CXPA's Guide to Building a Customer-Centric Culture

It can be overwhelming to find relevant, unbiased CX resources to help move your work forward.

CXPA is here to help.

Our Topic Guides--CXPA members who are Certified Customer Experience Professionals--have curated our most relevant, popular articles, whitepapers, and webinars to bring you the very best information on topics that are critical to your success.

Note that some resources in the links below may be content only available to CXPA members. 

CXPA's Guide to Building a Customer-Centric Culture

Building a customer-centric culture is a key success criterion in driving change across organizations. It is commonly said that "culture is what employees do at the workplace when nobody is watching." Employees, as the most important resource for organizations, have a major role in adopting and executing the various operations needed to build a customer-centric culture for the company.

At least 3 major areas of knowledge will be covered in this topic guide.

Performing a customer culture maturity assessment

A culture gap analysis will help determine the baseline level of customer-centric culture adoption inside an organization and enable better planning to drive the transformation.

Defining core values to drive the change efforts

Vision, mission and values drive interest and focus inside organizations. They are essential to aligning employees in applying and spreading customer-centric behaviors.

Hiring, engaging, and rewarding employees

How focused and open to change efforts employees are is impacted by their level of engagement and desire to surpass expectations for themselves, their customers, and their organizations. 

Insights and business cases about cultural transformation projects

Sharing the experience of other CX professionals who drove cultural transformation projects in various organizations is a great source of inspiration.

 

Your Topic Guide

Georges Essama is a CXPA member and a CX professional based in Central Africa. He has over 10 years of experience in the telecommunication industry in various Sales and CX management positions. He develops VoC programs, involves in Culture change and employee engagement projects in a public company. He is highly active in CXPA activities in Sub-Saharan Africa and works at developing interest of various organizations (public and private) in adopting best CX practices.  He is a lecturer and professional trainer in various discipline such as CX Management, Design Thinking and Innovation.

Georges Essama, CXPA Member

Watch

Video: Lessons from Building a CX Cultural Transformation

Daniel Ord, CCXP, spent two years building and executing a cultural transformation program reaching every employee at a major telecoms company, running over 60 workshops during that time. Here, Daniel shares lessons learned from the effort—including how the program was designed to capture the hearts and minds of all employees as well as deliver sustainable change. 

Webinar: Changing Culture One Bite at a Time featuring Anthem

3 practitioners share how their culture-first initiatives have transformed their company and how to accomplish more with even fewer resources.

 

Video:  3 Steps to Building a Customer-Centric Culture

This quick Insight Exchange video from Gohkan Kara, CCXP is about building customer-centric culture through awareness, ownership, and inspiration. He shares his experience leading a successful culture change initiative.

 

Video: The Role of the CEO in Embedding a Customer-Centric Culture

This Insight Exchange video from Mosun Shasore, CCXP offers 3 actions senior leaders can take to embed customer-centric behaviors inside an organization.

Read

Article: Building a Customer-centric culture

Nicholas Zeisler, CCXP presents 3 concepts as tools to bring about a more customer-centric culture in organizations. Enablement--by providing resources to employees. Empowerment--by giving employees the authority to do the best for customers. Encouragement--by showing concern as a leader about all actions taken to improve the Customer Experience.

 
Article: Engaging the hearts and minds of your employees

Kathy Van de Laar, CCXP reminds us of 3 components of intrinsic motivation and presents how they can be applied to grow employee engagement. She emphasizes the value in helping employees connect their personal goals to business goals, making corporate directions and intention clear, and creating projects that require collaboration.

 

Article: The Five Rules for Affecting Real Culture Change

Colin Shaw reminds us that culture change is not easy. He presents five rules affecting real culture change to help professionals mentally prepare for this challenge.


Article: "Treat your employees right" is more than just 'feel-good' rhetoric

Nicholas Zeisler, CCXP shares an important principle: “if you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers.” It's necessary to build a culture that enables and empowers employees to take care of your customers. Employees will feel more engaged if they have the appropriate tools and authority to serve customers in the best way possible.

 
Article: Linking the Employee & Customer Experience: A Practical Guide to the Holy Grail

Howard Lax, focusses on the “WHY” and “HOW” of the link between Employee and Customer Experience. He answers questions about how they affect each other and how, when combined, they drive business outcomes and customer behaviors. The challenges may be huge. The various internal and external obstacles are all surmountable. The gain is tremendous for customers and organizations.

Listen

Podcast : CXPA Freshman Series Coaching Call with Jeanne Bliss

This conversation with Jeanne Bliss, CCXP, a founding member of CXPA, answers some questions raised by the audience about the challenges various CX professionals face in transforming their organization.

Podcast : CXPA Freshman Series Coaching Call with Roberta O'Keith

More great insights on CX culture change and questions from the audience answered in this chat with Roberta O'Keith.

Templates

Template : Customer-Centric Culture Assessment Tools, B2B and B2C

This tool helps to assess how far an organization stands on 5 dimensions of culture change: what people expect, how decisions are made, what people speak about, and how people are hired, rewarded, and managed.

Template : Winning Hearts and Minds by Putting Customers and Colleagues First 

This tool is a case study of a UK gas company presenting actions and initiatives taken in building a customer-centric culture.

 

Template : "Meeting in a Box" - Transforming Culture by Engaging Employees, B2B and B2C

This tool is a case study of a US Bank presenting how they designed and implemented a Culture transformation program based on 3 key principles: Learn, Engage, Commit.

Template : oPositive, a Social Recognition and Celebration Tool, B2B/B2C

This tool is a case study of a global property management company presenting how they engaged their employees through an internal social media platform.

Template : Acquiring the Right Talent and Designing the Right CX Organization

This tool is a CXPA Insight Exchange presentation on CX Organizational Structure Best Practices and key Characteristics in Building a CX Team. The CX Strategist, Roberta O’Keith, shares her experience on these topics.

Have a topic to suggest for a future guide? Drop a note to Gabe Smith, CCXP.