Creating a CX Culture and Mindset

The following is a guest post by Caroline Quinlan, Customer Experience Strategy Manager, Electric Ireland

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE GOES BEYOND THE CX DEPARTMENT

While having a CX department is instrumental in driving CX excellence within organisations, it is merely the starting point when it comes to creating a CX culture and mindset. The truth is, you can’t make meaningful changes in CX without embedding a CX mindset throughout every fibre of your organisation.

The most advanced stage of CX operations is having an embedded CX operational model where every department takes responsibility for driving CX improvement within their area.

Essentially the role of a CX department should be to work towards educating and supporting the people within the organisation to embrace and drive meaningful change when it comes to customer experience. CX departments should be creating processes, tools and procedures to empower the people within the organisation to drive CX excellence.

The 4 CX operational model types:

  1. Ad Hoc: Elements of CX are happening throughout the organisation, but no team or leader is driving this function.
  2. Centralised: A dedicated organizational unit acts as the CX centre of excellence – it bundles all CX activities, i.e. collects functional requirements from business departments and steers and performs technical implementation end-to-end.
  3. Hybrid: A staff function is established to consult and coordinate CX efforts across all functional business units but has no predominant decision authority and responsibility for technical implementation.
  4. Embedded: Business departments work independently on CX concepts/ initiatives and steer their technical implementation taking ownership and accountability for CX within their area. To help you get to the optimum embedded CX operational model, fostering customer closeness through customer personas, VOC reporting and customer journey mapping will be key to its development.

In addition, monitoring your CX maturity level will be a helpful metric to measure the shift in mindset and gather feedback on your progress.

From the customer's side, they too should notice improvements in communications, products and services as customer closeness becomes a priority helping to enhance empathic thinking and move the dial on Csat, NPS & CES in the process.

Whatever operational model you choose they all have one thing in common – You will put the customer at the heart of everything you do, and the results will be evident!