Your CX Leader has the capability and mission to be your CEO's most valuable player. In sports, a Most Valuable Player (MVP) is your team member who propels and protects your team's value to the greatest extent. When CX insights guide growth and risk reduction, your company can maximize both profitability and revenue, with sustained momentum. As the person in your company with greatest access to customer insights, your CX Leader is best suited to help every member of your Executive Leadership Team be a stronger winner than every before.
Key #1: Who is discovering and monitoring expectations?
For employees, customers, partners, and investors, a good experience happens when what's received is equal to or better than their expectations.
For instance, your CEO sees investor expectations as a moving target, shaped by competitors, economy, and many other forces. Yet, your CEO proactively manages investors' expectations. Everything possible is done to meet or exceed expectations, and shape realistic expectations for the future.
Likewise, customer expectations and employee expectations must be understood, realistically shaped, and met or exceeded. If not, then costs expand in numerous ways.
In fact, when executives strive to manage and deliver to investors' expectations first, this is a case of "the tail wagging the dog", or "putting the cart before the horse". This is because customers are the source of everything that investors want: revenue growth and wise cost management.
Everyone who manages customers is collecting customer expectations, yet generally, nobody is collecting these insights. This vast data is almost-free VoC.
VoC managers can use creative processes, data-mining technologies, and qualitative research to capture expectations of customers, employees, and partners.
This is a key to becoming your CEO's Most Valuable Player because it significantly reduces risks of siloed business decisions. It empowers proactive decisions and actions that are in-tune with the greatest possible value.
Key #2: Who is shaping expectations to be realistic with your strengths?
Your business development team is prioritizing customers for sales efforts. Then your marketing team creates and communicates a value proposition. Then your sales organization closes the deal with buyers, who receive what your company's processes deliver.
Is someone coordinating this to ensure everything matches? When customers contact your company for help, it typically means something went wrong with the value proposition. This is a customer experience fail. Whether or not every CX failure involves a request for resolution, all of it costs your business and investors -- a LOT.
Your CX Leader can increase communication between the groups who shape customers' expectations. They don't know that inflated expectations are causing unnecessary costs unless your VoC is capturing this to inform them.
This is a key to becoming your CEO's Most Valuable Player because it avoids negative word-of-mouth from frustrated customers, distrust of your brand, and spiraling costs of customer acquisition, accordingly.
Key #3: Who is shaping every work group's performance standards to deliver your value proposition right the first time and consistently?
Your Chief Operating Officer is coordinating many moving parts to keep your business running. Still though, a percentage of your customers express their dissatisfaction in surveys, Customer Service, Customer Success, negative word-of-mouth, and churn.
Your VoC analyses of customer expectations must be shared with every work group so they can prevent issues for customers. Your CX Leader can influence every work group to understand what right the first time means for their performance standards.
Your VoC collection can be more accurate when you untie compensation from survey ratings. This prevents bias that causes invalid data. It's more important to capture truth. Tie their bonus to what they are doing about the ratings for continual improvement. Expectations are a moving target, so complacency has no place with VoC and VoE.
This is a key to becoming your CEO's Most Valuable Player because preventing issues is the leanest way to run your business. It frees up talent and energy toward more growth efforts rather than tying up talent and energy with trouble-shooting, negativity, and rework.
Key #4: Who is influencing every work group to urgently and permanently close gaps between what was expected versus delivered?
Your Quality department may be monitoring incoming and outgoing quality, but if they were preventing all gaps, there would be minimal need for Customer Service, Customer Success, Customer Loyalty programs, etc.
Some issues are at the top of your list every month, every quarter, and every year. There is no end in sight because nobody is championing collaborative efforts to eradicate the root causes of these issues.
Consider ongoing gaps in employees' expectations. These gaps have enormous consequences. Indeed, it is possible to get to the root of these issues and stop them from ever happening again. The same applies to partner experience and customer experience.
Your CX Leader can champion every work group resolving at least one thing annually that they are contributing to in customer dissatisfaction and in employee dissatisfaction.
This is a key to becoming your CEO's Most Valuable Player because putting a stop to prevalent issues is a gift that keeps on giving. I call this CX Annuities because you save money and resources every month in the future that would otherwise be tied-up still with that long-time issue. Not only that, but those funds and resources go on to generate even more value. And, customers are spreading less negative word-of-mouth, which reduces doubt of potential buyers. Furthermore, your customers' time and resources are freed-up from trouble-shooting, and their prosperity generates your prosperity. Consider these mammoth savings: you may become the standout in your industry for NOT raising prices, stooping to shrinkflation and skimpflation, or stressing out your employees with austerity and layoffs!!
Why would a CEO allow value to fly out the window and sink down the drain rather than elevate your CX Leader role with these 4 VoC keys? It's all a matter of perspective. Typically, business leaders, media, schools, and so on have not yet considered this perspective. Please share this message with your senior leaders to turn-around value this year.
See more about this here:
CEOs: Your CX Leader is Your Most Valuable Player
Chief Customer Officer Strategy: Dispensable Playbook or Most Valuable Player?