CX & benefits of collaboration with HR

lintu1In my previous post I discussed the company internal collaboration between Customer Experience people and Finance & Control. Today, I want to take up another important collaboration partner, Human Resources.

Again, collaboration means joining forces, providing expertise, two-way help and support, saving efforts and breaking cross-organizational silos.

Strategic focus on customer centricity requires change management

A CX transformation program introduces the need to refocus on customers. Among other things, it means changing established practices, learning new things and unlearning old habits. This usually requires engaging, motivating and mobilizing employees, developing new ways of working, building competencies etc. When a CX organization is responsible for facilitating the transformation, they need agents to help make the change happen. Colleagues from Human Resources can play a key role here.

Developing CX competencies

One of the first tasks in a CX transformation program is to ensure that all stakeholders in the company understand what the company’s CX vision and strategy are and what the company intends to achieve with its CX goals. The next step is to learn more about the concrete things, like tools, metrics, available data, reports, projects and achievements. A successful CX initiative ensures that everybody involved has an awareness of priorities and the necessary skills and competencies to contribute to the common goal.

The size and complexity of the organization has a big impact on how the awareness and competencies are realistically built. CX collaboration with HR gives possibilities to come up with good learning solutions. Integrating CX into existing competence development programs rationalizes many of the efforts.

CX targets in rewarding programs

When CX is a strategic focus area, a company usually monitors at least one customer metric as one of its key performance indicators. KPI’s in turn are cascaded into employees’ targets and compensation plans. And it is true that rewarding is an effective way to guide and accelerate actions.

CX people are experts of customer metrics, they know the data that is available, and they can help HR with proposals of realistic incentive targets – either based on numeric customer data, maturity of deploying customer centric practices, or on actions taken.

Recruiting and retaining CX-minded people

It is self-evident that customer orientated mindset is essential for customer-facing employee groups, and skills and qualities needed to provide excellent customer service should belong to their recruitment criteria. In today’s business, customer mindset should not only be limited to the front line. Ensuring consistently delightful customer journeys requires customer focused mindset and collaboration across all organizational groups.

And of course, it’s not just about hiring people with customer focus. Today, there is more and more discussion about the correlation between happy employees and happy customers. Here again we have a topic that should be on the agenda for both CX and HR.

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