Getting to understand what customers love and providing an experience that meets customer needs - as well as delights them - has become a constantly evolving effort for many organisations. Through effective change management strategies, businesses can navigate the improvement cycle more smoothly, significantly enhancing their ability to deliver the overall customer experience.
Let's look at the relationship between change management and customer experience, and gain some practical insights for sustainable customer success.
Understanding Customer Experience:
Customer experience (or CX) refers to the sum of all interactions a customer has with a company throughout their journey, encompassing every touchpoint from initial awareness to post-purchase support. It's a concept that goes beyond individual transactions, laying out a lifecycle or a whole experience; the overall perception and satisfaction a customer derives from their engagement with a brand.
Change Management:
Change management involves systematic approaches to prepare, support, and help individuals, teams, and organisations in making organisational changes. These changes can range widely from structural modifications to processes, technologies, or even cultural shifts.
The goal of customer experience is to recognise the value of customers, and to provide a long term mutually beneficial relationship with your brand. It means understanding customer need and fulfilling it. It may require micro-shifts in thinking away from providing what you want - towards providing what they want. The primary goal of change management is to ensure that these transitions are smooth, efficient, and embraced by stakeholders at all levels.
How Change Management delivers on Customer Experience
1. Aligning with Customer Expectations:
By staying attuned to market trends and customer feedback, businesses can make strategic changes that directly impact the quality of customer interactions. Change management allows organisations to align their internal processes and structures with the evolving expectations of customers.
For example, a top Australian tertiary education institution gathers regular customer feedback and conducts detailed journey mapping. This provided the insight that students are highly engaged and satisfied with their social clubs and groups. This information would enable the re-direction of communication channels to achieve better cut-through for communicating changes that impacted students.
2. Enhancing Employee Engagement:
Engaged and motivated employees are more likely to deliver exceptional customer service. Change management fosters a positive work environment by involving employees in the change process, giving them true ownership of the outcomes. This, in turn, translates into improved customer interactions as staff become more attuned to how their work impacts customer experience.
A 2021 study in municipal service delivery in the Western Cape province, South Africa, investigated the relationship between low employee motivation and poor service quality (often leading to violent citizen protest). The quantitative study found that motivated employees are highly likely to deliver high-quality services. It further concluded that a transformational leadership style, regular job variety and development opportunities and a change in organisational culture could improve work environment, promote greater employee motivation and result in better service quality.
3. Adopting Customer-Centric Technologies:
Quite simply, technology advancement is not going to stop. That's not to say organisations must adopt every new thing, however, they must have a process to adapt to the relevant new tools and platforms that will enhance their customer experience. Why? Because if they don't, a competitor might start providing an organisation's customers with an even better experience. Change management ensures that the adoption of these technologies is smooth, minimising disruptions and maximising their impact on customer satisfaction.
Employee involvement in change programs, and their sense of ownership, helps to retain motivation around customer experience, and maintain a drive and focus towards market response and leadership.
4. Cultural Transformation:
True customer-centricity is often a cultural shift for organisations. This becomes more obvious in lengthy value chains that have customers sitting way down the other end. Change management helps in cultivating a customer-focused culture by breaking down silos, encouraging collaboration, and instilling a shared commitment to delivering outstanding customer experiences.
Change management helps to understand the prevailing culture and create alignment that centres on the organisation's values. Change management processes identify the gap between what we're delivering now and what we want to be delivering in future. It defines streams of activity that can directly address the cultural transformation needed to provide customer-centricity.
Practical Steps for Integrating Change Management into Customer Experience
1. Comprehensive Communication:
Transparent and open communication will always be crucial during change. Keeping both employees and customers informed about upcoming changes, the reasons behind them, and the expected benefits helps manage expectations and builds trust. It doesn't have to be bulky or onerous communication: it should be delivered how customers want it. It can be as simple as a pop-up screen on the website: it just needs to be effective and have the right reach.
2. Employee Training and Support:
Equip employees with the necessary skills and knowledge to understand that when they receive an internal request for assistance, that somewhere on the end of that request there's a customer. Adapting fast to new processes or technologies means fewer delays for customers. Well-trained staff with a positive work environment are more likely to provide superior customer experiences.
3. Continuous Monitoring and Feedback:
Establishing mechanisms for ongoing monitoring and feedback collection enables organisations to identify potential issues early on, make necessary adjustments, and continuously refine processes to better align with customer expectations. Ideally, you don't want to leave this job to lag indicators. Getting on the front foot is essential. For more on this topic: https://www.agenciachange.com/post/gut-feel-and-lag-indicators-when-change-isn-t-going-well
4. Celebrate Successes:
Recognise and celebrate milestones and successes achieved through change initiatives. Positive reinforcement creates a culture that embraces change, making future transitions smoother and more widely accepted. Why fake it? Employees who are genuinely valued and celebrated will feel looked after. When employees feel this way, they will look after their customers in the same way.
Change management isn't always about adapting to external shifts; it's a strategic tool that, when employed effectively, can significantly enhance customer experience. By aligning organisational changes with customer needs, fostering a positive work culture focused on customer experience, and providing ongoing support and training, businesses can ensure that the customer journey is seamless, positive, and ultimately, a key differentiator in competitive markets.
Actively seeking out customer feedback that will result in change may seem counter-intuitive to stable business models. However embracing change as a catalyst for customer experience improvement is fast becoming essential for sustainable success.
Agencia Change is the world's first online change and communications agency. For more information on how we can help you deliver excellent customer experience: https://www.agenciachange.com/explore
Spot on! Very interesting read.