Did you know, 50% of strategic decisions fail? 85% of decisions are made on gut feel. However, our gut isn’t always the right decision to follow, especially when it comes to customer experience strategy. It is important that your good ideas and innovations see reality through the ability to understand your execution readiness.
There are so many good ideas or so many great innovations and visions, from fortune 500 companies down to startups. But the big gap is between idea and realization.
How do you correct some of those vulnerabilities that prevent good execution? In Alex Castro’s book Measure, Execute, Win: Avoiding Strategic Initiative Debacles, he talks about everything you need to do to ensure that your customer experience strategy succeeds.
Why the Right Customer Experience Strategy Matters
As a Contact Center leader, you are trying to drive tremendous growth. You are also trying to do it in the face of a market that is moving faster than ever before with higher expectations. It’s a razor’s edge between success and outright failure.
There isn’t that opportunity to circle back around for another chance at it. You have competitors right on your heels. If you have that idea, somebody else does too. There are probably two or three other people and they’re going after the same customers that you are. A lot of times those visions that leaders fund are then put into operations for execution.
When execution doesn’t work, it begins to erode the confidence of employees. The overall operational scalability of the company relies on the leader’s vision for execution. When execution fails, people become less committed to the purpose.
Case in point, a football team can have a tremendous coach, tremendous front office, a great vision, and treats players incredibly well. If they can’t put together a winning record, it’s only a matter of time before those great players begin to attrition away to a winning organization. Business relies on good customer outcome. One of the methods as an example for measuring that is a net promoter score.
Using Net Promoter Score To Measure Customer Experience
Customers provide feedback on an NPS associated with the delivery or the execution of what the company is doing. The only way that you can get a solid NPS score isn’t by having a friendly customer service voice. It’s not about having a great culture that envelops the customer.
The customer expects you to deliver on the promise that you made to them. Many elements add to the promise. And if you can’t deliver on that promise, your NPS scores go down. Your ability to grow sales and execute further vision becomes harder and harder. That also internally begins to erode an employee’s connection to purpose.
So how can you as a leader differentiate today? Set a vision to go out and push the company beyond what it is today. The challenge is that sometimes that vision or that idea or that initiative strategy is so juicy. It’s so inviting to make that leap as a company to the next step. Consider this question. can you execute the plan?
Poor Strategy Execution Decreases Employee Morale
When employees and team members begin to see the erosion during execution, the project is going to take longer. It’s going to cost more if you have to cut back on what the initial idea was in order to get it over the finish line. It begins to demoralize the connection to the company’s purpose. Professional growth also begins to erode.
At the end of the day, the problem was at the decision point. It is going to cost you both time and capital expense to correct issues before engaging in the process. Does that fit within the window of opportunity? If businesses can begin to consider execution capability as part of the overall formula between business case financials and execution readiness, there will be a significant increase in capital performance within companies.
Why It is Necessary To Execute Customer Experience Strategy Correctly
More importantly, you’re going to start to see overall stock value, earnings per share, return on invested capital is going to skyrocket. The companies that take on the attitude of measuring execution readiness before investing capital are going to be the ones that are going to begin to outperform the rest of the market.
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Jim Rembach is the Editor in Chief of the Customer Service Weekly and it’s Podcast host. He is President of CX Global Media and the creator of the Call Center Coach Virtual Leaders Academy. As the host of the Fast Leader Show Podcast, he has interviewed hundreds of experts, authors, academics, researchers, and practitioners on various angles, viewpoints, and perspectives for improving the customer experience. He has held positions in retail operations, contact centers, customer support, customer success, sales, and measured the customer experience. He is a certified Emotional Intelligence practitioner, Employee Retention Specialist, and recipient of numerous industry awards.