Greg Kihlström advises on CX, Marketing, and Digital Transformation at GK5A, hosts The Agile Brand Podcast, and is a best-selling author.
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If your organization is like most these days, there is at least some appreciation for the impact that a great customer experience (CX) can have on both short- and long-term results.
Maintaining a consistently great CX while continuously improving it to stay ahead of the competition, however, can be quite challenging. Much like DevOps helps software engineering teams maintain a continuous stream of high-quality software updates or how marketing operations supports the delivery of a constant stream of marketing campaigns and deliverables, I would like to propose that you consider implementing experience operations. Like those other two examples, experience operations supports continuous delivery of its output—in this case, consistently great customer experience.
In this article, I’m going to talk about the ways that an experience operations approach can help your organization improve the experience your customers have, as well as the experience that your employees have while delivering it.
Centralizing Experience Streamlines Complex Processes
Great customer experience is rarely delivered by a single team (e.g., the marketing team) on a single channel (e.g., a website). Instead, it often takes collaboration between multiple teams, integration of data between several systems, and spans many devices and platforms.
If only a single team is tasked with managing and improving the customer experience, they are often put in a difficult spot. Because delivering great CX takes many people, processes and platforms. Having a more centralized experience operations function can help ensure that the diverse disciplines and methods are aligned.
A formalized experience operations practice within your organization can help streamline the many moving pieces that it takes to deliver winning CX. And it can take some of the strain off of individual teams that are accountable but not always responsible for some of the pieces of delivering a great experience to your valuable customers.
Centralizing Experience Helps Support Everyone In Their Relationship To CX
At the end of the day, it is everyone’s job to in some way support the creation, management, delivery and improvement of great customer experiences.
When done well, this investment and formalization of the strategic relationship between the business and customer experience sends everyone in the organization a message that their work in some way contributes to delivering stellar CX. Additionally, savvy managers and leaders understand that contributing to great customer experience can be both a goal and a reward. This can motivate employees and contribute to them finding greater satisfaction in their jobs. Spoiler alert: Customers can tell when employees are engaged—and appreciate it as well!
Establishing experience operations sends a message to everyone in the organization of just how important the customer experience is to the strategic direction and success of the company. When you can align this with every individual and their respective roles, you have a win-win situation.
Centralizing Experience Operationalizes Continuous Improvement Of The Customer Experience
We often hear about those category leaders who are often the case studies of how to do CX well. One of the commonalities between these leaders is that they didn’t just achieve a high level of customer satisfaction and call it a day. Instead, they have operationalized the measurement and improvement of CX and made this continual refinement a part of their day-to-day work. This is another benefit of formalizing experience operations: You can dedicate time and resources to ensuring that your teams are consistently delivering above and beyond so your competitors aren’t able to pull ahead.
It’s not enough to raise your Net Promoter Scores or other customer satisfaction measurements temporarily. Great customer experience doesn’t allow for a “set it and forget it” approach. Instead, systems of continuous improvement ensure you stay ahead of the competition.
As you can see, implementing an experience operations approach in your organization can streamline the many teams and processes needed to deliver great CX, provide a cohesive and motivating factor to all the employees who contribute to customer satisfaction, and ultimately establish systems of continual improvement so that your organization can pull ahead and stay ahead in the race to deliver phenomenal customer experience.
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