Conversations with the C-Suite, with Oke Eleazu
In this first instalment of ‘Conversations with the C-Suite’, our brand new event series working to bridge the gap between customer experience professionals and C-level executives, we spoke with seasoned leader, Oke Eleazu.
With an extensive background in customer experience and leadership positions across various industries, including Director of Customer Service at Sainsburys, Customer Delivery Director at Prudential and now Founder and CEO of Elevate Colour, Oke is distinctly qualified to offer key insights into the mindset of the C-suite.
In this article, we give you the top takeaways from Oke’s session.
C-Suite Priorities Encompass All Areas of the Business
The role of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is to facilitate the achievement of the business objectives, whereas the role of a CX professional is to enable exceptional customer experience.
Therefore, when working together, there needs to be an alignment between ensuring good customer service and meeting the overall business objectives. While any C-suite executive would state that customers are crucial to the company, declining CX remains a real problem.
“There isn’t a CEO that I have ever met…that doesn’t say customers are their most important priority…if that’s the case, why do we have a real problem with declining customer experience?”
This may be because a CEO’s agenda is extensive, with various business areas to ensure they meet expectations (such as revenue, market share, trading objectives, etc.). Though the customer is implicit in all of these areas, they are not explicit in all of them. Therefore, the customer often feels the squeeze, with the C-suite funnelling resources elsewhere
“...If you’re trying to save money, or drive profit by driving down costs…I’ll focus on what I can do around the business to keep costs down and often the squeeze will be on…customer experience.”
The ‘Good Enough’ Mentality is Causing a Decline in CX
When trying to keep business costs down, a CEO will often focus on customer experience and try to keep it ‘good enough’: when complaints are at a level where revenue is still being generated and the business is profiting. When this is the case, CX professionals struggle to garner support for their initiatives, as the CEO will be weighing these costs up with other business objectives.
“I think that’s the issue that many people who are in CX will have, and I have had before, you know…it’s good enough - let’s go and do something that better meets the objectives.”
Challenges in Articulating the Value of CX
If exceptional customer experience is the fundamental focus of your role, it is effortless to bang the drum for CX. However, when your role is at the C-suite level, you are often judged most on making decisions that drive profit, typically while reducing costs. Therefore, the most important thing is aligning customer experience with business objectives as a revenue generator - create an experience that is a profit-centre, not a cost-centre.
Prove Value by Attaching Customer Experience to Economic Drivers
To demonstrate the value of CX initiatives and persuade the CEO to spend money on implementation, it is imperative to know cause and effect. Attaching CX initiatives to economic drivers is the best way to do this, and if possible, create a low-cost initiative that generates revenue, to give you a double economic driver!
“The thing about customer experience for me is that it often requires the organisation to leave money on the table - it’s going to cost - that makes convincing people even harder.”
Utilising metrics to demonstrate value is a way of attaching CX initiatives to economic drivers.
When describing these metrics, ensure that the numbers are brought to life through connection and explanation.
Create a boundary for these metrics to define what will be a ‘good’ figure for the business objective.
Benchmark these metrics against past figures and other businesses. However, be wary that there will be a race to the bottom when doing the latter, and your business could be in danger of ‘coming last’.
When creating these benchmarks to define success against and compare to others, avoiding the safety that mediocrity and being ‘good enough’ provide is vital. While the C-suite will define strategy overall, try to differentiate your offering, as this will lead to a broader scope and, thus, a more significant number of customers.
“Benchmarking is great but can sometimes give people safety in mediocrity…which is terrible for customers! The reason nothing is happening is because everyone thinks their service is … no worse than the other guys.”
Navigating the Championing of Customer Experience
In a dream situation, the best CX team within an organisation…is no CX team! If every employee continually builds processes with the customer in mind, then there would be no need for a separate customer experience function. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and many employees may feel that CX is not ‘their job’.
The most important role of a CX professional in an organisation is to work to ensure that the organisation believes customer experience is important.
“The use of metrics, the buying in, the championing, the convincing, the hard yards of showing the connection between customer experience and the objectives of the business…is super important.”
This can be done through Champions:
The organisation needs to be enlightened, and this is done through a top-down approach—get the C-suite engaged, and it will travel down through the organisation until everyone understands its importance.
Narrow down those in senior leadership who will be the right people to be a CX champion within their area - if they cannot engage those in their area, it will be a waste of time!
Set up a meeting with this individual and enlighten them on the value and importance of CX - using metrics and economic drivers associated with CX initiatives. If they are convinced, they will champion customer experience themselves.
Almost all departments either directly serve customers or enable them, and so they cannot do great things for customers unless someone behind them is also doing a great job.
If you struggle to convince other departments that CX is their responsibility, try hitting people in their pockets. Money is a motivator! Suggest that bonuses be withheld unless these CX objectives are achieved. The easiest way to make people accountable is to put some element of the money they make on it.
Employee Experience and Customer Experience go Hand-in-Hand
For the business to continue to grow and succeed, those who work for you must advocate for the company! Sometimes, you can have unhappy employees, but you do ‘ok’ with customers. The reason for this is that people take pride in their jobs. Or, sometimes, you can have the opposite. You can have happy employees because their needs are met, but the process is poor. If you have dissatisfied colleagues, their service will be mediocre. Thus, if employee experience is declining, customer experience will also decline.
Unfortunately, this also suffers from the ‘good enough syndrome’. If the service is ‘good enough’, and the employee experience is ‘good enough’, that's probably ‘good enough’.
“The cost of doing business is good enough - good enough is the enemy of all elements of customer experience.”
Therefore, if the business's vision is to be the best, work to foster an environment where the employees champion and advocate for it, and good customer experience will follow!
Interested in learning more? Become a WiCX member and watch the full conversation now. Oke shares his key insights into the ethos of C-level executives and how to align CX initiatives with business objectives.
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