When I describe what customer experience (CX) management requires to be able to transform a CX vision into reality, I often hear from my audience, “This is interesting, but we are different.” The nature of that difference is then often stated as one of the following: We are operating in B2B, not B2C; we operate in a heavily regulated sector; we are a public service; we don’t have clients, and so on. In fact, whether you want it or not, you are a customer experience business. What might be different for you is the context you are operating in — your CX ecosystem. But the six competencies you need to develop for CX management are the same:

  1. Research
  2. Prioritization
  3. Design
  4. Enablement
  5. Measure
  6. Culture

CX culture is not an option: in this illustration, a caterpillar's shadow is in a shape of a butterfly, symbolic to the fact that even companies who think they are not in CX actually already are

France Heringer-Jallot, SVP of customer experience and sales at Orange, shared at our recent French event #Tendances2020 some of Orange’s efforts and learnings related to culture. Here are a few of her points:

Plant The Seeds And Nurture A CX Culture

For companies that operate in countries with different markets and cultures, it is critical to create a global framework that local teams can adapt to their own context but also to source and share local initiatives that proved to be good practices. Orange adopted a customer journey focus and trains and supports business units on journey mapping activities, as well as organizes every year its Customer Experience Transformation Challenge (450 initiatives sourced in 2019 coming from its 26 countries).

Connect Employees, From Leaders To The Front Line

Making CX everyone’s responsibility is a tedious task that requires humility. In its CX transformation efforts, Orange gave voice to all its employees. Client-facing staff members felt that company leaders were disconnected from their day-to-day reality. They challenged executives to get a first-hand experience interacting with customers. Paul de Leusse, Orange’s deputy CEO for mobile financial services, went to Morocco to sell SIM cards at the market (see the video). This initiative turned out to be so valuable for Orange’s CX culture that what started as a challenge is now a company standard: Orange executives now do a field trip twice a year.

Do you want to know where you stand in terms of CX management? Take a look at our latest research or get in touch.