So I got your attention? It seems so. You too are looking for the two golden rules to transform your organization in 30 days without any efforts or budget. Welcome to my protest. (I promise to provide two golden rules by the end of this message so I will not break the title’s promise)
This forum and several others are being populated with the “5 rules to” articles and manifestos. Practitioners and consultants alike are attempting to describe the fast track to success.
Strativity, we are dealing today with prospects who followed that route, were mislead by shortcut promises and are left disappointed and frustrated. (Not to mention light on budget.) They also eroded their organization’s commitment to customer experience due to the failures or lack of progress delivered.
After conducting over 120 transformation projects around the world touching over 300,000 employees and impacting 150 million customers, we know conclusively that there are no shortcuts. There are no 2 golden rules for immediate customer experience transformation in 30 days. Guaranteed.
So our message is quite clear. Wake up. We are no longer in customer experience 1.0 where inspirational stories of brilliant entrepreneurs promised to deliver us to heaven if we only did…. Benchmarking against other companies is nice but bear little fruit in terms of changing YOUR company. It is time to stop cheating ourselves and search for shortcuts and bypasses.
Your organization did not get to be so far removed from its customers overnight. It took years of product centricity, executives’ arrogance, making decisions that did not support the customers’ needs, ignoring your customers requests and overall taking them for granted. There is no magic pill that will turn the clock around overnight.
The simple rule in business and life is if it sound too good to be true, it is probably not true.
It is time to welcome customer experience 2.0 and start the disciplined hard work. Develop a proper strategy. Understand the potential roadblocks, develop a data driven decision process and innovate our value proposition. Its time to design for transformation. Its time to do it right.
If we, as customer experience professionals, wants our discipline to be taken seriously by the executive level, we need to be honest about what does it take to make it happen. Otherwise we commit the same sin that our companies doo “over promising and under delivering”. No executive will believe that his or her organization can be transformed with one magic pill. Lets design serious strategies, commit to results and drive change the old fashion way.
As for the two golden rules
1. Tie your strategy to the corporate financial results to gain credibility
2. Stop wasting your time on shortcuts to customer experience
Good luck.
Follow me @LiorStrativity
