Engaging the senior team

To ensure the success of our implementation with clients we have found it is essential to engage the senior team from the beginning

You think that improving the Customer Experience will help your company and yet you are not certain the senior team agree with you? This is a very common situation for many people in organisations today and one that we have come across many times.
Our view is simple. You need to engage the senior team early in the process to ensure they understand what a Customer Experience is, what it means for the organisation, what it will take and last and most importantly what are the benefits. In our experience people say they know the answer to these questions but in reality they don’t, you can see it in the actions they take.
When you start to engage the senior team it is important you understand they will be motivated by a number of factors; revenue, costs and profit to name but a few. Effectively the challenge they will provide will be “show me the money”.
Most people think that to improve a Customer Experience costs more money. In our experience we have found this is incorrect. Providing a great Customer Experience will save money, as poor service costs money. Again this needs to be demonstrated to the senior team in examples they can understand and relate to.
To ensure the success of our implementation with clients we have found it is essential to engage the senior team from the beginning and therefore over the years we have developed a number of techniques to ensure they are engaged.
This includes the following:

Philosopher’s Day
This is a one day event with the senior team where we typically run through the following agenda:

• What is a Customer Experience
• Why is it important
• How can it generate revenue and save costs
• Case studies of other organisations
• A self assessment of where the organisation is today
• Agreeing an action plan

We have found this highly effective. Either separate to, or as a part of the Philosopher’s day, the second technique is called a Customer Mirror. (link to Customer Mirror site and to Darren Cornish video on us undertaking a Customer mirror)

Customer Mirror
A Customer Mirror is where, with our specialised trained eye, we act as a Customer. We video and audio record all interaction and then analyse the results and provide recommendations. We then use this data to play back to the senior team what their experience is like and bring it to life for them. This has a great impact as they realise the gap between where they think they are and where they want to be.

Emotional Signature®
The third way to engage the senior team is to undertake specialised research with the Emotional Signature® (link). This provides a statistical analysis of how much value they can gain from undertaking this work. By doing so we can “Show them the money”!
Finally, we all know “it is difficult to be a prophet in your own land” and therefore getting someone from the outside to come in to challenge the status quo can be what is required. Sometimes it is more acceptable if someone from outside says “your baby is ugly”. We can say the things that are difficult to be said.
As you can probably see ‘Engaging the senior team’ is more of an art than a science; it depends on a number of factors which we would be happy to discuss with you further if required.