Why it is so important to build a connection with your customers

As the customer landscape rapidly reshapes the role of the CX leader, it is not always clear how CX leaders should be managing teams and guiding the business toward delivering the best possible outcomes for customers.

CX Network spoke with David Hicks, founder and President of TribeCX and facilitator of our CX Masterclass, to hear his breakdown of the skills and approaches that are key for CX leaders right now and how he expects the field to develop in the coming years.

CX Network: Earlier this year you told us that collaboration, strategy deployment and tech translation were the top skills CX professionals require to deal with the pace of change in CX at present. Is this still the case?

David Hicks: If you take a look at collaboration, you have got to do more with less. People are being asked to help change business processes, and so on. We are getting really good at injecting the customer experience team into those conversations and helping folks to collaborate so that CX and EX improve while you are changing things. This requires really strong collaboration skills.

If you then take a look at strategy deployment, somebody somewhere in the business strategy and the CX team will point out how experience can support their business strategy. You might be functionally or geographically organized, either way it is important to make sure that the customer strategy is actually underpinning, supporting and helping to accelerate and de-risk the business strategy. Helping people to execute their strategy by being more customer-centric is a key skill.

With tech translation, I'm finding that oftentimes, when businesses get things like their CRM system in place, it is remarkable how little of the functionality they are paying for that they actually use. Because whether you actually use five or 10 percent of your CRM functionality does not matter, you pay a license for all of it. CRM systems work by improving the business processes and efficiency benefits, but they also work by delivering a better experience to the customer.

Most of the focus during Covid-19 was on business efficiency and reducing the reliance on people. We are now unpicking that digitalized manual process and redesigning the experience, so that it works for customers and colleagues. The industry is now looking to not only digitalize, but also take a look at this from the customer’s and colleague’s perspective and use those platforms to their fullest potential. This does not mean you need to be spending more cash on your CRM system, you just need to be using it to improve business efficiency, customer effectiveness, resources, capabilities and outcomes.

CX Network: How can CX leaders build the culture and capabilities that encourage and rewards these skills?

DH: Building capability and building culture require two different areas of focus for the CX leader.

Building the right culture requires CX leaders to behave as senior players in their business. Elevating staff that are doing a great job for their customers or colleagues and bringing them to the attention of the chairman or the chief executive is a really smart way, from a cultural perspective, to reinforce the things that are working for colleagues or customers. Start to behave in a way that is supportive of the customer-conscious employees and that is encouraging staff as they see people are getting noticed for embracing these customer-centric approaches.

[With regard to capabilities] I am seeing CX leaders having to justify every member of their team, and rightly so in these times. Some are saying that they need these people so that they can put somebody from their team on each of their projects, providing a gatekeeping or policing role. Those that have been successful are those that have realized they do not need to have a team of experts in the business. What they do need is a systematic, disciplined, structured and scalable way of training everybody to do some of these things.

This is key in getting everybody to understand the customer and colleague metrics, getting everybody to understand how to redesign the experience from a rational and emotional point of view. The more people you get doing it, the more those capabilities are dispersed and spread and the more chances as an CX leader that you have those skills being delivered even when you are not there.

CX Network: How do you expect the role of a CX leader to change in the coming years, what can CX leaders do to prepare their own capabilities?

DH: I think collaboration and soft skills are becoming a premium for CX leaders as we emerge from Covid-19. The people that you need to transform your business and keep it agile, the 20- to 35-year-olds. These are folks who are highly marketable, highly sought after and they want to be part of a business that has a clear and authentic purpose.

My son left a really good job in a global car rental business. He had completed an environmental science degree and wanted to be part of an organization that he could believe in, he wanted to be part of a utility business where he could make a difference to the to the planet. He took a reduction in pay, but he feels really empowered and at peace with himself, and that is not uncommon.

If you have employees in that sort of age group that you are going to be leaning on to drive the agile transformation of the business, they need to understand what it means to be part of your business. That is where the CX leadership role is starting to move, the focus for customer CX leaders is, quite rightly, improving the customer experience. You will not, however, be able to sustain a CX career unless you are making your colleagues feel good about what they do and you are deliberately designing the employee experience.

CX Network: What is your golden tip for CX leaders to get the most out of CX teams, to deliver business outcomes from CX?

DH: The critical thing is that the outcomes from CX do not have to be very sophisticated. It does not have to be based on particular technologies. You just need to be able to show that by taking an experience-based approach, we have improved business performance.

[At the start of my career] I joined [a milk delivery business] as a graduate expecting to do well. What I found was that the other milk delivery businesses in the area had sent their drivers to knock on all the doors of my customers. By the time we got to the end of the week, around a third of my customers had left, which was around 800 households. People had left because they do not know me, there is no connection, there is no loyalty there.

We went to the local printers and bought 6,000 leaflets with a picture of my fiancée and I, and a heartfelt note saying: “We have just started as your Milkman and we have just started out as a family. We would love to serve you, we realize you have given our competitor a try, can we pay for you to now try us for a week so we can get you back?”

Every single one of those customers, I got them back. It was because I managed to build an emotional connection, some sort of emotional engagement with these customers. But  I had 5,200 leaflets left. So, I called every single customer of every other dairy and I knocked on the door and said, I would love to have your business. The week after I had 500 customers and then 1,000 customers.

The minute you are able to show that you can do something that builds advocacy, loyalty and connection with your customers and your colleagues, you cannot put that back in the bottle.

If you found this article interesting, connect with David on LinkedIn and find out more about the CX Masterclass here.