Building strong foundations for experience management (XM) Building strong foundations for experience management (XM) Building strong foundations for experience management (XM)

Great experiences rarely happen by chance. It takes a strong vision and strategy coupled with a solid experience management (XM) program to ensure you save (and gain) both time and money. The good news is that you might already have more assets within your organization than you think to make it happen. So, what are you waiting for? Now’s the time to leverage them!

No building stands the test of time without strong foundations. Foundations don’t need to be too complex but definitely have to be robust. In XM – as for the drive of your entire business – it all boils down to:

• A vision to define the direction
• Strategies to serve that vision
• Organizational strategic alignment
• A culture which provides the motivation to work together for better performance

To be successful, it is important that your Customer Experience (CX) or Employee Experience (EX) vision matches your organization’s mission, vision and purpose. It must fulfil your brand promises. The first step might be to check that these elements are well-defined and fully aligned.

So, here comes the strategy. Most importantly, remember this: You won’t get anywhere without defining how you’ll get there first. Whatever your vision might be, you must be able to finish the following sentence: “To achieve our vision, we will…” You might need more than a strategy to achieve your goals. And always make your strategies simple and easy for everyone in your organization to understand.

It is then about aligning your activities to the strategies. More than the quality of the strategies themselves, it is your capacity to execute them that will make the difference.

Success is a joint effort. Conversely, failure could be at the hands of a single team member. Having everyone sailing in the same direction and understanding the path to the destination will have a huge impact on your capacity to deliver your promises. Although a CX team executes your CX/EX strategies, XM spans the entire organization. It must be owned by the C-suite, driven by all managers, and adopted by all employees.

To pin company values up on the canteen wall is not enough to build a culture. Turn your desired brand experiences into a joint quest, take care of your employees, and ensure that they all adhere to your target statements. This is something that starts before the hiring process and must be part of a continuous people management program.

“It is not the strongest that survives, but the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.” – Charles Darwin

Our expectations, as well as our perceptions when confronted with a situation, continuously change. This is because our behaviors are shaped by factors including past experiences, personal observations of others, our environment, and even our mood at any given moment. The recent pandemic or current momentum around ESG topics are good examples of circumstances that influence us.

If organizations want to deliver the best experiences, they must be ready to adapt to change at an extremely high pace. They cannot rely on generalities and must regularly take stock of their understanding of their customers.

A decade of commitment and effort to bring agility in operations certainly pays off! Do you have scrum masters or agile teams within your staff? Good! You’ve already got one of your XM program success ingredients on board.

In a nutshell, XM is:

• Understanding your customers by centralizing data and insights in a central place that facilitates the mapping of customer journeys in real time.
• Identifying points to improve, both in the way you conduct your XM operations and the delivered experience.
• Launching and driving your initiatives in an agile way, focusing on those that bring the most value, aligning with the business owners and journeys and testing your initiatives before large scale deployments.
• Defining the key success metrics to continually measure experiences and retrospectively analyze the impacts of your initiatives.
• Adapting your VoC, VoE, and VoP processes to collect the most relevant feedback.
• Nurture your communication and people management programs to ensure organizational alignment and strengthen company culture.
• Close the loop and repeat again after sharing your learnings for eventual strategy adaptation with the C-suite and managers.

This simple operating model can help you accelerate your organization’s XM, as it not only focuses on structural aspects, but also on bringing solutions to the most urgent expectations.

Want to know more about pre-existing frameworks and methodologies to accelerate that transformation? Get in touch now and see how KPMG can help you shape your future.

This blog has been written together with Jean-Pascal Nepper.