How to keep CX a priority on your leadership agenda
Senior CX leaders, Amy Radin and Mark Mitchell identify the top 5 practical ways to keep CX a priority on your leadership agenda.
These are actionable and practical tips you can use today; things you should be doing now to keep CX a priority.
Top tips summary:
- Use proof points to identify and prove that CX is working in your business
- 1-1 meetings with stakeholders and senior leaders to build relationships and understand business priorities and agenda to drive your CX goals
- Establish an effective governance structure
- Bring everyone along for the ride to build advocacy and support
- Create CX incentives and a reward and recognition program
Proof points
Identify and prove that CX is working in your business with proof points.
Share these proof points and successes with employees and partners, and celebrate them! Building excitement and a buzz around CX and its wins will gain advocates for your future CX improvements.
Struggling to prove the value of CX in your business?
One-to-ones with business partners
Sitting down with your stakeholders and senior leaders, in a one-to-one setting, will help you to build relationships and help you understand business priorities and agenda to drive your CX goals.
Amy Radin highlights how business partners hold the key to prioritising many of the things you want to prioritise in CX, and it’s all about demonstrating ‘what’s in it for me’ for people to sign up for what you’re doing.
Mark Mitchell emphasises the importance of face-to-face interactions like coffee and lunch to build rapport and become an effective influencer in driving CX results.
He explains that building those relationships and aligning your work to their priorities will gain support and advocacy amongst senior colleagues.
“If you can figure out what your stakeholder’s agendas are, and tag them onto their agenda, the reciprocal result will be that they are going to help you be successful too.
“Finding the win-win and the partnership with your business stakeholders is key and starts with that one-on-one conversation,” said Mark Mitchell.
Amy Radin points out the different ways people react in a group setting compared to individual meetings, and how building relationships will help you move faster with your CX initiatives.
“If you invest the effort to build those relationships, build that support, and really smoke out what’s really on people’s minds, and what you can do to help them… you will find that when you get into that room, you’ll have allies, you’ll have advocates, and it’ll be much easier to build support.”
Need help in driving your C-suite of key leaders to success?
Governance structure
Establishing an effective governance structure is key to ensuring CX remains a priority through changing and disruptive times.
Effective governance can be in the form of steering committees, advisory forums, and employee engagement teams, and understanding and accepting your role as a CX educator and coach within these settings.
Amy explained: “Your role is to be an educator who needs to constantly help your colleagues see the connection between CX and business performance. Embrace your role to help move CX as a priority and where it belongs.”
Simply engaging your key stakeholders on a regular basis, providing program updates, sharing customer feedback with executives, and bringing ‘customer wins’ to life by sharing proof points are all helpful in driving CX agendas and keeping them top of mind for Executives.
“Create a meeting cadence, whether that’s quarterly, monthly, or weekly. Have an audience that allows the conversation about customer experience and C-suite, with key stakeholders on a regular basis,” said Mark Mitchell.
Need help with your CX Governance? Get in touch
Get everyone involved
Bringing everyone along for the ride when it comes to CX will build support and advocacy around your improvements and goals, especially customer-facing employees who can give you a better insight and perk the ears of stakeholders who want to keep them happy.
Mark explained: “When you bring your frontline and customer-facing employees into the process, they’re going to have lots of questions, ideas, and thoughts about it. Engaging them means the leadership has to take notice and be responsive to the ideas that are coming forward.”
Bringing others from across the business on to your CX improvement projects will help them relate to the work and success of CX, makes them see the benefits, and also gives them ownership and responsibility within the project to become an organic advocate.
Amy added: “When I was leading digital experience for one of the biggest credit card franchises in the world, one of the things that were critical for my team’s success was pulling people from the business into all of our efforts.
“We had them help us brainstorm, and set priorities, and they owned the results. They saw how the work that the experienced team was driving their success.”
Incentives, rewards, and recognition
Creating CX incentives and linking compensation to your CX improvements can help to keep momentum and sustain it for the longer term.
Mark said: “You can create reward programs for successes across your customer experience.”
Using a few, if not all, of these activities, will be a strong way to keep CX at the forefront of your business, especially when there are so many priorities at the moment.
Not having CX in the fabric now will mean reworking later. Customers are getting more discerning in how and where they spend their money. Go back to the basics and make CX a success.