If You Are Not Doing Customer Success Launch Planning in September, You Are Behind

On July, 17 1955 it was well over 100 degrees in Anaheim, CA on the first day in the original Magic Kingdom.  Women’s heels were melting into the asphalt, and people were thirsty but there wasn’t enough to drink.  Yet what was a disastrous first day for one of the world’s most famous CEOs is now known as the “happiest place on earth”.

How did that day spark the beginning of the most famous Client Experience (CX) program the world has ever seen, and the largest revenue producing entertainment company on the planet?  Because Walt Disney knew that people love great experiences, and they would pay a premium for them.  So he prepared his team to look for ways to improve experiences and drive those improvements across the park.  In short, Walt institutionalized CX into the culture from the beginning.

As a CX leader, what can learn from Walt?  For one thing, like Walt we can capture the touchpoints across the customer journey that teach us which parts of the experience really matter.  This insight can safely power our revenue growth plan, so the cross-sell feels like a natural part of the experience.  Not just an attempt “to sell more at every turn”.

Download the CX Launch Tool to begin mapping out your CX plan to positively effect 2019, leverage a 5 step plan to launch a winning CX culture, and score your company’s performance based on various benchmarks.

But why the urgency to start before September?  Assessing and building CX capabilities in the Fall is what empowers us to apply it to strategic planning for the next calendar year.  If we don’t, we miss an entire planning cycle to rethink our approach to the customer experience.  By waiting until after Fall we are helping our competitors and we’re falling behind.

At SBI, we’ve been helping clients drive revenue growth by implementing emerging best practice CX programs, which are highlighted in the 2019 Client Experience Workbook.

To make sure your CX strategy “sticks”, follow these five simple launch steps. Using these, we can see what Walt did to launch Disneyland.  Put another way, let’s learn and apply what Walt would do (“WWWD”):

1. Publish A Plan

    

   • Build and roll out a plan with clear roles and responsibilities across touch points

      

   • Walt emphasized the finer details of the guest experience and made sure cast members know their roles and how to best support each other as a team as guests moved throughout the park. Those interactions weren’t left to chance.

      

2. Seek To Improve

    

   • Create a culture of change and embrace agile methods, including empowering team members to seek better and not just “good enough”.

      

   • “Pixie dust” was sprinkled to guests by on-stage cast members to make sure experiences felt magical.

      

3. Coordinate Big Changes Together as a Team

    

   • Big ideas require organization, includes dates to coordinate execution. Consider technology to support the CX motion, to help embrace related best practices.

      

   • Creating magical experiences required a range of engineers and trades, with detailed planning and execution that later became Disney Imagineering.

      

4. Create Content to Teach Design Changes

    

   • Enablement tools and training curriculum have been created prior to driving the change, to help you teach and benchmark performance vs. peers.

      

   • Walt created Disney University to make sure cast members learned and quality was consistent.

      

5. Coach and Manage to Seek and Embrace Design Changes

    

   • The best ideas come from the field. Create incentives to seek design changes for better customer experiences, and coach team members to execute those changes.

      

   • Disney’s “I Have an Idea” program rewarded costs savings and experience improvements that made a difference. Most of those ideas would never have happened without team input and motivation to surface them.

      

Don’t fall into the trap of being the leader who sponsors CX as an initiative but doesn’t put the execution plans in place to make the changes work and stick.  Because the details matter.  And you can get help by taking the Self-Scoring tool below to make sure you start in time  to benefit next year’s results.

Just ask yourself, what would Walt do?  Or wait, and risk ending up with the wrong kind of Mickey Mouse operation.

Download the CX Launch Tool to begin mapping out your CX plan to positively effect 2019, leverage a 5 step plan to launch a winning CX culture, and score your company’s performance based on various benchmarks.

Schedule a working session at SBI’s Studio. 

Located in Dallas, TX, our facility offers state-of-the-art meeting rooms, lounge, full-service bar, and a studio used to tape our TV shows. SBI provides the location and facilitators, all at a compelling price point.