Jeanne Bliss’s Five Customer Experience Competencies

The first book I read on customer experience was Jeanne Bliss’s Chief Customer Officer. Like many of us, it changed my life. In Jeanne’s blog, Framing the 5 Customer Experience Competencies, she shares with us the five CX competencies. She states right up front that:

“To make customer experience stick as part of your operation, you need an organized and phased approach for integrating customer experience into your organization… These competencies don’t need to be tackled in order. Relevance to your operation is most important.  Getting traction is paramount.”

The Five Customer Experience Competencies

Company Wide Alignment around Experience

Many organizations say they focus on their customer “experience” but few do the hard work to define the stages of their experience from the customer journey point of view. In the absence of this, all of the operating areas do their own thing, driven by their internal tasks and agenda and scorecard. A lot of work is done, often in the name of the customer, but it doesn’t add up from the customers’ experience to deliver a unified experience. Customer experience reliability isn’t managed because each silo manages projects to their own annual priorities and scorecards.  The big things don’t get systemically fixed. We miss the opportunity for the big “wow” moments.

Critical Checkpoint: Define the stages of the experience and “the moments of truth” that comprise all of the experience touch points.

Experience Based Listening and Feedback

Determine your “Listening System” – Collecting and organizing the information is important to prevent “one off” fixes and to attach issues to the appropriate stage in the customer experience. You need to determine how you can connect all of these listening “pipes” to take advantage of the information that enables you to trend and track it. (This includes discussing the IT implications of “buying” vs. “building” a listening system.)

By having “everyday” listening feedback, we loosen our reliance on surveys. We can take real-time action and also gain focus on the things that really matter.

United (Cross-Silo) Experience Reliability and Accountability

Reliability in your experience is proactively managing the key “touch points” with shared accountability across the silos. This approach emancipates your organization from the one-note dependency on survey results for driving change.   Operational KPIs means not waiting for survey results – but knowing before the results come in where your operation delivered, and where it did not. Take these steps to begin to manage experience reliability:

  1. Identify and Establish Key Operational Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for your top 10-15 customer experience touch points.
  2. Bring Cross-Functional Teams Together to Take Experiences from “Broken” to “Reliable” (and ultimately to a differentiating moment). Once you get this process down, you can move past the top 10-15 touch points.  But start with just these few – otherwise the work will become too overwhelming.
  3. Establish a “Customer Room.”

Prove the ROI Connection between Experience and Growth

Reconcile “Customers In” with “Customers Out” to know how well you are managing customers as an asset of your company.

Critical Checkpoints: For many companies, since every silo frequently has varying definitions, putting together these simple articulations of “incoming” and “outgoing” customers requires:

  1. Alignment in definition (What is an “incoming” customer? What is an outgoing customer?)
  2. Alignment in data and databases

“One Company” Customer Experience Culture

To get started on your one company culture, I suggest four simple actions you can do now without spending much money. All it takes is passion, commitment and making customer experience a priority.

  1. Call lost customers
  2. Be a customer
  3. Connect with the frontline
  4. Do customer math

To learn more about Jeanne’s ideas, please visit her blog, Chief Customer Officer 2.0.