Key Drivers for a Customer-Focused Implementation

Technology is often viewed as a holistic solution to business problems. As wonderful and convenient as we know technology to be, it can also reflect the problems perpetuated within an organization.

A lack of vision and cross organizational alignment on how to best serve customers leads to low adoption and ineffective functionality. And when implementing technology, organizational alignment needs to be in place in order to create and carry out a unified vision.

My entire career has been focused on experience led transformation and the human centered change required to adopt new ways of working — across systems, processes, experiences and behaviors.

I started in IT consulting, helping customers automate processes and workflows. At that time, we created very functional interfaces with gray screens, dropdowns and radio buttons, but not optimized for a user’s experience.

As we all are growing accustomed to streamlined user experiences that are easy, intuitive and delightful, older interfaces can feel outdated and hard to use in comparison. Customers seek to engage with companies with smarter, more personalized experiences that help them easily achieve their objectives.

At Salesforce, I lead our Experience Design (XD) team. We work with our customers to help them create insight-driven experiences and solutions to help them strengthen their customer relationships.

What makes XD most valuable is that we act as the bridge between strategy and implementation: we unite the customer relationship focused vision with the behaviors, capabilities and tools necessary to make that vision a reality.

It all begins with a clear idea of what success looks like.

ALIGNING AROUND A VISION

Aligning on a vision for how technology should support customers is necessary in delivering a successful customer experience.

When our customers orient around a shared vision for how the technology serves the customer, it allows the new technology to be implemented to fulfill their goals.

By identifying the ideal solution and validating it prior to investing significant time and money in implementation, we have seen companies increase user efficiency by 2x, reduce development time by 75%, and deliver solutions 2x as fast.

Validating the experience will meet user needs and enable a user centered mindset — introducing new development habits by experiencing the power of a user-centered approach first-hand.

A unified vision affects everything — products, processes, practices, services, systems, and ultimately the customer.

Silos create the biggest challenge to alignment. Across sales, service, and marketing, often the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. This results in a variance in processes and practices between teams, organizations, and regions.

In order to break down organizational silos, lines of communication must be open and collaboration must be embraced. If an organization can rally around the customer and their needs, they can find common ground around the needs of the customer at each step in the process, and then collaborate to establish the best ways to address them.

What does this look like in practice?

Putting the customer first. Align all goals and strategies around the customer experience and make sure everything ladders up to that core value. Prioritize funding and programs that keep the customer at the forefront and ensure that it will benefit them. Have all leadership participate in getting to know your customers to build empathy. We do this by leveraging our personas and customer-satisfaction metrics such as Net Promoter Score® and Net Adoption Score.

Knowing what’s ‘good’ and how to measure it. Have clarity about what ‘good customer experience’ means for your organization and identify the quantitative and qualitative signals you need to know you have been successful. What kind of relationship do you want to build with your customers? What metrics show that you’re achieving that? You cannot fix what you cannot measure.

And then, how are you incentivizing your organization around those measures? Because behaviors follow incentives.

Creating a customer engagement strategy. Based on what ‘good’ looks like, come up with a clear strategy for customer engagement by leveraging customer data across functions and processes derived from a single source of truth.

This is no small feat. Orchestrating functions and teams around shared data, common goals, and integrated tools for the good of the customer is hard work. But it is essential to transform vision into reality.

And then, that reality has to reflect in company culture.

CULTURE MINDSET SHIFT

For organizations to orient around the customer, cultural and behavioral changes in the way work is prioritized and accomplished have to be reinforced. Our customers come to us seeking a ‘digital transformation.’ However, the term implies that the transformation is technological. The real transformation comes from how people work.

At Salesforce, we engage our Human Centered Change team to apply the LEVERS model: a heuristic that provides a comprehensive way of organizing the personal, social, and structural forces and landscape within an organization to promote and sustain new ways of working.

Here is a look at that framework to guide successful change of work culture.

Leadership — Are leaders demonstrating their support, updating their teams, responding to questions, leading the way? Communicate the “why” behind changes in addition to the “what”; shared purpose creates alignment and clarity.

Ecosystem — Are people at all levels across the organization being reached, involved, and encouraged? Establish clear roles, responsibilities and ownership when new changes are rolled out. Create opportunities to connect employees across teams to build visibility into the work happening within the organization.

Values — Has the reason for the change been clearly communicated? The connection to what people care deeply about influences how a person is intrinsically motivated to think or act. Design experiences around key change events (e.g., announcing new leadership, announcing changes to team structures, onboarding/standing up new teams) to create a sense of belonging.

Enablement — Do people have the information and knowledge they need to adopt the change and associated new behaviors? The information, tools, training, and resources available to help people do their jobs. Build a comprehensive plan for communicating and engaging with stakeholders throughout the change effort.

Rewards — Does the incentive landscape align with the new change? Would any additional incentives help move the change along? Ensure rewards strategies are aligned with key behaviors. Our rewards recognize and incentivize key behaviors that support effective change management.

Structures — Are the necessary policies, processes, and systems in place to support the change? The collective set of systems and processes both govern and enable work, how data is handled and shared, and how decisions are made to drive objectives. Establish a more formal handoff process from leader to leader when team members move.

A cultural shift will not happen overnight, but it will over time. As leaders, it is our responsibility to advocate for the vision, encourage and model new behaviors, and reiterate the change we want to see. It is equally important to empower your teams of employees so they can successfully deliver on the vision.

EMPOWER EMPLOYEES

Employees are often faced with too many systems that are not well integrated. Understanding the challenges of your frontline is key to a successful technology implementation that will enable them to deliver a great customer experience.

Once your workforce is aligned and incentivized around delivering a world class customer experience, they become your best source of insight into what’s not working well.

Research the employee experience. Find out what challenges your employees are experiencing in completing their work and any pain points in their processes. How are they using the tools or technology? What improvements would best support them in serving the customer?

Provide the right data. Having the right data refers to everything the sales, service, or marketing professional needs to engage in a meaningful relationship with customers. It is necessary for employees to understand what the customer wants, what they need, and what problems they have come across in the past.

Make it an intelligent experience. Leverage customer data across functions, processes and channels to deliver consistency and a personalized, connected experience. This is how companies can get smarter with every interaction.

. . .

Creating the right experience for every customer, every time is a tall order. People change all the time and their needs change with them. Technology should empower employees to consistently deliver great customer experiences, as needs and expectations change. Because those great experiences are the building blocks for trusted, valued, and lasting customer relationships.

Complex technology does not immediately translate into great experiences for employees or customers. Technology is always embedded in the human behaviors, processes, and culture of an organization. It is a tool but not the answer to all things.

When we use design methodologies in service of great cross-organizational relationships, unified around a vision for great customer relationships, we unlock the potential for technology to drive transformative change–for our company, and especially for our customers.

For more on how to deliver a customer-centric, unified experience, learn more about our transformation services.

Special thanks to the Experience Design team for guiding our customers to success through platform expertise and our design led approach. And, thank you also to Madeline Davis and Crystal Garrett for all of your support and helpful edits!

Learn more about Salesforce Design at www.salesforce.com/design.

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