Where does customer service begin?

Is there a set of rules or specific policies that a company should follow to ensure that each
customer receives the best experience? Or does it start by establishing a customer service
department that customers can call if they have a problem?

Customer service is actually much more. It is not a department. It is not found in rules and
policies. It is a philosophy, and to be successful, it must be embraced by every member of an
organization, from the CEO to the most recent hire.

As I travel the world and work with clients from all types of industries, they recognize the
importance of customer service and the role it plays in marketing, sales, growth and revenue.
They want to know how to go about creating a customer service culture in which all their
employees understand the role they play in ensuring customers receive great service.

The key is creating a culture that is customer-focused.  That means that every decision is made
with the customer in mind, and everyone in the organization knows how they impact the
overarching customer service strategy as well as the entire customer experience (CX).

The best companies create policies and procedures that are customer-focused, and then train
ALL their people – not just the front line – to the culture. They learn how to handle certain
situations, issues, problems and complaints – but remember, it has to go beyond rules and
policies. The bottom line is doing the right thing for the customer.

That might seem hard to teach, but there are ways to be successful. Here are some things to keep
in mind:

Start With The Right People.

First, the leadership team must create the culture. Then, you must hire people with not only the
skills to do the job, but also the right mindset to fit in with your customer service culture.

Make Sure Everyone Understands The Basics.

Before you can empower people to do the right thing, they must have a base of knowledge to
work from. Therefore, everyone must go through basic customer service training, so they
understand your vision for delivering good service.

Give Them The Freedom To Do The Right Thing.

Once your employees are trained in your special brand of customer service and know the
guidelines in which they operate, empower them to make their own decisions. Let them know
they don’t have to “ask the manager” for approval every time they make a customer-focused
decision.

Reinforce And Realign.

Take advantage of customer service triumphs and missteps as opportunities to give feedback to
individual employees, and use success stories as examples to teach others.

a customer-focused culture has to include everyone – all leaders and all

employees must be on board 
So, whether you are just beginning or already on your way to establishing one, remember that a
customer-focused culture has to include everyone – all leaders and all employees must be on
board, or, to put it another way, be in alignment. With everyone working together to achieve the
customer service vision, and all decisions made with the customer in mind, the end result should
be a growing base of new and returning customers.
We’ve talked about some steps to take to ensure everyone understands that customer service is a
philosophy, based on doing the right thing for the customer. Let’s expand on those and take a
look at some other important steps to building a customer-centric culture.

Define Your Customer Service Vision.

Create a customer service vision statement, or mantra, in simple terms. It should be short and to
the point, something that everyone can remember and understand, and it should inspire your
employees to deliver great customer service.

Let The Vision Guide Your Hiring Decisions.

Of course, you want to hire someone with the technical knowledge and skills to perform the job,
but it’s also essential to consider a candidate’s personality and attitude and how they fit in with
your customer service vision and customer-focused culture.

Train Everyone.
Start training from day one, focusing on the soft skills, your customer service expectations and
your core values. And, the training has to apply to everyone, including leadership. Otherwise,
employees will come away with the impression that customer service isn’t as important as you
say it is.

Model The Behavior.

Everyone, but leaders in particular, should serve as role models for others to emulate. Treat
employees with the same respect and dignity as you would the customer – maybe even more so.

Empower Employees To Deliver Good Service.

Once employees are trained in your customer service vision, don’t encumber them with rules that
get in the way. Give them the power to do what it takes to meet and exceed your service
standards. Trust them to do the right thing.

Provide Continual Feedback.

Recognize others when they do well. Letting people know when they are doing a good job may
be the motivation they need to continue or, even better, take it to the next level. Also, if someone
is not acting in sync with the customer service standards, consider it a teaching opportunity and
use it to help the employee grow to be more successful in the future.

Celebrate Success.

Employees love to be appreciated and rewarded, so don’t forget to celebrate a job well done.
That doesn’t have to mean a party every week. It may be recognition at a weekly meeting or a
mention in the company newsletter. Or, maybe it is something big, like an annual awards dinner.

One more thing to keep in mind. I believe that to truly have a customer-focused culture, a
company must first focus on its employees.  A happy employee who feels appreciated and
respected will be better able and much more enthusiastic about delivering a good customer
experience.
So, starting at the top, leaders must be an example of good service as they interact with
employees and follow the steps to building a customer-centric culture. Do it right, and the
customer will respond to the company’s positive culture with repeat business, and ultimately,
loyalty.
 Brand ExperienceChange ManagementCompany CultureCustomer ExperienceEmployee Engagement

Shep Hyken
Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert and the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard
Presentations. He is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author and has been inducted
into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement in the speaking profession.
Shep works with companies and organizations who want to build loyal relationships with their customers
and employees. His articles have been read in hundreds of publications, and he is the author of Moments
of Magic®, The Loyal Customer, The Cult of the Customer, The Amazement Revolution, Amaze Every
Customer Every Time, and Be Amazing or Go Home.

Customers are yearning for better experiences. But what are you doing to design a better
experience? How do you know what your customers’ expectations are? What are they trying to
achieve? And how well is that going for them? Are you listening to customers? Are you mapping
their experiences? How are you driving the necessary change within your company?

That’s a lot of questions to start with, right?

Let me take a step back and start with a couple of definitions.

What Is Customer Experience?

Before I begin to write about designing a better customer experience, let me first provide a clear
definition of customer experience. We’re not always all on the same page about what that is.

In its simplest definition, customer experience is (a) the sum of all the interactions that a
customer has with a company over the course of the relationship and includes (b) the customer’s
feelings, emotions, and perceptions of the brand during the course of those interactions.
Examples of “interactions” include: making a purchase, using the product, paying bills, calling
support, visiting the company’s website, and more.
Many people confuse customer experience with customer service, but they are not one and the
same. Customer experience is actually the “umbrella discipline,” so to speak. “Customer service
is what happens when the customer experience breaks down.” That’s how Chris Zane, owner of
Zane’s Cycles, defines or differentiates the two. Customer service is just one aspect, one
touchpoint in the overall customer experience; servicing customers is one action of many that
comprise the customer experience.

What Is Journey Mapping?

Let me start with explaining what journey maps are not: they are not lifecycle maps, sales
funnels, buyer funnels, buyer lifecycles, etc. Those are marketing tools and are too high level for
customer experience design. Customer experience professionals require a lot more detail at a
micro level in order to understand the pain points and to, ultimately, fix them. As such, journey
maps are an illustration made by walking in your customers’ shoes to capture their steps, needs,
and perceptions for some interaction they had with your company, some journey they were
taking to achieve some outcome.

Journey mapping is a creative process that allows you to understand – and then redesign – the
customer experience.  The output is not just a “pretty picture;” once the map is developed, it is
meant to be a catalyst for change.

Why Map Journeys

Mapping isn’t just a lame exercise; it’s a learning exercise. Companies learn about their
customers and about the experience they put them through to interact with the business.

Done right, maps help companies in many ways, including to…

Understand Experiences.

You can’t transform something you don’t understand, is what I like to say. Maps bring
understanding. They highlight and diagnose existing issues and opportunities; at the same time,
they capture what’s going well, too.

Design Experiences.
Once you understand the current experience and moments of truth, maps help you prioritize and
rethink existing processes and/or create new ones.

Implement And Activate New Experiences.

The maps become blueprints or statements of direction for the work to be done to improve and to
redesign the experience.

Communicate And Share Experiences.

Maps are great communication and teaching tools. They can be used during onboarding, training,
and other ongoing education opportunities to unite the organization around the customer, to teach
employees about the current and the future experience, and to further ingrain the customer-
focused culture of the business.

One thing to note is that journey mapping is not just for customers but for all constituents,
including employees, vendors, partners, franchisees, licensees, etc. It’s a tool to design a better
experience for anyone that interacts with your company.

The Benefits Of Mapping Journeys

There are a ton of benefits of mapping customer journeys. They can probably best be summed up
in the following five categories.

1. Align The Organization

 Executive and employees, as well: get everyone on the same page about the importance of
delivering a better experience

 Break down silos: get people collaborating and sharing data for the benefit of the customer

2. Understand The Customer And His Experience

 Build empathy for the customer: when executives see the steps they put customers through to
do business with the company, it’s an eye-opener!

 Improve the experience: understand the customer, what she’s trying to do, and how well the
company is performing against that so that you can redesign a better experience

3. Identify Experience And Process Efficiencies

 Identify and remove ineffective touchpoints

 Kill inefficient rules, policies, processes

4. Optimize Channels

 Learn about the different steps customers take to purchase or use the channel that they use so
that you can be prepared to deliver the expected experience to the right channel at the right time
for the right persona

5. Shift The Culture And The Organization’s Mindset

 From inside-out to outside-in: maps are created from the customer viewpoint and are validated
with customers; bringing their voice into the organization is the first step toward shifting that
mindset

 From touchpoints to journeys: think about the entire customer journey, the entire relationship
with the organization; realize that journey thinking means to consider both what happened prior to
this interaction that you’re mapping and what the customer will do next

A Catalyst For Change

Based on those benefits, you can really start to see how they are a catalyst for change. There are
so many ways to use journey maps as part of your overall people-focused culture
transformation. 

As you can imagine, this is a good spot to jump in and write about how to go from journey maps
to a great customer experience. Let me start with some of the things you need to do before you
even begin mapping:
Make Sure You Have The Right People Involved In Creating The Map.

First and foremost, your customers must be involved; this can happen either during the initial
mapping session or later, when you ask them to validate what we call an assumptive map that
was built internally based on what we know and have heard from customers about the
experience. Second, make sure you’ve got the appropriate stakeholders in the room, as well. No
excuses; they must be there. Include folks from various departments in the room because you
need to take into account what’s happening upstream and downstream from the interaction
you’re mapping. And they need to have a reasonable level of influence on what actions need to
be taken as a result of the workshop.

Similarly, Ensure That They Are Committed To Acting On What They Learn.

I don’t really need to explain this one much more than that. If there’s no commitment to act,
change, or improve, you’ll be wasting everyone’s time.

Select The Personas For Which You’ll Be Mapping The Experience.

Personas are research-based representations of the customer type for whom you’ll be mapping;
customer experience personas differ from marketing personas as they include details around
problems to solve, pain points, jobs to be done, tasks they are trying to achieve, etc.

Select The Journeys To Map.

You’ll be mapping a lot of journeys over time, but select the most impactful ones to begin with.
Where’s the low-hanging fruit? What journeys cause the most pain for your customers today?
Where can you make the greatest impact?

Hold A Prep Meeting With Stakeholders.

Get everyone in the room before the session to ensure that everyone understands what you’re
doing and what their role is/will be.

Outline The Scope, Objectives, And Desired Outcomes.

Make sure attendees know what they’ll be mapping and why. And, most importantly, what
they’ll be doing with the output.

Give Attendees Homework.

Have them start thinking about the journey and what the potential steps are. Have them “mystery
shop” the journey themselves, if they don’t yet have a full picture of it. Ask them to get
feedback, comments, and insights from their employees about the journey. They can also gather
any customer feedback, insights, behavioral data, and emotional data about the journey. And
have them bring to the session any artifacts (documents, audio files, videos, images, etc.) that
support the journey and bring it to life.

Begin To Formulate A Plan For Next Steps.

Go into the session prepared. What happens when you leave the room? How will you
operationalize the findings? How will you assign ownership? Who is responsible and
accountable? How will you manage the improvements going forward? Etc.

Line Up Process Mapping Or Value Stream Mapping Sessions.

Process mapping should be done in conjunction with journey mapping. You can’t fix the front-
stage/on-stage experience if the backstage processes aren’t efficiently and effectively supporting
it.

Taking Action
I could write another full article on where to go after the mapping session is over, but I’ll give
you a couple high-level bullets to get you thinking of where to go next.

 Gather on a weekly basis to discuss quick wins, action plans for longer-term fixes, next steps,
success metrics, etc. This is important to keep the momentum going, to lend oversight, and to
ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

 Identify the key moments of truth, those make or break moments during the journey that must
be executed well in order to satisfy – and to keep – the customer.

 Take the breakpoints and prioritize systematically; factors considered include: time to fix, cost to
fix, impact on the customer, and impact on the business.
 Assign ownership and teams for the improvement items. Develop project plans for each
improvement initiative.

 Get commitment from executives to assign resources.

 Map the future state to design the new experience – with customers.

 Design the new processes to support the experience from behind the scenes.

 Implement changes.

 Test. Fix. Roll out.

As you can see, there’s a lot to mapping and redesigning the experience. Don’t let that be
daunting. It’s actually a fun process that has very tangible outputs and outcomes. When done
right.
 Brand ExperienceC-SuiteChange ManagementCustomer ExperienceEmployee ExperienceExperience Design

Annette Franz
Annette Franz is CEO of CX Journey Inc, a boutique consulting firm specializing in helping clients ground
and frame their customer experience strategies in/via customer understanding. Her passion lies in
teaching companies about customer experience and helping them understand the importance of the
employee experience to a great customer experience. She has 25 years of experience in the CX space
and has been recognized as one of “The 100 Most Influential Tech Women on Twitter” by Business
Insider and by several other organizations as a top influencer in Customer Experience. She is an active
CXPA member, as a CX Expert, CX Mentor, and a SoCal Local Networking Team Lead; she also serves
as an executive officer on the association's Board of Directors.

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