Fact: 70 per cent of all change initiatives within a business and organisational context fail1. Ensure you’re a part of the successful 30 per cent. Here, we'll set the case for why customer experience should be a main part of your change management initiatives, and how it can propel you in the right direction, regardless of what your business objectives are.
As you’ve probably heard a million times before, nothing is more certain in life than change. But it’s worth reiterating as change management is a big topic in the business world. In this blog, we’re going to talk about change management in relation to customer experience and explain why one pertains the other.
Qualifying the need for change management
As you will know, at certain times of the year businesses set strategic goals they want to achieve within a certain time-frame. Whatever the particular goal may be, (and let’s assume it’s one of the usual suspects: performance, growth, efficiency or innovation), in order to achieve it, there’s a requirement for a solid strategic and tactical plan.
With any new company-wide directive, there will likely be the need for organisational change (whether smaller or larger scale). In order for this transition to be effective and lasting, both management and employees need to buy into the new strategic direction. Cue: the need for a change management initiative.
For sake of argument, your main business goal could be: “We want to be a $10 million business in five years, and in order to do that we need to generate 1,000 new customers by 2020”.
Related content: 3 steps to successful customer experience change management
How does customer experience come into play?
Regardless of what your goal is (and again, we’ll assume it’s growth or performance focused) and as a part of your strategic plan, the need to assess the status quo will arise, before you can even think of where you’re heading.
The two major impacts on your business are its customers and employees. So it would make sense to start there. Customer experience and employee engagement are crucial players for achieving your business goals, whatever those goals may be.
Change management in brief:
- Start with the why: what is the goal you are trying to achieve? Always come back to this throughout your change initiative.
- Assess your current state: you need to know where you are today in order to know where you’re heading.
- Draw up your top-level strategic plan: the goal in itself will help you on how to get there.
- Get tactical: Put short-term tactical plans in place throughout the implementation period, helping you achieve your overarching strategy.
- Creating a customer journey map: this will help in this process as it will highlight your customer journey and any barriers and improvements you need to make
Basically, becoming a customer-led business in itself will have a big impact on whether or not you can achieve your goals, as knowing how you fare in your customer experience will help you understand your current state and the actions you need to take to improve.
For example if your goal is to have X amount of customers in ten years, having a strong customer retention strategy could be a part of this goal, in fact it usually is. In order to facilitate a strong retention strategy, you’ll need to know the current state of your customer experience, which includes how satisfied and loyal your current customers are. Being a customer-led business does tie into many company goals, as they often are growth focused.
And finally, it’s important to measure your progress and feedback throughout the whole process. If you don’t measure, you simply won’t know if you are on your way to achieving your goals.
This all qualifies customer experience as a highly relevant topic in the context of change management.
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1. Leading Change, by Dr. John Kotter, renowned author and change management guru. Harvard Business Review Press, 2012.
