Steven Covey’s Perspective on Customer Experience

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“Why is it so hard to get CX at the top of the agenda in my organization?”

“How can I create more sense of urgency for CX?”

“It feels like I’m the only one who truly cares about CX.”

Sounds familiar?

These are some of the FAQ’s I receive from people responsible for CX in their organization.

Now there are many things that play a role in mobilizing an organization as you have seen in previous blogs:

Having the right data, steerable information, pragmatic approach to journey mapping, creating a lot of fun and energy to make sure people want to do something with the insights.

I think there is another helpful perspective that will help take the brakes off your transformation.

Covey’s Time Management Matrix

Probably most of you know the matrix that Covey uses in his book “7 habits of highly effective people”.

The good news when it comes to Customer Experience?

No company will ever say it’s not important.

And they are sincere about that.

For Employee Experience this is a little different.

Most companies will not explicitly say it’s not important, but it’s definitely not yet at the same level of importance as Customer Experience is today.

So we can ignore quadrant 3 and 4.

Biggest mistake people make

One of the key mistakes that many people responsible for CX programs make, is to try to get CX to become a quadrant 1 topic: urgent and important.

That is never going to happen.

Creating satisfied customers and satisfied employees is not an urgent quick fix.

The sooner you realize that, the less time you spend on non-effective interventions and the more time you can spend on designing interventions matching quadrant 2.

Let go of the frustration that “no one takes time for CX” and realize you need to change perspective.

Customer Experience is important but not urgent

Once you realize that CX is in quadrant 2, you have a world of possibilities to help your colleagues.

You will immediately be more compassionate towards them (how many times did you yourself try to meditate more, exercise more, eat healthier and failed? These are all quadrant 2 topics).

Once you realize this, you can (hopefully) find joy in the challenge of figuring out ways to change peoples behaviors, which is one of the most interesting puzzles (at least to me).

What makes a huge difference in exercising more? Data tracking like a fitbit, throwing in some competition, getting rewards thus making it fun.

What makes a huge difference in eating more healthy? Data tracking of what you eat via an app.

What makes a huge difference in meditating more? Mindfulness apps reminder you with smart, short suggestions you can do right away.

Now you understand that CX is in the 2nd quadrant, you know you need to help your colleagues to manage the daily craziness of quadrant 1 (someone higher up in the chain needs a report right away) and 3 (checking all the bleeps on your phone every 5 minutes).

This is where transformation design comes in.

The five principles of transformation design

Standing on the shoulders of experts like BJ Fogg, Roberto Cialdini, Covey himself, there is so much available material you can use.

You just have to look outside of the CX field and dive into topics like persuasion, behavioral science, employee engagement, adoption, etc.

My top 5 design principles for successful transformation with energy and fun?

  • make it measurable;
  • make it fun;
  • make it tiny;
  • make it pragmatic;
  • make it part of daily routines;

They work every time, yet the nuances you need to tweak for your specific context.

Enjoy designing your energizing CX transformation approach that seduces >10% of all your colleagues in your organization to jump on this train!

Want to check my summary of the 4 ‘bibles’ on behavioral science? Download the slides.

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