Welcome to CX Whisperer

I am glad you have found your way to my circle of CX Leaders!

I am going to start this first edition with something controversial: CX in the company strategy is not necessarily a win.

When a CX leaders excitedly tells me their company has just named Customer Experience as a strategic priority and now "things finally move forward", I am a bit cautious. This can be a real, strong foundation for future success, but it can also be a ceiling that creates the impression of "being customer centric".

In the past 18 years I have seen multiple mentions of superior customer experience, customer obsession, customer value, or customer loyalty in company strategies. But when asked, many of these companies are struggling to articulate what this means.

Having CX in the strategy is a great starting point. But it is not a win, unless a deeper work is done first. Let's look at what this means.

Imagine two companies: Company A with "Superior Customer Experience" in their strategy and company B with nothing on customer. On paper, comparing the two, the company A looks set up to succeed while company B the one to struggle.

But I wouldn't bet on it.

Walk into Company A and ask people what superior customer experience actually means. One large B2B company, with something similar in their strategy actually did this exercise. They recorded how their employees responded. They got as many responses as the people they asked. No wrong answers as such, but no clear articulation what superior means to them. This work simply had not taken place. As a result people saw the strategic priority more as a slogan, than something actionable.

Meanwhile, Company B does not list CX as a strategic priority, but it does aim to shift from selling products to offering lifecycle services. The CX team works closely with the executive team to define what this shift means from the customer’s point of view. Together with leadership, they are identifying what kind of customer insights will be needed in the coming years and how this insight should be used to drive retention, sales and growth. As a result of this work, the leadership is starting to see customer experience as a business-critical topic. This helps to communicate a shared, coherent message to the rest of the organisation.

My lesson learned to you is this: Whether CX is named in your company strategy or not is much less important than whether you can articulate, simply and clearly, how customer understanding makes the rest of the strategy possible. What is not understood cannot be acted on. This is the real danger here, not the semantics.

How to evaluate your situation?

To quickly grasp how connected your CX work is with the company strategy, ask this question from your leadership team: What do we need to know from our customers to succeed in the next 3-5 years?

If the answer is clear, customer experience is already in their minds as a strategic priority. Not as a statement but as a foundational principle, and something that helps the business to succeed. You have a strong mandate to drive the CX work.

But if the answer is unclear, even when words like superior customer experience are sitting right there in the strategy deck, you know there is more foundational work to do.

Key takeaway: It is never too late to articulate how Customer Experience helps your company succeed

Try this. Take one strategic target your company is currently committed to: a new market, a service area, a customer segment. Then write down, in one sentence, what you personally think your company should know from your customers to succeed in that target.

How did this exercise feel to you, was it easy, or hard? This is one of the facilitated exercises I do with my B2B clients when we start connecting CX to company strategy and build a shared story what CX means and how it drives success in the business.

In the next week's episode, I will share more real-life learnings on this process - creating a shared CX story.

Until next Friday!

Anna-Maija

I am Anna-Maija Tanninen, B2B CX advisor, founder of CX Agency, and one of the global CX stars by Customer Experience Magazine. After 18 years in this field, I have seen the role of the CX leader is the most critical lever in customer experience success. That is what this newsletter is for. Every Friday I send you one curated thought on how to lead CX better using storytelling, positioning and influencing. More on my work at cxagency.fi and my approach to B2B Customer Experience on LinkedIn.