Designing a Customer-First Service Organisation

Overhauling your customer experience is no easy feat, but it offers countless benefits. Here Zendesk’s Caitlin Keohane, SVP, Global Customer Advocacy and Zoe Koven VP, Customer Advocacy share their tips on how best to embark on business transformation and ways to keep on track.

Business transformation is a fundamental shift in how your company conducts business and will impact staff, processes and technology. It involves a large amount of change management, but is a critical component in driving sustained growth.

If you’re looking to transform your customer experience (CX) there’s a number of steps you’ll want to take. These include improving customers’ digital self-service experiences through the use of automation and bots. 

In addition, you’ll want to move away from unauthenticated channels like Talk and Chat to something more asynchronised like Zendesk’s Messaging platform. 

When’s the right time to overhaul your customer experience?
It’s key to start your transformation when there’s no friction in the business – when you’re still driving a positive customer experience.
 
Perhaps you’ve stagnated, you haven’t brought in new technology and you’re seeing your competitors do things that are more innovative? Whatever you do though, don’t wait until you’re in crisis as you won’t be in a good position to think about scale, timeframes and resources.
 
Key areas of focus when transforming your customer experience
There are three key areas of focus when looking to transform CX within your organisation.
 
1 - Strategic context
Ask yourself what’s happening with your business and the market that’s setting the stage for your transformation. Right now, this could be the demand for conversational experiences.

Set a maximum of 3-5 goals and ensure they are measurable – this is especially important if you’re doing something completely new.
 
Also set baselines, or at the least set and validate goals as you go.
 
2- Organising your team
This can make or break a transformation project.
 
Your team is probably cross-functional so will require thought around set-up. Identify the people who will be your key advocates and organise a steering committee within your company to help with resourcing, defining milestones and driving the project forward.

 3- Momentum
It’s important to bridge the gap between your vision and the ultimate execution and also how to create and maintain momentum throughout the entire process.
 
Focus not only on where you are nailing your key goals and use feedback to improve, but also on incremental progress and celebrate mini-milestones to ensure your team remains motivated. 

To ensure you retain momentum, your team should have four key roles:

• Program lead – creates timelines, milestones and ensures the program is on track
• Business lead – creating the service design, establishing the vision
• Solution architect – translating the vision into reality with the technical architecture
• Tech lead – driving the team and running the day to day execution

Collaboration is key to success, but it’s also important to have workstreams defining everyone’s individual bodies of work, each with their own milestones. Otherwise, it’s hard to set incremental delivery.

In summary, to design a customer-first service organisation you will need the following:
Service design with a vision statement and measurable goals.

• Sponsorship from your CEO/senior leadership team.
• Cross functional effort, so you need clear accountability in your program framework.
• Focus on incremental change to keep momentum.