Transform Customer Experience

Chapter 3Building a CX culture

Happy customers make for happy employees. I see this often when working in customer sites. You can feel if an organisation has a positive culture as soon as you walk in, because employees will be smiling, positive and focused, and the attitude is contagious. On the flip side, if there are problems internally, there are usually warning signs, such as a lot of unplanned staff absences and a high attrition rate. You can bet that there will be problems with their customer experience as well. This in turn destabilises an organisation’s brand and has a negative impact on revenue.

Orange, the telco that swept across the UK in 1994, built a broad brand-awareness campaign in an industry that had never had powerful consumer brands. Patrick Harris, who was Director of Creativity there at the time, realised that the first task for his staff was to give this new, disruptive brand a positive presence. He writes:

Staff actions should reinforce the promises a brand makes to its customers. If wisely conducted, this reinforcement breeds more success in terms of sales, awareness and loyalty. Employees have the formidable task of demonstrating the brand by the actions they take.¹

Like many organisations today, Orange faced both internal and external problems: interdepartmental rivalries, staff and management mismatches, inconsistent suppliers and the diverse communication requirements of a sizable workforce not being met. The company managed these issues by embedding ...