Signature Experience

The Signature Experience, by Karen Root, is an engaging and thoughtful book that makes a powerful argument that to deliver exceptional customer experiences, CX leaders need to engage all the employees in the organization to reinforce a customer-driven culture. Sure, there are specific opportunities you can tackle that will move the needle for your CX, whether new digital experiences that reduce friction on the customer journey, improvements to how your call center agents engage with customers, or reinvigorating product and service innovation. However, without a broad-based approach that instills a deeper and more broadly held appreciation for what employees need to do to deliver on your brand promise across your leaders, managers, and frontline employees, you can’t truly transform your customer experience.

Karen recognizes that every organization is a living entity. Energy flows in the organization, which is boosted or reduced based on the motivation and commitment of your employees. Karen shows how your employees can help renew and reinvigorate the energy in your organization through their own contributions to your Signature Experience. Karen’s focus on how to treat your organization like a living entity, where your people contribute to its overall health, shares much in common with Norman Wolfe's book, The Living Organization, which I reviewed and included at the end of one of the chapters in my own book, The CX & Culture Connection. Karen builds on this theme, showing how your employees act as brand ambassadors to spread energy through adoption of behaviors that align with your Signature Experience.

The Signature Experience also shares some themes with another book featured in The CX & Culture Connection, Clued In by Lou (Lewis) Carbone. Like Lou, Karen emphasizes the importance of creating a deeper emotional connection with your customers that goes beyond the functional benefits of a product or service. Karen emphasizes the value of building alignment for a shared set of personas and journey maps across the organization. She discusses the importance of modernizing your approach to CX listening to generate more meaningful insights to guide the development and ongoing progress in realizing your Signature Experience. Like Lou, Karen also recognizes the value of treating your employees as an equally powerful source of insights to support your CX innovation and continuous improvement efforts. Lou refers to this as Clue Consciousness. Karen shows how encouraging your employees to contribute to your Signature Experience helps reinforce their sense of pride, further boosting the energy of the organization.

In this way, The Signature Experience provides a powerful framework to link together customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX). Karen shows how by focusing on employee behaviors that enable your Signature Experience, you can deliver a huge impact across your system of metrics that align to your Signature Experience (not just survey scores like NPS or CSAT but operational and outcomes data) through many small steps over time. Given the importance of human-to-human interaction across your customer journey, employee behaviors are what make congruence of the CX with your brand promise more emotionally engaging and drive higher customer loyalty and lifetime value. Strengthening your customer listening and behavior measurement capabilities to track whether your desired behaviors are scaling across your broader employee population is key to reinforcing the congruence of your CX with your brand promise. Using a platform like Qualtrics to mine your unstructured data (e.g., call centers, chat, messaging, social media, ratings and reviews), allows you to build much deeper insights into whether the way your employees “show up” with customers is congruent with your brand promise. Taken together with other operational and outcomes data, this is very valuable feedback to be able to guide your training and coaching efforts.

Karen focuses on two core elements for creating your Signature Experience. First is building organizational alignment on the brand promise. Second is developing deeper insights into the wants, needs, pain points and delights of customers to deliver a more differentiated experience that delivers on the brand promise. Crafting your Signature Experience starts with understanding your core values and purpose, and then building deep insights across personas and moments that matter on your customer’s journey to identify ways to better deliver on your brand promise. To truly deliver on your brand promise, you need to analyze the behaviors, beliefs and norms that are prevalent among employees and whether the culture is aligned with your desired brand promise. Creating a shared understanding of personas and embedding their use across the organization helps you to identify gaps between your CX and brand promise and drive continuous improvement to close those gaps. There should not be different personas across teams for the same exemplar customers. Sharing knowledge and insights across internal teams will reinforce alignment of behaviors.

Finally, Karen emphasizes that creating and sustaining a Signature Experience is a journey that companies go on together with their employees. I couldn’t agree more! This is at the heart of the layered metaphor for the name of my own company, JourneySpark Consulting. First, your customer is on a journey. Second, your company is on a journey to be more customer-driven and bring your brand promise to life. Third, your employees – across your leaders, managers, and frontline employees – are all on a journey, too. Being proactive in how you build a movement in your organization that taps into and amplifies your employees’ energy is key to creating the highest ROI on your investments in CX. I’m excited to share this review of Karen’s book to help you all on your own respective journeys!