What do structural foundations have to do with Customer Experience Management?  This question is at the core of what you want to accomplish.  Do you want to address some specific problems and improve targeted customer experiences, or become customer-centric?  Becoming customer-centric is a cultural play – it takes place on a foundational level.

Different foundations are called different things in different organizations. The key isn’t what they are called, but the question they answer.

Don’t get caught up on whether you have all of these individual pieces.  To best achieve our purpose of getting and keeping customers we need foundations, whatever they are called, to address these questions:

1. What do we stand for?
2. Who are we – what is our desired customer perception of us?
3. Where are we headed?
4. How do we get there?

Current direction and objectives build on foundations
To turn these foundations of Values, Identity, Vision and Mission into results, we need strategies and plans – the top of the Identity Pyramid.  To get and keep more customers, strategies need to at least cover:

• ■ Operations
• ■ Customer experience

To achieve these strategies we need plans. The business plan typically focuses on accomplishing the operational strategy. Our Customer Experience Management plan needs to accomplish our experience strategy. This is a strategy most organizations are missing. 

Does your organization have a defined customer experience strategy? A compelling experience strategy answers:

• ■ Why – The overarching purpose of our customer experience efforts
• ■ What – The objective – what we are specifically seeking to accomplish
• ■ Where – Our experience position within our competitive set
• ■ How – The way in which we live our foundations and experience strategy on a day-to-day, touchpoint by touchpoint basis

See TOUCHPOiNT POWER for a step-by-step guide to developing your compelling experience strategy.

Remember, to your customers, you are your touchpoints.

This post an excerpt from my book, TOUCHPOiNT POWER! Get & Keep More Customers, Touchpoint by Touchpoint (William Henry Publishing, 2013).  Now available!  For information and to order, visit TouchpointPower.com or view the TOUCHPOiNT POWER! listing on Amazon.

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phone: direct  904.466.1805, text   415.515.6391
 

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