Change Management Strategies For Enhancing User Experience

Let’s be honest, the “Listen, Analyze, Act” model just isn’t enough anymore. CX teams need to move faster, focus sharper, and deliver results everyone in the business can see. That means making outcomes core to your approach, and making sure you energize the entire organization around what matters. How do you deliver on “Outcomes > Action” as the new mantra over “Listen—> Analyze —> Act?” First, unify your data. Easier said than done, but you have to pull together every signal from surveys, tickets, chats, ops data, and social feedback. Use AI to create a real-time, connected customer view, so you’re not just looking at snapshots, but seeing the bigger story as it unfolds. Second, interpret what you find. AI can surface intent, risk, and opportunity in ways traditional methods miss. Zero in on what actually drives the experience and impacts the business. This is where you separate noise from the signals that count. You should also be thinking about how this impacts revenue, cost-to-serve, and your company’s culture (not just customers). Third, orchestrate targeted action. AI can help you prioritize and automate interventions, whether that’s routing cases, suggesting next-best actions (or product), or personalizing experiences at scale. Every action should have a clear line of sight to the business outcome you’re after. Measurable. Fourth, focus on the outcome. Set non-negotiable, measurable goals: revenue, retention, cost to serve, or employee engagement. Every initiative, every improvement, should be traced back to these metrics. Celebrate when you move the needle and be honest about what didn’t work. Finally, energize the business. Change only sticks when you bring others with you. CX leaders have to rally stakeholders, share early wins, and make progress visible. This is about building belief and momentum so everyone feels ownership of the results. How does this look in real life? Imagine that renewal rates among small business customers are falling. You unify data across channels and use AI to interpret that a recent product change is causing confusion. You orchestrate a fix by launching in-app tutorials or targeted outreach, and equip the frontlines with talking points. You measure the outcome by tracking renewal rates, then energize the business by celebrating the improvement, sharing the story, and holding teams accountable for continued results. Listening, Analyzing, and Acting are important. But the framework is what, 15 years old or more at this point? It needs to evolve given businesses, technology, and customers have evolved. Don’t keep following the same old script. Challenge the status quo. Action with purpose, a business energized around outcomes, and AI as the catalyst for lasting impact is the start. #customerexperience #leadership #ai #changemanagement #outcomesoveraction

#CustomerExperience leaders need to split their strategies into deliberate bottom-up and top-down approaches. Many get the bottom-up right, but they struggle with the top-down. Bottom-up strategies focus on improving customer-centric employee behaviors at scale. These approaches include #CX or empathy training for front-line workers, using Voice of Customer feedback to set touchpoint expectations based on customer feedback, and building customer-centric KPIs into individual performance appraisals. But where many CX leaders struggle is often with engaging senior leaders to influence their customer-centric behaviors. It's difficult to influence C-suite behavior, but if you're expected to improve customer-centric culture in the organization, then you cannot avoid this. Top-down strategies start with showing senior leaders how customer satisfaction impacts growth, retention, margin, and lifetime value. It also includes improving CX and VoC reporting to provide more recommendations and actions, not just findings and data. Having discussions with leaders about the importance of financial and non-financial rewards for customer-centric behaviors is another tool in the top-down toolkit. And using personas and journey maps is a vital way to convert customer and touchpoint data into a compelling story of necessary change. Don't rely on dashboards and reports to do the job of top-down CX engagement. Don't count on a couple of positive customer-centric comments from leaders as a sign of meaningful, irreversible support. And do not assume that the fact your CX job exists is evidence of senior leaders' commitment to customer experience. Part of the job for a successful CX leader is to constantly prove the value of customer-centric strategies, influence senior leader priorities, and arm decision-makers with the insight they need to make customer-centric decisions. Don't just empower your frontline workers and assume the job is done. If you aren't building a consistent dialog with executives, you're not only missing an opportunity to make the most significant customer impact but also seeding future problems that can lead to declining support, budget, and resources for customer experience initiatives. Take a comment today to identify or define your top-down and bottom-up CX strategies for 2024. If there's an imbalance, solving that now can lead to better outcomes by the end of this year.

Bad customer experience (CX) is costly. But worse than the cost is the damage it can do to your business. We’ve all seen the fallout from poor customer interactions—lost sales, negative reviews, and damaged reputations. That’s why it’s crucial to prioritize and enhance CX. Here are key strategies to implement: ➡ Map the Customer Journey: Each click and interaction shapes their perception. Create detailed personas to uncover needs, behaviors, and pain points. ➡ Process Inventory: Identify inefficiencies, like delayed shipping, by mapping the customer journey and tracing issues back to their roots. ➡ Ethnographic Research: Study customers in their natural settings to gain insights data alone can't capture. Align strategies with genuine customer expectations. ➡ Cultivate a Customer-Centric Culture: Follow Tesla’s lead—ensure every employee is driven to enhance CX, fostering continuous feedback and adaptation. ➡ Leverage Data: Use a 360-degree view of each customer to predict needs, personalize interactions, and exceed expectations. Don’t cut corners when it comes to improving CX. Focus on these strategies to drive loyalty and revenue. It’s worth it.

Friday honesty: Customer-centricity is a lot harder to maintain than it seems. Even for those of us in Customer Success. The tendency is always to drift toward making our processes and focus company-centric rather than customer-centric. Don't believe me? Just look at one example of this: Customer Journeys. Many teams say that they have a defined Customer Journey. But rather than actually being oriented around the customer, for many the journey map is a list of activities from the company's perspective that are built around milestones the company cares about (contract signature, go-live, renewal, etc). I know about this, because I've been guilty of it in the past myself. I confuse my activity list with a customer journey and wonder why customers aren't as successful as they'd like. While important, that isn't a customer journey. It's an activity list. It's a rut none of us mean to fall into, but it's the natural drift because we live and breathe our own organization. So what do you do about it? How can you adopt a more customer-centric mindset in this area? TRY THIS APPROACH INSTEAD: 1. List out the stages your customers' business goes through at each phase of their experience with your product. Use these to categorize journey stage, rather than your contract lifecycle. 2. For each stage, list out what their experiences, expectations, and activities should be to get the results they want. Don't focus on listing what YOU do, but rather focus on listing what a customer does at each phase of their business with your product. List out the challenges they'd face, the business benefits they'd experience, the change management they'd have to go through, the usage they'd expect. Think bigger than your product here. 3. Then map what support a customer would need to actually accomplish these desired outcomes at each stage of the journey. Think education, change management enablement, training, etc. 4. Based on all of the above, you're finally ready to start identifying what your teams do to support the customer. ____________________________________________ Following a process like this helps build customer-centricity in 3 ways: 1. It causes customers to be the center of how you decide which activities are most important to focus on. 2. It empowers your team to become prescriptive about what customers should be doing for THEIR success. 3. It exposes what you don't know about your customers' business. And if you don't know something, just ask them. Don't make assumptions when you can instead talk to your customers directly. Avoid the company-centric drift, fight to maintain true customer-centricity however you can. This isn't just a nice to have in 2024. It's a business imperative that's important for any business to survive in this climate. But I want to hear from you! How do you guard your org from drifting to company-centricity? #SaaS #CustomerSuccess #Leadership #CustomerCentric

What do most Customer Success teams get wrong about user adoption? It takes more than communication and training to change people’s behaviors. Damon Centola, a noted social network scientist, says there’s a big difference between hearing about something and creating new norms. Well-connected influencers can quickly get the word out, a phenomenon Centola calls a simple contagion. Like COVID-19 in the early days, news can travel exponentially fast. Add some resistance, however, and Centola says the contagion becomes complex—spreading it takes multiple exposures. For example, if you see a neighbor put their yard waste to the curb, you’d do nothing. But if three neighbors did the same thing, you’d ask what’s happening. After learning that there’s a special waste pick-up the next day, you’d clean up your backyard, too. It’s the same thing for technology. Once peers adopt, the social pressure’s on to adopt, too. In successful transformations, the wave starts small, progresses to adjacent groups, and after a tipping point, mass communication accelerates the change everywhere. The difference in this approach is astounding: 90% adoption versus only 3% relying on mass communications alone. The lesson? If your solution depends on changing the habits of many users, don’t rely exclusively on training and communication. Use social network analysis tools like the one pictured from Polinode to reveal the hidden change agents. Then work with your sponsor to target them, score an early win, and expand along the perimeter before converting the masses. You’ll get substantially higher adoption and your economic buyer will get maximum ROI. Integrate change management into your customer journey with scientifically proven methods. Contact me directly or see the Comments below. #customersuccess #customersuccessmanagement #cx #saas #revenueoperations #changemanagement