Complimentary Chapter - Strativity Customer Experience Strategy Customer Experience Strategy 311 CHAPTER 15 Launching the Strategy When a New York energy …

Complimentary Chapter

This chapter is excerpted from

Customer Experience Strategy

The Complete Guide From Innovation to Execution

By Lior Arussy

Chapter 15 Launching the Strategy

Copyright © 2010 by Lior ArussyFirst Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without written permission from the author.

Published by 4i, a Strativity Group Media Company401 Hackensack Avenue, 8th FloorHackensack, NJ 07601Tel (201) 808-8500

ISBN 978-0-578-04757-7

Printed in the United States of America

www.strativity.com

310 Customer Experience Strategy Customer Experience Strategy 311Customer Experience Strategy 311

CHAPTER 15

Launching the Strategy

When a New York energy company launched its customer experience program a couple of years back, the executives decided to simultaneously announce the initiative companywide while laying its previous customer approach to rest—literally. Company management placed a coffin labeled with “The Old Ways” in a conference room, invited all the managers into the room, and staged a funeral, complete with eulogies, while praising the ways of the future. The managers then served as pall bearers, closing the casket, carrying it outside, and burying it on organization property.

Laying the “groundwork” for your customer experience initiative won’t likely be as literal as this humorous approach, but a good deal of heavy lifting and a strong element of burying the past will indeed be called for.

Launching your customer experience strategy cannot take place until you have installed the framework that we’ve been discussing in the chapters leading to this one. The framework is held together by numbers—by the demonstrated value of bringing customer experience to the customers. CEOs from major corporations most often come from finance or operations. For many years, these people managed life through spreadsheets. You’re not going to change them after they’ve spent 30 years doing things in a certain way. Thus, the necessity of speaking their language, focusing the strategy on such financially measured objectives as differentiation, customer advan-tage, additional revenues, customer retention, and customer expansion.

Only when the CEO and his direct reports understand they’re losing busi-ness daily by not enhancing their customer experience will he listen and eventually sponsor your efforts. Such is the foundation of the framework. It is built upon The Number. In the case of the credit card company I mentioned in Chapter 1, The Number was $3 million lost as a Return on Nothing. In our example of ABC Image In Color Corporation that I outlined in Chapter 3, “The Economics of Customer Experience,” The Numbers were $1,568,000 in losses from not providing superior experiences to its


customers, representing a 19% decline in annual revenue. Everyone must know The Number, understand The Number, and believe The Number. Ev-eryone must be able to recite The Number.

As we’ve seen throughout this book, the framework founded upon the burning number that will drive CEM with resolve and urgency is built of these elements:

Identifying and eliminating dissatisfiers across all touch •points. If you can’t address consistent sources of dissatisfaction, you can’t transition to customer experience. This is a foundation of the framework, and you can’t build a framework of surprise and delight on a cracked foundation.

Redesigning complaint resolution. • Design procedures not just to surprise and delight, but to shock and delight. know that the customer is watching you, asking if you are seeking a true relationship or just a fling.

Building a culture of excellence • . The organization and employees must work toward a common goal of top customer performance at every moment. This culture can’t materialize without eliminating dissatisfiers and reinventing complaint resolution. Employees won’t commit to a culture of excellence if they see a lack of organizational commitment in addressing the cornerstones of customer satisfaction.

Engaging and empowering employees. • Within the culture of excellence, employees are given the tools to create differentiated experiences and the permission to use them. If you do nothing more than tell your employees, “Please smile nicer next time around,” you’ve lost the battle.

Visualizing the value. • Excellence has specific benefit. Make sure both the organization and the customer can quantify the value of that benefit.

Expanding and reinventing the experience. • Build the memory.

This framework also entails monitoring progress toward The Number, begin-ning by understanding where the company stands currently. Toward that end, conduct a new benchmark study dedicated to customer experience. This study must be fresh, as the results of old satisfaction studies may simply return you to the disconnected position you started in. Measure and evaluate all touch points, because, as we’ve seen, every function is either an experience creator or experience enabler. Then share this benchmark-ing across the organization. Don’t allow silos to lead the organization to the next stage in customer experience. The organization’s goals as a whole must lead the silos. Provide a view into the complete journey that is cus-tomer experience.


Today, companies are organization-centric, centered around finance, around sales, around a number of specifically identifiable silos, but not around cus-tomers. Each department has its own issues, strategies, agendas and met-rics, so each is pursuing only what they want to pursue or are chartered to pursue. Lacking a track record of these silos working together, and lacking incentives for them to do so, instilling cooperation won’t be easy.

Worse yet, each department is working with its own metrics, and in many cases, their own customer surveys. Customer service notes a problem with customer dissatisfaction while those in sales scratch their heads and say,

“Our satisfaction numbers look fine.”

To break silo-centric thinking, shatter the ownership of knowledge. Such alignment of data will likely require the services of business analysts. Con-solidate the data, using the Customer Council described in Chapter 14 as your central lens for focusing information and illuminating actions. Employ the Customer Council to create agreement around the benchmarking work you’ve done. In doing so, avoid using conflicting data sources. Unify the data used by the various departments, and eliminate conflicting data that allows silo-based metrics to disguise overall problems. One group may be using statistical data; another group, anecdotal data. Surveys may be conducted with one set of procedures here, and another set there. One department may use predictive modeling, while another bases its percep-tions on real-time transactional data. You can’t justify your strategies and instill cooperation when silos operate from unreconciled data points. Again, this points to the need for universal awareness of The Number, so that silos can connect their work to the overall goal, and become more receptive to aligning toward that goal.

here’s where corporate sponsorship becomes very important. Your execu-tive evangelist may need to step in not only to offer support and reinforce-ment, but also to resolve conflicts. When you start this process, you will expose pockets of the company—departments and individuals—that aren’t performing their jobs. The executive will bring pressure to get the slackers in line. This will require creating incentives for cooperation and penalties for the lack thereof.

When unifying the silos for the customer experience initiative, focus every-one on the customer, not on internal agendas, as we discussed in Chapter 13. Investigate the different stakeholders’ isolated strategies, and design the customer experience solution to complement existing efforts and strategies to ensure the customer experience is fully supported. Remember–you need to sell it .


Build mechanisms for cooperation, such as brainstorming workshops that involve as many employees and managers as you can. One such mecha-nism, and an important one, is a cross-functional team to lead the effort. When assembling such a team, recruit decision-makers. Avoid possible disconnects, delays and misinformation that can result if you settle for a

“coordinator” who reports back to the decision-maker. Assign clear responsi-bilities to each function’s representative.

Use these cooperation mechanisms to build a consensus on a reasonable timeline to achieve your objectives, to evaluate possible resistance and prepare for it, and to create a prioritized list of actions based on customer insight. This is the framework upon which your launch will be constructed.

With this groundwork laid, it’s time to start digging in.

Different Approaches to Getting Started

Your next step is to determine the scope of your launch. You don’t have to “boil the ocean.” It’s difficult enough to change departments, let alone entire organizations. Consider starting small, learning the process, and then shoot-ing for the stars. This approach may actually be mandatory if you don’t yet have backing from senior leadership.

Some companies choose to approach the transformation to customer ex-perience in phases rather than tackling the new strategy all at once. Begin-ning in phases has several advantages, including proof of concept, or in self-education in the concept’s execution. An incremental approach allows space to learn from mistakes, to solidify the principles and design that suits best, and to demonstrate feasibility and profitability. When considering the transition to customer experience, the company will likely exhibit two bits of skepticism: 1) Can this company execute such a strategy?, and 2) Can you execute it? You must prove that both are possible. The company may be looking at you and thinking that just because the plan is good doesn’t mean that you can make it happen. You have no track record in executing such an endeavor. Incremental implementation allows you to build that track record.

With a phased strategy, aim for a point of significant potential impact. Target the area of business that will benefit most from the strategy. Or look for an area where you can demonstrate maximum impact with minimum disruption. Within each isolated target, apply the principles of customer experience, and monitor not only your return on investment but also your development of competencies. Once you have demonstrable return and


skills, apply your successes to other parts of the organization. Targeted ap-proaches can include:

Start with a single touch point, • such as customer service or the web.

Start with a single customer segment, • such as Platinum loyalty program customers, or customers with special needs, before rolling the strategy out to the broader customer base.

Start with a single product line. • Design the experience from A-to-z with a single group of products or services.

Start holistically • . Some organizations like to start with a vision, with the end game in mind. They design the target customer memory for the organization as a whole, and then define how various functions will create and own their memories, which in turn roll out to the greater memory. These companies start with a complete top-to-bottom definition, then turn to the stakeholders and say, in essence, “Now that you have the blueprint, the guidelines, values, the commitment and the standards we all share, apply them to your own situations.”

Each approach is legitimate in the context of your business model, your re-lationship with customers, and, your organizational readiness. The approach you select will depend on these factors:Your leadership commitment. how serious is the CEO? A fully commit-ted CEO can open the door to across-the-board change. A reticent CEO will need convincing, and incremental wins will help make your case. As we established in Chapter 13, “Leadership and Change Management,” you can’t fight the CEO’s agenda. You can work to change it and to develop the CEO’s commitment, but running counter to the CEO’s mandate will leave you without support, resources and effectiveness.Your own commitment. Are you simply testing the water to see if cus-tomer experience will pay off for you? Without clear conviction, you might want to start incrementally.Organizational appetite for change. Are you an organization that can handle change very fast, very well? Technology companies are often good examples of organizations with such a culture. Product-centric companies, particularly those who have administered certain product lines for years and decades, usually must incrementally build organizational confidence in their ability to innovate.Financial drivers. Do you have a burning platform because you’re posi-tion with customers is in dire shape? If so, you probably want to start with a holistic approach.

If opting for the incremental approach to transformation, consider these strategies:


Select one of the weakest links in your organization to use as a test •case. Position your approach as a micro-strategy to fix a well-known problem. But avoid high-profile people/projects that are most likely to attract resistance. You can’t afford high-profile failure right out of the gate. As I’ve previously cautioned, based on a wide range of personal experience, don’t try to fix sales first. Sales is set in their ways, and this department is best approached when most of the organization is on board.

Develop a balanced list of high-impact and quick-win efforts. •

Focus on experience elements that have the highest gap between •customer importance and customer satisfaction.

Select an area you fully understand or get professional help to avoid •rookie mistakes.

Develop and use clear criteria to avoid internal objections and to •ensure maximum impact.

Work on your customer database and start segmenting your customers. •Begin tailoring new offers to each target group. Focus on experience elements that matter to your profitable customers first.

Conduct feasibility and brainstorming sessions to ensure exploring all •possible ways to address the selected issues.

Bring more people into the project to share the success. •

Identify the next-weakest link or least desired area for the next test •case.

Aggregate your results, and begin taking your case to other •organizational stakeholders.

In fact, you can begin with very small points of incrementality, by soften-ing the ground for the overall initiative. Elements of your overall customer experience goals can be put into place immediately—perhaps before even beginning your formal exploration and design of your customer experi-ence initiative. Start delighting your customers right now. As possible within your current structure, provide employees with permission to do what’s right for their customers in the ways we’ve explored in previous chapters. Educate them so they understand customer needs and the financials behind your margins and customer profitability. Then just let them do it—again, employing some of the spirit and tools discussed ear-lier. Set the tone and the rest follows.

To forge the path using immediate delight, start right here, right now. Don’t delay. Consider deploying these customer-centric gestures:

Send a customer a personal apology letter with a small compensation 1. when something goes wrong.


Assume responsibility when something goes wrong, even if it 2. is not your fault.

Respond quickly. Set goals to return calls or emails within 30 minutes, 3. with resolutions or answers at the ready. Because most companies don’t do this, you have opportunity to generate a WOW reaction from custom-ers. Fast response also reduces overall engagement resolution times.

Give the customer a bit extra beyond what they actually ordered.4.

Call customers before sending invoices to ensure they are ready 5. for what’s coming. And triple-check the invoices to make sure they’re correct.

Ask your B2B customers how their businesses are doing, and what 6. else you can do to help them.

Ask your B2C customers about their hobbies–engage them in 7. conversation on the subject.

Upgrade your customer to the next level of service, as a measure 8. of appreciation.

Let your customer know you noticed and appreciate their increase 9. in business with you.

Develop a post-transaction survey with immediate escalation if the 10. survey reveals problems or exceptional satisfaction.

Celebrate milestones with something as simple as a mailed card. 11. Milestones can be within your relationship with the customers—anni-versaries of the beginning of your business relationship, for instance—or within the personal lives of your customers. For example, send out birthday or wedding anniversary cards.

Distribute recordings of customer calls to executives, or require them to 12. personally staff a customer-service desk regularly. Let best customers know that they’re speaking that day with someone with top authority.

Require customer service leaders to attend marketing meetings.13.

Create a “customer experience” wall in a break room or in a hallway 14. displaying with customer pictures and quotes.

Invite employees to take part in the innovation process.15.

Enable non-customer-facing employees to meet customers.16.

Feature employees’ commitment and pictures in your advertising.17.

Link to a cause that matters to your employees.18.

Create a “competition” wall in a break room or in a hallway help 19. visualize the challenge and to highlight the need for urgency.

Prepare a managers’ brief about customer experience needs and 20. successes to incorporate into staff meetings.


The quick-hit ideas listed above are just a start. Facilitate discussion with your employees to generate additional ideas. In all our studies, we identify caring as a major factor in making an impact. It’s the difference between the customer as a one-time transaction and the customer as a relationship. Companies that truly believe in customer relationships invest in caring and generous service. They invest in the long-term aspect of their business. Sure, employees would like to delight customers by sending them a birth-day card, but they don’t have the budget to do it. Of course, they would love to chat more with the customer and try to understand their problems and business issues, but such activity isn’t in line with corporate productiv-ity objectives. Grant employees permission to take these steps.

Of course, such quick hits don’t replace a comprehensive, enterprise-wide strategy. But they will assist in forming the strategy and softening the ground for it. The moment the organization notices the changes associated with the quick hits, they’ll realize that the company is ready and willing to make the leap toward customer-centricity. This realization sets the stage for the larger, more formal launch, by lowering resistance, demonstrating effec-tiveness, and expediting the work of the cross-functional strategic team.

Deploying the Customer Experience Strategy

Rolling out this brand-new initiative will certainly employ the usual fanfare and pomp of other initiative roll-outs, whether a new product launch, insti-tuting new employee benefit programs, and so on. We’ll concede the usual arrival of mugs and posters and T-shirts (and probably not caskets). Aware-ness and excitement are integral to any major strategy shift or improvement. Quickly move beyond the superficialities and potential stopping points of a cool slogan and a nice new mouse pad to concentrate on communication. Be detailed and transparent in explaining the changes, their impact on the organization and employees and customers, and be relentless in delivering the message. Set the strategy in motion, and keep it in motion with these critical tactics:

Broadcast The Number. It is, after all, the foundation of the initiative itself, and therefore should be at the core of all communications about the strategy.

Explain clearly and completely the mission and its objectives. Detail and document the expectations of each element of your ecosystem—de-partments, touch points and individuals. Tie each stakeholder’s role to the overall mission and specific objectives within the mission. WOW Brands experience a smoother transition to their aspired wow world. They respect the past and have clear answers about change and why it takes place.


Similarly, establish strong linkage of compensation and the measurements that evaluate the success of achieving the mission.

Clarify the sense of urgency. Communicate the reasons behind the burning platform to change to a cross-section of employees. Explain the necessity and timing for change. Openly discuss market trends, financial pressures, customer requirements, competitive dynamics, and legislative is-sues that are driving the need for timely change. keep employees updated on the status of the project. Involve them to help overcome challenges that arise along the way.

Launching a major initiative without conducting these types of discussions communicates that the brand remains the sole purview of marketing pro-fessionals, not the broader organization. Companies should undertake such initiatives only if it will effectuate change in the organization, not because a so-called marketing guru thinks that “it’s time.” Ultimately, your employees will ensure the success of the customer experience initiative. If they don’t share your urgency for change, the initiative is doomed to fail.

Generate energy through promotional campaigns. In launching a program, you aren’t seeking only buy-in. You’re seeking excitement. Echo the goals of customer experience and delight in presenting your program internally. You want to convince people that the organization is taking ab-solutely the right step, and you can drive home that point by increasing the frequency and the volume of your communications.

Incorporate the long view into your presentation. A WOW initiative is more than a launch date. It is a long-term commitment, reflecting a deci-sion to change organizational behavior and performance. NOW brands, on the other hand, lack any substantive, long-term plan, beyond the launch party. Stress the long-term nature of the new program, and the importance of sustaining energy and concentration over the coming years. Present not only the launch plans but also the plans and schedule for organizational follow-up and evaluation. Demonstrate to those you present to that you will come back to them in a week, in a month, in a year—and detail the exact form of that return to set expectations and establish accountability. Docu-ment how compensation and evaluations will be structured and deployed.

A detailed long-term action plan will prove crucial to the success of the initiative. In the absence of such a plan, the new project will be dismissed as a branding or marketing ploy, leading to employee and customer disap-pointment, cynicism and lack of trust.

Document a specific program timetable. When launching your pro-gram, detail what will happen when during the first two years of the program’s operation. Share that timetable with everyone to reinforce the


long-term commitment you have made. A typical overview timetable might look like this:

Day 1: • Launch the program, and announce program-related incentives, high-level metrics, annual performance goals, specific bonuses (perhaps quarterly) based on program performance, and targets for years 2 and 3.

First 3-6 Months: • Identify and celebrate quick wins, make first rewards for program execution, release regular reports, and institute redesign of processes (which will continue through the life of the program).

Year 1: • Distribute and celebrate annual rewards and first-year wins, conduct formal evaluations of the program and the performance within the program, and establish benchmarking upon which future performance will be measured.

Year 2: • Continue with Year 1 celebrations and evaluations, continue process redesigns, and establish the first formal benchmarks upon which future performance will be measured.

CUSTOMER ExPERIENCE INSIDE LOOk — CASE STUDY

ProCure Treatment Centers, Inc.Headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, ProCure provides complete ser-vices to cancer patients through its proton therapy facility. Proton therapy works much like X-ray therapy (photon therapy), but is less invasive because less healthy tissue is destroyed during treatment. John Cameron, Ph.D. created ProCure, as he says, “to move proton therapy from research hospitals, where it had its develop-ment, into the mainstream.”

THE CHALLENGE“ProCure is dedicated to bringing proton therapy to patients using a compre-hensive approach which provides state-of-the-art proton therapy in a healing environment,” the company notes. Because of the relatively new nature of the treatment, and the fear and difficulty in dealing with cancer for both patients and family, ProCure understood that it had to work to make the customer experience as supportive and empathetic as possible. “Patients are our primary focus,” states ProCure’s approach to cancer treatment. “Approaches at the centers have been cre-ated to support exceptional patient care. Medical teams are committed to ensuring that patients’ needs are met, their time respected, and their dignity upheld.”

THE STRATEGYProvide a complete solution for patients undergoing treatment, building a positive, nurturing experience for both physical and emotional needs. A senior leadership team approached the challenge using these tactics, among others:


Develop customer-centricity from the very beginning. • ProCure began with a vision as stated in its motto: “Precision Therapy. Passionate Care.” As a company moving from research to functioning centers, ProCure took the opportunity to design the customer experience in all elements of the centers execution. In one way, customer experience was built literally from the ground up. The design of the first of several planned centers integrated a customer-welcoming atmosphere.

Build the experience across all touchpoints. • ProCure vP of Marketing Melissa Sturno and her team and consultants conducted extensive experience mapping to identify the five areas most important to patients, and then conducted extensive research to identify significant customer-experience touch points within those areas. The team discovered 26 touch points to address within the customer experience context.

Engage in continuous employee education in customer •experience. Initial training for frontline employees included stressing the company’s values, and instruction on finding and demonstrating appropriate levels of concern and empathy so patients will feel that they are the only ones that matter. Even the doctors themselves were considered frontline (as indeed they are), and received customer experience education. Follow-up training includes quarterly offsite coaching for customer service representatives.

Make the patient comfortable at every tur • n. The customer wants that comfortable chair that we’ve described in crafting innovative experience. In addition to conducting focus groups, ProCure customer experience designers visited cancer patients in their homes. No detail of stress-reduction was overlooked, including instituting appointment-scheduling efficiencies to reduce distractions. ProCure works to answer as many questions in advance with such tools as a robust informational web site and an informational on-site welcome kit that introduces patients to the local area so that they can better feel at home.

Building Momentum

One of the most frequent fatal mistakes of those embarking on customer experience is creating the sizzle and then allowing the fizzle—failing to follow through on the strategy. Organizations tend to focus on the launch and on the destination, and then expect everything to work on its own from there. You must travel your design and follow through on a long-term quest. And you must bring the rest of the company along on the continuing ride.

When you introduce change, some will doubt its need, as we saw in Chap-ter 13, “Leadership and Change Management.” Building post-launch mo-mentum is an extension of the change management we discussed earlier, geared toward building the confidence of doubters, eroding resistance from


those who aggressively fight change, and recruiting the cooperation of those apathetic people who shrug their shoulders, consider your campaign just another T-shirt and mug celebration, and wander back to their offices and do nothing differently because they’re seen it all before and they can live without participating.

But don’t fall into the trap of one-mug-and-gone—as I said, sizzle followed by fizzle. Dispel any perception that this is the program of the month. Instead, sizzle and then drizzle—be steady. Work to establish and promote momentum and continued awareness. Again, we’re dealing with people, and therefore must keep their interest fresh through evolving their experi-ence and the program itself. vary the incentives and the targets to make them ever more challenging—challenging, yet attainable. Follow up on strategy execution, and identify and publicize early successes. Show that the strategy is working, and that it is benefiting the customer, the organi-zation, and the stakeholders. To achieve and maintain forward velocity for your customer experience strategy:

Repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat. Maximize the communications tools available to you. Utilize all corporate communications assets to announce, explain and build buy-in for the strategy. Consider this a multi-pronged advertising and word-of-mouth campaign directed internally.

Evaluate every aspect of your organization—every bit of “real estate,” and determine how you can take over that real estate. Whether counter talk-ers next to the sink in the bathroom, posters in the break room, napkins in the cafeteria, or a billboard in the parking lot, the more you can ratchet up the volume in announcing your message, the more attention you’ll get. When airplane manufacturer honeywell deployed its customer experience initiatives, the CEO used the outside of his corporate jet to display cus-tomer experience messaging. Seeing that, how could employees doubt the importance of the new strategy? What real estate within your organization will communicate the seriousness of your new endeavor when your mes-sage occupies it? Paychecks are of course important to employees. Use pay stubs or benefits communications to deliver your message. Every communi-qué, every elevator, every door to the stairwell, every log-on to the intranet—all are open territory. In one client engagement, we replaced all employees’ pens overnight with pens that stated simply, “Writing a new chapter.”

Other important communication media include face-to-face meetings, web-casts, tailored education sessions, internal brochures, signage, giveaways, and dedicated intranet and internal websites.

Your goal: don’t let employees escape from the message, or from under-standing its scope and its importance. Drive home the point that customer experience is here to stay.


Unleash the pioneers. Focus on early adapters to help you evangelize and disseminate the messages. Recognize and reward early adopters.

Identify pockets of resistance and address them quickly. In Chapter 13, I discussed the importance of identifying the specific threat that each touch point believes it is facing. Now consider your biggest threat: cynicism. Any strategy is susceptible to undermining and to failure if middle manage-ment is cynical. A gesture as small as manager making a snide remark or a cynical joke during a coffee break will kill the spirit you’re trying to engender. If you sense underlying cynicism, it’s time to employ your CEO, your customer experience evangelist. Take the mission statement that you created earlier, and print it and the specific pledge to your customer on a poster. Ask all managers to sign the poster in an official ceremony conduct-ed by the CEO. Print copies of the signed poster for display throughout the company. Now the managers’ signoff is real, and their personal signatures are there for all to see. As a truly public step, reprint the poster in newspa-per and trade journal advertising so the customers understand the commit-ment, and will return pressure on the organization and the managers simply by asking that the organization deliver on its public promise. Backing off such public commitment is very difficult.

Address potential pockets of resistance specifically, creatively and publicly. You might even have some fun with it. One of our clients took the concept of asking managers to place their John hancock on the customer pledge literally. They recreated the poster-sized customer pledge in the style of the Declaration of Independence, and upper management dressed in the period garb of our Founding Fathers to sign it theatrically and publically.

Broadcast progress toward The Number. Measure performance vs. your original benchmarks and publicize improvements as you make prog-ress toward the ultimate goal.

When you spot early successes, celebrate. Look for examples of employees going above and beyond, and reward those employees publicly. Don’t just make an announcement in the company newsletter. Don’t just hand the performers a check. Throw a party. Especially in the early stages of the initiative, convince any doubters of your seriousness. Broadcast evidence of the strategy’s momentum to maintain the momentum, and to convince doubters that they’d better get on board, because there’s nothing they can do to stop it.

Especially when successes are particularly dramatic, promote employees based on their adherence to the program and the degree to which they take initiatives. Communicate to the organization that the promotions re-sulted from such adherence—this is public celebration on a larger scale.


Leverage new employees to solidify momentum. Be realistic: the changes you’re instituting will lead to a certain level of attrition. There are those who won’t accept the changes, who might consider what you’re asking of them to be too much work, and will move on. This is to your advantage, because you are losing anchors to the past whose loss will make way for new energy. Create a coaching program specifically for recruits to assure that they don’t learn the old mistakes, and that they take the fresh approach from the very start. Recruits are in danger of learning the past from current employees; make sure you teach them first.

Remember: Steady as she goes. Establish the discipline to review results regularly. Review the objectives and the success of achieving each in regular meetings. Task the Customer Council with maintaining consistent flow of feedback from customers and appropriate data from touch points.

Be steady, but don’t be static. Your Customer Council is chartered with refining your plan as you learn about the effectiveness of the plan itself and of its execution. Don’t hide their important work. Roll out refinements and reinventions publicly, and include them in the celebration. Identifying a course correction is a win in and of itself. Adapt ideas from stakeholders’ ecosystems to give those stakeholders additional ownership, and to lever-age the opportunity to further promote the seriousness with which the organization is taking the new program. Your people have the answers right now. They have simply lost hope or the power to make it happen.

Summing Up: The True Question

Whatever your approach to customer experience, whatever level you choose to roll out to the organization and to the customers, it’s imperative that you get the process underway, and get the organization on board with the overall program. The question “how do we get started?” is really a ques-tion of “how can we reignite the fire in our organization?” If you’ve finally realized the severity of the issues associated with customer loyalty and profitability, it means the issues are burning. You must get started, here and now, and make it happen. One employee at a time. One customer at a time. One idea at a time.

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Complimentary Chapter - Strativity Customer Experience Strategy Customer Experience Strategy 311 CHAPTER 15 Launching the Strategy When a New York energy …