Be Real About Customer Experience Transformation

There are some amazing examples of transformation in the world of Customer Experience. There are also some cautionary tales. A critical difference I have noticed between successful and unsuccessful CX projects: Honesty. Being real about your Customer Experience transformation can be the difference.

When the people running these projects are truly honest with themselves, the results seem to improve.
Honest about;

Progress – How they are tracking against the plan. I have seen/heard of elements in the RAG report that were Red, showing up green in the following report because a new delivery date was agreed. Be real about progress, even if it means you need to have a difficult conversation. As a leader, make sure your team feels able, to be honest.

Return – If you don’t know what your return will be, don’t just guess. If your return is looking to be less than initially thought, don’t try to spin the story.

Ability to measure – If you are unsure of how you are going to measure success, either stop and figure it out or make sure everyone agrees that this is acceptable (I vote for option 1).

Capability – Do you have the people to deliver the project? Are there any people risks that would leave you vulnerable?

Culture – If you are thinking that you will need to change the culture in order to be able to deliver the outcome you are looking for, trust me on this, you need to transform the culture before you add a major project to the mix.

Influence – If things start to stall, do you have the influence you need to be able to keep things on track? Do you have enough buy-in of those with the influence you need?

Enterprise Infrastructure – I have heard the story over and over that a project stalled because they realised that the Infrastructure could not support the project and so they needed to delay whilst they ran a readiness project. Get your IT stakeholders involved and get it right.

Organisational readiness – I think one of the major elements here is an understanding of how transformation will impact processes and systems across the business. I had a great conversation about this last week in relation to BPM. When the problems caused by a project start to stack up, you might find you lose your support really quickly.

I can think of a list that probably goes on for a lot longer. What else do you find companies tend to overstate in CX transformation projects?

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