Building a customer experience (CX) vision

What is a customer experience vision?

A customer experience vision is an aspirational statement on how your organisation has chosen to service its customers. It is a standard that employees should be able to strive for, and a banner that your company can look to when making decisions that will affect its customers. A well established and clearly communicated vision will inspire action at every level of your organisation. Forming a vision is a vital step in improving your customer experience.

Establishing a vision and giving clarity

Your vision for your Customer Experience Management programme needs to be specific so that everyone within the organisation can easily understand the common goal. We recommend a short and simple vision statement to help you increase understanding and buy-in from leadership.

Criteria for a customer experience vision statement

• Simple and clear
• Known and repeatable at each level of the organisation
• Possesses executive sponsorship
• Associated with specific goals and objectives
• Associated with a clear roadmap of milestones

Examples of good vision statements

Here are some inspiring CX vision statements to get you headed in the right direction:

“At American Express, we have a mission to be the world’s most respected service brand. To do this, we have established a culture that supports our team members so they can provide exceptional service to our customers.” – American Expres

“In-store or online, wherever new opportunities arise, Nordstrom works relentlessly to give customers the most compelling shopping experience possible.” – Nordstrom

“We believe that buying glasses should be easy and fun. It should leave you happy and good-looking, with money in your pocket.” – Warby Parker

“Deliver exceptional experiences with every single interaction creating life long clients that not only stay with Hagerty but tell their friends about.” – Hagerty

After you’ve solidified your vision, you can start thinking about what your customer experience strategy will be. Check out our guide to designing a customer experience strategy.

Getting company buy-in

Your vision will never become a reality unless you can get others in the company to invest their time and energy into making it happen. Try to spend time with people in every department and at every level to communicate what the vision means for the company, and for their specific role.

Starting with senior leadership

Establishing a customer-centric culture starts at the very top. Without executive-level buy-in there is a low probability of creating maximum impact for any customer-centric initiative. You’ll also want to garner the support of lower-level leaders to truly move the needle on improving the customer experience. Leaders set the tone for their organisation, so if a leader decides that the customer is important, their direct reports will follow suit.

Strategies to obtain leadership buy-in:

1. Create an ROI Outline
2. Collect case studies of similar companies who implemented a CEM program with success
3. Conduct a trial CEM program

• Collection: Demonstrate data quality and cost per response
• Analysis and Reporting: Demonstrate ease of reporting and insight value
• Action: Identify low-hanging opportunities and close the loop
• Impact: Demonstrate impact in areas that can prove the value

Company alignment and action

Alignment means that all members of your organisation are marching towards the same vision, and each team understands exactly what action they need to take to help realise that vision. Generally speaking, action refers to the measurable steps taken to improve the customer experience. A properly designed root cause or driver analysis will help to inform what areas to take action on.

Strategies to consider:

1. Map key objectives to business and organisational touchpoints
2. Create and align cross-functional teams toward singular objectives

Setting goals around your customer experience vision

To ensure that employees across your organisation stay motivated and committed to your customer-centric culture, it can be helpful to set goals and to tie employee incentives and compensation to customer outcomes. Setting goals for your program and then rewarding employees for taking steps to achieve those goals will reduce your organisation’s risk of burnout and keep everyone on track to achieve your goals.

As you track your progress toward your goals, it is critical that each leader can visualise your current CX standing in relation to your goals. A platform with configurable dashboards allows every employee to quickly see the customer analytics relevant to them while making confidential information only accessible to specific people. Configurable dashboards also allow you to zoom in to the individual customer and zoom out to see the big picture.

A configurable dashboard should allow you to:

• View current NPS and historical trends
• Track satisfaction by individual sales rep
• See which store locations have the highest NPS
• Track CSAT by geographical location
• Track trending topics
• View open tickets