to create robust programs. Which is great. Ideally, you’ll also have team members with a commercial mind-set to help translate that analysis into something meaningful for the rest of the business. Again, all good stuff when it comes to taking action on insight, but one team can’t change the world. Or even one company. 

You need to make the customer the focus for the entire organization. And that means making sure you and your team are in a position to help everyone in the company drive their own changes. You don’t own CX, insight or data. It’s time to share. Better still, it’s time to become a coach to the rest of the business. Don’t try to be a hero. There’s no glory in trying to slay dragons single-handed. Your role is to enable everyone in the business to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, supporting each other to achieve your goals. 

Get out there and enable everyone to succeed by becoming a CX coach. Here’s how.

Become storytellers

To become an activist within your business you need to frame the story so that it resonates with other departments. Make connections with people and share compelling stories. Become a fire starter and inspire others across the company to spread the good word about CX. To drive program change, CX coaches need to enable teams to set goals, communicate and define success using measurements and terminology that will secure broad support. Here are a few storytelling best practices. 

  • Share success stories: Use the opportunity to highlight the value of CX internally. Put together a storybook of how CX programs have had an impact on the greater company across departments and highlight how MR delivers process improvements by quickly capturing accurate insights. Include quotes about how colleagues have been able to perform their jobs more effectively because of CX, putting CX champions in the spotlight.
  • Leverage case studies: Present one or more case studies that evolve from the CX program, paying attention to client rescue or delight stories. 
  • Add context to the numbers: Bring data alive with the real stories. To secure buy-in, combine quantitative metrics like the number of client interventions with anecdotes like examples of saved revenue. Make it human and your colleagues will remember the emotion they feel long after they forget the numbers.

Adopt an entrepreneurial spirit

You won’t succeed if you stick to a narrow focus. You need to look beyond collecting and analyzing insight. Look for ways to support people across the company – with an eye on corporate goals. And make sure you’re thinking about driving change and monitoring impact so you can help teams understand where they’ve made the right decisions and when they need to chart a new course. 

  • Speak the language of the business: Focusing solely on CX metrics is fine when speaking with other practitioners. But here’s a newsflash – other people don’t care about NPS. People outside of the CX team care about their own metrics and their own ability to make a difference to the company’s success. Linking CX initiatives to business success moves CX from a “nice to have” to a critical component of strategy. Put together a communication strategy that helps the wider business understand what the team is doing and why. 
  • Ensure objectives are aligned and agile: Make sure CX vision supports what the overall business is trying to achieve, clearly defining how CX is supporting company goals. Identify how CX can help resolve issues that are keeping your co-workers awake at night. Articulate what you are looking to achieve with CX so you can track progress against the overall plan. CX objectives will have to remain flexible and should be updated at least once a year to reflect changes in the business. 

Learn to adapt

The need for high employee engagement at all levels of the organization, from the frontline, customer-facing employees through to middle management and senior leadership is critical. To create a customer-centric culture, you’ll need to wear an exciting variety of hats to make information meaningful to many different people and adapt your message to appeal to different audiences. To reach different interest groups, a coach must:

  • Make it relevant: Not everyone in the organization will be motivated by CX metrics. To get colleagues involved and invested about experience, talk to them in terms that they understand and matter to them. Deliver actionable insights to the appropriate colleagues outside of the MR department.
  • Tailor to your audience: Consider metrics that matter to other teams and align goals to the different business outcomes that individuals and departments are being challenged to achieve. For senior leadership, this means highlighting the financial numbers and outlining how CX-driven changes can help them hit their targets. In the contact center, this means demonstrating how CX can help agents meet their goals for key metrics like customer satisfaction.
  • Manage relationships: Take time to understand the company mission and the values of all stakeholders. Listen to the leadership in other departments to identify ways CX can improve their jobs. Pivot to the communication needs of different groups in the business. 

Provide feedback

The ability to celebrate success and recognize areas for improvement is key to promoting customer-centricity. In the process of promoting a new company culture, it is important to provide constructive feedback on where stakeholders are succeeding and areas that need work. As the resident expert on experience, other employees throughout the organization will look to you for guidance and direction to achieve their goals. Tips for advising other employees include:

  • Educate your colleagues: Be pragmatic and help everyone understand how CX is involved in their role. Make sure the entire business understands the value of MR, feedback and voice of the customer programs. Give them examples and options, enabling individuals to take ownership of their own behavior change. 
  • Allow people to fail: To enable viral change and inspire individuals to get involved in change, allow colleagues to try new things – even if it is unsuccessful. Trust employees with the respondent data and MR reporting you have provided and encourage them to try a new approach. Monitor progress and if it works, adopt it. If the idea fails, learn from the project rather than placing blame. 

Inspiring change 

No CX or insights team is an island. To transform an organization you must expand beyond your department and get out into the business to inspire change. Use strong evangelists that can build compelling narratives and turn colleagues into CX champions. Make sure you speak the language of your business and connect to the mission of the entire organization to secure buy-in. Tailoring your approach and messaging to the different business units will make it easier to articulate how CX can benefit individual stakeholders. Bringing together CX and internal market researchers is incredibly powerful and can help produce richer insights with the benefit of context to help get that oh-so-important buy-in.