Executive buy-in with cross-functional alignment priority

Consider how your CX and brand vision connect to collective team goals and reactions to market conditions. Evaluate how the institutional practices of an organization influence how decisions are made. Map organization hiring goals to what you measure in employee promotions reflected in your vision and purpose. Are you consistently elevating culture with a brand vision, clearly connecting values to monthly and yearly goals?

Never underestimate the influence of the smallest policies to customer experiences. Map them to a customer journey to see where unnecessary friction occurs. Consider employee impacts from poor interpretation, commonly defaulting to not being fired. They are equally incentivized by bonuses and promotions which can be highly influential in maintaining these policies. Unbalanced policies between customer goals and the business vision will prevent your CX growth.

Consider how processes that employees and/or systems programmed in operations support or inhibit within the customer journey. Inflexible procedures can greatly impact customer experiences. Can you waive a one time late fee? Evaluate how front-line teams are having to apply these policies with customers. Simple or complex, you begin to understand how procedures can impact brand trust and confidence. Evaluate where you need to revisit policies for the sake of greater customer loyalty.

Evaluate milestones and project goals of your teams as they rally to achieve targets. Consider setting frameworks that consistently point to CX measurements. Make sure that these team measurements are connected to the customer experience. Don’t just measure a click-through metric, make sure you’re understanding what behavior you’re measuring. Evaluate and promote incentives for teams that continuously measure from the voice of the customer (research) and employees that support them. Incentivize with their contribution to customer intelligence and success.

It’s common to tie performance to financial quarterly reports. It’s important to understand that financials are an outcome of consumer trust and spending. Individual performance is highly influential in decision when you multiply this across your organization. Evaluating how you are incentivizing employees with promotions and bonus compensation. Did they move the brand (CX) purpose and improve customer goals? Or are they detrimental in their goals that are antithetical to CX? Begin to reset performance that is tied to customer metrics with existing business metrics.

Training your teams on how to apply a CX vision is key to delivering product and customer success. As employees enter an organization, they quickly understand what matters and what doesn’t. Existing employees should also have continuous training as commonly align and maintain corporate “how it gets done.” Model training regiment with your CX vision for improving employee decision-making. A lack of this education can quickly telegraph the absence of the customer.

For example each year, Salesforce employees complete a V2MOM (vision, values, methods, obstacles, measurement) assessment of their work.