All I Want for X-MAS is a Better X-perience

Bruce Tempkin of Forrester and the Customer Experience Matters blog has gift-wrapped a nice little stocking stuffer in the form of "Customer Experience Resolutions".  They are:

1. We shall focus more on our customers and less on ourselves
2. We shall get to know more about what our customers really need
3. We shall formalize a voice-of-the-customer program
4. We shall incorporate personas in our experience design processes
5. We shall clearly define our brand in terms of promises to customers
6. We shall judge every interaction on how well it fulfills our brand promises
7. We shall engage front-line employees in improving customer experiences
8. We shall get the executive team to collectively own the customer experience
9. We shall establish a multi-year journey towards customer-centric DNA
10. We shall give customer experience the attention that it deserve

It's a great list.  I would add one:

1. We shall revive a company culture who's core purpose is to serve people.

That's the foundation of it all.  Great experiences that are customer/people-centric are extremely hard to achieve.  If you are working for a company that doesn't have a culture of customer-centricity baked into it, then it will be difficult to achieve any of these goals.  If your company never had it—you will have to figure out how to build that culture.  If you had it and lost it—you'll need to "revive" it.

You can hire all of the customer-centric consultants that money can buy.  But at the end of the day, the best results come from a culture focused on serving people.  In this case, the people just happen to be customers.

Comments

[Kaleem]

It is a pretty good list but the seeming necessity of personas in

"4. We shall incorporate personas in our experience design processes"

is a little much.

Personas (or personae if you prefer) are a design tool like any other. I've created my share of research-based personas and they were effective but they were also important to the particular projects I was working on.

Personas may not be the right tool for the job and if you're going to hang your hat on them in every case, you may end up hanging yourself (and your project) along with them.

[Crawford]

Why overcomplicate it.
If you look at all great customer service organizations, they have two fundamental things in common.
Nothing comes ahead of respect for the individual.
The operational process to ensure delivery is that old standby, the golden rule.
It worked then. It works now.
So long as we don't hide it under a bushel basket of lists.

[DA]

good point Crawford. Maybe a list makes it seem more complex than it needs to be, but I still feel its easier said than done. For example in the airline industry I can only think of one provider that has this type of culture. Southwest. And maybe they don't need a list. But maybe their competitors do.

[Crawford]

Absolutely agreed DA. My principal bitch with lists is that it makes it seem like a problem to be solved by checking off specific steps, assigning tasks and roles.

Slavish devotion to customer satisfaction is an absolute. It is not accomplished so much as lived. I've witnessed it in action at several client companies. And in each the solution was so simple as to be almost incredible. Too simple by half.

Living it, of course, that is the challenge.

[jassim abrar]

this is rock