Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today's dynamic business world. I'm Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you're new to the show, welcome. If you're a returning listener, thanks, and it's great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer.
These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you're new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.
This is episode 69, the fifth episode of January. 2020 has been slated as the year that customer experience will overtake price and product as the key differentiator. So here we are, nearing the close of month one of a new decade. And CX professionals need to be ready to face the challenges of helping businesses become more customer centric.
This month, my mini masterclasses have explored employee rewards and recognition, practical tips for internal and external marketing of customer experience, and HR strategy as the bedrock underpinning team culture. Today, I'm closing out the month with a topic that bridges customer experience strategy and organizational alignment. And that is defining your customer promise.
The episodes earlier this month explored how you can drive organizational alignment to customer experience, but all of these things hinge on having a clear definition of what the customer experience should be. I call this defining what good looks like. And the output should be a customer promise or a statement that teams can rally around.
If you've been looking for clarity on yet another popular customer experience buzzword and would like to learn about why it's important to create a customer promise in the first place, then this episode is for you. As always, if you're out and about while listening to this and hear something that you'd like to remember later, don't worry about writing it down.
You can find an overview of the key concepts we've covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. In episode 67, I spoke about how and why organizations should internally and externally market customer experience. This, of course, hinges upon having a clear definition of what experiences customers can expect and how teams should deliver these experiences. I'm not talking about the company vision, mission, or values.
All of these are important and they should definitely support customer centricity. But what I'm referring to is the customer promise or a single statement outlining the experience that a brand intends to provide to its customers and prospective customers. A customer promise should be clear, simple, and actionable. It should be a single statement, ideally no longer than one sentence.
You could almost think of a customer promise as a vision or mission statement focused exclusively on the experience and how it's delivered. The car brand hyundai has a great example of a customer promise statement for their service team. Their customer promise is, at hyundai, we put all our efforts to provide customers with the best after-sales service.
This statement lets us know that hyundai takes after-sales service seriously and that they're willing to put some muscle behind providing a great experience, and that customers can expect a best-in-class wow experience, one that possibly competes with service experiences from other consumer categories altogether.
Now, if they wanted to say that they were just better than the other car companies, they might have said, we put all our efforts to provide customers with the best after-sales service in the industry. But they didn't say that. For Teams, this promise statement indicates that the service experience is a major strategic priority. Notice that they say, we put all our efforts.
This signals to hyundai's Teams that everything they do should contribute to a journey defining after-sales service experience. Personally, I'm a little ambivalent about the fact that this customer promise is so specific to the after-sales service part of the business. I think they could have just as easily made a customer promise that was applicable to the entire customer journey.
Such a statement might have sounded something like, At hyundai, we put all our efforts to connect people with cars they'll love and an experience they'll remember. Now, I took their statement in a slightly different direction, but I think it still captures the essence of the company putting their efforts behind an experience that is unique, special, and makes the brand stand out. If these promise statements feel a little vague to you, that's okay.
Remember that you can only be so specific with a single sentence. A customer promise should be backed up by customer experience principles. Guest expert Ben Motram spoke about the importance of experience principles in CX Strategy during episode 29. I'd suggest you check out that episode if you haven't already. Experience principles are the how-to details behind the customer promise.
hyundai outlines eight of these, and they include things like, we listen carefully and actively follow up on your request, and we maintain a clean, safe, and friendly environment. Your experience principles are there to make up for what your customer promise lacks in detail due to brevity.
If you're building your principles and promise from scratch, I might suggest building the experience principles first, based on what customers tell you is important, and then creating an overarching customer promise that ties these principles together and connects them to the brand vision, mission, and values. So why do we care about a customer promise? I suppose we could ask the same thing about a company purpose, vision, or mission.
The short answer is that organizations need a strategic north star, especially when it comes to customer experience. Without this, teams can and will action customer experience in terms of their own individual interpretation, which nearly always leads to teams driving things in disparate directions. You'd be surprised by how many organizations claim to differentiate on customer experience, yet haven't taken the time to define what this actually means.
And if you'd like to evaluate your own organization's level of cohesion with this definition, then I'm going to give you a quick little activity that you can take back to your team or your executive group, sort of as a little reality check. Get everyone together in a room, hand out individual pieces of paper, and ask each person to jot down what they think a good customer experience provided by your organization should look like.
If you haven't defined your customer promise, my money says you get as many different answers as you have people sitting around the table. I've done this exercise with countless leadership teams, and it never ceases to amaze me how leaders expect teams to rally around customer experience when they haven't established clarity on what that means. Which is why it's worth the time and effort to define your customer promise.
If crafted correctly, this can become an organization's strategic north star. If you're looking for help defining your customer promise or principles, please get in touch. I'd be happy to explore how I could help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I hope that you're enjoying the show.
Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show. I'll be back next week with another episode. I'll see you then.