3 actionable tips for influencing customer centric change: CX Mini Masterclass – E25

This CX Mini Masterclass includes actionable tips for influencing customer centric change from show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt. Customer experience strategy must be supported by the business in order to take hold. CX professionals must carefully navigate how to affect change within their organization, and in this episode Julia takes listeners through her top 3 recommendations for how to effectively influence change. A CX leader and a diplomat Customer experience leaders can have brilliant ideas, but they must also be able to foster buy-in and support to effectively influence change. As a professional community, we spend a lot of time discussing and debating the functional side of our profession, and this is great, but we must also support each other in the “softer” competencies of leadership that can be just as important. I view business diplomacy and influence as part of these softer leadership competencies. As I know that many are preparing for the year ahead, I thought it was an apt time to curate and share my top 3 recommendations for actionable interventions to foster support and influence real change. 1. Speak the language of your stakeholders It’s important to understand how decision-makers in your organization frame their world and address priorities so that you can help make CX one of these priorities. In many cases, decision-makers speak the language of financial metrics, so think about how you can frame CX outcomes in these terms. Your ideas will be more likely to resonate with your audience and garner their support. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is one of many metrics that you can use to align to the case for CX to financial metrics. If you’d like to learn more about CLV, episode 22 covers this topic in detail. 2. Establish a stakeholder management plan This may sound simple or obvious, but a proactive stakeholder management plan can go a long way to helping you effectively engage with others in your organization. Plus, once you document this as a formalized plan, you can share it with your team. If you are looking for ideas on templates for stakeholder management plans, here is a nice template and another example. Curious about what a stakeholder plan looks like in action? In episode 21, I spoke with Marnitz van Heerden from Hollard Insurance about his journey influencing customer centric change. He explained how he leveraged the SCARF model and several other approaches to win over his colleagues and foster support for CX. 3. Communicate customer centric initiatives with empathy We all know that communication is key, but for my final recommendation, I’m suggesting that you reflect on how you communicate your plan, and to introduce empathy into your communication. Take the time to acknowledge your audience’s hopes and fears, and how these might evolve during the change process. Also, be open with your organization about the possible impact of CX changes so that people can properly prepare. This 3rd point was inspired by a Harvard Business Review article that I recently read. You can read the article here. Transcript Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript. Click to expand full transcript Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. This is episode 25. If you’re new to the show, welcome. If you’re a returning listener, it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX mini masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-sized overviews of key customer experience concepts… …and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer-centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience… …are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics… …this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional. If you’re looking to learn more about how CX best practices can be put into action or to be inspired by global customer experience thought leadership… …be sure to check out my longer format interview episodes, which are published on the first Thursday of each month. This is episode 25. It’s a special episode, as the 25th one feels like kind of a milestone for me. And I’m recording it while on the road. I’m in London at the moment for some client meetings, so if you hear a little extra background noise, that’s because I’m not doing this from my normal recording space. So please bear with me and just think of it as a little extra ambiance for the customer experience professional on the go. During the month of January, my mini masterclasses have been building on the concepts related to strategic planning for customer-centric change. It’s the start of a new year and I know that many of you are busy creating your plans for the rest of 2019. So for the last episode of January, I wanted to dive into a topic that’s hugely important for making your CX strategy a reality, and that’s influencing change. Because we can develop the best customer experience strategy ever, but if it doesn’t take hold, then all of our efforts are for naught. So today I’m going to share with you my top three actionable tips for winning the hearts and minds of your colleagues and getting real buy-in and support for your CX efforts. Hopefully, you’ll be able to put these recommendations to use immediately and get the most impact out of that 2019 plan you’ve been sweating over the last couple weeks or months. If you happen to be dashing around between meetings or commuting on the London Underground as I’ve been doing all this week and hear something that you’d like to remember later… …don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered in today’s show in the show notes for this episode… …which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Okay. So let’s jump right in with tip number one for influencing customer-centric change, which is to speak the language of the audience that you want to influence. I mean this in more of a figurative than a literal sense. Understand what’s most important to the top decision makers or influencers in your business… …and frame your efforts in terms of outcomes that are relatable. For many business leaders, this language is the language of financial results. The rest of the business world doesn’t always talk about things in terms of net promoter score, customer satisfaction or customer advocacy… …though if you work in an organization that does, count yourself very lucky. Most executives have KPIs that tie back to financial metrics… …which are reported at a board level. If you want to sing to their heart and have them support your initiatives, position these in terms of their metrics. For example, if leaders are measured on revenue, position your outcomes in terms of customer acquisition and revenue growth that comes with this. If leaders are measured on cost reduction or profitability, show how customer retention saves money on the cost of acquisition or align experience improvements to efficiency gains. And if you think your executives are open to it, introduce them to the concept of customer lifetime value and see how this might be woven into established financial reporting. If the term customer lifetime value puzzles you, I’d encourage you to check out episode 22, which covers this concept in detail. Tip number two is to make a stakeholder engagement plan. Don’t leave stakeholder engagement as something that you deal with on an ad hoc basis. Make it deliberate and intentional. Look at who the key players are in your organization, evaluate their level of influence and their level of interest or resistance to your plans. If you’ve never made a stakeholder engagement plan before and aren’t sure what this looks like, don’t worry. I’ll include some links to examples in the show notes for this episode. You can also check out episode 21 where I interviewed Marnitz van Heerden from Hollard Insurance about his journey influencing change. He shared the SCARF model, which is an approach that he used to understand and leverage common drivers for stakeholder behavior. These plans are often quite simple and straightforward. So don’t be put off just because you haven’t done a stakeholder engagement plan before. Putting thought into this approach and documenting it will help you engage with people in a way that is deliberate and not haphazard. Plus, if you turn this into a tangible plan, it means that you can share it with your team members and bake it into your overall project management and communication efforts. Which brings me to my third and final point, communication. I saved the best and possibly the most important one for last. In order to properly engage with stakeholders, you have to have a communication plan. How your efforts are positioned within your broader organization’s ecosystem can make or break success. For most of you out there listening to this, I’m sure that this goes without saying and you’re thinking, why is Julia telling me to make a communication plan? Of course I’m doing that. So what I’m going to do is delve a little deeper into the topic of communication and urge you to think about empathizing with others as you communicate your customer experience strategies. Understand that your plans or suggestions might make some team members a little uncomfortable, put their performance under the microscope or challenge their existing beliefs. Also, understand how stakeholders’ needs may evolve through the process and how your communication might need to be adjusted along the way. People could be skeptical at first and then need a little extra encouragement when the change process hits a hurdle. Another consideration is to be honest with people about the change that’s coming and what to expect. This will give them time to acclimate and perhaps make provisions if your plans or initiatives will impact their day-to-day responsibilities. As customer experience professionals, our work to improve customer experience often has real downstream effects for customer-facing and operational support teams. We might be inherent agents of change, but we shouldn’t underestimate how others could be resistant to change. I often speak about the importance of communication when trying to realize customer-centric strategy, though diving into the empathy behind communication was inspired by a Harvard Business Review article that I recently read. I’ll post a link to this article in the show notes for this episode. So, if you have big CX strategy plans for 2019 and would like to see these come to fruition, remember… …first, speak the language of your audience, recognizing that financial metrics will resonate with most key decision makers. Second, take the time to establish a stakeholder engagement plan. You won’t regret this effort. And finally, communicate your plans with empathy and understanding for the needs of your audience to get them on your side from day one. Thanks so much for listening and I wish you all the best of luck for the coming year. If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program with others who might be interested… …or head on over to iTunes and rate this podcast. It helps others find the show too. I’ll be back next Thursday with one of my longer format interview episodes featuring thought leader and aspirant customer experience punk, Adrian Swinscoe. Adrian and I caught up in Johannesburg recently and explored the role of technology in customer experience and how being powered by humans is actually a thing these days. If you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet or LinkedIn message. My handle is @juliaahlfeldt and my full contact details… …are also listed on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to check out more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, leadership alignment and CX change implementation) or get in touch via email.