Customer Experience 
Customer experience (CX) is a decision every employee at your company has to make every day — and it all starts with leadership. That’s the basis of Blake Morgan’s latest book, The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership, written to help businesses center CX by transforming the attitudes of key decision-makers.
Blake is a CX futurist and author who has been dubbed “the Queen of CX” by Meta, thanks to her decades of expertise in teaching brands how to lead with customer experience. She sat down with us for our free virtual summit (you can watch it now) to discuss the eight laws of leadership from her new book, imparting wisdom and sharing exciting case studies along the way.
Let’s get into these CX strategies.
8 Top Strategies To Improve CX
1) Create a customer experience mindset
As Blake points out, CX is the great equalizer. No matter how big or successful a company is, it can rise or fall based on customer experience. There are massive opportunities today for companies to harness a CX mindset and achieve impressive digital transformation because customers are just looking for someone to make their lives easier.
Blake uses T-Mobile as a case study to demonstrate this opportunity. Years ago, it was lagging far behind the competition — until a controversial move from the then-CEO John Legere. He jumped on stage at a tech conference to announce that T-Mobile was the Un-carrier, distancing the company from all the things customers hate about their phone carriers.
He even changed his look from that of a straitlaced CEO to a wild card who had long hair and wore a leather jacket and T-shirts to set himself apart visually from the rest of the corporate executives. Talk about dedication!
Legere focused on communicating with customers and setting a strategy that delivered everything they wanted, including initiatives like eliminating long-term contracts and allowing rollover of unused data. Over time, the company built goodwill with customers, leading to explosive growth.
2) Focus on both short-term and long-term profits
Blake says that executives often focus too much on short-term profits, preventing them from investing up front in the customer experience, which would pay dividends in the long run.
Jeff Bezos is an example of someone who didn’t focus on short-term profits. He was quoted in the 2000s as saying, “I am not my stock price.” What was he telling employees and Wall Street with this simple but powerful statement? In short, he invested in the customer experience with an eye on future profits rather than worrying too much about the short term.
We all know that hard work and CX emphasis have paid off in spades for Bezos and Amazon’s stockholders. So, put your customer experience first, and trust that success will come.
3) Lay out your customer experience strategy and stick to it
How can you get started on creating your customer experience strategy? Use Blake’s W.A.Y.S. Framework as you draw up your customer experience plan.
- Walk a mile in the customer’s shoes
- Ask for the truth (through constant feedback)
- Yes to accountability
- Small improvements every day
Marvel is an excellent example of the power of reevaluating customer experience. In the early 2000s, the company was struggling, so it embarked on a CX journey to streamline operations and reduce debt. It focused on its most popular products instead of trying to reinvent the wheel with too many new characters, which helped it create high-quality comics. Ultimately, the company revitalized Marvel Studios.
Fast-forward a bit, and Marvel was sold to Disney for $4 billion. This shows that even the highest-performing organizations must transform their customer experience to stay ahead of competitors.
4) Embark on a 90-day sprint
Blake has interviewed many CEOs and execs while doing book research. Several of them have told her the same thing: They all go on listening tours during their first 90 days in their job positions to understand business needs and familiarize themselves with company processes and departments.
Ali Bouhouch, who was the CTO and VP of Enterprise Architecture at Sephora, employed this exact strategy and found numerous silos within the organization that he was able to break down. It turns out that the departments were competing against each other, so he changed how stores were rewarded to address the more significant problem.
“Part of creating a customer experience transformation is about finding your advocates. It’s about listening, it’s about learning, it’s about understanding what you do have to work with but also what you don’t have to work with and what you need to do,” Blake explains.
5) Anticipate the future — be a customer experience futurist
If you think a particular brand is too big to fail, think again. No one is exempt from the need to improve customer experience, and it’s a continuous process.
“Many companies right now are falling flat because they’re not innovating; they’re not adding value. Many companies are guilty of raising prices on customers without adding value,” Blake says.
That’s why she recommends becoming a customer experience futurist. This means always listening to what your customers say and trying to predict what’s next and how to give them more value.
Abercrombie & Fitch is an excellent example of a brand that essentially brought itself back from the dead. But it wasn’t easy — the company had to undergo a complete brand transformation to distance itself from its former reputation as a superficial and exclusive retailer and focus on delivering a modernized product line and an inclusive customer experience. With the strong financial performance the company is now seeing, Abercrombie & Fitch can reinvest in customer programs, delivering even more value.
If you need help developing your CX strategy, consider the benefits of a unified CXM platform like Nextiva. With its built-in, AI-powered tools and analytics, you can easily anticipate your customers’ needs and deliver seamless customer experiences.
6) Don’t forget that employees are customers
This one is superimportant. If your employees don’t want to be at work, then customers won’t want to interact with them. Period. Blake uses the example of shopping at Trader Joe’s to convey the importance of this law.
Trader Joe’s has built an in-person shopping experience that many people cherish. Part of that experience is encountering friendly, happy employees at the checkout counters. Trader Joe’s doesn’t have self-serve kiosks or a mobile app like its competitors do because interacting with its employees is a huge part of the customer experience.
The company pays its employees fairly, offers insurance and employee discounts, and treats them well — and it shows. Its employee retention is among the highest in the retail industry.
7) Evaluate success and measure what can be measured
Those of us in the contact center world are accustomed to using all kinds of metrics to measure our impact. But Blake says that during uncertain economic times, we see the pendulum swing from measuring effectiveness to measuring efficiency.
Sometimes, that measurement shift can be costly. Executives get focused on cutting costs, and the first thing to go is often customer programs. She warns that businesses should be careful about what they measure, even in unstable times, because those are the outcomes they’ll end up driving.
If you focus only on reducing operational expenses, you can achieve your goal — but at what cost to your customer experience? Stay the course, measure customer satisfaction, and you’ll weather the storm.
🔎 Further Reading: Measuring Customer Experience: Top 10 CX Metrics and KPIs for Success
8) Keep customer experience front and center
The final law in Blake Morgan’s leadership playbook is simple: Keep customers at the forefront of everything you do, and foster a customer-centric culture.
She uses BarkBox as an example to illustrate the power of this idea. Every month, BarkBox sends dog owners thousands of personalized gift boxes that are filled with treats and toys chosen specifically for each pet. The company prides itself on getting to know its customers well enough to succeed at personalizing each box and strives to speak with at least one-third of them each month.
In fact, the founder of BarkBox famously said, “Do things that don’t scale.” That may sound scary, but that’s how you get customers to notice and appreciate you.
Blake recommends focusing on qualitative rather than quantitative data so you can hear the customer stories that matter and adjust your strategy accordingly. Set yourself apart from the competition by going the extra mile in the customer experience.
Drive Business Growth With Customer Experience
The bottom line Blake Morgan wants everyone to understand is that CX is a business accelerator and customer experience is the only thing that can help you stand out. However, only leadership can create this customer-centric culture, and there’s no time like the present to get going on it.
“There’s so many exciting things happening today in the world with technology advancements, but we have to make sure that we still focus on change management, that we still pay attention to our people — the people who are delivering customer experience,” Blake says.
Even tiny improvements in CX can mean huge transformations, so just take small steps every day, and you’ll be well on your way to success.
More strategies and tips for CX leaders
Check out our on-demand virtual summit to hear Blake Morgan’s full talk and gain insights from additional CX experts.
