Today, businesses are quickly aligning their marketing, sales, and customer support teams as it is proven to improve business relations with clients. Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers as per
Forbes. To get insight from an expert on how to launch a new CX program, Colin Crowley, the VP of Customer Experience at Freshly, sends his recommendations below.
We asked,
“What recommendation(s) would you provide to someone launching a new CX program, or attempting to improve on their existing strategies?”
Colin:
My main piece of advice to those building CX programs – and I will reference most specifically my experience in the customer support space in particular – is twofold: First, you should focus on infrastructure early and often and spend time and resources creating the skeletal foundation out of which your organization will growth. Infrastructure is very important to ensure that an organization functions efficiently and intelligently and it becomes more difficult to build and develop over time as more and more people (and therefore more and more complexity) is added into your organization. The early stages of any program provide a unique opportunity to set the rules and processes around which everything else will function and also provide early directional focus, forcing you to prioritize the components of a longer-term strategy and think more in-depth about what sort of organization you want to build.
Second, you should shoot for excellence early as well, as opposed to kicking the can down the road and assuming you’ll conquer excellence when your organization reaches a certain threshold of maturity. It is easy to defer excellence when you’re relatively young as a company or an organization – and there are some forms of excellence that you may have to defer, logistically speaking – but, aside from pure logistical constraints, you should aim for KPI excellence early in your history.
By hitting those targets, it (even morally) commits your organization to continue hitting them, because no CEO wants to show their shareholders a chart with a line heading in the wrong direction – and that, in turn, makes you more mindful about investing in excellence as your organization grows and prompts you to develop scaling strategies around maintaining excellence, rather than letting cost concerns dominate primarily on the basis (often unfulfilled) that you’ll invest in excellence later.
