Culture eats strategy for breakfast – or does it? The famous quote from management consultant Peter Drucker is often debated in corporate circles. But the role of communications in achieving both strategic and customer experience objectives cannot be overlooked.
Communications is at the heart of workplace culture and change. Muriel Rukeyser was onto something when she wrote that the universe is made up of stories, not of atoms. We connect and relate to each other through storytelling, and it is a powerful force to motivate action.
Forrester’s research shows that customer experience leaders grow revenue faster than CX laggards, cut costs, reduce risk and can charge more for their products. On average, when companies deliver a good service experience by solving problems quickly, their customers are 2.4 times more likely to stay with them.1 A relatively small improvement in the speed of problem solving could increase the revenue of a multichannel bank by $37.9 million and the revenue of a mass-market auto brand by $370 million.2 How can communications help elevate CX in your organization?
1) Fostering a culture of transparency
Customer experience starts with employees. Prioritizing employee experience alongside an enterprise CX strategy helps engage people in rallying around your company mission, vision and values. It highlights the importance of putting customers or clients at the center of everything you do. It helps ensure employees have access to customer data in order to best do their jobs and are on board with achieving company-wide KPIs related to CX. Communications can also play a pivotal role in connecting CX company-wide and individual measures to performance management activities and helping to build employee engagement.
2) Connecting CX to the C-Suite
Communications can help elevate the profile of CX – especially as it relates to leadership. By communicating frequently about your ambitions and ensuring executive buy-in, employees will understand the importance of customer experience to the company’s bottom line. Reinforcing CX strategy, progress, goals and more at townhalls, leadership forums and other internal company meetings helps build momentum and engagement.
3) Instilling empathy
Sharing great customer experiences alongside frustrating ones to a broad audience will help open employee’s eyes to pain points in the customer journey. By highlighting common process errors playing out it real time to cases where employees go above and beyond to solve problems for customers, communications can help build empathy. Thoughtful communications can help employees better understand customers and to put them at the center of their work.
4) Accelerating quick wins
Communications help educate, inform and engage employees along your CX journey. Create incentives for employees to submit process improvement ideas and accelerate quick wins. Share your company’s progress toward larger goals on a regular basis. Humanize individual instances and tell stories about ways in which listening to customers resulted in exceeding their expectations.
There are so many ways that communications can fuel a company’s journey to becoming truly customer-centric. With a thoughtful strategy, communications can build a customer-first mindset and help execute on a company’s CX objectives.
1,2. Forrester: The ROI of CX Transformation, 22 January 2021.
