Industrial manufacturing companies are facing a complex task when it comes to developing customer experience (CX). As consumers, we are transferring our expectations for excellent CX from B2C to other fields. In the context of industrial manufacturing becoming customer-centric requires both a mindset shift and operational development. This is why solid change management capabilities are extremely important to ensure success of your CX transformation. In fact, McKinsey’s research shows that a comprehensive approach involving 24 actions related to the people side of change leads to a 79% transformation success rate.
Where to start?
Building awareness across the organization is always the first step. Employees need to understand the transformation’s actual impact on their work and what exactly is required from them.
- Engage from the beginning. Create a change vision together with the management and support them in communicating it. Involve as many teams as possible into defining the transformation’s goals. When you write the plan, you don’t fight the plan.
- Keep it specific. Define what customer excellence means in practice for your company and avoid generic descriptions. Customise communication for each team and show how exactly they can contribute.
- Focus on the customer. Explain customers’ needs and wants through customer personas and journeys. A complex value chain makes this step especially interesting in industrial manufacturing. With various customer journeys and profiles existing, there is a need for thorough research and mapping.
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How to continue?
Ensuring organizational commitment might be the hardest part of any change project. At this point, the novelty is gone and making the change stay for good requires work on many levels.
- Embed into business-as-usual. While the change implementation phase is critical, 20% of the desired value can still be lost after the implementation. The need for manager support and feedback, guidance, clear and easily available instructions cannot be underestimated.
- Measure the change. A typical transformation has business benefits and metrics, but how about the people side of change? Employees’ perception and experience should be measured throughout the whole transformation, too. This way, possible challenges and groups struggling with the change can be spotted early on. Sharing the results transparently across the organization increases trust and strengthens organizational commitment.
- Support CX with digital solutions. When it comes to digital capabilities, industrial manufacturing companies have a lot more room for improvement compared to other industries. The demand for digital services is growing, while continuous digital modernization is necessary for staying competitive. From the business continuity and growth perspective it is important to take the following into account: service availability, service path continuation, convenience and personalization, as well as smart utilization of automation and AI.
Change is inevitable but fear not – by carefully planning and investing resources into execution you can significantly improve your CX transformation’s success. What is even better, we have more than 70 change professionals to support your organization.
