Getting Customer Experience Buy-In From Senior Management

Associate $$$ (either saved or earned) to your customer experience process and you’ll have all the support you need.

About 25% of all comments, emails, and feedback from people I work with is along the lines of “those are all great ideas, but I just can’t get my company onboard“.

Yes, getting the rest of the organization, especially senior management to buy-in and support customer experience is difficult, but it’s not impossible.

How are you selling “customer experience” to management?

One of the biggest challenges to customer service leaders isn’t recognizing that there is potential to improve or identify areas where we can improve service, but getting the organizational support to make customer experience and customer service changes happen.

Your ability to prove the REAL value of any customer experience process or customer service action to your organization’s decision makers will be the key to getting support from senior leaders at your organization.

How to effectively enlist your organization to support customer exprience.

Most of us approach changes within our organizations with the “here’s what’s wrong and how to fix it” approach. How’s that working out? If you want to put people on the defensive and get the biggest amount of feet dragging with your change process, try this method.

If you actually want to make customer experience changes and improve customer service, we need to sell people on the idea of “streamlining”, and by that I mean the “making less busy work, less red tape, more effective practices that we know our customers have said they appreciate and it keeps them coming back to work with us” approach to customer experience and customer service.

Customer experience has to focus on $$$ and on customers.

Throw around the words “customers tell us they come back to us because of this, this, and this“. Management loves it, they’ll clear all sorts of red tape, barriers, hard-headed department managers, policies, and historical procedures because ultimately getting customers to keep coming back equals $$$. And frankly, executive management is really judged on $$$ that comes in to the business.

Use real customer experience statistics that support customer experience programs.

It works. You may doubt it, but it works. Assign real value to your customer experience process or to any customer service action changes and the support will come.

Have you found other effective ways to make changes happen? What’s been your experience in implementing customer experience changes within your organization?