Jason S. Bradshaw argues organizations need a clear North Star for customer experience and 3-5 core pillars like "be easy" or "make it human" to guide behavior and measure improvement. Use these pillars as a simple test to evaluate whether processes actually work.
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Hi and welcome to Talking Points with Jason, the live edition. Of course, each fortnight I have a newsletter that comes out called Talking Points as well. You can subscribe to that at Jason S. Bradshaw.com or on LinkedIn, whichever platform suits you best. And as always, if I can help you in any way, you can reach out to me on my website, Jason S. Bradshaw.com or. Or Jason S. Bradshaw on all social networks. I look forward to connecting with you. Now, today we're going to talk about making an intentional valuable customer experience. And I asked the question in the description, are you creating an intentional customer experience? Are you every single day being intentional about the way you serve your customers, or are you leaving it up to chance? I once worked for an organization where for two years, every month I would repeat, what was the main goal of our customer experience program and what the three to five. In the particular example, there were five core pillars of that program. There was no confusion about what we were aspiring to deliver and what the key elements were that would allow us to deliver it effectively. There was a mission, if you like, a North Star, of what great customer experience would look like. And then the test of whether we were delivering it was in those core pillars. Did we deliver in harmony each of those five core pillars? Now, in every organization I've worked at, I've taken and that I've worked with, I've taken the same approach. Define the North Star of what customer experience is. Then define the three to five core pillars. Now, I would say out of experience, you probably only need three, maybe four core pillars. By the time you get to five, people are forgetting. I know it sounds odd, but by the time you're getting to five, people really do seem to forget all five. So three, they can do easily, four, usually at a pinch. But five, it takes some more work, doesn't matter, whatever is right for your organization. Three, four, five, maybe it's two. But you have your North Star supported by your core pillars. And then those core pillars in and of themselves should become a coaching tool, but also a guiding force in how you do business and how you behave. So let me give you an example. Let's just say one of the core pillars was be easy. And then you see someone creating a process that puts 15 steps in front of a customer, achieving something, success, achieving the goal of buying a product, using your product. Well, the very simple question you have from that is, how is that being easy? How is that making it easy for the customer or for the employee? It disarms conflict because you're not Saying they're not great. You're not saying that person's doing the wrong thing. You're simply asking a curious question around how they believe that those 15 steps are delivering against one of the core pillars. You may have a pillar around making it human. So someone goes and introduces an AI bot to serve customers well, then you can have a really good conversation around. So is this making it easy and making it human? How does this work together? And while there'll be cases where you can't get a perfect answer, it's that intentional thought, that critical thought to the work that you're doing and the way that you're doing it against. However you define those pillars of success, that means that you end up delivering a better experience to your customers and a more consistent one. And importantly, you understand the formula for improvement. So if one of your pillars are make it easy and you go from five hours to three hours in order fulfillment, well, they've still got a decent period of time there that you can improve it to make it even easier, right? Or if you go from 50 clicks to 20 clicks while you've still got 19 clicks that you could potentially eradicate or at least be challenged to justify that you still need those 19 clicks. My point is simple. In business, if you want breakthrough success, you need to have clarity around what it is you're trying to achieve, the way or the how you're going to achieve it. So the behaviors that support that North Star. And then you need to measure yourself against how you're delivering across each of those pillars. When you do that, while you may not be perfect every single time, you'll be moving towards great every single time. And that will allow you to break through and have great success in your business. As always, if you're struggling in your business to break through and have success, whether it be through sales or marketing or customer employee experience, I am here to help. I have programs for businesses of all sizes and individuals. So feel free to reach out or visit my website, Jason sbradshaw. Com and I look forward to the next time I get to speak to you and to surf you. Have a great day.
