Prioritize the Right Things

Ever felt like you're juggling too many priorities and not making the impact you desire? Discover how small teams can master the art of prioritizing impact within the customer experience realm. In this episode, Jeannie Walters guides you through strategies to define clear organizational outcomes and align your efforts with those critical goals. By identifying the root causes of customer issues, like unfulfilled promises affecting contract renewals, we can make more informed decisions that benefit both the organization and its customers. Uncover the power of a solid customer experience strategy success statement that clarifies what success truly looks like and where your investments will yield the highest returns.

Transform your approach to customer experience by finding new strategies to create meaningful interactions that elevate customer value and align with your organizational priorities.

Resources Mentioned:
Experience Investigators Learning Center -- experienceinvestigators.com
CX Success Statement Workbook -- bit.ly/cx-success-workbook
Take the CXI® Compass assessment -- CXICompass.com
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/)

Chapters

• 0:00 Prioritizing Impact in Customer Experience
• 15:10 Strategic Approach to Customer Experience

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, jeanne 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

Hey there, CX Change agent. It's Jeannie Walters and I have a question for you. Do you feel like you maybe don't have enough priorities? I bet the answer is no.

Listener Question: 0:44

Hi Jeannie.

Listener Question: 0:45

CX feels overwhelming.

Listener Question: 0:47

We are a small team and there are so many things that we should be doing. It seems like what we are doing gets derailed by competing priorities pretty often.

Listener Question: 0:57

Do you have any recommendations?

Jeannie Walters: 0:59

See, you're not the only one. We all struggle with priorities. That's because in customer experience, everything can feel like a priority, especially if we hear from our executives. Sometimes complaints go up and up and up and they're escalated to the point where suddenly the CEO is calling us saying how could this happen? And we have to explain that. Well, yeah, maybe something happened and there was a big complaint about it. It wasn't on our priority list because we have so many other priorities. So how do we keep from getting pulled in 8 million directions every single week and not making real, true progress on what matters most to both our organizations and the business?

Jeannie Walters: 1:44

Well, today I want to talk to you about priorities. It's such an important topic in customer experience because when we talk about priorities, what we're really talking about is impact. How can we make sure that in the 24 hours in the day that we get, just like everybody else, we are efficiently and effectively defining our day, putting in the effort to get the biggest impact for our organization and the customers we serve? Let's talk about that. First of all to the listener who asked this question. Thank you for asking this question. This is such a big challenge and I see it in all of the organizations that we work with, small business, mid-size, large enterprise organizations, nonprofits, education, healthcare. It's everywhere and that's usually because we haven't taken the time to really step back and define what is the impact that we can have on the organization. Now, if you were a sales leader, somebody might come to you and say you won't believe what happened to this person. They tried to get through the website and they couldn't get to where they could buy the product, so they had to call and it was a big mess and sales should fix this. Now the sales leader who is being asked for this might take a step back and look into what happened, but it doesn't derail every other thing happening in sales. So why does this happen in customer experience? It's because we haven't yet defined what is the impact we're trying to have. This is where you have to go back to your organizational outcomes. What will do the most good for our organization?

Jeannie Walters: 3:30

Now, if we are working in a B2B organization and we're having a big problem renewing those contracts and we figured out in our work as customer experience agents, as customer experience leaders and champions we have figured out thanks to customer experience investigation, sprinkling in a little of that CXI. We figured out that the reason that many organizations are not renewing those contracts is because we have a problem. We have a problem with overestimating the timeline, and so we are setting expectations during the actual experience of being a customer that we can't live up to. Maybe there are inventory issues, maybe there are staffing issues, maybe there is something else going on. But when we say we will deliver this for you on Tuesday and we can't deliver that for 30 days after Tuesday, then we start eroding the trust that was built with customers. This leads to fewer renewed contracts. This means that every day we're late, they could be shopping around trying to figure out who can get the contract next. So if we were to invest in making sure that part of the journey really got figured out, so that we understood how to create a more seamless experience for the customer, so we could make sure that we're living up to those promises and expectations and building that trust consistently, then our renewals would go up. So maybe that's where our effort has to be, because we've defined that on behalf of the organization.

Jeannie Walters: 5:09

So when we hear something that sounds like an emergency, sometimes it can be very easy to drop the big, important ideas in replacement of the urgent. Now are there urgent issues that pop up, absolutely, but what I want you to do is think about what will have the biggest impact. How can we prioritize around that? And in order to know that, we have to define that from the beginning. That's why we use something called a customer experience strategy success statement. This is where you outline your organizational goals, your leadership goals. Where can you have the biggest impact? What are the efforts that you're putting into the customer experience, to understanding your customers and reacting and gathering insights that turn into action that will lead to real results for your organization? So if you do not have a defined customer experience strategy, if you don't know what success looks like, it is very difficult to say what is a priority.

Jeannie Walters: 6:15

If you've ever met with a financial planner of any kind, one of the first things they do is they ask you what are your goals? Because assessing all the money is not the goal. The money is to help you achieve your goals. The same thing is true with customer experience. We have to make sure that we are investing in the right places to get the return on that investment for the organization. That's how we win, that's how we get ahead, that's how we stay ahead of our competitors and innovate and create a workplace that people want to work in and create an experience that customers want to be a part of. But all of that leads to results. So first, if you have not figured this out, you have to figure that out first. That will help everything else with prioritization, because you want to prioritize based on impact.

Jeannie Walters: 7:11

And there are times you have to say, hey, executive, who sent me this random complaint, I hear you. I acknowledge that this happened. I need to ask you should I drop this big, important piece for this maybe smaller, urgent piece? Or is there a way that we can maybe work around or appease this short term in a way and put it on our list of priorities for later, because otherwise you will get whipped around based on priorities every single day. So you want to have that clear definition of success. You want to make sure that you have the language and the agreement and that leadership has bought in to what you've defined as that definition of success, and then you want to make sure that you have clear, measurable goals around that success. So if you are talking about priorities but you're saying things like, well, we're going to be friendlier and we're going to be nicer and we're going to have a higher net promoter score, none of that moves the business forward. None of that really reflects real business results.

Jeannie Walters: 8:21

And this is the challenge we face again and again. We have to define success differently. We have to speak like business people. We have to speak the language of our leaders, and this means that our priorities have to align with what they've agreed is most important.

Jeannie Walters: 8:42

Now, every organization in the world usually there are there are a few exceptions, so I won't say every, but I'll say almost every organization in the world wants two things they want higher revenue and they want fewer expenses, because that equation is profitability. Now, even if you're in a nonprofit, even if you are in education or a nonprofit, you know, cultural arts organization we still need revenue to go up and expenses to go down. That's what people are looking for. So, anything you do, start looking at that. Will this have an impact on helping us achieve more revenue? Will this have an impact on helping us decrease our expenses, because sometimes that looks differently. Sometimes it looks like operational efficiencies. Well, if we can improve this inside our organization, that means we don't have to add headcount, we don't have to buy this expensive technology, we won't have expenses long term because we're not duplicating efforts anymore. Sometimes that looks like you know what, if we could help those customers I mentioned who are having problems with delivery expectations, if we could improve that, we could bring in more revenue through those renewed contracts.

Jeannie Walters: 10:04

So we have to look at these equations and really articulate them in a way that grabs everybody else and they understand why it's good for the organization. So you want to define success, you want to have real measurable goals, you want to have language to talk to your leaders about these priorities and then, as you're going through this process, you really want to leverage and lean into automation and tools. What can we do to basically make sure that we are streamlining what we can? Every moment of time that we are reporting on work or that we are explaining or communicating about work, we actually aren't working. So if there is a problem to solve and you are spending way too much time presenting slides to various groups about why it's a problem to solve and you are spending way too much time presenting slides to various groups about why it's a problem to solve, then ask yourself can you automate some of those lower impact tasks? Because this is about our self priorities as well. So really make sure that you understand not only what your organization needs you to do, but what you personally, as a leader in your organization what you need to do because that is a priority as well.

Jeannie Walters: 11:24

I have seen way too many customer experience leaders who sacrifice way too much, thinking that they're doing the right thing by shifting from one priority to the next and in six months, in a year, in two years, their leaders don't understand what they've done Because everything's been short term, everything's been ad hoc, nothing has had that big impact that they need. We need to get better at this. We need to understand priorities. I also would encourage you to lean into some sort of framework. Now we are, of course, we love our CXI navigational framework because we really see it as starting with that intentional success model, defining what does success look like here at this organization and what are we doing about it. And so, if you are trying to define and communicate why priorities are the priorities that you have, having a framework like that can really really help you because it gets everybody on the same page, and, of course, we want customer experience to be woven into everything. Of course we do, and so part of your priorities has to be understanding how to get other people on board, how to help people understand that they are part of this solution. We like to say customer experience is everyone's business, but we have to be careful about saying it's everyone's job. We have to make sure that when we tell somebody it's their job, we give them the right tools and information and outcomes that we're seeking so that they know what to do and feel empowered to do it. So, yes, there are tons of priorities in this work that we do.

Jeannie Walters: 13:07

If you are not sure where to start, if you have a list of things in front of you right now and you're like, oh my gosh, from the customer feedback surveys, from journey mapping, from complaints, from what the last shareholders meeting mentioned, we have 120 things that we're expected to do. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to make a very simple matrix for yourself. We use this all the time and on the y-axis, the vertical axis, I want you to write impact, and on the horizontal or the x-axis, I want you to write feasibility. How feasible is it to get this done? Because would we love to snap our fingers and say, let's do hyper-personalization at scale for every single customer? Yay, of course we would. But how feasible is that? That might be a big, huge data reorganization project. That might be something that you just cannot access right now, this minute. So is it important and would it have an impact? Absolutely, is it feasible? Maybe not right now. So you want to look at the quadrants of that matrix and decide what is feasible and what will have the biggest impact that can help you make real progress, so that you can show progress as you're working on these larger, maybe less feasible kind of more arduous things that we do to have that greater impact on the customer experience.

Jeannie Walters: 14:37

At the end of the day, it all comes back to your organizational priorities and you, as a leader, you have to define your leadership priorities. Those go hand in hand. Sometimes that means saying to somebody who sounds the alarm you know what I hear this alarm. I understand this alarm. Let me go over our priorities and why, and maybe you can help me understand where this would fit in. That's a great conversation to invite somebody into.

Jeannie Walters: 15:13

This work is hard. It's something that we have to work hard on every single day and we do it because we believe that investing in the customer experience, helping customers feel more valued, have more meaningful experiences and get through their day a little better that has a positive impact on results. This has been proven a time and again. We need to live that by showcasing why we're prioritizing, the way we are tying that all back to how we define success and at the end of the day, we're going to be able to look back and say we not only delivered for our customers, we delivered for our organization and if you can say that you are doing the right things in the right priorities.

Jeannie Walters: 16:01

Thank you so much for this question. Don't forget we have lots of resources for you at experienceinvestigatorscom, including things like our CXI Compass, where you can assess a little bit of how you're doing on different priorities within your customer experience efforts. We love hearing from you, don't forget. You can leave me a voicemail at askjeannievip. You are also always welcome to reach out on LinkedIn or through experienceinvestigatorscom. I cannot wait to hear from you again, and I so look forward to talking to you again then. Thanks. 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.