Ensuring every employee can instinctively activate your corporate story and strategy in the customer experience requires unwavering commitment and persistence. To make this happen, CMOs must infuse the corporate story and strategy into the company’s culture. But, how?
It takes unwavering commitment from the executive team.
For employees to embrace and activate your strategy and story, leaders must drive mindset, behavior and cultural change throughout the employee population. To illustrate what happens when leaders don’t play their part, we share this example. Leaders in a financial services firm told customers that it was shifting from being a retailer to a financial adviser, but a year later research showed the customer experience with the company had not changed. It turned out leaders across the company did not support the change so employees were still churning out transactions and hadn’t changed their story or behavior to match their new adviser role. What this means is, words and actions matter in the customer experience. Leaders must ensure the story and strategy are communicated in a consistent manner inside and outside the organization.
It requires formal training.
Companies spend millions of dollars training employees on basic job skills. Yet, a fundamental requirement of every employee should be that you are able to share with conviction who your company is, what it does, the value it delivers and, ultimately, why someone should do business with your organization. To make this happen, CMOs must develop educational programs that enable employees to internalize, personalize and activate the corporate story in their daily work activities. This can be accomplished through a combination of classroom training and on-demand or virtual classes offered online. This should be part of the overall learning and development process for every employee.
It must be infused into daily work activities.
Formal training is a start, but CMOs need to develop educational tools that enable employees to structure consistent customer conversations, content, presentations, and customer-facing communication vehicles. Tools like department or role-specific quick reference guides, handbooks and online messaging content can dramatically increase employee productivity as well as corporate messaging adoption and activation across the organization.
It has to become part of your culture.
Employees need to be immersed in your strategy and story for it to stick. A sustained, 18-24 month, internal communications initiative should be launched and executed. This is where you blend cognitive learning (formal training and education) with emotional engagement to infuse the corporate story into your culture. This is how you engage employees in such a way that they instinctively activate the words and actions that are required to deliver a differentiated customer experience.
CMOs that “get it” commit to designing an intentional and disciplined process that ensures every employee can instinctively activate the story and strategy throughout the customer experience.
