Designing the right customer experience culture for your organisation will help you articulate who you are, hire the right people, and draw your customers to engage with you. Culture can be emergent, or can stem from a leader’s vision and values, however culture can also be created with intentional design.
Is it possible to design and measure an organisational culture?
The short answer is ‘yes’.
Core to designing and affecting cultural change is understanding a key relationship: Our values shape, guide and direct our behaviours. We can measure behaviours and we can measure sentiment towards how our peers and managers behave.
By measuring behaviours, we can track the effectiveness of our change program. For an organisation to be successful in changing its culture, we must see a tipping point of behaviours exhibited by the group of employees, aligning to the desired culture behaviours.
Put simply, an organisation can track the success of a cultural change program by measuring the point at which a series of small behavioural changes becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more important change across the organisation.
Organisational culture change success requires a tipping point in key behaviours aligned to the desired cultural behaviours. The great news is the proven tipping point is only 35%. When 35% of your team are exhibiting the behaviours needed for success, the culture changes.
Four steps are needed to move from today’s culture to tomorrow’s desired culture:
Clarify the desired culture – specifically, determine the behaviours that would prove we have achieved our target culture.
Baseline today’s culture to identify existing ‘right’ behaviours - we keep and leverage what already works.
Deploy an engaging program of activities, communication and capability development to create the culture shift required.
Measure and proactively manage the culture change over time.
Zappos aligns its values with behaviours
Zappos, an online retailer, is renowned for designing an engaging customer culture. Two of Zappo’s values are ‘Deliver WOW with service’ and ‘Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication’. Honoring these values, they very publicly celebrated a record breaking 10 hour and 51 minute customer service call. In this example, behaviours around highly invested engagement are modeled. Tight customer call times are not.
Zappos Customer Team Call Centre
To support the company’s values, members of the Zappos Customer Team are asked to reflect on: “What are things you can improve upon in your work or attitude to WOW more people? Have you WOWed at least one person today?”
Sample behaviors for ‘Delivering Wow with Service’ (according to the Zappos website) are:
Helps even when it “isn’t their job”
Wows everyone, everywhere
Actually makes me say “wow”
Measuring Cultural Change: The Culture in Action Index
Being able to baseline and then track the impact of an organisation’s culture change effort is critical in ensuring change success. Undertaking change programs without an objective, usable measurement system.
CapFeather uses an approach called the Culture in Action (CIA) index. The CIA Index was developed by Dr. David Rosete, CapFeather’s Organisational Psychologist, and is being used by a growing number of organisations as a KPI to measure cultural engagement. This measure tracks cultural change over time allowing near-real time monitoring of the effectiveness of change programs.
The CIA index is calculated by exploring a group of employees’ views on how they see themselves, colleagues and their direct manager either encourage or dissuade others from displaying the core cultural behaviours within the work-place.
Our prior work shows that the tipping point for cultural change comes when 35% of employees are displaying the desired behaviours in a consistent fashion.
The index is built in a similar way to the well-known NPS model and is both simple to deploy, and simple to understand.
The value comes from being able to quantify in part the success of a cultural transformation program by measuring the point at which a series of small behavioural changes or incidents becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more important change. In the case of a culture program, the desired cultural behaviours are demonstrated by the organisation’s members.
Delivering a Return on Change
The Culture in Action (CIA) index measure was specifically designed to form part of the Board’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track the effectiveness of investments made in transforming a company’s culture.
Critically, an effective culture change measurement allows us to determine the ‘return on change’ – or the financial impact of the planned change program. In one organisation, when the CIA Index reached 36%, sales had increased by 4%, service metrics had increased by 8% and customer churn had decreased by 11%.
Design and measure your ideal customer culture
The CapFeather team will invest the time getting to know your organisation to see if we can help you. Our first objective is to ensure you get a return on your investment in working with us. We will then tailor our Customer Culture Design program to your organisation and outline the detailed activities and time-frame needed to reach your goals.
Start the conversation with us today
Why CapFeather?
We help mature firms find new and sustainable opportunities by looking beyond the immediate horizon.
Over 20 years of senior advisory, our people have worked on more than 200 projects to deliver bottom line growth and new revenue through product and service innovation - achieved though compelling customer relationships.
