Creating An Agile Approach To The Retail Customer Experience
How can an industry giant and household name improve its customer focus? We took some of its senior VPs through an immersion that challenged their approach to the customer experience (CX).
Sometimes even large and successful organizations need to take a step back and revisit how they manage their customers’ needs, wants, and experiences. To be fair, most major customer-focused companies do this from time to time. However, how often do they learn about their customers’ journeys from startups and other disruptive businesses?
The Client – A Major Retail Group
Our client is a global household name. The chances are, you’ve shopped with them – we all have. However, the more established and even venerable an organization becomes, the more it can become set in its ways.
Don’t get us wrong, this is a good thing: the company knows who it is, where it is, and what it offers, and if what it offers and the way they offer it is working… why not continue? But customers change and situations evolve, and to continue to provide the experience their clients demand, even retail giants need an agile approach to CX.
So, we brought in the startups and disruptors to bring that new perspective. Here’s what happened.
Their Situation – Challenging Customer Experience
The organization nominated a group of 30 enthusiastic individuals for our program. They were all Vice President or VP-level leaders. At this level, people tend to live and breathe their organizations, and care about them deeply. While this is commendable, it can make it trickier to see the organization through a different lens, and that’s what this program was about.
The immersion experience introduced our group of VPs to a collective of startup innovators and entrepreneurs, who all have a different approach to CX and evolving customer trends.
The younger organizations encouraged the established company to think differently about their customers. Specifically: challenging internal views of the customer, identifying the future customer, identifying the present customer, and how to put themselves in the customer’s shoes.
Along with this comes personal mindset growth, as awareness is brought to long-held views and the corporate blinkers are gently removed. Opening up to change can be a vulnerable experience for many senior-level participants, and we were confident that our immersion experience would make this a real positive personally as well as professionally.
What We Did
The organization had realized (and we have to say, we wholeheartedly agreed with them) that an immersive approach was critical to bringing in an external focus. The participants would meet a diverse set of exemplars from innovative organizations.
The objective was to inspire new thinking about:
- The innovation and startup mindset: what talent, culture, eco-systems, and leadership are needed to create high growth?
- The customer experience focus: what are the best ways to lead with a CX approach?
- Leadership through disruption and change: what is needed to achieve this stamina?
We approached hosts who could bring these objectives to life: startups that are recognized for their customer focus, and that had the ability to support the leadership initiative.
We designed meetings between the participants and these carefully chosen hosts, with an emphasis on openness, sharing, and challenging organizational processes and culture.
The meetings were also designed to enable the participants to hone their capability to respond to external perspectives, shaping immediate and future leadership decision-making. In short, both cultural and personal development.
The Immersion Learning Experience
As with all our immersion experiences, we designed themes into the program, which formed the basis of the conversations. Each theme was supported by a different host, matching expertise with specific areas
- The customer at the center of every decision. This was led by leaders from a high-growth startup, which is recognized for disrupting the customer experience
- Thinking like a customer. The hosts for this discussion were leaders from another high-growth startup, who are evolving business models and processes around the latest customer needs and trends
- Reimagining the customer journey. Our participants met entrepreneurs who are focused on developing a customer-centered learning and design culture
- The digital customer. This startup is creating new and alternative digital offerings to entice their customers: what could our participants learn about digital CX?
The dedication our participants had to improving their CX was clear and evident, and their willingness to open up and look at how the hosts’ organizations approach CX enabled them to think differently. What were the outcomes of these immersive discussions?
The Impact – You Need To Pivot Quickly
The reflection and debrief sessions showed an immediate impact on the participants’ thinking. In the words of one participant:
“The exchanges and insights that were discussed were inspirational”
The VPs particularly liked the culture of agility within the startups, which enabled these organizations to pivot quickly. This ability to pivot is built into the customer experience culture of these newer organizations: essential in the current, fast-moving world.
Were they challenged? Yes, they were; and the VPs from this enviably established and globally renowned organization accepted the challenge to re-examine their CX approach and their own mindsets, which they did with energy and commitment. They themselves were willing to pivot.
Could an immersion experience transform your team? To find out more, get in touch with us and start the conversation. We can work together to create a program that builds on your team’s talents and addresses any areas you wish to explore.