The fifth of the seven customer experience (CX) dimensions discussed in Perficient Digital’s CX guide is Operations. You can see in the diagram below that the first and most critical dimension, Customer Insight, sits squarely on top of Operations. That’s no coincidence!
Technology + Operations = BFFs
I’m sure you’ve experienced this before: you invest heavily in a technology platform, only to implement the basic functionality and miss opportunities by not optimizing the analytics, having the platform rejected by business units that don’t want to change, or by not modifying policies that would enable employees to use it to its fullest potential.
CX leaders have recognized that an exceptional customer experience isn’t possible without operational improvements that create a more agile, responsive organization. They are rethinking roles and responsibilities, reorganizing to improve collaboration, and empowering employees with new decision rights. They are introducing an agile/lean methodology to make faster decisions and implement with fewer surprises, plus modifying their governance policies to deliver a consistent CX across divisions and products, with managed oversight of third parties.
We see excellence across six operational indicators:
- A CX champion is actively engaged and empowered to make decisions across functional groups
- A clearly defined escalation system is in place to manage and resolve CX issues
- The user experience (UX), marketing, and technology teams collaborate on a regular basis without a corporate mandate, and are able to reach compromises without management intervention
- The core team is actively applying the principles of agile methodology
- A change management plan is created for every major initiative
- Team resources are thoughtfully assigned to important CX projects, with skill set and capacity as high priorities
Best Practice: Ensure Your Operations Support CX Excellence
CX leaders understand that key functional teams have to work effectively together to succeed, but it’s naïve to believe that disagreements will magically disappear. It is imperative that operational policies and procedures be developed to proactively deal with the issues that are most frequently encountered on complex digital projects.
In the next post (almost done!), I’ll discuss the sixth dimension of CX: Measurement.
