As things in the Customer Experience space change more and more rapidly, the idea of implementing a Customer Experience board is becoming more popular amongst organisations.
So for those of you who are thinking about it, or want to know what benefits a Customer Experience board might bring to your organisation, we’ve explored three of the most important below.
A Customer Experience board can break down silos between departments
Many companies have different data sets for every single department. Marketing has one set of data, customer service is using another and they can’t, or won't, share their information with each other. This creates silos, where different information about customers is held by different parts of the business.
One of the most common reasons silos exist is because of legacy systems. These have all been built separately and it's very hard when you're a big, established business to change those processes.
Even for established businesses, if you get all of that information in a central database, such as a CRM system, you have somewhere that you can go in and look at each of your customers. You can understand their journey, every touch-point that they've been through. It makes it so much easier to understand the context and then deliver the right experience to each customer.
They can change mindsets within an organisation.
Breaking down silos is not just about making sure you have the right technology in place and are properly communicating and sharing information. It's also about making sure that across departments, people are prepared to collaborate and understand that customer experience is important.
There are times when you’ll come across resistance, where people are unwilling to change their mindsets. It’s always going to be a challenge. But, there are ways to break down this resistance. Perseverance is number one. But it’s also about making sure that you can prove an ROI and get your stats and facts in place to prove the business case as to why you should be making that change.
If you can build a strong business case, then it undermines the arguments of people that think customer experience is just a bit wishy-washy or vague, because you can prove to them with the facts and figures that there's a real business benefit to it.
There are a lot of things associated with customer experience that people see as costly. They might be enhancing the customer experience, but when you're talking to a CFO, you really have to justify your position. Customer experience people need to get a lot hotter on proving the ROI. It's really about building a business case and getting support on the board level, agreeing that that's what they're all striving towards. Then, you’ll be able to embed customer-centric decision making in the boardroom. So every decision they make is influenced with the customer in mind.
The main ethos then becomes that the customer drives every decision. Instead of behaving like people expect a bank or utility company to act, it’s about challenging yourself and striving to be more like the best in breed companies for customer experience, regardless of your industry.
They can get your customers to input on your product or service.
Your customer experience board can take your customer experience to such a level that your customers are actually inputting suggestions and ideas for product development. If you've got a good relationship with your customers, a dialogue about you as a company can begin to take shape. So your customers feel that they are participating in the solutions and that what they have said has influenced the direction of the company. They feel they're in control. It's almost a flipped model, with the customer determining the company strategy.
These are just some of the benefits you can achieve by implementing a Customer Experience board within your organisation, to find out how else you can benefit, download our eBook:
