Consortium members met at Cisco outside Dallas for an exploratory meeting around building a global support strategy. We originally thought we were looking to create a consistent customer support experience across multiple channels. After some discussion, we realized the better question was: How do we build a strategy that offers a customer experience which reinforces our brand promise across the globe, in multiple support channels?
We began by defining our scope. We looked at Esteban Kolsky’s customer experience touchpoint model and determined that customer success is the “Use” half of the infinity loop. While customer success has dependencies on the whole customer experience, this is where support organizations have the most input and impact.
We took a look at the continuous improvement model, as defined by the Consortium’s Customer Success Initiative, and realized that these five steps are just as applicable in designing a global strategy for customer success.
Thanks to Christine Egli and Mike Altmann from National Instruments for sharing the story and results from their internal process mapping – and for providing some truly impressive visuals.
Thanks also to Koree Mires from Cisco for hosting, and for sharing their efforts in mapping the customer experience, and to Jonathan Ruckheim for his demo of Cisco’s TechZone collaboration tool and their content visualizer.
The team spent time discussing considerations for a global support strategy: what we need to know in order to build one, and who we need to include.
We determined four key dependencies for building a global strategy:
- Executive buy-in is key, so find an executive sponsor.
- Create customer empathy across the executive team.
- Create (or find) and be sure everyone understands the organization’s compelling purpose, vision statement, and brand promise.
- And, if your company has a Customer Experience council, tap in to those resources. If not, create a cross-functional Customer Success council of your own.
Open Space topics included building a business case for support investment and how to design a customer experience program across all services, among others.
We hope you’ll join us for a meeting soon; click here for upcoming events!