5 Guiding Principles of Innovative CX Management

Customer Experience is a relentless effort in pursuit of achieving customer loyalty. Considering the uniqueness in offerings, customer behavior, or culture within the organization, customer experience is also very distinctive to it. A successful customer experience program demands consistent efforts in identifying new solutions, being creative, having holistic views, subject matter expertise, and value creation.

Over the next few weeks, we will address different guiding principles that help drive innovation in customer experience management.

Solution Centric Mindset

Have you ever noticed when you desire or want something deeply, you end up seeing more of it around you? For e.g, if you want to buy a house, everywhere you look you find these sales banners, advertisements for exciting deals, and newspaper articles on tips to buy houses. Before you set your mind on buying a house you probably overlooked it. This is how mindset functions to direct us towards our true desires.

Now there are many definitions of the term Mindset. In generic terms, it means a set of beliefs that shape how you make sense of the world and yourself. It influences how you think, feel, and behave in any given situation.

When we set our wants clearly and more specifically, it helps define our sense of purpose which in turn opens door to our perceptions or visions. Basis these perceptions we take actions that lead to certain results in our effort.

What supports purpose is a strong belief in it, the focus, and optimism. In other words, pursuing your purpose with passion helps you accomplish it!

To be innovative in customer experience initiatives it is important to pursue with a solution-oriented mindset. This will inspire focus on ideas, insights, or thoughts that lead to varied ways of addressing and progressing out of a problem.

The leaders should work to create an environment that allows people to be keenly observant, curious enough to accelerate their learnings, and bold to experiment with new ideas.

Differential Thinking

In the famous words of Thomas Edison, “There is a better way to do things, find it!” To be innovative one needs to be constantly looking for newer, better, different ways of finding solutions. Our mind is like a kaleidoscope. With little turning and twisting, it throws back new approaches to address a particular task. 

Customer Experience is one domain that challenges you enough. The Cx fraternity has to spend a whole lot of time and effort convincing the ROI of the program that is either proposed or in progress. It is a fact that extreme pressure and stressful situations are never the breeding ground of ideas. 

A few easy disciplines come very handy in combating such situations and prepare us better to resolve tricky situations. Here are a few tips:

• No idea is a stupid or a bad idea. Encourage your teams and yourselves to share any and every thought that crosses your mind. Create forums or mediums to welcome such conversations.

• Have a laundry list of ideas, categorized by specific opportunity. Brainstorm on possibilities, risks, and applicability and summarise in the notes. 

• Do not fear the new or unknown but be open to exploring and taking calculated risks. Test run the ideas and conclude with informed decisions.

• When expanding on ideas, think of visual tools like diagrams, process maps, mind maps, etc to dig deeper and identify all possible paths of working through them

Mundane methods can be an answer to a problem at hand but it implies mediocrity.

To pursue excellence, one must be creative and constantly looking for better ways. 

Allow the ideas to flow freely, be spontaneous, and experience joy in serving your customers.

Being Mindful and Consistent

You would agree that creativity demands discipline and can be very exhausting. It is fair to admit that day-to-day distractions cause immense disruption in the creative thinking process. At the same time, isolating oneself completely from the world can also lead to a very one-sided view of the new idea. Especially, when it comes to solving business problems, the different solutions may need varied perspectives and hence either extreme is harmful to the innovative mindset.

Being mindful and consistent is an answer to striking the balance in this wide spectrum of environmental factors. Specifically, relating to CXM and the dynamics involved in the process, we must stay focused and ideation is more of a habit than an act.

Ikigai beautifully explains the art of being mindful and consistent and that is through the power of flow!  Our process of thinking through new ideas, working to build on those ideas, and executing them, should all be well integrated into our daily lives. It’s true that most of our ideas strike when we are in a relaxed state of mind say in the shower, or when we are half asleep, or listening to some great music, or just driving back home. Creativity is only healthy and effective if it’s organic and not a mere calendared activity.

Finding balance enough to work with clarity in a much ambiguous and complex program like CX management can be an uphill task. Here are a few tips to make it possible:

Don’t be too tight with measuring output vis a vis time involved. Creativity should be allowed a smooth flow of thoughts without an evil eye of time pressure. To stay in the flow, it is important to be staying with your idea at the moment and delving into it as deep as it demands.

-However, demanding the situation could be, take some time for relaxing or doing things that drive you away from pressure. In the flow state, one should be able to effortlessly navigate from intense work mode to a fine state of peace and calm. This helps you stay engaged and allows you to stay on the path of fresh ideas and thoughts consistently.

-Take pauses to comprehend your findings. Separate simple and concise thoughts from complex and intricate detailing. Creativity tends to trap in a timeless loop of thoughts so it is important to prepare a laundry list of what is workable and what is not. Step away from time to time and come back to it for a fresh perspective.

Simple ideas could lead to breakthroughs, let creativity be your default setting.

Collective Intelligence

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." As wisely stated by Helen Keller sounds quite cliché when it comes to the ground realities of the business world and is often underestimated in its power. Believe it or not, this particular principle, collective intelligence works like a superfood for innovation.

The ask here is to create and build a high-performance team that is diverse and complements one another in skills to amplify the desired outcomes. Collaboration is not only about different individuals working cohesively together towards an idea but also how each individual fills the blind spots in the creative process. The understanding is that the group intelligence derived from teamwork results in ideas that are more evolved and successful.

Customer Experience Management demands mobilizing several ideas and insights efficiently within the enterprise across the board. This could mean a diverse set of people from different functions or roles have to adapt to the change. If the suggested reforms are not vetted for varied processes or policies in the organization, the ideas could backfire and derail the customer experience program.

Without simplifying the concept of collective intelligence, let us understand a few strategic insights that could help move on that path.

1.       Hire for Collective Intelligence
With a clear vision and goal in mind, enterprises should corroborate a way to hire people not just for hard skills or technical skills and knowledge but also search for competencies that enable an innovative mindset. Critical thinking, problem-solving, and ambiguity, are some of the abilities to look for in the hiring process. It is important to see how the new hire will complement the existing team.

2.       Diversity is the key
The innovation team must be formed by resources that are multidisciplinary to make sure that there is a perspective that covers depth and width allowing information to feed new ideas. It is important to allow healthy exchange across disciplines and encourage a trustworthy, open environment. Everyone in the team should be aligned to a common goal and understand their responsibility and role.

3.       Integrated with Business
The team while focusing on new ideas, forming insights, and building innovative solutions to business problems, cannot be functioning in siloes. It is important to have them associated with ground realities and be aware of existing issues or priorities. They need to work in alignment with the organization’s vision and goals and understand the inside out of business. This has to be an open lab kind of a structure wherein all masterminds come together, virtually or physically to brainstorm ideas.

A set of right minds, breaking the status quo, and working in unison can lead to many more creative endeavors.

Value Add

Building an environment of innovation in any business starts with putting together a framework, that includes the right environment, skilled resources, and processes. This would allow a seamless flow of new ideas about services, products, and methods or policies. There is no denying that it involves a certain amount of investment both in time and material.

Value addition is an important guiding principle that works as a foundation for creative pursuits in business. In simple words, value add implies looking at creating ideas that can help resolve a problem, faster, better, and may be cheaper. The ideas that serve no direct or indirect purpose to the growth of the organization and/or their customer are an effort in vain.

Following the underlined recommendations for value add will not only aid organizations in ensuring a return on their investment but also the journey could be a lot easier.

1.    Clarity in the problem that one is trying to solve is a must to keep the focus and not beat around the bush. The beneficiary of the solution, impact on business, etc. are worth a discussion at the beginning.

2.    Build a strong understanding of consumer needs: Knowing your target customer and having a solid grasp on their changing demands, and expectations, is a key to ideas that would be relatable.

3.    Brainstorm the impact of the idea on stakeholders, both internal and external. It is important to have a holistic view of how the idea would create positive as well as negative impacts in the value chain.

4.    Test and try the idea for scalability, performance, results, and feedback before finalizing it across the organization.

Innovation in Customer Experience Management specifically demands value added to the customer that keeps the brand standing out in the market. Strong and timely communication helps in taking these ideas further to the end-user and building their trust. Customer Journey Mapping and feedback are great tools to use for vetting the idea and developing it further.

Ideas should always be measured for the value they bring in! Always look for that extra worth in new ideas!