First 100 Days as a CX Leader

Do you want to make a lasting impact in your first 100 days as a customer experience leader? Discover how to navigate your new role effectively with actionable insights from Jeannie Walters in this episode of the Experience Action Podcast. Hear strategies to help you understand your organization's unique CX landscape, from identifying quick wins to building long-term visions that align with your company's mission and values.

Tune in as we uncover approaches for successful CX leadership, including the importance of stakeholder perspectives and using tools like journey maps to pinpoint areas for immediate improvement. Jeannie emphasizes the necessity of proving ROI and fostering a culture of continuous CX improvement. This episode is a treasure trove of practical advice for new CX leaders eager to make their mark and champion the importance of customer experience within their organizations. Listen now to start turning your CX ideas into impactful actions!

Resources Mentioned:
Experience Investigators Learning Center -- experienceinvestigators.com
CX Mission Statement Workbook -- bit.ly/cx-mission-workbook
CX Success Statement Workbook -- bit.ly/cx-success-workbook
CX Charter Guidebook -- bit.ly/cxcharter
Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube -- youtube.com/@jeanniewalters

Want to ask a question? Visit askjeannie.vip to leave Jeannie a voicemail! (And don't forget to follow Jeannie on LinkedIn! www.linkedin.com/in/jeanniewalters/)

Transcript

MC: 0:00

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, jJeanne Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready set action.

Jeannie Walters: 0:31

Welcome to the Experience Action Podcast. I'm Jeannie Walters. You have questions. That's why we're here. Now, a little birdie told me some of you have been job hopping, let's go ahead and listen.

Listener Question: 0:46

What advice do you have for someone's first 100 days as hHead of CX?

Jeannie Walters: 0:57

All right, congratulations on your new role. First of all, the fact that you have a role leading customer experience is something to celebrate. Now, depending on what you're walking into, those first 100 days could look very different. You might be walking into a well-established customer experience program. You might be walking into something where they're just starting. In fact, just today, I was talking to different clients. One of them, we had to start from the beginning. We had to talk about what customer experience actually was and why they might want to consider doing more than just talking about it once a year. Now for another client, they have a very well-established customer experience program, but they were stuck. They were doing the same things. They were checking in on feedback and trying to get people to pay attention to it. So we had to start from a very different place in that conversation. So, whatever you walk into, be prepared for the things that maybe you are assuming about the program, about the organization. Now, as a CX leader, what you want to do is make an impact.

Jeannie Walters: 2:03

Unfortunately, in every organization, customer experience is being asked to prove itself. Right? How many of you have heard this? We need to prove ROI. We need to prove why customer experience is important. Now there is tons of data out there about why it is important. Just recently, new reporting came out stating that those organizations that invest in customer experience for real see results that other organizations don't. Now we know this, you and I, because we're in the actual industry. We have seen the results. We get it. But when you are stepping into a role, don't make any assumptions about what people already know. It's a great opportunity to use your interview skills to sit down and ask leaders what's important to you here about customer experience. It will be enlightening to hear what the sales leader thinks versus what your IT leader thinks. Now many of them might say things like, you know what, It's not my job, that's not what I'm focused on. That itself is an enlightening answer about where they are.

Jeannie Walters: 3:20

So, the first thing I want you to do as a CX leader in your first 100 days is to determine the best way to really understand your organization's customer experience landscape. Now you might hear about this with maturity models or things like that. Whatever they've used there to gauge that. Great, that gives you information. I want you to get your arms around what does customer experience mean here at this organization. How are they measuring success? How do I want to measure success? How can I have an impact on the organization itself? This means making sure that you are looking at and understanding the overall organization's vision, mission, values and then understanding how has that translated into a customer experience mission. How are they defining success and how have they achieved it in the past, or maybe not? So figure out what are they really talking about when they talk about customer experience. That organizational CX landscape is so important.

Jeannie Walters: 4:27

Now, another way to do this is, if they have journey maps, take a look at those. Look for places where you can have an impact in those first 100 days. I always advise the leaders that we coach to think about what are the quick wins first and what is the vision that you're building. In the first 100 days, you have to achieve both, and I know that seems impossible. But quick wins, something where you can see a pain point and make it a little bit better, that gives you that thing to communicate about to your leadership to say this is the impact we're having and make sure you relate it to the overall business. So, instead of saying things like well we were able to get better feedback on this from customers, say why that's important. Are they actually moving through the journey? Are they converting because you've removed friction? That's the type of thing to think about.

Jeannie Walters: 5:22

So as you approach this and you think about how to make those quick wins, you also want to have an eye towards the future. What is the vision that you see for customer experience? How can you have the biggest impact based on prioritizing the right efforts, with customer experience work? Maybe you look around and realize you know what. Yeah, there are some quick wins, but really this whole culture needs some work. That can be daunting, but it's a great way to paint a vision of the future. Here's what I think we need to do. We need to start creating a customer-centric culture, and here are some ideas on how.

Jeannie Walters: 6:05

So once you have that big idea and you're looking for small wins and you're also really understanding what is the landscape within our organization, then you want to make sure that you're doing some things consistently. The first one you need to build relationships. Coalition is so important. We need to get buy-in from leaders across the organization. This is not a one-person job.

Jeannie Walters: 6:31

CX is a team sport. It requires collaboration across departments. It means reaching across to different leaders and saying hey, I want to learn about what you do, I want to learn about what's important to you, and And, then share with them how if you can build the right customer experience success, they win. It has to be a win-win. So instead of just talking about customers, instead of just talking about your KPIs or OKRs or goals or whatever else you call them, you want to include their goals and outcomes in those coalitions. That's how you build cooperation across the organization. So really look for CX programs that engage cross-functional support, because that's what's going to win and succeed long term.

Jeannie Walters: 7:19

You also want to make sure that you are not only following what they've set up for customer experience success metrics. You want to make sure those are the right ones and if not, you need to define the vision for why you want to change what is being measured. Remember, measurement is just measurement. It's not an outcome. This is probably the thing I see more and more at CX programs that maybe aren't as mature as they can be. They focus on a feedback metric like Net Promoter Score, and they say that's our goal, we want to get that number up. But what does that number actually do? It's a measurement of something bigger. How have you defined that bigger outcome? Is it getting more customers into your pipeline? Is it getting more referrals? Is it lowering churn? Is it improving employee engagement?

Jeannie Walters: 8:13

There are so many ways to really look at this that have a direct impact on the outcomes of your organization and, as you've heard me say before, every organization has at least two distinct goals they want more revenue and fewer expenses. That basically summarizes every single business outcome. Now, yes, there are others. You might have a laundry list of outcomes that you're aiming for, but really, if you can make an impact on one or both of those two levers, you will prove the return on the investment. So that's what you want to look for. So make sure that you are defining your customer experience success metrics in a way that is related back to your organizational goals and, if you have to make some changes, start making your case now that you need to make those changes, because those changes can take a long time. We have invested in an NPS program. We have invested in tools to actually collect that information and gain those insights, you might have a stable full of analysts. All of that can still be valuable. We need to paint the picture of how.

Jeannie Walters: 9:24

Then you want to really make sure that, as you develop these ideas, as you roll out these cross-functional programs, that you have a centralized way to look at customer experience effort. And this is where governance is so important. So really assess your CX governance structure. Look for who needs to approve what. How do we make sure that we're not over-sending surveys? How do we make sure that we're prioritizing the right insights? All of that is so important. We use something called a CX team charter. That can be very, very helpful. We have some ideas for you on the site at Experience Investigators, so check out our learning center for more about that.

Jeannie Walters: 10:06

But as you step into this role, you have to really be looking for how can we make sure that whatever we build is not going to spin out of control? How many of you, as I'm talking to you, think about the fact that maybe in your organization, you have surveys going out over here? You have surveys going out over there and that's because we didn't take the time to really centralize this idea of governance from the beginning. This is your opportunity, starting this new role, to really take that on and make sure you're set up for success for the long term. And then, finally, you probably need to build a team. You probably need to look for how can we build the most effective team in the most efficient way.

Jeannie Walters: 10:53

I would love to give you a magic wand and say hire whoever you want, but that is typically not the case in our world. Customer experience rarely rarely has the resources we need, even though it's often called a priority, so we have to get scrappy folks. What that means is we have to look for what can tools do for us? How can we automate, how can we build those cross-functional coalitions to get some help throughout the organization, and how can we get that leadership buy-in to add to that team? So, if you have certain priorities, if you've built out your customer experience success statement which I highly recommend you do you have tied organizational goals and leadership goals back to what you want to invest in for the customer experience. If you've done all those things and you realize that you know what, you can't do this without a certain tool. You can't do this without a certain team member.

Jeannie Walters: 11:51

Now is the time to start making your case. I know, as I say these things, a lot of what we do ends up being around making the best business case for what we're trying to do. Okay, I have seen so many organizations where, instead of asking why, somebody just says, okay, try it. And what that means is we get set up as CX leaders to fail because we don't know why we're trying something. We just think it's good to do. It's good to survey customers. It's good to gather feedback. It's good to get these insights. If the goal of whatever you're working on in customer experience is to quote unquote understand our customers better, that is not a goal. That is a means to a goal. So make sure everything you do wraps back to real business outcomes. This is where the tools that we've developed around the CX Mission Statement and the CX Success Statement and the CX Charter can really be helpful to you, because we want you to win, we want you to build an airtight business case. We want you to know when you're successful.

Jeannie Walters: 13:01

Leaders get into these roles. They do a bunch of things at once. They make real change, but they can't tie it all together. So after a while, it feels like, well, yeah, we're measuring feedback, but so what? That is not an actual outcome. That's what we have to focus on. So, coalition building, making sure that you have your strong business case, looking for those quick wins, that's what I would do in my first 100 days if I were stepping into a role today. This is a marathon, not a sprint. So make sure that as you think about these first 100 days, you think about laying a foundation for success, for your long-term success and for the long-term success of this customer experience program. So I hope that helps. The first 100 days is very exciting to think about and I know that if you're asking this question, you, as a CX leader, are going to have tremendous impact wherever you are. So I wish you tons of luck in your new role and I hope that they appreciate that they have such a thoughtful leader.

Jeannie Walters: 14:08

Thank you so much for this question. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for listening. We get so much joy out of hearing from leaders like you, so please keep the questions going. You can leave me a voicemail at askjeannievip. Check out our site at experienceactionpodcom or our bigger site at experienceinvestigatorscom for so many more resources all around customer experience. The mission of my company is to create fewer ruined days for customers, and by you being here with me, you're helping us live that mission. So thank you so much and we will see you next time. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigatorscom, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.