Building a Movement

“I absolutely believe that people, unless coached, never reach their maximum potential.”

-Bob Nardelli

Over the past weeks I’ve blogged about a broad set of topics, ranging from lean startup thinking and agility, to self-awareness about your company’s own journey to be more customer-driven, to a top ten list of my favorite business books. In this blog, I’m going to bring it all together and share thoughts on how you can catalyze a movement at your company to amplify the impact of your investments in experience management. This blog is directed at anyone that wants to be a change agent at their company to help it become more customer-driven.

What do I mean by a movement? I’m thinking bigger than prioritizing a specific set of CX opportunities that you can prototype and launch. I’m thinking broader than building a change management network to engage stakeholders that need to support your CX initiatives. I’m thinking bolder than training programs and AI coaches to help your people say and do the right things as they engage with customers. How can you achieve the best combination of “top down” leadership with “bottom up” energy from your managers and frontline employees so they can be more active contributors to how CX supports your broader strategy?

In my experience, there are 5 key lessons learned if you want to build a movement that truly rises to the level of the questions above:

Build alignment about your north star CX vision and jump start real conversation among your employees about where you can improve.

Define the emotions that you want both customers and employees to feel along the customer journey and modernize your CX listening approach to see how you are doing.

Combine lean startup, human centered design, enterprise agility, and quality management practices to drive impact for both your bold bets and the brilliant basics.

Ensure your leaders, managers and frontline employees have a shared vocabulary, set of skills, and tools to spot improvement opportunities and share them with each other.

Strike the right balance between formal and informal organization levers to drive adoption of your desired CX behaviors.