Customer Experience Leadership or Customer Service Management?

Customer experience leadership is about creating new things. It’s about change. Taking people and groups from point a to point b where it’s more effective. It’s about innovation and change.

Customer experience leadership is about creating new ideas and things, it’s about coordinating existing systems and resources, and connecting with customers in new ways.

The great customer experience leaders are innovators, motivators and drivers of people and systems. Behind all great leaders, are exceptional managers. These are the people that can get things done. They motivate and inspire people around them and find ways to make resources work to accomplish the tasks that make a difference. They get the right people and customer experience working to solve customer service problems.

Customer Experience Leaders Focus on Customer Problems

Exceptional leadership is effective management connecting the right people to solve the right problem. Too often we focus on connecting people with tasks, but we only engage when people find meaning in the work they do. Meaning comes from understanding that the work we do isn’t just a task but a solution for good.

All organizations need leaders and leaders are needed at every level. These are people who know how to get things done. Leadership isn’t just about charting a course and inspiring or motivating people. It’s about settings the direction for where we need to do and then being able to outline the steps to get there. Leaders then get people moving forward towards that goal.

There’s often much discussion between management vs. leadership and what organizations need and which is best for success. But at the end of the day, both are equally important.

“Stop worring about the destinction [between management and leadership] and start working to build in people the capacity to do both things well.”

-Kim Clark, former Dean of Harvard Business School.

 Customer experience leaders need to focus on the basics of making people and systems around them work FOR the customer, not for the business. They do this by:

• Creating a customer-focused, experience culture.
• Hiring people-focused people.
• Coaching effective customer communication.
• Inspiring people to think about the customer.
• Empower people to act for the customer.

Zappos, the online retailer, is often used as a model of a customer-focused organization. They don’t have a secret method of customer service that makes them successful. They just focus on the customer throughout the entire organization. From the CEO to the front-line people, even the back-end people think about the customer before they act in their capacity.

Zappos is known for:

• Having a plan to deliver “wow” customer experiences.
• Encourage employees to think on their own.
• Enable employees to act and react to what customers want, based on customer needs.

Err on the side of the customer. It’s worth it. A positive customer experience, with the right system in place, will keep customers coming back.