In the dynamic business landscape, Customer Experience (CX) is a key focus for organizations, yet determining ownership can be challenging. Trustpower tackled this by fostering collective responsibility, and forming a group of CX champions across various departments.

Trustpower's former Head of Brand, Carolyn Schofield, shares a fascinating insight into the approach taken to show how true collaboration can elevate an organisation's customer experience to new heights.

Customer Experience (CX) is still a relatively new area of focus for many businesses. As a result, it’s common for organisations to still be finding their feet when it comes to how to ‘do’ CX. They are still exploring what it means for them, how to incorporate it into current business practices and where to find a home for CX within their existing structures.  Often multiple business units all believe CX is ‘theirs’. Customer Operations are the front line, interacting with customers day in, day out so isn’t it up to them? CX is an important way the brand is brought to life for consumers, so Marketing and Brand may see the responsibility as theirs. Even technology get a look it in as you can’t deliver great CX without great technology, right? Sometimes an organisation can seem a bit like the seagulls in ‘Finding Nemo’, with multiple groups all declaring it’s “Mine. Mine. Mine”.

The truth is that an effective CX practice doesn’t live in one function or sit in one team. A customer’s experience is influenced by the decisions made and actions taken by multiple parts of the business, from the customer facing staff, to product performance and the user experience when interacting with digital channels. As a result, responsibility for CX crosses the boundaries between different functions and groups.

But how can you develop a way of working where multiple different parts of the business take collective responsibility and accountability for the customer experience?

When research showed that Trustpower needed to improve its CX performance in several key areas it was important to create an attitude of collective ownership across the business rather than making CX the responsibility of a single team. To achieve this a group was created of CX champions who could each drive a culture of CX within their area of the business. This group included people from across customer operations, digital and marketing; all areas of the business that directly affected the customer through their actions.

An opportunity to utilise this group effectively was presented when Trustpower undertook extensive customer journey mapping. Trustpower’s customer journeys could become extremely complicated.  Customers could have a combination of up to five different services, with additional variations, for example different broadband packages, within these services. Added to this were multiple different propositions meaning no two customer journeys were the same. Pain points for the customer could occur at multiple stages and the actions of multiple teams could be required to improve the end to end journey.  A key objective was to drive a deeper understanding of customer journeys and embed them within the business to enable continuous improvement.

To achieve this, a number of the CX champions were trained to be able to conduct their own in-depth customer interviews to map customer journeys. In a collaborative process with Ipsos, who were helping Trustpower with their CX approach,  the group underwent training in how to conduct successful research interviews, from developing discussion guides and recruiting participants to interpreting the results. The group then progressed through three stages of involvement. First, they observed the Ipsos team conducting interviews, then they moved on to conducting interviews in tandem with a researcher and finally conducting interviews solus.

This approach not only helped to embed the importance of understanding customer journeys across the business but also upskilled multiple members of staff to enable ongoing journey mapping research to take place. By taking ownership of journey mapping, this group would understand firsthand how customers experience the company and would be empowered to drive change.

This approach also helped to create the relationships between different groups within the organisation that would enable the collaboration and cooperation required to effect change for customers going forward.  And, to quote another Disney hero, with true collaboration and cooperation your organisation can take your customer experience, “To infinity, and beyond!”.

Source: Carolyn Schofield, 30 January 2024