Forrester CX: Sam Stern Culture Change Insights

We are live-blogging from Forrester’s CXNYC this week, the event for customer experience leaders, innovators, and practitioners.

Culture is so important that it eats strategy for breakfast.  We looked at CX leaders and CX laggards across 21 different industries and asked questions:

Do CX leaders and CX laggards describe their cultures in different terms.

• No, they don’t describe the culture in different terms. They both say the same things.

Do employees of CX leaders feel differently about their firms than employees of CX Laggards?

We went to Glass Door and crunched the data.

• Yes, employees of CX leaders feel differently about their company.
  • Overall ratings were better
  • Culture and values were better
  • Willing to recommend better
  • CEO approval were also better
• The pattern held across industries like credit cards, health insurance, airlines, etc.

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There is a correlation between elements of positive customer experience and elements of positive employee experience.

Customer –> Employee

Effectiveness –> Mastery

Ease –> Autonomy

Emotion –> Purpose

How do they do it?

There are five customer obsessed behaviors

1. Emphasize attitudes
   1. CX leaders were more likely to articulate a human value. Integratity, transparency, responsive.
   2. CX Laggards: simple, profit, value
      1. Don’t tell employees how to act and behave
2. Cultivate organizational lore
   1. They are storytellers
   2. Nordstrom is known as customer obsessed. Story about returning snow tires to a store that doesn’t stock it.  Their employee handbook has one rule, “Use good judgement in all situations.”
      1. Behind that is the need to hire and train great people to apply that good judgement.   They offer a lot more training than other retailers.
      2. They also get great tools. They have access to instant inventory for example.
3. Make visible comments
   1. They are looking for opportunities for great stories to tell.
   2. Container Store: they decided against employee layoffs in 2008.  That’s a visible commitment to values
   3. Nationwide insurance in the UK. They have five PRIDE values.  Gave a key reminder of the customer. They build a full scale recreation of a customers home in their offices. They kicked off meetings in the customers house to bring the customer voice to the conversation.
4. Ensure emotional well being
5.  ??

What should you do?

Map the employee journey. Map both parts of their lives. 1. the deliverer of the customer experience 2. the subject of your journey.

Protect and anonymize employee data.  They fear that this information could be used against them.

Involve employees in follow up activities.  The second you start a journey you set their expectations and they want to see it and contribute to it.  Involve them in co-creation sessions. Involve them in additional research.