You've been Framed: A Simple Way to Strategically Frame your Business & its CEM Programme

Firstly I have failed miserably to keep up my once a week target for blog postings but it’s been all go at Blairgowrie Associates at the moment.  There have been a couple of interesting developments. We met our first senior director who told us that they have no customer issues and they have little use to use NPS...this is despite much publically available comment to the contrary.  I guess the maxim of 80% chief executives believe there customers have a great experience but less than 8% of their customers do really holds true.

More importantly, we have started to use a tool to help frame our client’s strategy.  For clarity, this is not about redesigning or recreating strategy, it is a simple way to understand and frame where your organisation is, no matter how big or small you are.

Helping Bridge the Gap...

We use this as a way of seeing how joined up an organisation is from business imperative through to end value created.  To create a common lexicon for Blairgowrie, we often score each component and discuss how connected each of these components are.

So the power is actually in the "joinedupness" (is that a word?) not necessarily the individual components. For most businesses one would be hard pressed to honestly say “there is no vision or strategy or activity”.  When we have run this past senior leaders we get an initial

contemptuous look and a short “of course we have all these things”.  More often than not this is true.  Yes for some it  could always be much clearer so everyone in the organisation understands their contribution and impact. 

To take a simple example and quantify, one may score the clarity of business vision, say, 4 out of 10.  This could simply mean the business needs to be more effective at communicating this internally to move it up a couple of points.  This indicates some improvements to be made for each section - NOT Recreation.

Where we often see major challenges for companies looking at the individual components is in the business activities box.  Often too many activities that are, at best, tenuously linked to strategy, vision and imperative – or sort of retro fitted by managers to please others. 

If we take a moment to reflect on how many of us have been involved in activities where it is not clear how they link to the other components of the model and it is difficult to articulate the reason why they are linked, without reverting to management speak?  I will admit there have been some occasions in my career where this was certainly the case; fortunately for me not too often.

Back to our senior leaders...the moment of truth is whaen you ask them to honestly assess how strong the joins (as indicated by the arrows) really are and how big are the gaps between each component. 

The acid test being can you move from left to right and right to left articulating CLEARLY how things fit together and why to people outside your company eg. shareholders, investors, analysts? If one finds oneself tripping over words, you know it could be better.  The reality is that it is more important to drive cohesion across these areas, as well as focus on the individual boxes.

This is our raison d'être at Blairgowrie - when we talk about "bridging the gap" this is what we mean.  Stating the blindingly obvious by joining up these areas and strengthening the linkage it means that the improvement and business value created greater and much more sustainable.

“Simple is as simple does”

I hope you agree the tool and its application is pretty straightforward, but we all know in our business lives we are swamped with lots of initiatives, governed by resource constraints and the need to execute these things...yesterday. 

Often we get distracted (or is it allured) by trying to unconsciously complicate things,  work to someone else’s agenda , or create false functional silos. All this is not out of badness, everyone wants to do a great job, but often this is easier to do than providing the headspace to step back and use this simple tool to frame the strategy and where to focus effort.  Focus on the blocks, the linkage or both?

It will help prioritise and stop some initiatives that have sprung up, undoubtedly with good intensions from the team.  I have used it as a great challenge mechanism at board meetings to question how things really fit and help prioritise for valuable resources when say the IT director  passionately suggests doing XYZ.

So how does this relate to Customer Experience & Business Improvement?

We have covered that the model simply helps frame a business in a slightly different way – the focus being on how joined up things really are.  The challenge for customer experience and business improvement is they simply become disconnected “stuff” that goes on in the business. 

This is NOT saying they are unimportant, but if it is not linked to the model it means that the programme becomes part of the other 1,000 other initiatives that suck up organisational time, money and energy.  How many of us have sat in meetings to talk about our deliverables without first contextualising how the deliverable links to business imperative, vision, strategy, activity and end value?

All voice of customer or NPS programmes are well intentioned but if they operate in a disconnected manner within an organisation any value created tends to be diluted or one spends lots of time trying to establish an ROI. 

In some cases managers will not be able to articulate or identify an ROI because the approach has become an end in itself - not a means to an end to build the bridges between strategy, operational reality and results.  Short term this is great but mid to longer term this initiative will eventually be changed and forgotten as the next great white knight initiative comes to prominence.

Funnily, I came across a PR statement from Satmetrix research today saying 70% of organisations do not know, cannot measure or cannot prove the return on investment (ROI) from customer experience management initiatives.... Q.E.D

If you want to discuss this further you can get me at doc@blairgowrieassociates.co.uk