THE CHALLENGE
With its latest and most significant merger completed, a large multinational telecommunications company was ready to evolve its approach to customer experience. The merger and subsequent formation of an evolved corporate strategy provided the ideal time to evangelize a core company promise among employees and customers, and assess the organization’s capacity to deliver a compelling customer experience.
The merger provided an ideal time to asses the organization's capacity to deliver a compelling customer experience.
Seeking to harness the momentum for change, the company turned to long-time partner North Highland to provide a barometer of its current customer experience capabilities, identify factors that were helping or hindering its ability to deliver engaging experiences and pinpoint improvement opportunities.
THE SOLUTION
Using its Phase Zero methodology, North Highland and its experience design division, Sparks Grove, built a cross-functional team of Strategy, Data & Analytics, and Customer Experience experts to assess the company’s customer experience ecosystem. The goal was to understand current state experience delivery at the customer interaction level, while also illuminating opportunities across organizational enablers – elements like strategy, operations and employees that are critical to the sustained delivery of a compelling customer experience.
North Highland focused on understanding the internal employee perspective by conducting quantitative and qualitative research among employees from both legacy companies. The findings demonstrated that while employees were highly motivated to deliver compelling customer experiences, their ability to do so was highly contextual and differed widely among business functions, roles and orientation.
Through research analysis, North Highland identified four essential opportunity areas that would help the company set a new customer experience foundation. With detailed change recommendations in each area, the path forward entailed:
- Start with Purpose – Define a single, unified customer-centric purpose for the corporation
- Be Customer Crazy – Make the shift from a product-centric culture to a people-centric culture
- Clear the Path – Break down the barriers across the corporation that cause friction in the customer and employee experience
- Invest in the Engine – Create an internal infrastructure and capabilities that support a customer-centric organization
THE RESULTS
By enacting an enterprise view rather than focusing on one-off interactions, North Highland identified the organizational elements most affecting customer experience and recommended actions for significant and sustained improvement. The Phase Zero methodology enabled North Highland to quickly (over just 12 weeks) determine the areas of friction and opportunity that existed within the client’s organization. The project succeeded in helping the client refocus its understanding to include the eight organizational enablers of customer experience:
