How We Built Personio’s Three-Year CX Strategy
Without Strategy, Execution is Aimless
We recently talked about the DNA of Customer Experience, the story behind why we exist, what we provide to our customers, how we work as a team, and how we measure success. In a following article, my colleague Micaela Arizpe Narvaez, then shed even more light on how we measure success through goals, KPIs, and operational drivers.
Today I’ll dive into how we created our strategy that helps us focus as we drive toward our success metrics. For this, let’s go back in time to see how we developed our department vision and strategic pillars. The process is universal, so you can follow it for your own team’s strategy or even on company-level.
Back in 2020 we formulated a three-year strategic plan for Personio. This plan was designed to give us guidance through several dimensions, like regional focus, new products, and company profiles. However, we felt that there were more specific aspects and nuances that the company-wide strategy didn’t sufficiently cover for a customer-facing organisation. Because of this, we started work on an additional, department-focused strategy that looked at where we want to be in three years (our vision), and guidance on how to get there (our strategic pillars). The combination of both, company and department strategies spanned a wider field, allowing each team to set more effective individual goals.
As we always strive to be inclusive at Personio, we used a bowtie-like approach to organise the involvement in our entire organisation. The bowtie is split in four phases:
- Starting broad with collecting opportunities and challenges with the entire team
- Narrowing down and consolidating that content in discussions with all leaders
- Formulating a vision and strategy in the smaller management team
- Finally using the same groups as above for carrying the communication back to the organisation
💡 Collecting Input
Once a year, Personios from across all offices gather in Munich to celebrate and reflect on our culture, work on team topics, and, of course, have fun together. We call it the All Company Culture Week or “ACCW”. As one of our core company values is #CustomerEmpathy, part of this event, also revolves around our work with People and HR teams.
The whole CX function dedicated half a day looking into the future and imagining what serving 10x our current customer base would mean for us. We started with an introduction on our plans around product expansion, internationalisation, and shifts in the customer base (e.g. size distribution) in order to provide context. The key takeaway from this discussion: Our customer base will continue to grow larger and more diverse with time. We then split into small, cross-functional groups to answer a series of questions in a simple start-stop-continue format. What are we doing well? What should we continue to invest further in? What should we change or even stop doing? What new opportunities should we look into?
Each group had a mix of roles and experience levels, naturally leading to lively discussions on each topic. At the end of the session, each party had identified, grouped, and prioritised specific challenges and opportunities for the future of CX at Personio.
💬 Discussing and Consolidating Topics
After gathering each group’s output from the ACCW workshop, our next step was to cluster the challenges and opportunities identified into one summary. This overview included 16 statements, such as:
- Improvable structure and find-ability of tribal and product knowledge
- Customer engagement models not yet tailored enough to offer the perfect mix of high-touch and self-serve support for each customer
- Ensuring that we keep hiring the best people, culture- and skill-wise, at scale
To gain better insights, we then spent two hours in our monthly Leadership Circle to browse through all the comments, explain the current situation, draft the desired state, and list potential obstacles. These deeper discussions helped to create more awareness within the leadership team, and the respective summaries served as briefing material for the upcoming strategy offsite.
🏔️ Identifying and Formulating a Strategic Direction
With the comprehensive briefing in our back pocket, the management team headed off to an intensive offsite in the Austrian Alps. Our goal was to walk out with a clear view of where we want to be in three years, and a formalised strategy to get us there. We were joined by David, Executive Coach and Sidekick from ForChiefs, to facilitate an effective and efficient workshop.
ForChiefs, and David in particular, has partnered with the Personio for a few years now. Based on those experiences, I can highly recommend including a neutral moderator in your organisation’s workshops so that everyone in the team can be fully involved in discussions. In our case, the ongoing partnership with David meant we had someone with contextual knowledge of the company, product, and team, but who was not involved in the day-to-day.
Part I: Purpose and Vision — The Why
We kicked the first day off by defining the role that we want to play for our customers, our team, and the company. This exercise was about empathising and aligning on the needs and expectations that key stakeholders have of CX at Personio. This collection of statements later became a key input for drafting our vision.
Step two focused on envisioning what tomorrow’s success should look like. In this related exercise, every participant had time to draw a picture of that future — and everyone was encouraged to think big. The drawings helped us to talk through qualitative and quantitative measures of success, leading to distilled statements that would help inform our vision and strategic pillars.
Lastly, each participant formulated a (big, hairy, audacious) vision statement, which we then combined in one shared sentence. We thought of the vision as an internal marketing slogan: inspiring, and memorable. Ultimately, it’ll become the mantra your teams should use as general guidance for their work, and as an anchor for decision making.
At the end of the day we had formed our vision statement, staking our desire to create “The most remarkable B2B experience through impactful interactions that drive our customers’ success so they stay forever.” It paints a bold picture of the future that we aim to build and emphasises points which are specifically important to us, such as:
- Creating innovative, memorable, and impactful experiences
- Adapting our engagement to different segments to achieve optimal self service and human-touch mix for every customer
- Becoming experts in our customers’ work
- Driving adoption, guiding on what success means, and eventually calculating customer ROI
- Working towards 0% avoidable churn
Part II: Strategic Pillars and OKRs — The What
With a freshly baked inspirational vision, we began to define the strategic pillars. Strategic pillars are designed to be the guardrails for the work that’s needed to achieve the vision over the course of two to three years. They also provide a foundation for building better Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
To draft each pillar, we revisited the summary of qualitative success as well as connected measurements. As those were mostly high-level statements, we then collected additional snippets to better align on the meaning. For example, one of our pillars is to “Enable our people to craft remarkable customer experiences”. The additional details for this pillar could be “empower everyone to focus on their mission”, “zero distractions”, “knowledge and news management”, “customer obsession”, and more. Those words are then later used for writing the descriptions around a pillar, like what you can see in this slide below:
These CX pillars are not only a subset of the company’s strategy, but also provide guidance on other dimensions of our work — and how one contributes to the success of the other.
As our workshop moved to drafting the OKRs for each pillar, we asked ourselves what would need to happen in the next six months and the next year in order to achieve each pillar. The answers helped to frame our Objectives (qualitative, inspirational outcomes), which we then took with us to create Key Results (quantitative measures) for together with the teams.
Like when drafting the pillars, we always kept both company and team strategy in mind when setting OKRs, as both help clarify what is and isn’t important for the business. Team-level OKRs can play either into company-level or team-level strategy, or, in many cases, both. Here you can see our process, as we worked backwards from our future aspirations to defining the pillars, Objectives, and Key Results that would get us there:
Bonus: As you can imagine, discussions around strategic direction bring up a lot of different views and opinions. We used two simple yet highly effective tools throughout the off-site to keep us on track during our discussions. First, throwing an Elmo — which stands for “Enough, Let’s Move On” — into the conversation is a lighthearted way to stop the group from over-discussing topics.
The second tool we used is the principle of 80% Agree, 100% Commit. This is useful when some people still feel that more alignment is needed on a decision, and can help isolate sticking points so the group can move one. If everyone is beyond 80% agreement, we expect 100% commitment.
✨ Communicating and Executing the Strategy
Strategy is not the result of planning, but its beginning. Following the offsite, we prepared briefing artefacts to share the outcomes (see bowtie above). The first version included a lot of context and background on the decisions for our leadership team. Later we developed a crisper version to share with the entire organisation, in alignment with our company value of #Transparency.
The vision, strategic pillars, and CX OKRs were then used as guidance for planning and prioritising initiatives in different teams for the upcoming half year. In fact, we now prioritise department projects based on an “impacted pillar” attribute. This helps each team, and the overall CX organisation, to focus on projects that move us forward in our strategy. At the same time, clearly defined success metrics and operational drivers ensure that we have a consistent framework of measurements for the success of those initiatives.
From that point, it is about ensuring our strategy is the consistent thread through all communication. We constantly repeat the vision and pillars, be it ad hoc when completing initiatives or as part of our regular ceremonies and new hire onboarding.
Investing so much time and effort into thinking through where we want to go, and how we intend to get there, really pays dividends. Now our entire Customer Experience organisation has a clear, scalable story to share with everyone. For that reason, I can only recommend that every organisation or team — especially fast-growing ones — invest in a similar process.
