Most organisations create a strategy combining a direction for their activities and a business plan to guide delivery of their objectives. Typically, the overall strategy document contains functional detail in the form of a Marketing Strategy, Sales Strategy and IT Strategy.
Also typically, the piece that is missing is the Customer Strategy or Service Strategy, an omission that can have a hugely detrimental impact on the prospects for success.
Customers are the only group likely to experience the outputs of your entire business; all functions and activities affect customer experience either directly or indirectly, so it is crucial that all are aligned in terms of their quality and focus. Any activity that cannot be mapped to customer benefit should be subject to close scrutiny and possible conversion. It is critical to understand your service ambition and the customer experience you want to provide and how you are going to deliver that consistently across all channels.
Some organisations have a tendency to refer to ‘back office’, usually sweeping up a range of administrative activities that are not obviously customer-facing. Loose vocabulary can set the tone for employee disengagement from the organisation and from it’s objectives and values.
At Customer Journey Consultancy, we believe that it is important to map all functions and activities against customer impact as well as to the organisations broader strategic and tactical goals. We believe that this mapping will engage employees by providing a sense of direction, a sense of purpose and a sense of value/contribution, effectively translating the strategy so that it stops being ‘something that the Directors do’. Engagement is imperative, as services need to work as well for employees as they do for customers, otherwise quality will be degraded by short-cuts and work-around practices.
If you are interested in our ‘translation’ services, please call Stephen Grey or Martin Wright.
