Elite athlete and CX guru Melanie Disse launches “CX is a Team Sport”

She’s a world champion canoeist and a leading customer experience consultant. Melanie Disse has now launched a book linking her two worlds and applying lessons from elite sport to help leaders improve their CX performance. In this exclusive interview, she gives us a sneak peak into CXTS™ – Customer Experience is a Team Sport, available soon on Amazon.

What inspired you to combine your elite sports background with your experience in CX to write this book?

After many years as an international athlete, I recently stepped into a team coaching role. It was that coaching experience that helped me understand the similarities between a high-performance sports team, and a high-performing organisation. In CX, every single department, whether they know it or not, has a direct or indirect impact on the customer. For an organisation to provide great experiences to customers, they must all work together. And that’s hard! I’ve seen it fail so many times, with business units KPI’ed to optimise for their own performance, not for the greater good of the customer. And that creates friction, for the customer, and the organisation.

So I started to think about how to apply what I’ve learned in my sports career to my work in CX, and CXTS™ – Customer Experience is a Team Sport was born!

Initially I had a few sports stories include in the book.

For many years, I’ve kept my sports and professional careers very separate. It took me 10 years to realise that I can (and should!) apply learnings from one to the other!

It really is thanks to my editors that the book now includes a lot more sporting stories, not just to illustrate the similarities and make the analogies easier to understand, but also to make it more fun to read!

How did you come up with the idea behind the CXTS™ framework and operating model that the book describes?

I didn’t actually set out to create an operating model; it evolved as I was writing the book. The building blocks were there: leadership, alignment, culture, the coach and the toolkit, insights and performance, I had it all written down but it wasn’t until later that one of my editors encouraged me to think about it as the pillars for an operating model. It changed how I approached CXTS™, and how I structured the book.

The framework came later still. I had the idea in my mind that we need to approach CX from an enterprise-wide perspective, while still keeping a CX function (business unit) in place. The framework I created explains the way organisations can address and set up CX as both an organisation-wide practice and a business unit within the practice. The operating model then outlines the pillars needed to create both, and align with the rest of the organisation. It creates a holistic picture for CX while providing practical tools and guidance for leaders to rethink CX and implement changes.

The one thing I knew from the start was that I wanted to write a book that makes CX easy to digest, and practical for any leader to pick up and implement. Since CX truly is a team sport, it’s not just CX leaders who need to rethink CX, but all leaders. I didn’t want to write a specialist book to preach to the converted, but instead reach every part of an organisation. And I truly hope I managed to do that.

What are the key learnings you’d like to share with our readers?

I think the key learnings are that we need to rethink how we approach CX. It starts with clarity on what we mean when we say CX since CX is often used interchangeably with customer service, NPS, surveys, design, journey mapping, and so on. In reality, they’re all part of CX, but most organisations don’t spend time defining clearly upfront what it is and who’s responsible for what. With shared accountabilities across most if not all business units, clarity and alignment are king, and that’s not always easy.

The second learning is that the role of the CX function is quite different to what most people think it is, and what most CX leaders are tasked to do. I describe it as the coaching role. Your CX function isn’t part of the delivery of the work, it exists to empower and enable all other teams in providing great experiences – consistently, end-to-end, and every single day. They need the right tools in the toolkit for that (VoC, journey mapping, design thinking, etc.), but they also need to have alignment and shared accountabilities at the leadership level to create a customer-centric culture.

And thirdly, for CX to thrive, we not only need the right culture backed by the leadership team and shared accountabilities, but we must also create tangible ways of measuring impact at business unit level, and track performance.

Simply having an insights program and sharing key metrics isn’t enough. To drive change through the organisation and enable performance improvements (for customers and the business), organisations must make changes and enable continuous improvement opportunities. That requires not just buy-in from everyone, but also a holistic way of designing those new and improved experiences.

In a nutshell, that’s what CXTS™ is all about.

You mentioned shared accountabilities. How does accountability for CX outcomes work in a team environment, for example from a KPI perspective?

Yes, that’s a great question and one many organisations struggle with. I like working with CX Principles for that.

CX Principles are standards you can create that outline what outcome you’d like to create for your customers, guide staff behaviour, and explain how experiences should be designed.

For example, things like “make it easy for customers to work with us”, or simply “Seamless Experiences”, are CX Principles that are often used and easy to understand. They explain what we’re aiming for, and each business unit within an organisation can tailor it to their work to guide staff behaviour, change processes, design new products or digital workflows, and so on.

While all business units may have the same CX Principles to work with from a KPI perspective, the behaviour that sits behind that Principle may differ from function to function. Nudging staff behaviour to change customer outcomes, or experiences, is the first step. The next step is to measure how successful you are. Surveys or operational data points can be used to understand and track performance, and tie those to KPIs. For example, you can use the Customer Effort Score (CES) for the above mentioned CX Principles in contact centre environments (perhaps predicted via a conversation) or through a journey survey that captures all business units that are part of that journey. That way you understand how each department performs against the CX Principle, using the CES as a measure. There are many different ways to measure impact but that’s a common example.