From Costs to Culture: Realizing Experience Program Gains
Realizing your experience program goals is a pivotal moment for your organization. Getting to this stage requires lots of careful design work, listening intently to customers, understanding their feedback, and using that new learning to meaningfully transform the business. Brands can also evaluate how well they hit their experience program goals as they achieve this step.
How can companies most effectively evaluate how well they’ve realized program goals, though? And what might that goal realization ultimately look like as it reshapes or redefines processes? Let’s walk through what to look out for as your brand turns its goals into reality.
The Four Economic Pillars
There’s a highly effective paradigm for evaluating how well your program did and is doing for your brand, which we call the four economic pillars. These four elements are a relatively simple way to spell out your program’s performance and can serve as a powerful story to tell whether they were goals you were aiming for or not.
The first pillar here is customer acquisition; how many new customers has your company picked up since your experience program began, and how big a role did it play in netting new business? Like I said before, experience programs require a lot of design work before they’re activated, and part of this process is setting forth tangible, quantifiable financial goals to hit. Creating these goals and bearing them in mind is a great way to both prove ROI and establish your program’s role in acquisition.
The second pillar is customer retention. Did your program help keep customer churn low and build stronger relationships with your existing customer base? Why or why not? The third pillar, cross-selling/upselling existing customers, is similarly important for evaluating your experience initiative’s effect on your customer base. Finally, check your goals to see if your program hit the fourth economic pillar: lowering cost to serve. Evaluating your program’s success through the lens of these four pillars is a great way to both gauge its success and make the case for additional funding.
Costs and Culture
Taking a monetary magnifying glass to an experience program is everyone’s first expectation, and with good reason. A good experience initiative should result in a better experience, of course, but it’s a given that these programs are also created with the goal of helping brands control cost and boost profit, hence frameworks like the four economic pillars.
However, there’s a more abstract, yet arguably more important, element to consider when realizing experience program gains, and that’s the effect these initiatives have on company culture. Consider whether your program has positively impacted the workplace—are employees taking more pride in their work? Has your company achieved a united, holistic vision of the experience it provides?
These and other questions are important because these types of transformational changes are what create true Experience Improvement (XI). They allow organizations to create fundamentally connective relationships with customers, which stokes loyalty and turns those individuals into brand advocates. Meanwhile, employees become more passionate about their jobs, which further boosts a brand’s market profile. In other words, realizing experience goals means attaining the sort of meaningful cultural change that can take a company straight to the top.
Click here to read my POV on realizing experience goals and effectively tying your initiative to company success!
