What we find is that it is most powerful to combine story telling when we deliver this information. We will tell the growth of donors and how many we did not keep, and then we will challenge the organization with the impact of losing donors. We tell this story in both the number of lost donors and also in the value of the donor we lost – to show the potential future revenue of a lost donor.
We show explicitly the incremental growth that we would have if we kept 5 or 10 or 20 percent more donors. And then we attach that information to examples of issues that drive donors away. Now people's work is connected to growth and they have clarity about what they can do about it.
Competency 2 gives leaders a framework for guiding the work of the organization: requiring cross-silo accountability to deliver deliberate customer experiences. It unites the organization in building a framework for ‘earning the right’ to customer asset growth. The role of the CCO is to unite leaders and the organization in building a one-company version of their customer journey.
This means facilitating across the silos to unite them in the development, and understanding of the entire customer journey, versus the silo-based processes that dictate the customer experience (such as the sales process, marketing acquisition process, etc.). It includes focusing the organization on priority one-company experiences. And on changing the conversations from silo-driven conversations to collaborative conversations about customers' lives – their experiences across the journey they have with your organization. Over time, this will evolve leadership language to drive performance along the customer journey, driving accountability to journey stages, not only down silos.
As a result of competency two, questions about silo and project performance will shift to include accountability for customer life improvement. Your customer journey framework will provide a disciplined one-company diagnosis into the reasons behind customer asset growth or loss. And it will establish rigor in understanding and caring about priorities in customers' lives (The real power in journey mapping.)
With this book, you will be able to assess how you currently use your customer journey map as the framework to consistently drive company focus, in your customer listening, experience improvement, and planning efforts. You will learn how other CCOs have avoided the “shiny object” syndrome that journey-mapping is at risk of being today. And you will learn how to move mapping from a one-off activity to the beginning of a competency that drives business behavior.
Lesley Mottla was part of the management team that developed Zipcar's award-winning customer experience and technologies. She just joined LAUNCH, a start-up devoted to reinventing multichannel consumer experiences.
To get started with customer experience, we built a very simple high-level customer journey on one page so everyone could understand it. We call it our eco-system. Here's what's included: At the top are the activities and moments of truth customers go through, in the middle they are bucketed into high-level touchpoints, or stages as some call them. These are what we call “front of the house” – what customers see. Then below the stages are the “back of house” items – the things we have to unite on to deliver seamlessly to the front of the house. Presenting the visual on one page was very important for us in communications and creating understanding.
To build this map we started internally with our people, then we did a lot of observations with customers to build out the specific front-of-house components. When we started working on the micro-processes under these, we got more detailed. But starting here was important to build a one-company view of the Zipcar experience.
Then every year we would create a roadmap using the eco-system visual. Each year we would start with certain themes to focus on. Inside of each theme was the customer experience to be improved or heightened and why, the development, investment, and initiatives. This also included the financial impact and cost to the operation.
We used this singular format consistently every quarter and prior to planning to align and focus and make the work real and tangible.
Competency 3 unites your organization to build a one-company listening system that is constantly refreshed to tell the story of your customers' experience, guided by the customer journey framework. Feedback volunteered from customers as they interact with you, survey and social feedback, ethnography, and other sources of gathered input are assembled into one complete picture, presenting customer perception and value, stage by stage. This alignment of multiple sources of feedback focuses and galvanizes the organization to focus on key areas of improvement connected to customer growth, driving greater results and greater understanding of this work.
The role of the CCO is to engage leaders and the organization to want to be a part of one-company storytelling to unite decision-making and drive cross-company focus and action. That's why I call this competency as building a customer ‘listening path.
With this book, you'll be able to evaluate your current listening system to determine how to evolve to the comprehensive customer listening path of competency two. This will enable you to utilize multiple sources of information to move your company past survey-score addiction, to customer experience storytelling – prompting caring about customers' lives, and improvements that earn the right to growth.
Graham Atkinson, is Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at Walgreens, the largest drug-retailing chain in the United States, with responsibility for the full customer experience/relationship, including loyalty.
What I first encountered at Walgreens was that the stores were receiving a simplistic survey report with results by store. Often it gave them results from only 20 to 30 customers with only the survey score numeric. There was very little if any commentary behind the score. They might receive a few ad hoc comments. As you could guess, from these results, store managers could easily explain or rationalize bad results away.
Then, in our leadership meetings, we had a monthly report-out from sales and marketing. In this meeting there were just two lines of information reported on that applied to customers: the exit store survey results and the competitive results. One meeting's discussion on these results elicited an almost cathartic conversation, which opened the door to change.
We didn't really understand what this customer number meant or the impact. One of the first things we did to put meat on the bones of this information was to understand what we had in terms of tools and processes and start to build out a robust listening system with understanding and meaning behind the data we were gathering.
Within my first six months, we rebuilt our approach to give each store higher response rates with more credible feedback that was harder to refute, we built a program to identify how each store was performing to encourage a friendly horse-race among stores, and we did the heavy lifting for store managers to identify a few key things per store to focus on.
Over time, we created a central repository of multiple categories of listening feedback and turned it into a consistent scorecard on business performance. We also looked at behavioral loyalty so we could connect to improvements that would drive a return on investment. With analytics we were able to show how behaviors changed over time and how we needed to achieve different results to achieve customer-buying patterns that drive growth. Importantly, this was not just a rudimentary part of our leadership meetings – but presented as important as the report-out of financial results.
Competency 4 builds out your “Revenue Erosion Early-Warning Process.” We need leaders to care about operational performance in processes