Customer Experience
Experience Management And Culture: Looking Inside Out
By Carolyne Gathuru
Along the customer journey, be it digital or physical, customer interactions that elicit delight are a sure sign that‘ something somewhere’ is working! They are an outward expression of an organization’ s inward state, as before customers ever experience a brand, the internal employees have already lived it. Every moment of truth is influenced by both the employee making it and the customer receiving it. This is often the underrated truth in boardrooms, and the ivory towers of senior management who generally consider experience management as a nice-to-have and not as the engine that drives strategy. The very popular assertion that Culture eats Strategy for breakfast is not just a nice jazzy saying- it truly does, with breakfast being the least of it; culture absolutely demolishes strategy like a teen ploughing through all meals during a growth spurt.
Across industries- governmental, nongovernmental, and private sector alike- experience management is thankfully shifting from being a gray area to being handled as the system through which strategy is implemented. The efforts being made over the years are bearing fruit, and this fruit is being valued increasingly. Strategic plans now visibly include core pillars anchored on the customer. This shift has been as a result of a combination of advocacy efforts over time, as well as the realizations caused by the Covid-19 pandemic that reshaped the positioning of service excellence. Customer convenience and inclusion have since taken centre stage, with a more discerning customer base triggering CX and EX innovation.
That all said, Institute of Customer Experience Kenya( ICX) conducted a research titled The State of Employee Experience to Customer Experience that reveals many organizations are still trying to conquer customer experience excellence whilst still on rocky ground. The unsteadiness of this race track stems from the imbalance between focus on investment in external customer
Auditing culture is thus no longer a decorative piece on the table but a functional piece of silverware. Regular check-ins to identify what’ s causing grief that needs attention, and what’ s causing inspiration that needs to be sustained should be the order of the day. Culture needs gardeners who are great at tending soil, battling weeds, pruning dead matter, adding manure and celebrating fruit.
experience, versus the attention paid to employee experiences that generates these. This then begs the question as to where the equation or is it the nexus of culture and experience management intersects?
Turning Customer Journeys Inside Out
Is there a single definition of who the customer really is? When the term customer is mentioned, the automatic view is of external entities, whilst employees are internal customers who partake of the organization’ s product and service offerings daily. The manner in which these- leadership, processes, systems, structures, interactions- are offered, constitutes the back drop of every internal experience generating either friction or fruitful outcomes at every touchpoint.
A culture of delightful employee experiences is not as yet the automatic DNA in many corporates, and what is observed as window dressing is the reliance on engagement surveys and occasional team building initiatives. These are often designed to tick a box and to‘ show’ that something is being done. Engagement is of high importance no doubt, but it is only one cornerstone that cannot completely balance the cooking pot that cooks internal customer success. The entire cooking infrastructure needs to weave excellence from end to end, knitting together recruitment and onboarding, personal and professional growth, wellbeing, recognition, retention and ultimately graceful separation.
One of the most striking findings in the ICX study is that over 50 % of respondents do not feel emotionally attached at work. Experience is about feelings and feelings drive effort, advocacy, and the impetus to keep going even when there are bumps
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