Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Digital Transformation Strategy (145-slide PowerPoint presentation). Digital Transformation is being embraced by organizations across most industries, as the role of technology shifts from being a business enabler to a business driver. This has only been accelerated by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Thus, to remain competitive and outcompete in today's fast paced, [read more]
Customer Experience (CX) Pyramid
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Most organizations aren’t ready to deliver great Customer Experiences across all channels. Many of them have invested heavily in conventional methods of doing business, backed by in person or over-the-phone customer experience. This has led to creation of siloed operational structures within companies, where each silo operates individually.
With the advent of digital channels, these organizations set out to use and proffer their services via digital channels. They did this by creating discrete digital-product groups in their existing operational infrastructure. However, their siloed infrastructure falls short of meeting customers’ requirements in terms of seamless communication and interaction across all channels. The reason being:
- Customers’ utilization of multiple channels and touchpoints across Customer Journeys.
- Requirements of personalized services / products by the customers.
- Anticipation of impeccable coordination and communication by the customers no matter how they interact with the business.
This necessitates the businesses to not only provide great Customer Experiences at each channel, but also make the transitions across these channels simple to improve the overall Customer Experience (CX). However, improving the overall Customer Experience isn’t that simple a feat, especially with silo-based operational infrastructures. Providing consistent amazing Customer Experience warrants:
- Creation of a robust operational ecosystem through Transformation of internal operations, to respond quickly to customers’ expectations.
- Meticulous design and delivery of Customer Experiences.
Most organizations understand the significance of Transforming their Customer Experience—however, they lack the direction and support required to realize this goal. Organizational leadership can make use of the Customer Experience Pyramid to guide their CX Transformation.
The Customer Experience Pyramid is an empirical research based framework, which is quite effective in not only improving individual touchpoints but streamlining the entire Customer Journeys. The CX Pyramid entails 2 core dimensions:
- Focus Areas – the organizational spheres that must change to enable provision of amazing digital Customer Experiences.
- Strategic Building Blocks – the strategies that define how this change can take place and made part of the organizational processes to deliver exceptional Customer Experiences.
The 4 Focus Areas crucial in a business to change in order to deliver top-quality Digital Customer Experiences at scale are:
- Vision and Strategy
- Talent Management
- Operations
- Technology
Let’s discuss the first 2 individual Focus Areas of the CX Pyramid in detail for now.
Vision and Strategy
Redirecting focus on making Customer Experience a part of the Organizational DNA necessitates creating a Vision statement and Strategy to depict, clarify, and plan out the purpose and objectives of serving the customers. The senior leadership needs to come up with a short and crisp Vision statement. The Vision sets out the foundation that reflects the leadership’s focus, importance the organization gives to Customer Experience, and the high-level objectives associated with the provision of quality Customer Experiences.
Next, the leadership should work on developing strategies to build fundamental competencies within the 4 CX Building Blocks—i.e., CX operations, metrics, CX-centric culture, systems and governance protocols.
Talent Management
Once the Vision statement has been agreed upon, it’s time to work towards carrying out the required actions to produce customer-centric outcomes. The first step in that direction involves linking all employees who work in discrete silos (in conventional structures). To align all employees, there is a need to create a Transformation team and define new roles / CX groups. The Transformation team should train and direct teams responsible for the different stages of the Customer Journey, instill new ideas, and foster desired behaviors in them.
Senior Leadership need to also assign a CX Team to run the CX program. The CX Team has to lay out processes and yardsticks to foster cross-functional collaboration and coach functional units to adopt customer-centric design practices in their operations.
Interested in learning more about the other focus areas of the CX Pyramid Framework? You can download an editable PowerPoint presentation on Customer Experience Pyramid here on the Flevy documents marketplace.
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In the modern Digital Age, advances in technology and communication, combined with the explosive growth in data information, have given rise to a more empowered global customer. Recent economic and political events highlight the need for organizations to understand how consumers view the world and the most important attributes for their purchasing decisions.
Thus, increasingly more organizations are seeking to invest and focus on Customer-centric Design. A clear understanding of customer needs and behaviors across the organization will help drive profitable growth strategies and provide the confidence to invest in opportunities at a time when staying within budget can be extremely difficult.
Learn about our Customer-Centric Design (CCD) Best Practice Frameworks here.
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About Mark Bridges
Mark Bridges is a Senior Director of Strategy at Flevy. Flevy is your go-to resource for best practices in business management, covering management topics from Strategic Planning to Operational Excellence to Digital Transformation (view full list here). Learn how the Fortune 100 and global consulting firms do it. Improve the growth and efficiency of your organization by leveraging Flevy's library of best practice methodologies and templates. Prior to Flevy, Mark worked as an Associate at McKinsey & Co. and holds an MBA from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. You can connect with Mark on LinkedIn here.
