In a time when customer attitudes and behaviors are shifting and evolving rapidly, companies are finding customer intelligence uses across all functions enterprise-wide to be vital to survival. Along with widespread thirst for customer insights is the heightened realization that mis-alignment to customers is wasteful and precarious. The best way to be nimble and lean to grow is to tightly align with customers.

Are managers in your firm thirsting for customer insights?

Will the dynamics behind this recent trend lessen in 2021? Not likely. This decade ushered in changes that are here to stay, along with even more rapid change. The human-to-human (H2H) emphasis of brands in the early days of stay-at-home was overdue: Prior to the pandemic, PwCs customer intelligence series found that 59% of people believe that companies have lost touch with the human element by focusing too much on technology.1 Empathy-infused H2H has been a weakness historically, and it will take concerted efforts for it to remain prominent.

Is H2H embedded in your firms practices?

Forces on customers are dictating digital experience and employee experience, along with investor experience, supplier experience, and community experience. Business recent shift to replacing shareholder capitalism with stakeholder capitalism orientation of corporations to serve the interests of all their stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, local communities) is being put to the test:

Dynamics we all experienced in March-May 2020 will persist through 2021, strengthening or crippling organizations to the degree that they continue to align or mis-align with customers, not only at customer touch-points, but also enterprise-wide.

Is your firm aligning with customers, even beyond touch-points?

Staying on top of these wild rapids requires a North Star. In business, the North Star represents a companys unwavering definition of its purpose, explained Greg Shepard, Chief Strategy Officer of Pepperjam. Nearly all pitfalls, which include loss of focus, lack of passion, and disharmony among team and investors, can be avoided if a company has the proper sense of focus: if it establishes and aligns its strategies with its North Star.5

In practice to-date, a compelling vision is referred to as an organizations North Star. The vision is typically product-centered or ego-centered, and less often truly customer-centered. Your organizations North Star is not to be confused with the term North Star Metric, which is a single metric that focuses on your products core value.6

With todays dynamics, Intentional Customer Experience is your crucial, customer-centered North Star.

Is your firms North Star a compelling customer-centered vision?

Intentional Customer Experience takes typical notions of CX up a notch, explained Krista Sheridan from TELUS in my talk show. Instead of treating customer experience as interactions with customer touch-points, treat CX as a lens for decisions by all functional areas, to prevent hassles for customers and to generate greater value for customers.

She continued: Intentional Customer Experience means you know what you do, and more importantly, why you do it, and you bake the what and why into all aspects of your business policies, processes, how you hire and review and reward, how you build products and send invoices, and so forth very deliberately.7

Has your CEO characterized a vivid Intentional Customer Experience, particularly for your core-growth customer segment?

Investor and customer interests are balanced by Intentional Customer Experience. Sheridan explains: What customers experience is built many steps upward from customer touch-points, from the way you designed and built and launched the product/service. So you have a lot of solving to do on the other end when your product doesnt deliver. When your customers are getting what was promised, youre much more productive its like measure twice to cut only once. By preventing the need for remedial efforts you gain more time to be creative. From a shareholder perspective, right the first time provides a financial reward.7

At TELUS, our customer experience efforts were going well, but we wanted to perform better than industry norms. A higher level of customer experience excellence is a team sport, and to achieve that, everyone needs to know how to put customers first through deliberate behaviors by each individual.7

We asked team members, end to end, top to bottom across our company: What are things we can all do everyday to bring our Customers First promise to life? Through forums and workshops across the country, we asked what each function can do to put the customer first.7

With those thousands of ideas we summarized the key things relatable to everybody. This established our 4 Customer Commitments. We wanted to get really specific to help each role know what behaviors and activities they should adopt day-to-day, so we repeated the forums and workshops across the country. Using the collective genius of the organization, we turned this into training and a practical, simple toolkit.7

Intentional Customer Experience is so much more than a number. Its hard for people further away from the customer to get excited about a customer score. Our CEO sends out stories about what people are doing toward Intentional Customer Experience. For most things requiring approvals, employees must specify in writing its contribution to customer experience and employee experience.7

In the first 15 months we saw double-digit increases in employee engagement and customer experience results. Im proud weve been able to maintain that Intentional Customer Experience over many years since we started on this path.7

Heres some evidence that Intentional CX as North Star yields stellar results:

Heres what you can do now to outperform your industry in 2021:

Were in flux for an extended period in the future. If youve already established your 2021 strategies, weave-in the list above as you conduct rolling updates to your strategies and processes.

The window of opportunity is wide open now for inserting these practices into whats already being overhauled for work-from-home and related needs. Yes, people are overwhelmed and everyone wants things to be simple and normal. Even so, youll find that Intentional Customer Experience as North Star is an anchor of trust, goodwill, and energy both internally and externally.

Set your compass to true north. Mis-alignment to customers is wasteful and precarious. The best way to be nimble and lean to grow is to tightly align with customers. In 2021, its mission-critical.

Will 2021 be the Year of CX as North Star?

1Responding to Customer Behaviour, PWC.2Moment of Reckoning, Edelman.3Retailers Face a Data Deficit in the Wake of the Pandemic, HBR.4Adapting to the Necessary Growth Mindset of 2020s, LinkedIn.5Never Too Early to Establish North Star, Chief Executive.6An Introduction to North Star Metrics, Mobile Jetpack.7Intentional Customer Experience, ClearAction.

Image licensed to ClearAction Continuum by Shutterstock.

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Will 2021 Be the Year of CX as North Star? - Customer Think