99% of Companies Failed to Do This Last Year

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s rapidly changing business landscape, one essential activity that 99% of companies failed to prioritize last year is conducting regular independent customer and employee experience audits. These audits are critical for understanding the current state and potential improvements needed to enhance engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction among customers and employees.

For most companies, customer and employee experiences are the backbone of their success. A business can’t thrive without satisfied customers buying their products or services, and employees are the driving force behind delivering these experiences. Despite this understanding, many businesses neglect the proactive steps necessary to evaluate and enrich these experiences systematically utilizing unbiased external third parties to walk the experiences and document friction points and opportunities.

Is your company part of the 99% that failed to conduct both an independent customer experience audit and an independent employee experience audit last year?

If you are part of the 1%, please be sure and leave some thoughts about the experience (no pun intended) in the comments!

Why Independent Experience Audits Matter

Independent experience audits are comprehensive reviews of interactions customers and employees have with a company performed by an unbiased external resource. They help identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. These audits should be performed regularly as they can reveal insights into:

The alignment between company offerings and customer needs.
The effectiveness of internal processes in promoting a positive work environment.
The coherence of brand values with actual customer and employee experiences.
Emerging trends and preferences that might impact future strategies.

“73% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.” – Temkin Group

Despite the apparent value proposition of these independent audits, why are so many companies still overlooking them? The constraints are often a mix of perceived complexity, lack of in-house expertise, or prioritization of immediate financial metrics over strategic insights. However, history has shown that organizations that adapt ahead of changes in expectations are better positioned to succeed over those that react out of necessity.

Case Study 1: An Overlooked Opportunity – Company X

Company X, a well-established retail brand, faced declining sales figures and employee turnover. Their product line remained strong, and pay scales were competitive. However, deeper insights revealed that customer experiences were inconsistent, and employees often felt disengaged due to a lack of communication and growth opportunities.

Recognizing the signs, Company X engaged in a comprehensive independent experience audit. The audit discovered two key issues:

Customer Experience: Customers reported a lack of personalization in their shopping journey, expressing frustration over disconnected in-store and online experiences.
Employee Experience: Employees felt unappreciated, with inadequate feedback channels and professional development options.

Armed with these insights, Company X implemented a strategy that enhanced personalized shopping experiences using AI-driven recommendations and integrated both digital and physical stores for seamless customer journeys. Simultaneously, they developed a robust internal communication framework that empowered employees through regular feedback and offered career progression pathways.

Within six months post-intervention, Company X witnessed a 15% increase in customer satisfaction scores and a 20% decrease in employee turnover—solidifying the importance of independent experience audits.

Case Study 2: A Success Story – Company Y

Company Y, on the other hand, already valued independent customer and employee experience audits as a vital component of their corporate strategy. As a result, they experienced steady growth and minimal churn rates despite operating in the highly competitive tech industry.

Company Y conducts bi-annual audits using a company like HCLTech, reviewing user interactions with their software products and collecting feedback through employee surveys intertwined with one-on-one interviews. They discovered that:

Customer Experience: The need for improved user interface intuitiveness was prevalent, prompting a user-centered design overhaul that optimized performance and usability.
Employee Experience: Although engagement levels were high, team collaboration across departments showed potential for enhancement.

By proactively addressing these issues, Company Y not only improved its software product, which increased customer retention by 25%, but also invested in team-building exercises and diversified project teams, leading to more innovative solutions and a dynamic organizational culture.

How to Implement Experience Audits in Your Organization

To avoid the common pitfalls highlighted, businesses need to incorporate independent experience audits into their regular strategic evaluations. Here’s a simplified approach to getting started:

Define Objectives: Clearly identify what you aim to discover with the audit. Are you focusing on loyalty, satisfaction, efficiency, or a combination?
Select a Partner: Choose an independent resource that is experienced, trustworthy and thorough in their activities to assess and document their findings as they walk the critical components of your customer and employee experiences.
Gather Data: Utilize surveys, interviews, focus groups, and data analytics to collect comprehensive insights.
Analyze Findings: Categorize feedback to identify consistent patterns, pain points, and potential areas for improvement.
Develop an Action Plan: Prioritize issues by impact and feasibility, then devise a strategy that aligns with your company’s goals.
Implement Changes: Address the identified opportunities with targeted interventions, ensuring stakeholders are engaged and informed.
Measure Impact: Continuously track the effectiveness of changes and refine strategies as necessary.

Conclusion

Independent experience audits are not just a ‘nice to have’ but a strategic necessity. Companies can no longer afford to be complacent; they must take actionable insights from these audits to craft memorable and meaningful experiences for their customers and employees. Companies like Y that put independent experience audits at the heart of their strategy invariably found themselves robust against industry challenges, offering lessons that the broader business community should heed.

“Companies that excel at customer experience are 60% more profitable than their peers.” – Gartner

If you would like to engage an unbiased external person like Braden Kelley to conduct a customer experience and/or employee audit for you this year to join the 1% leapfrogging their competition, contact us!

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Pixabay

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The Secrets of Customer Support Triage

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The Secrets of Customer Support Triage

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Recently, I had the privilege of being a keynote speaker on customer experience (CX) at a company’s quarterly event. Following the speech, the CEO shared an insight into their approach to customer service and CX, comparing it to a medical emergency room. “Our response to customer complaints and issues is akin to triage,” he said. “We effectively diagnose the problems, yet find ourselves treating similar cases repeatedly as if sending them to an emergency room that never addresses the underlying causes.”

Triage is an interesting word. It’s a medical term, but I wanted to better understand the definition, so I did what most people do. I Googled the word, and this is the definition from Merriam-Webster:

The sorting and allocating of treatment to patients, especially battle and disaster victims, according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors.
The assigning of priority order to projects on the basis of where funds and other resources can be best used, are most needed, or most likely to achieve success.

The first definition confirmed that the CEO’s comment was accurate. They fix problems, but don’t seem to be preventing the problems. The second definition sounds like common practice for most businesses, not just hospital emergency rooms. They prioritize projects – in this case, customer service issues – and focus on what will provide the best return.

I loved the CEO’s comment because he recognized the end goal wasn’t to deliver great customer service when there was a problem but to create a customer experience that had few, if any, problems. Put another way, it’s one thing to fix problems. It’s another to understand why there’s a problem and create a preventative solution or system that eliminates – or at least mitigates – the problem in the future. Yes, there will be customer service issues, but with this line of thinking, you can eliminate many problems and complaints.

This reminded me of commercials I remember seeing when I was a kid. From 1967-1988, there were commercials for Maytag washers and dryers. Many of you are too young to remember the Maytag repairman known as “Ol’ Lonely,” who was lonely and bored because the Maytag equipment was so dependable. Of course, the machines weren’t perfect, but they were reputed to be more reliable than competitors.

I like the idea of boring – when it comes to problems and complaints. Nothing would make me happier than to see the true depiction of a company’s customer service agents sitting around bored because customers seldom called with complaints.

So, consider this question: Would you rather be the company known for solving problems when they happen or the company that doesn’t have problems?

Image Credits: Unsplash

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Which Go to Market Playbook Should You Choose?

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Which Go To Market Playbook Should You Choose?

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Life-cycle go-to-market has been the focus of much of my life’s work, and I had the opportunity to recap that experience at a recent chalk talk at the HackerDoJo in Mountain View. It turned out that most of what I had to say was captured on a single slide. For readers over the age of X, this may be familiar territory; for those under the age of Y, it may prove new.

This framework highlights four different go-to-market playbooks, each optimized for a different stage of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. The two key takeaways are:

The playbook that creates success in any given stage will under-perform at any of the other three, and
The playbooks do not blend; instead, they actually undercut each other when combined.

Thus, the number one job of the go-to-market strategy-setting leader is to get the entire team aligned around one, and only one, playbook.

Now, full disclosure, because different segments of the market can be in different phases of the life cycle, a go-to-market organization can be running more than one play at the same time. What they must not do is run more than one at the same time in the same place!

The Early Market Playbook

The focus of this play is to engage with a visionary customer executive who wants to leverage disruptive technology to change the world. Because your technology has yet to be adopted, the category does not yet exist, and thus there is no budget for your product. As a result, it must be funded as a project, and the customer executive has to be senior enough to have the clout to extract the necessary funds from the enterprise’s existing resource pool. Your job is to inspire that executive, hence the emphasis on thought leadership marketing to connect your breakthrough technology to their compelling business vision. It makes for a wild ride, to be sure, but when successful, it puts your company on the map as the company that did what!?!? There still is no market, there still is no budget, but there is buzz, and that buzz is associated with you, provided, that is, that your target customer is a marquee brand that people look up to. For Salesforce in its early days, this was Merrill Lynch. For Amazon Web Services in its early days, this was the CIA. For OpenAI recently, this was Microsoft.

The Bowling Alley Playbook

This is the playbook described in Crossing the Chasm. Its focus is to engage with a pragmatic business manager who is responsible for a deteriorating business process that is causing increasing problems for their enterprise, and thus, urgently needs a fix. All the conventional approaches have been found wanting, and so this prospect is open to a disruptive approach, but only if it commits to solving its specific problem. There is budget to spend here although at present it is allocated to traditional approaches. As a result, the sales cycle begins with winning the right to redirect that spend. Sales success depends on your company demonstrating a deep understanding of the problem state followed by a clear explanation of why your technology can succeed where traditional approaches fail. Implementation success depends on bringing together a team that can solve the problem end to end, leveraging domain expertise with technological leverage, to deliver what Ted Levitt taught us to call the whole product (the minimum set of products and services needed to eliminate the problem). From a market development strategy point of view, the key is to focus on a single use case in a single industry in a single geography, the goal being to develop a congregation of successful companies that will serve as a reference base as well as a loyal customer base. That is how desktop publishing helped give birth to the Mac Faithful.

The Tornado Playbook

This is the playbook that drives The Gorilla Game, a market share land grab that catapults a single company to stratospheric valuation, dragging a cohort of close contenders in its wake, resulting in the gigantic market caps that motivate early-stage venture capital investing. It is triggered by a tipping point in the adoption life cycle when pragmatic customers’ resistance to early adoption is overcome by their fear of missing out. In a flash, the new paradigm becomes the new mandate—we must have mobile apps, we must transition to cloud computing, we must procure software as a service. Budgets sprout up everywhere like mushrooms, and they are there for the picking. All this rewards a “Just win, baby” approach to go-to-market, characterized by as broad a coverage model as possible combined with highly disciplined sales tactics. RFPs (Requests for Proposals) are prevalent, driving both pilot projects and bake-offs, with marketing focusing primarily on competitive differentiation and pricing discounts. Importantly, whichever vendor wins the first pick becomes that customer’s incumbent, giving it privileged access to future purchases. Just as importantly, if one company becomes the clear market share leader, then the ecosystem of supporting companies rallies around it, elevating its competitive advantage to gorilla status.

The Main Street Playbook

This is the playbook that drives sustained earnings growth in markets that have adopted the new technology and now seek to maintain it over as long a useful lifetime as possible. At this stage, customers prefer to work with their incumbent vendors and over time to consolidate around a smaller set of integrated suites. These suites serve as platforms for ongoing innovations that are sustaining rather than disruptive, something that bores visionaries but appeals greatly to pragmatists and even more so to conservatives. In the land-and-expand as-a-service business model, we are in the expansion phase, and the growth goal is to cross-sell and up-sell new service transactions, and the earnings goal is to maximize renewals and minimize attrition. Telemetry about user adoption and feature usage is mission-critical to this effort, enabling both account managers as well as the software itself to guide the customer’s buying decisions. Product-led growth supported by self-service transactions is mission-critical for consumer applications and other user-driven offers. For enterprise sales, packaging up sets of requirements and aligning with the customer’s procurement cycle calls for the kind of account management we used to call farming and now call customer success.

Final Takeaway

Each of these playbooks makes distinctly different demands of the marketing, sales, and services teams running the go-to-market effort. People talented at one type of play may struggle with another. Our tendency as human beings is to want to stick with what we are good at, so it is usually wise to empower a new leader whenever you change playbooks.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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How Courage and Trust are Transforming Bayer

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Fewer Rules and Better Results

How Courage and Trust are Transforming Bayer

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Consider this question: If workers are hobbled by 1,000 rules, does it make a meaningful difference to reduce them to only 900?”

The answer is No. In fact, this is precisely why most attempts at fighting bureaucracy fail – and why true transformation requires starting completely fresh.

Bill Anderson, CEO of Bayer, knows this and isn’t afraid to admit it. When he took the helm in June 2023, he discovered a company paralyzed by bureaucracy. Instead of trying to optimize the system, he looked at the company’s “1,362 pages” of employee rules and knew the entire structure needed to change.

Breaking the Stranglehold

As Anderson stated in Fortune, “There was a time for hierarchical, command-and-control organizations – the 19th century, to be exact, when many workers were illiterate, information traveled at a snail’s pace, and strict adherence to rules offered the competitive advantage of reliability.”

The modern reality is different. Today’s Bayer employs highly skilled experts, operates at digital speed, and competes in markets where, as Anderson observes, “the most reliable companies are the most dynamic.”

The challenge wasn’t just the encyclopedic rule book. The organization’s “12 levels of hierarchy” created what Anderson called “unnecessary distance between our teams, our customers, and our products.” In today’s innovation-driven market, this industrial-age structure threatened the company’s future.

Unleashing Innovation

Anderson’s solution? “Dynamic Shared Ownership” – a radical model that puts 95% of decision-making in the hands of the people actually doing the work. Instead of annual budgets and endless approvals, self-directed teams work in 90-day sprints with the autonomy to make real-time decisions.

The results are already showing. Take Vividion, Bayer’s independently operated subsidiary. Operating in small, autonomous teams, they went from FDA approval to first patient dosing in just six weeks. They’re now on track to produce one or two new drug candidates for clinical testing every year.

Speed Becomes Reality

The impact extends across the organization. Bayer’s scientists have transformed their plant breeding process, reducing cycles from “five years down to merely four months.”

In the consumer health division, teams have accelerated their development timelines significantly, reducing product launch schedules “by up to nine months” in Asia. Within their first two months under the new system, these teams generated millions in additional value.

While financial markets remain uncertain about this transformation, one crucial metric suggests it’s working: employee retention has improved. The scientists, researchers, and product developers – the people doing the innovative work – are showing their confidence in this dramatic shift toward autonomous operation.

Why This Matters & What to do Next

For most of us, the question isn’t whether our organization has too much bureaucracy – it almost certainly does. The question is: what are you going to do about it?

Try this – Create a small, autonomous team with a 90-day mission. Give them real decision-making power and see what they can accomplish when freed from bureaucratic constraints.

Remember Anderson’s key insight: reducing rules from 1,000 to 900 won’t create meaningful change. Real transformation requires the courage to fundamentally rethink how work gets done.

For anyone who’s ever felt the soul-crushing weight of bureaucracy, Bayer’s radical reinvention offers hope. Maybe the path to innovation isn’t through better rules and processes, but through the courage to trust in human potential.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2024

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2024 Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are December’s ten most popular innovation posts:

Top Six Trends for Innovation Management in 2025 — by Jesse Nieminen
Best Team Building Exercise Around — by David Burkus
You Are Doing Strategic Planning Wrong (According to Seth Godin) — by Robyn Bolton
Why Annual Employee Experience Audits Are Important — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
Don’t ‘Follow the Science’, Follow the Scientific Method — by Pete Foley
Artificial Innovation — by Braden Kelley
Dynamic Thinking — by Mike Shipulski
The State of Customer Experience and the Contact Center — by Shep Hyken
The Duality of High-Performing Teams — by David Burkus
Uber Economy is Killing Innovation, Prosperity and Entrepreneurship — by Greg Satell

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in November that continue to resonate with people:

Leadership Best Quacktices from Oregon’s Dan Lanning — by Braden Kelley
Top Ten Uses for a Customer Journey Map — by Art Inteligencia
The Power of Cultural Competence in Leadership — by Greg Satell
Components of a Good Digital Strategy — by Howard Tiersky
Customer Experience Audit 101 — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

SPECIAL BONUS: While supplies last, you can get the hardcover version of my first bestselling book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for 44% OFF until Amazon runs out of stock or changes the price. This deal won’t last long, so grab your copy while it lasts!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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What Separates Truly Revolutionary Leaders from Everyone Else

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What Separates Truly Revolutionary Leaders From Everyone Else

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1919, Mahatma Gandhi, who had long established himself as a revolutionary leader of uncommon strategic acumen, called for a general strike throughout India to protest unjust laws levied on his people by the British. It was, at least at first, an enormous success. In Mumbai, for example, 80% of shops closed their doors.

Yet things soon got out of hand. What began as peaceful protests against oppression turned violent. Riots broke out. The moral high ground that Gandhi so coveted—and relied on to accomplish his objectives—would crumble under his feat. Things ended with a horrible massacre at Amritsar. Gandhi would later call it his Himalayan miscalculation.

Yet that wasn’t the end of the story. Not by a long shot. He not only admitted his mistake, he vowed to learn from it. Ten years later, when the opportunity presented itself, he took a very different tack, which led to the Salt March and became his greatest triumph. It is often the ability to learn from mistakes that makes the difference between success and failure.

A Flash Of Insight That Would Overthrow A Dictator

One day in 1998, a group of five friends met in a cafe in Belgrade. Although still in their 20s, they were already experienced activists and most of what they experienced was failure. In 1992, they had taken part in student protests to protest the war in Bosnia. Yet much like the #Occupy protests that would later spread across the world, they never amounted to much.

In 1996, they took to the streets to support Zajedno, a coalition of opposition parties aligned against Slobodan Milošević. Although the ruling party clearly lost at the polls, the Serbian dictator annulled the election. Massive protests broke out, but unfortunately, the opposition coalition was unable to maintain unity and it was all for basically naught.

It was these defeats that they began to examine in 1998. They took a hard look at what had worked and what didn’t. They knew that they could get people to the polls and they knew that if people went to the polls they could win the Presidential election coming up in 2000. They also knew, from bitter experience, that if Milošević lost the election he would try to steal it.

So that’s what they planned for. They created a movement called Otpor that was steeped in patriotic imagery from the World War II resistance. It grew slowly at first, amounting to only a few hundred members after a year. But by the time the elections came around in 2000, Otpor’s ranks swelled to 70,000 and had grown into a potent political force.

When the Serbian strongman tried to falsify the election results massive protests, now known as the Bulldozer Revolution broke out. This time Otpor was able to enforce unity among the opposition parties, having lost the confidence of the military and police forces, Milošević was forced to give in. He would later be extradited to The Hague and die in his prison cell.

The Epiphany That Would Lead To The Lean Startup

In 1999, the day before his eighth startup went public, Steve Blank decided to retire at the age of 45. With time to reflect, he sat in a ski lodge and began to write a memoir with a “lessons learned” section at the end of each chapter. “In hindsight, it was a catharsis of moving from one part of my life to another,” he told me.

What he realized was that the idea a business started with was always wrong. Sometimes it was off by a little, sometimes it was off by a lot, but it was always wrong. The key to success was not a better idea, necessarily, but identifying and fixing its flaws before you ran out of money. To do that you needed to go and talk to customers.

“I was 80 pages in when I realized there was a pattern. When I sat inside the building things didn’t go very well, but when I got outside the building things turned around and got much better,” he remembers. Pursuing customer development even before product development was the essential insight behind the Lean Startup movement.

Today, lean startup methods have gone beyond startups been proven useful for large corporations, scientific institutions and even government agencies. The essential epiphany that made it possible came not from divine enlightenment, but rather through hard examination of two decades of mistakes and the will to change tack.

The Unmasking Of The Most Deadly Disease

In 1891, Dr. William Coley had an unusual idea. Inspired by an obscure case, in which a man who had contracted a severe infection was cured of cancer, the young doctor purposely infected a tumor on his patient’s neck with a heavy dose of bacteria. Miraculously, the tumor vanished and the patient remained cancer free even five years later.

Looking to repeat his success, he created a special brew of toxins designed to jump-start the immune system. Unfortunately, he was never able to replicate his initial results consistently. His idea was met with skepticism by the medical community and, when radiation therapy was developed in the early 20th century, Coley’s research was largely forgotten.

Yet his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts, kept the dream alive. With a $2000 grant from Nelson Rockefeller she founded the Cancer Research Institute in 1953 to study immunological approaches to cancer. While mostly dismissed by the medical community, it did inspire a small cadre of devotees to keep looking, albeit mostly in vain.

A breakthrough came in 1996, when a researcher named Jim Allison published a landmark paper that added a new twist to the mystery. Allison had a hunch that Coley’s initial insight that our immune system can fight cancer was correct. However, he had discovered a “switch” that would shut off the immune response and believed that he could switch it back on.

As it turned out, Allison got it right and would win the Nobel Prize for his discovery of cancer immunotherapy. Coley’s initial idea wasn’t wrong, exactly, just incomplete. He had a piece of the puzzle, but not all of it. What he failed to see was the diabolical nature of the disease itself, some forms of which, “learned” to outwit our immune system by switching it off.

Unfortunately, we can be proved “right” in the end, and still fail. Every idea is flawed in some way, it’s just that sometimes those flaws are more disabling than others.

To Change The World, You Must First Conquer Yourself

There’s nothing quite like the rapture of an epiphany, that initial flash of insight which is still pure and innocent, before the harsh realities of the world muck it up with a bunch of inconvenient facts, corollaries and exceptions. That’s when we can give ourselves to it wholeheartedly, without equivocation or bearing the burden of creeping doubt.

Yet our ideas never turn out like we think they will. To succeed, they must grow and adapt to the world around them. Gandhi, fresh off stunning victories gaining rights for Indians in South Africa, didn’t realize how his methods could go so horribly awry. The Otpor activists, Steve Blank, William Coley and so many others had similar blind spots.

What I’ve found in my research of revolutionary changemakers is that what makes the difference between success or failure isn’t necessarily the brilliance of the initial idea or even the passion and diligence of those who work to bring it about, but their ability to learn things along the way. They didn’t merely stay the course, they corrected it as many times as they had to until they won.

Unfortunately, most never learn that simple lesson. They would rather make a point than make a difference and wear their failures like a badge of honor. After all, who but the most righteous could inspire such opposition? And who but the most pure could continue to persevere in the face of such constant defeat?

That’s the really tough thing about change. To truly bring it about, we first must change ourselves.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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Taking Ownership with a Tool for Better Team Dynamics

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Taking Ownership With a Tool for Better Team Dynamics

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Whether you’re a leader or team member seeking to foster empowerment, accountability, and overall team growth, this card is designed for you.

It’s part of our Team Dynamics Cards and thus our suite of leadership growth and team dynamics tools aiming to boost team collaboration, performance, and communication. We develop such tools and approaches to ignite team discussions, inspire self-reflection and guide actionable steps.

Get in touch if you and your team would like to know more about our Team Dynamics Cards and how we can tailor this to your needs and interests.

Today’s Card: Taking Ownership

Category: Empowerment & Accountability

Our exploration leads us to understand the importance of encouraging team members to fully embrace their roles and responsibilities. By setting precise expectations, endorsing self-reflection, and cultivating a culture of mutual accountability, we can empower team members and enhance their sense of responsibility in their daily tasks.

Principles:

Set Clear Expectations: Promote understanding of each team member’s roles, responsibilities, and the goals they are working towards.
Practice Self-Reflection: Advocate for team members to assess their own performance, identify areas for improvement, and set personal growth targets.
Hold Each Other Accountable: Foster an environment where team members support each other in achieving their goals and taking responsibility for their actions.

Reflection Questions:

1) Reflect on your current demonstration of ownership in your role and responsibilities within the team. Where do you see room for improvement?

2) Evaluate the level of accountability practiced within your team. How can this be amplified?

Action Questions:

1) What specific measures can each team member adopt to enhance ownership of their roles and responsibilities, and how can these actions be monitored and tracked?

2) How can your team cultivate a culture that supports and encourages individual and collective accountability? What concrete actions can be implemented to demonstrate this commitment?

If you find this card valuable and want to delve deeper, we’re offering a free test-deck of Team Dynamics Cards as well as a more complete set of tools around topics like high performance teams, team dynamics and leadership growth.

Simply like this post, and send me a message or comment expressing your interest. We can even tailor the deck to your team’s needs and preferences in a pilot project.

In return, we would appreciate your feedback on the concept and your experience using the cards and tool. Your insights will help us refine and improve our offerings for future users. Let’s collaborate to elevate your team’s dynamics and personal development of its members.

Image Credits: Pexels

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There is Nothing Without Trust

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There is Nothing Without Trust

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If someone treats you badly, that’s on them. You did nothing wrong.

When you do your best and your boss tells you otherwise, your boss is unskillful.

If you make a mistake, own it. And if someone gives you crap about it, disown them.

If someone is untruthful, hold them accountable. If they’re still untruthful, double down and hold them accountable times two.

If you’re treated unfairly, it’s because someone has low self-esteem. And if you get mad at them, it’s because you have low self-esteem.

What people think about you is none of your concern, especially if they treat you badly.

If you see something, say something, especially when you see a leader treat their team badly.

A leader that treats you badly isn’t a leader.

If you don’t trust your leader, find a new leader. And if you can’t find a new leader to trust, find a new company.

If someone belittles you, that’s about them. Try to forgive them. And if you can’t, try again.

No one deserves to be treated badly, even if they treat you badly.

If you have high expectations for your leader and they fall short, that says nothing about your expectations.

If someone’s behavior makes you angry, that’s about you. And when your behavior makes someone angry, the calculus is the same.

When actions are different from the words, believe the actions.

When the words are different than the actions, there can be no trust.

The best work is built on trust. And without trust, the work will not be the best.

If you don’t feel comfortable calling people on their behavior it’s because you don’t believe they’ll respond in good faith.

If you don’t think someone is truthful, nothing good will come from working with them.

If you can’t be truthful it’s because there is insufficient trust.

Without trust there is nothing.

If there’s a mismatch between someone’s words and their actions, call them on their actions.

If you call someone on their actions and they use their words to try to justify their actions, run away.

Image credits: Unsplash

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Nordstrom Still Acting Like a Startup

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123 Years Later

Nordstrom Still Acting Like a Startup

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

In 1901, John Nordstrom and Carl Wallin opened the original Wallin and Nordstrom shoe store. Twenty-two years later, a second Nordstrom shoe store opened. Today, according to Nordstrom Company Facts, there are 360 stores in the U.S., including 93 Nordstrom stores, 258 Nordstrom Rack stores, two clearance stores, six Nordstrom local service hubs and online e-commerce websites for Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack.

In the past 123 years, much has happened and many retailers have come and gone. There have been stock market crashes, wars, economic issues, pandemics and more. Yet Nordstrom has weathered these storms and has continued to own a reputation for incredible customer service and convenience.

Robert Spector is an author and Nordstrom expert, having written five books on Nordstrom, the most recent titled, The Century-Old Startup: The Nordstrom Way of Embracing Change, Challenges, and a Culture of Customer Service. I had the chance to interview him about the book and how Nordstrom has remained a viable brand for more than a century.

Spector’s first answer was short, and as the title of the book implies, the leadership has a startup mentality. Its leadership is quick to make decisions and keep up with changes in the economy and customer expectations. Here are some of the top takeaways from our interview:

The Nordstrom Handbook: This is a legendary story. Nordstrom has one rule: Use good judgment. The company hires good people, trusts their ability to manage customer interactions and empowers them to make good customer-focused decisions.

Training: Training includes sharing examples of how other employees have solved problems and taken care of their customers. Legendary customer service stories (such as the story about an employee giving a refund for a used set of tires) showcase how Nordstrom treats its customers, which in turn inspires and motivates employees. These stories emphasize how important it is to find ways to exceed customers’ expectations.

Supporting Social Causes: Customers prefer brands that support the same social causes they do. More than just giving back to the community, Nordstrom also understands that embracing social responsibility includes respecting diverse values and perspectives and adapting to different cultures for both employees and customers.

Technology: You can’t continue to do business like you’ve always done. Nordstrom has shown that it can adapt to the new ways of retail. Spector writes that Nordstrom has embraced technology. Its philosophy is to try it. If it works, great. If not, move on. At the same time, the company recognizes that its reputation is tied to its legendary customer service. They have found ways to embrace e-commerce and adapt to the ever-changing needs of customers and how they buy. Spector says, “Balancing technology with personal connections and understanding the importance of human interactions is key to creating a differentiated and exceptional customer experience.”

Embrace Transformation: Retail continues to evolve, and new iterations of Nordstrom prove that the only constant you can count on is change. Yet one thing that doesn’t change is Nordstrom’s theme of focusing on the customer, regardless of the changes it has made, which includes opening Nordstrom Rack, clearance stores and e-commerce.

The overarching theme to all the ideas that Spector shares about Nordstrom is that, from the company’s very beginning, they have recognized the power of the relationship they have with their customers. Delivering a level of service that sometimes isn’t expected results in a reputation that has kept them relevant for more than a century. Spector sums this up by saying, “Ultimately, it’s about how decisions positively impact the customer, not just the company.”

Image Credits: Pexels

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com.

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Why CIOs Should Co-Lead Customer Experience

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GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Forrester recently gathered top Customer Experience (CX) professionals from around the world for the Forrester CX Forum in New York. For the uninitiated, CX is the discipline of defining the step-by-step customer journey from marketing through sales and service. It defines the key capabilities, content, and interfaces that need to be present at each customer touchpoint and how those touchpoints work together to form a cohesive experience.

At the conference, extensive data was presented to support the argument that delivering a seamless customer experience is more important than ever. In fact, it’s the primary way digital disruptors, like Uber and Amazon, are taking share from more traditional brands.

Forrester found that from 2011 to 2015, revenues for companies that scored near the top of the Forrester CX Index™ outgrew that from a group of companies who scored poorly (CX laggards in Forrester’s terminology) by more than five to one.

But who is actually in charge of CX, and who should be? Many CIOs classically would respond that these types of matters―the design of the website, its features, and generally how we interact with the customer―is the responsibility of marketing or other areas of “the business.” Once “business” decides what they want, IT will build and support it – that’s the breakdown of responsibilities. For the CIO, this may seem to be the most efficient arrangement, as they have plenty to worry about and sometimes it’s nice to be able to identify something they don’t have to focus on.

But in testing this classic mindset through conversations with many of the CX experts at the Forrester Summit, I heard a strong, unanimous dissent with this traditional view. The view of the CX community is that to deliver great results in customer experience, senior IT leadership must be intensively involved in the full CX lifecycle, not merely a recipient of requirements when it’s time to write some code, and not merely kept apprised in an “FYI” type fashion. For example, Ori Soen, General Manager of Medallia Digital, a leading provider of CX software, offered, “We clearly see that when CIOs and their IT teams are customer-centric and focused on CX, the organization is able to generate much better business outcomes from its CX investment.”

These experts point to successful CX companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Airbnb, where the development teams and business teams are working as one unit, making decisions about the experience, and implementing it together.

As Daniel Davenport, Managing Director of Liquid Hub, an agency that focuses on customer engagement, articulated, “I think it is important for the CIO to have a voice at the table and co-create the ultimate solution.”

But as busy as enterprise CIOs and their key lieutenants are, I pressed the CX experts at the Forrester Forum as to exactly why it’s truly essential that the CIO be so aggressively involved in CX and what the specific areas of value are. After speaking with some CX professionals, I derived five key areas of significant value that are derived from CIO involvement in the CX process.

1. Art of the Possible

CX innovation sits at the intersection of customer need and the ever-changing landscape of what is technically possible. It’s too abstract for CX professionals to define requirements and ask IT to figure out how to make them work if the CX teams don’t have a good sense of what they have to work with. New technologies from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Virtual Reality to In-memory computing make it possible to do things today that were impractical just a year or two ago. But IT can’t be expected to “brief” CX professionals on every technology in the world. Instead, the process needs to be a collaboration of those studying what customers need and those studying what technology is newly enabling so that they can pool their knowledge and find new intersections where value can be created for the customer and the company. That only happens when IT is intimately involved in the ongoing process of considering the next generation CX.

2. Understanding Level of Effort and Dependencies for Prioritization and Planning

In an enterprise, there are typically many systems and many simultaneous programs going on that impact what can be implemented, when it can be implemented and with what level of effort. CX teams need to be constantly considering how their visions intersect with the technical reality of enterprise IT to develop CX roadmaps that aggressively bring new capabilities to market, but don’t crash headlong into other initiatives, system upgrades, or compliance issues.

Furthermore, CX design requires the continuous balancing of the customer’s optimal experience and various business considerations, including the cost of implementing new capabilities and the cost of supporting them. A significant component of these cost factors is IT. Therefore, there is a constant and ongoing need to both understand from IT what the level of effort might be for any given enhancement, and perhaps even more importantly, IT should be a creative collaborator in thinking about how to optimize technical approaches so that great CX ideas can be implemented with a sensible value equation. To do this effectively, IT can’t just “cost out” requirements provided by the business, but needs to be “on the inside” to understand what is really trying to be accomplished. Sometimes the answer that works economically relies on a different set of requirements than that which was initially envisioned, and an engaged senior IT partner can get creative with their colleagues to search for the best value equation.

3. Measuring CX

Measurement is a huge component of CX. The goal of CX is to move the customer through a journey from awareness to consideration to purchase to advocacy and loyalty. Many discreet components make up this journey across various touchpoints: the emails sent to customers, individual features of an app, the information available to call center representatives, and the way returns are handled. The constant obsession of CX professionals is, “How do we make this process better so the customer is more delighted and the business outcome is even more robust?” But to do so, it is essential to constantly measure the impact of each individual component of the customer’s mindset and behavior. Measuring these many interactions is often complex because it requires collecting data across many different touchpoints and then being able to correlate it so as to figure out the puzzle of causality. That requires understanding enterprise data and how to connect it across very diverse systems ― an expertise that IT needs to bring to the table.

In addition to the enterprise systems themselves, there are many excellent and deeply technical tools that support the CX measurement process. CIOs need to be deeply involved in these systems just as they would in finance or HR systems. I spoke with David McBride, a CX expert and Director of Product Management at IBM who argued, “CIOs have long been focused on creating technology to help businesses operate; when they participate in the CX process, they get to see data or even videos of customers and how they may be struggling to move through the current customer journey.” IBM’s Behavioral Analytics tool (formerly known as Tealeaf), for example, offers tools that record user sessions for analytical purposes. McBride notes, “There is nothing like seeing a session replayed to illustrate the extent of a particular struggle.”

4. True End-to-End Perspective

Lastly, in enterprises very often there isn’t just one CX initiative, but many, focused on different products, channels, touchpoints, or customer segments. The office of the CIO can often make sure that the ultimate customer experience is achieved by making sure that there is cohesion to both the technology and also the management of data across these different initiatives.

I spoke with Angela Wells, Senior Director, CX at Oracle about this, “At Oracle, what we have seen is that the CIO can and should be essential to CX decisions. What has happened at a lot of bigger companies is that they have made many ‘one-off’ decisions about what they thought were best-in-breed solutions in separate [areas of the business], and then the data didn’t talk to each other. It all got pretty sporadic and expensive, and it didn’t really deliver the customer experience [desired]. So, what we have found is that CIOs have become a centralized source for thinking about what’s going to happen to that data. They are thinking more of an umbrella; what’s best for the whole company, not just what’s best for my little niche?”

As small steps in customer experience grow into a larger program, you run the risk of chaos if there isn’t someone with the broader perspective. Dimitry Grenader, VP Product Marketing at Luminoso, a leading player in the AI arena, expressed this passionately, “In this day and age, CX should not just be left to marketers. Software is eating the world, and being able to put together the right platform will ultimately determine the success or failure of the efforts. Everything in today’s world starts as a feature, then becomes a product, which in turn becomes a platform, and finally becomes the operating system. If you don’t have the right operating system, you are building a castle on the sand.”

“I believe that a CIO must at the very least be a strong stakeholder, if not the driver of the CX process.”

Oracle’s Wells summed up this shift in terms of the evolving role of the CIO in our new digitally transformed world, “If you are thinking of the CIO as that straight tech-minded person, you are going to miss out on that more modern CIO that is a Chief Innovation Officer who takes responsibility to figure out how we make the most of what we are spending on technology to deliver the best customer experience.”

5. Changing the Way IT Operates

Finally, the level of transformation required to enable enterprises to deliver on their customer’s digital expectations may require a significant transformation in many facets of how IT operates, so it’s important for the CIO to deeply understand this difference.

As Forrester Vice President and Research Group Director Sharyn Leaver summed it up, “Compelling experiences, delivered digitally, separate CX winners from laggards. Firms that lead their industries to customer experience aggressively embrace business technologies to help win, serve, and retain customers — and they do so at rapid pace. This requires intense involvement from CIOs and their teams. Not at an arm’s length. But through ongoing collaboration and innovation.

“CX brings new prominence to technology’s role, but also new pressures on CIOs. The pervasive need for digital experiences exposes old systems, static organizations, and especially outmoded cultures that cannot deliver at the speed of the customer. For the CIO, this is much more daunting than merely spinning up a digital or mobile team. For many, success will require an overhaul of their organization – the people, processes, governance, and technology itself.”

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Unsplash

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