Part II: Delivering on your Success Goals

Part One Click Here

In part one, you defined success so how are you going to get there?

The How:

Your success as either an employee of a company, a consultant, business leader, vendor working with this company is to help business solve “How” to deliver on their Corporate Goals.  As mentioned, most leaders have a vision of what success should look like, but many may admit they don’t know the best way to go about it, especially in today’s incredibly fast and competitive world.  Not everyone is an expert in technology and process.  So many options and where to focus?!?! How can you navigate your way to “Destination Success?”

After defining success, we need to understand the requirements. To illustrate, let’s take a look at another example:

The Business Owner Has a Dream:

As a business owner, wouldn’t it be cool if your customers can use their earned points on their loyalty/rewards program to purchase products from your available supply chain that talks directly to your ERP system? Let’s create a brief list of requirements:

YOU NEED:

• Voice of your customer and a way to track the VOC
• Your IT DEPARTMENT to help architect and manage your data to avoid those silo-purchases that don’t play nicely with other systems
• Different ways to configure your offerings
• Different ways for your customers to buy on their terms that suit your business. (One-time, versus seasonal, versus monthly, etc.)
• Analytic tools across all systems
• A way to segment and customize your branding to your customers
• A way to incentivize sales teams that are competitive and relevant
• Systems to communicate with each other that keep customer data secure

YOU MAY NEED:

• IoT sensors and tracking to monitor and log diagnostics for your products
• A way to optimize Partner Management to increase sales
• Multi-currency and multi-language
• A way to handle the exponential growth in customer and product data
• More self-serve and real-time-serve service tools
• Customized phone apps for your customers

Jotting down the requirements was easy, but that was a LOT of requirements.

How Can One Possibly Deliver on All These Requirements and How Can Executives Possibly Keep up with the ever-changing landscape?

It happens. As a business leader, you know what success should look like and you may even know the specific areas of your business you should change that will make you more successful; but not everyone has all the answers of how to deliver on goals with the changing landscape.  

Although no two customers I’ve worked with followed the exact same path to their modernization and transformation, I’ve found eight primary commonalities in those programs that were successful in their transformations:        

1. Always start with the customer.  In order to reach “Destination Success,” you need a Map. Customer Journey Maps to be specific. Many companies today have internal Customer Experience Departments and regularly run workshops across the organization to keep employees focused on a consistent, customer-focused culture.  If your company doesn’t have this resource internally, there are plenty of 3^rd parties and consultants available to facilitate these CX journeys for you.  
2. Focus on the value.  Whether you are using agile, Six Sigma or other Performance Improvement methodologies; dust off those project prioritization skills and identify those projects that provide the most value to your customers, company strategy and goals.  Align it to the Customer Journey Map you did in #1. You may find out the project that adds the most value to customers and to the organization may not be the one causing you the most headaches.
3. The Business Needs to Involve IT.  Sometimes the business is known to take matters into their own hands.  I’ve seen many times where the business needs to move faster than IT and Operations will allow and will take it upon themselves to purchase and or utilize products that cause grief later on.  Have you
4. IT Needs to Involve the Business.  On the flipside of #3, if IT is involved in making system decisions, IT needs to have a strong feedback loop from the business to make sure business requirements are thoroughly addressed.
5. Plan Long-term.  If you just keeping plugging holes and only fix your immediate problems without focusing on solutions that address your future needs, you will continue to re-live the same story like Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day.
6. Business Process Standardization. Conduct workshops to minimize business processes where it makes sense.  If you’ve ever done any business process mapping, you tend to map the current state, find either cracks in the process that are causing a financial drain or uncover areas for financial opportunity. The financial opportunities are areas you can innovate. Align your different divisions on similar processes and utilize similar terminology prior to the implementation of any new system.  “I love re-work,” said no one ever.
7. Be flexible.  Your organization may have to phase your transformational approach due to the current environment.  Perhaps you have multi-currency, multi-language, mergers, acquisitions, existing contracts, or dependencies out of your control that will require delays in different areas.  Find a way to address it, make a plan, and move on.  
8. Celebrate and Share Your Successes. Success seems to breed success – just ask the New England Patriots! It is important to acknowledge the successes of your projects both within your organization and externally. Your internal teams have a model they can replicate and your customers will see you as the innovative disruptor you always knew you were.

This list is not meant to be an exhaustive and meant to highlight those areas that can help business leaders deliver on the corporate goals.  You’ve hired the best people you can afford and like you, they are experts in their area of the business.  It is impossible for you to be an expert in everything so utilize and bring these talents together where you have them and utilize 3^rd parties where you may have gaps. 

Feel free to reach out to me for any additional guidance or to suggest related CX topics that will resonate with your existing CX projects. Wishing you continued success in your transformational CX journeys!

This post and this blog are solely the personal opinion of the author.