Center of Excellence: The Antidote to Failed Customer Experience Programs

It’s no secret that even good CX programs fail. Back in 2018, Bob Thompson of CustomerThink shared the “inconvenient truth” that “93% of customer experience programs are failing.”  Gartner echoed this two years ago. It found “most Customer Experience Programs are not delivering on the promise of improving differentiation and helping brands better compete.” The question becomes, why are CX Programs failing. And, more importantly, what can we do to rescue them and retarget CX initiatives toward growth?

Why Do Customer Experience Programs Fail?

There are many reasons CX programs fail. The list includes lack of institutional support and insufficient funding. And, certainly, failure to align CX programs with overall business strategy.

However, when we study the threats to customer experience program success (and we have done so in depth), all failed CX programs share the same characteristic. A weak core. Namely, an absence of a support structure to strengthen leadership and foster collaboration around shared CX Principles that drive growth.

This comes from a lack of resources and a lack of understanding how to make CX work. And work well. It is also the result of insufficient or ineffective training of leaders and employee teams. This training is necessary because it enables leaders and employee teams to speak the same language of customer experience across their individual areas of expertise. And to execute on customer experience deliverables in a way that is unified, purposeful, and sustainable.

In a Harvard Business Review article titled “The Most Common Reasons Customer Experience Programs Fail,” co-authors Ryan Smith and Luke Williams of Qualtrics identify “moving slowly, without purpose” as a key cause of CX program failure. We agree with their assessment that a “CX program is a living, breathing thing.” As such, it is challenging to maintain the momentum necessary for success, and to block out the noise that misdirects leaders and teams from achieving goals.

Smith and Williams see “true CX leadership” as the solution. They characterize true CX leadership as including ownership, expertise, resources, and empowerment. This is precisely where the Center of Excellence for Customer Experience adds value. Before we get into the mechanics of that solution, let’s take a moment to unpack what a Center of Excellence is, its origin, and the value it adds to organizations.

What is a Center of Excellence?

A Center of Excellence (CoE) is a centralized unit within an organization that provides training and resources, best practices, leadership, and support for a specific area of focus. The Center of Excellence focuses on a strategic approach to improving CX, promoting innovation, and ultimately, fostering growth. A successful CoE makes an organization stronger and more impactful, fueled by a clear, unifying purpose that guides decision making.

But a Center of Excellence is more than just an approach, or a living document output of a strategy session. It is comprised of a knowledge body. A group of individuals hand-selected from your organization, that come together to devise best practices for a specific area of interest and opportunity within your organization. Think of it as a purpose-built team of specialists that you cultivate around your shared objective, like the objective to improve customer experience to foster growth.

The beauty of this as a key component of customer experience strategy is that it enables you to develop – and leverage – the strength of your teams within their sub-areas of expertise to create and execute against a more holistic, collaborative, and effective customer experience strategy.

Center of Excellence Origins

The root of the Center of Excellence is lean manufacturing, a management approach that came out of the Toyota Production System, developed in the late 1940s. Lean manufacturing targets achieving maximum value for customers by eliminating waste. It involves building optimized processes, drawing on fewer resources, and identifying what is essential to meet customer’s demands and building systems accordingly.

What we see in this history is that customer-centricity is a focal point of lean delivery. And it was recognized as such prior to the advent of customer experience as a discreet discipline. So a Center of Excellence for the purpose of improving customer experience is an ideal fit. The internal body itself is built on the idea that we share the goal of meeting customer demand. And we recognize the ROI of achieving that goal – the business case for customer experience.

Why Center of Excellence for Customer Experience?

The most effective Centers of Excellence are those that are built to fill in knowledge gaps within your organization. Customer experience is a prime candidate for this type of internal body.

With our clients we often see there is general agreement that customer experience is important. We even get early buy-in on the idea of customer-centric design and delivery of experiences. But the reason many bring us in, and what they learn as we dive deeper into our engagements is that the simple best practice tenets of aiming for customer satisfaction, or reducing customer churn, are not simple to deliver.

In fact, customer experience programs are as layered and unique as the diverse customers you serve. And they are as complex as the personas you seek to guide along your customer journeys. This is where the Center of Excellence for Customer Experience comes in. When built correctly, and supported by leadership, the Center of Excellence provides a practical approach to demystifying customer experience and actioning the path to customer-centricity and ROI.

With a Center of Excellence for Customer Experience, aim for the following outcomes.

• Clarity around Customer Experience Principles
• Customer-centric leadership
• Support for customer experience initiatives
• Well-trained teams that understand the purpose and value of customer experience and how to work toward CX as a shared goal
• Integration of customer experience into business best practices and operations
• Sustainable customer experience programs

This is a tall order. And that is why a Center of Excellence is purpose-built to add value to your organization. And to leverage the skills leaders and team members bring to your organization. But as much as we rely on participation, the Center of Excellence itself provides a foundation for creativity, collaboration, and sustainability. To start, we do this by helping you identify leaders in your organization who can contribute to the successful development and deployment of customer experience programs and an overall customer-centric culture.

Customer Experience Ambassadors

People, in fact, are the key to a successful Center of Excellence. When we stand up CoEs for our clients, we start by helping to identify a set of Customer Experience Ambassadors. These are the individuals who will help shepherd customer experience programs, skill up teams to understand and operate within a more customer-centric perspective, and generate new ideas for meeting – and exceeding – customer expectations.

Usually a group of five members, our ambassadors work together. They learn from each other, and bring their expertise to the aid of shared CX goals. Importantly, we also take the time to train Customer Experience Ambassadors so they have a baseline understanding of the fundamentals of customer experience in general and the governing CX principles of your organization, in particular.

Training also gives ambassadors that common language of CX. This enables them to communicate and collaborate with each other in ways that recognize each other’s strengths while working toward unified, purpose-driven objectives. These objectives include improved customer experience, reduced customer churn, and increased customer loyalty, among others.

The Center of Excellence Library

Robust resources are key to a successful CoE. In our engagements, we provide customer-experience rich, expert content to include in the Center of Excellence Customer Experience Library. But as important as it is to have access to the resources that clarify customer experience promises, it is equally important to grasp what that means in practice. This is why we develop customized resources for understanding, operationalizing, and leveraging customer experience across your organization.

So, we tend to go a step further, by including an advisory service. This helps you source additional content that will position you to continue to grow as you continue to improve customer experience across the organization. What is essential in building out the CX Library (this should be an ongoing process as an organization and the CX discipline continue to evolve), is that all resources link back to the importance, purpose, and impact of CX on your customers, your employees, and your business.

Training and Practice

Even the best resources in the world do not, on their own, generate customer experience programs that drive growth. Training, communication, and standards underscore the success of a sustainable customer experience program. To that end, as part of a fully functioning Center of Excellence for Customer Experience, we advise on the key elements that include CX Standards, Communication Plans, and Training Design and Sequencing.

Our approach is unique in that, even though a CoE operates as a standard-setting element within an organization, we do not have a one-size-fits-all approach to building that Center of Excellence. Remembering that CoEs drive the creativity and collaboration that foster growth, we take a creative, collaborative approach to building the CoE. This means we customize for the needs of your industry, organization, team, and culture.

To learn more about building your own Center of Excellence for Customer Experience, schedule a call with us. For additional insight on how to make the business case for customer experience through targeted CX strategy, get your ticket to join us at the inaugural CX Strategy Conference, powered by The Petrova Experience in NYC, October 1.