Integrating strategy and customer experience

Essence

The integrated strategic framework. A robust customer experience strategy integrates organizational strategy with customer lifecycle insights and creates alignment across departments.
The role of management. Senior executives must take customer experience initiatives and integrate them into core business strategies for sustainable success.
Engaged employees matter. Connecting the employee experience with the customer experience drives engagement and ensures that employees understand their role in delivering exceptional service.

Despite its central importance to the success of every business, customer experience is rarely implemented as effectively as it could be by management teams. This is because customer experience is not yet fully integrated into the core of strategy planning, development and execution.

The challenge for customer experience practitioners is to ensure that senior executives take fundamental ownership customer experience.

Illustration of the Customer Centric Strategy Framework

Customer experience practices have two major problems.

The first problem is that the design process of “empathize, define, ideate, design, test” is never explicitly placed within a broader strategic methodology. Because of this, many design and innovation teams never manage to gain traction for their ideas at the board level, and therefore never gain buy-in and support for the ideas they try to implement.

The second problem is that traditional approaches to strategy do not explicitly include the customer life cycle. By placing the customer lifecycle at the center of organizational CX strategy, an organization can better deliver value to customers and clients by aligning every person, activity and process, ultimately achieving the vision and higher purpose.

When customer experience strategy is developed and communicated effectively within an organization, everyone understands their role in achieving strategic goals. There must be alignment and coordination across the organization to transform the customer experience. To achieve this, leadership teams must start with customer life cycle.

Why the Customer Lifecycle Matters in Your Strategy

The customer lifecycle has traditionally fallen into the realm of marketing, with core activities focused on sales and retention. However, it is much more than a high-level description of customer journeys. Its importance transcends customer relationship marketing, serving as the foundation on which a customer-centric organization is built.

Customer centricity is the formal way of referring to customer focus. It puts the customer at the center of strategy, aligning all aspects of a company’s operations—including product development, marketing, sales, and customer service—around delivering customer value. This concept goes far beyond customization, which is a specific customer experience strategy based on tailoring a business’s services and products to fit each customer’s unique needs and preferences.

Therefore, customer experience strategy must be integrated into the three major strategic activities of an organization – strategy planning, translation and implementation.

Key elements of a customer experience strategy

Strategic planning refers to the analysis of socioeconomic, technological, political, legal and environmental factors to prepare for future challenges and opportunities. The results of this stage include:

Identifying an organization’s strategic drivers, which are the key factors or elements that influence the overall strategic direction and decision-making process.
A clearly articulated value proposition.

A customer-centric strategic framework kicks off the strategic planning process with the new 4Ps framework, which helps senior leadership teams analyze their most pressing strategic questions in a systematic manner across all four dimensions:

Platforms: How will digital technologies, architectures, functionalities and platform-based business models change the way the organization operates, evolves and interacts with customers and collaborators?
Scope: How can the overall purpose of an organization be articulated in a way that clearly explains why it exists and what differentiates it from competitors? What needs does it meet and how will it meet those needs?
People: How can the organization develop higher quality relationships with people – both with customers and within the communities in which it operates and has influence?
Planet: How can the organization develop a systemic understanding of the positive and negative impacts it has on our planet?

We use the New 4Ps framework to facilitate dialogue between people across functions and levels to help them understand how their roles need to evolve to ensure their organizations continue to thrive in the future. By helping management teams develop a more systemic way of thinking, answering customer questions can begin to influence strategy at its earliest stages and before strategic drivers are formally established.

Turning your vision into a strategy

Strategy translation is the process of translating high-level strategic vision and strategic drivers into objectives, goals, and initiatives that can be understood and executed by different departments and teams.

Once a customer experience strategy is developed, it is implemented through strategic projects and organizational processes. By necessity, projects and processes are implemented by people. This means that management teams must ensure alignment between all three elements – people, projects and processes.

The success of a new customer experience initiative goes beyond simply implementing new customer marketing processes and systems. People in every area must be prepared for significant changes. The customer-centric strategic framework is explicit in placing communication leadership and change management activities at the beginning of the strategy translation stage.

At this stage, leadership teams must invest time in training people to help them understand the strategy in a systematic way, starting with the value proposition – the description of how the organization provides value to its customers. The most effective way to do this is by turning the strategy into a map so that people understand not only its individual elements, but also the causal connections between its parts.

Implementing your customer experience strategy

Strategy implementation is the execution of the strategic plan, which involves implementing projects and processes, deploying resources, aligning activities and monitoring progress. At this stage, there should be no surprises. Everyone in the organization should already be ready for the change, fully engaged and aligned by communicating objectives, indicators, goals and initiatives.

Strategic customer experience projects at this stage depend on the organization’s customer experience maturity level. Examples of project goals include improving customer experience assessments, discovering new customer requirements, researching new market segments, understanding the lives of typical customers, mapping customer journeys, and designing business processes involved in supporting customer experience.

The role of leadership in customer experience

The Customer-Centric Strategy framework includes a new concept we call “leadership experience,” which we use to help leaders explore how they understand the world and how others perceive them. Leadership experience (LX) refers to the inner psychological world of people, complementing employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX).

We developed the concept after being surprised by conversations we had with presidents and CEOs who didn’t have customer-centric mindsets. One, for example, told us he didn’t have time for customer experience because he was “focused on results.” When leadership experience is recognized as important to improving the customer experience, teams become more open to challenges. This change encourages mentoring and training for those responsible for managing team performance.

The role of employees in strategic success

A The customer-centric strategic framework visually connect the employee lifecycle with the customer lifecycle. Not only is it important to structure an employee’s development and career during their time with the organization, but it’s also important to use customer experience design the expertise to think about how employees understand and experience the strategy.

For example, gamification and storytelling can help senior leadership teams communicate strategy maps to employees who may not have enough training to understand the technical terms used to describe strategy more formally. By writing a story that explains the complex relationships between the parts of a strategy, leaders can ensure that everyone understands the purpose of the strategy and where they can contribute to its implementation.

These aforementioned efforts can get people excited about the customer experience strategy and involve them in its processes – from planning to implementation. It also provides a path for placing more designers and customer experience practitioners in positions of authority in their organizations. The goal here is to elevate organizations to achieve transformational results through localization customer focus at the heart of everything I do.

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