Experience Rules!
"The challenge of getting org-wide buy-in...occurs most often when a visible disconnect exists between your brand, customer expectations, and your strategy. Even if they are aligned, it's difficult to execute if your people aren't empowered to do so with new ways of thinking and working, cultural alignment, and an operating model aligned to bring the strategy to life."
- Michael Hinshaw and Diane Magers
At the heart of the book, Experience Rules! The Experience Operating System (XOS) and 8 Keys to Enable It, is a capability maturity framework that helps organizations be more human centered, driving continuous improvement in their customer experience (CX). In the words of the authors, your XOS “bridges the gap from organizational strategy and structure to individual moments, to cultivate genuine human experiences.”
The book was a collaboration between Michael Hinshaw and Diane Magers. Michael is founder and president of McorpCX . He’s on multiple lists of who’s who in the XM space, including Top Twenty Customer Experience Leaders to Follow, Top Customer Experience Influencers, and the CX Hall of Fame. Diane Magers is founder and CEO of Experience Catalysts and is a past CEO of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) . Before hanging her own shingle, Diane was a CX leader at AT&T Business Solutions and Sysco Foods.
A key theme of the book is establishing a closer linkage between CX initiatives and business outcomes, getting beyond chasing survey scores like Net Promoter Score (NSP), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). While directional indicators and a source of insights when companies go deeper with analysis of the customer journey, these benchmarks are typically weak and lagging indicators for business value. This was a focus at this year’s CXPA Leaders Advance event, where Michael and Diane presented findings from their work applying their capability maturity framework with CXPA members. While three-fourths of execs say CX is important, only 40% say they currently link it to business value.
Even as the field matures, most experience management (XM) professionals don’t yet have any formal XM credentials, like the CCXP from the CXPA. Most XM leaders come from departments that have a stake in delivering a great CX, such as marketing, product development, sales, customer success, and contact centers, rather than starting out with roles focused specifically on XM. Regardless of where XM sits in the organization, CX leaders are looking for ways to apply a multi-disciplinary approach that bridges organizational siloes to create measurable improvements in metrics the C-suite cares about. Michael and Diane’s book provides an actionable guide for how to do this.
Another key theme in the book is building deeper insights into the emotional connection customers have with your brand. The book dives into how to apply human-centered design principles using personas, journey maps, and storytelling to focus design efforts on peaks in the journey where emotions make them more meaningful and memorable. The authors focus on how the gap between a customer’s expectations and perceptions of the experience evokes emotions, and these emotions in turn drive how they feel about the customer experience overall. They lay out a causal chain where how you make customers feel along their journey reinforces ongoing behavior, i.e., a loyalty loop, and leads to better financial outcomes.
I couldn’t agree more. Emotions are at the core of the CX and Culture Connection, which is the title of my own book and podcast. Your employees’ behaviors have a direct impact on CX by evoking emotions at peaks in the customer journey, as well as an indirect impact through how your employees collaborate on the design and delivery of customer and employee experiences. Michael and Diane make culture one of the 8 keys in their CX maturity model and spend significant time in the book discussing how to take a culturally sensitive approach to change management.
The 8 Keys to Your Experience Operating System (XOS)
It’s often said that XM is a team sport, as it requires collaboration across the enterprise and benefits from a multi-disciplinary approach. Creating greater alignment on how your CX supports your business strategy and brand promise makes it easier to develop sustained support for a roadmap of CX initiatives and reinforce a more customer-centric culture. Michael and Diane lay out an 8-part Experience Operating System (XOS) that leaders can apply to drive measurable progress. The 8 keys for the XOS are:
1. Strategy & Vision
2. Alignment & Accountability
3. Customer Understanding
4. Design & Innovation
5. Experience Measurement
6. Business Processes
7. Technology, Digital & Data
8. Culture
They show these as a virtuous cycle around Humans in the center, reinforcing the importance of taking a human-centered approach.
The first key, Strategy & Vision focuses on aligning your CX to your brand promise and business strategy. This clarity helps employees make decisions that support the business strategy where your CX is congruent with your brand promise. The authors share how personas, customer journey maps, and storytelling can be used to foster shared understanding and prioritize where to focus for experience design efforts.
The second key, 360-degree alignment, is about prioritizing a portfolio of CX initiatives and continuously reinforcing collaboration and accountability for how teams deliver on them. Michael and Diane also share several complementary ways you can build and reinforce this alignment, including setting up an Experience Council of cross-functional executive sponsors; stakeholder engagement to build shared understanding, align on your roadmap, and address change management needs; a dedicated core team with the right skills, resources, and leadership support to drive your portfolio of CX initiatives forward; Experience Champions to clear a path for those teams; and program management, which they refer to as the “last mile” of experience delivery across the organization.
The third key, Customer Understanding is about keeping the voice of the customer top of mind to reinforce more outside-in thinking to complement more typical inside-out approaches when making business decisions. Again, personas, journey maps, and storytelling are key tools to develop this shared understanding.
Design & Innovation, the fourth key, focuses on taking a more systematic approach that gets at the root causes of friction along the customer journey and solves for customer pain points more holistically. The authors call out the importance of Design Thinking as a body of skills, practices, and methodologies to reinforce a “culture of intention and innovation.” They emphasize the value of bringing together teams with a diverse talent stack to collaborate on your CX initiatives, and that design thinking is most successful in cultures that encourage learning, testing, and iterative experimentation. In my own book and podcast, I include Design Thinking as one of several cornerstone disciplines you can focus on, along with others like Agility and Quality Management, to build a cultural movement that fosters adoption of more customer-centric behaviors that evoke the right emotions along the customer journey and gets your growth flywheel spinning faster.
The 5th key, Experience Measurement, enables a more holistic view across the organization to optimize desired behaviors. Your XOS empowers your employees to bring the organization’s mission, vision, purpose, and values to life through their behavior. It also provides a continuous feedback loop to measure and adjust your progress, as well as KPIs to measure value realization. As discussed earlier, XM leaders don’t just chase survey scores, they build an actionable system of metrics that link to business value.
The 6th key is Business Processes, which are the “coordinated steps or activities that a company performs to serve a customer’s needs, deliver a product or service, or address a customer’s request or complaint.” The authors discuss how, all too often, companies take a bolt-in approach, layering new reporting and process changes on top of one another rather than redesigning the way work gets done. Taking a more holistic approach is key to removing friction from the customer and employee experience and realizing greater business benefits from lowering your cost of quality. The authors again emphasize how friction evokes positive or negative emotions from customers and employees, which impacts business outcomes.
The 7th key is another enabler, Technology, Digital, and Data, that reinforces a more integrated approach to transformation and boosts the ROI from your CX and EX investments. But you won’t get the benefits without approaching this key as part of a holistic XOS. Many transformation efforts fail because they approach change from a tech-push lens. When combined with other XM best practices for a human-centered approach, and when change management is done in a way that taps into rather than fights your culture, you can accelerate your ability to turn insights into action and drive a continuous improvement cycle.
The final, 8th key is Culture, which amplifies the impact of the others. As the authors illustrate, being truly customer-centric requires changes in how teams collaborate on the design, development, delivery, and measurement of experiences. Leaders need to not only communicate the need for change and reinforce it at multiple touchpoints in your change journey but also translate shifts in mindsets into habitual behaviors.
Reinforcing a More Customer-Driven Culture
Michael and Diane call out the “4 C’s of change leadership” to elaborate on how to build a cultural movement for a more customer-centric organization. The first is Clarity of the vision, as well as creating accountability for measurable benefits. The second is Commitment, reinforcing behaviors that define your culture. The third is Communication, using storytelling to establish a stronger emotional connection with the organization and your portfolio of CX initiatives. Finally, Capabilities are the ways you fuse investments in people, process, technology, and data to drive a consistent set of business outcomes. Your XOS provides a framework to prioritize and sustain focus on closing capability gaps for reaching your vision.
I appreciate the sustained focus on culture and behavior change to realize your CX vision and put your XOS into place. In my own professional journey, I have learned to focus on culture and building habitual behaviors as the key to successful transformation efforts. It isn’t enough to set the vision and communicate it repeatedly. Communications create space for change by influencing mindsets, but they don’t move behavior in a sustained way. That requires leadership focus on a system of change that reinforces behavior adoption. It’s often said that the best way to move mindsets on a sustained basis is to act your way into them. This works best when there is also clarity on the specific cultural behaviors that support your mission, vision, purpose, and values. Ideally, you’ll map these behaviors to how they evoke the right emotions along the customer journey that reinforce your brand promise. You can then apply the right formal and informal change levers to drive behavior adoption and make them regular habits, including a balanced approach across formal mechanisms like hiring, role clarity, learning and development programs, and metrics, as well as informal means like storytelling, rituals, symbolic acts, and employee recognition.
I trust that you’ll find value in reading the book and hope you’ll tune in for my podcast with Michael that will come out in September.
If you’d like to check out other podcast episodes, go to www.cxandcultureconnection.com You can also find other book reviews by clicking here.
I hope this sparks some great ideas for you and energy to act!