Customer-First Mindset

Build CX aspiration and purpose at the top

Until recently customer-driven planning and experience design competency were missing from the customer communications lexicon.

Operational communications were treated as another back-end process - characterised by antiquated capability, a lack of strategy and an agenda driven by IT. It's no surprise Consumer Duty happened. A customer-focussed culture that drives excellence in communications requires strategic transformation. And making this happen starts with CX aspiration and purpose being driven from the top - with buy in across the C-suite. With the customer function – not IT - owning strategy and excellence in communications across all customer touch points.

 Building experience design competency

Leaders of communications centres of expertise or shared services have a crucial role in cultivating best practices and building out customer-focussed design competencies. We’ve identified 5 priority areas leaders need to get right.

1. Master journey design & management. Develop the service design practices for mapping existing communications journeys, and re-design these around the needs of customers. Done in a way that is scalable and provides real-time visibility of customer outcomes. Transforming customer experience whilst rationalising the legacy estate – a win win.

2. Harness behavioural science for customer good. Behavioural science has a vital role to play in helping customer’s make better everyday decisions. Behavioural best practice should be used to inform communication journeys and individual touchpoints – playing a key role in promoting good outcomes and regulatory best practice.

3. Adopt inclusive design and smart templating. Design a set of master templates that meet the needs of different customer segments - with the needs of vulnerable audiences designed in. A good template strategy will allow you to significantly reduce the overall number of templates, speed up multi-channel creation and deployment, and significantly reduce the cost of change.

4. Capture & distribute your communications principles. Create a set of communications principles that triangulate your brand promise with behavioural and regulatory best practice. Use toolkits that can be practically applied across your centre of expertise - including your copy & design teams and third parties. Enabling the consistent creation and maintenance of communications that meet customer needs.

5. Showcase communications excellence. Educate and influence the wider business with training, knowledge shares and interactive awareness sessions. Its crucial Product teams, Risk and Compliance have a strategic awareness of the ‘why’, an understanding of their role in governance best practice, and of course ‘what’ excellent looks like in communications. Enterprise awareness and focus is exactly what the regulator is looking for.

Read on for our next 3 blogs where we unpack the other capability foundations needed for effective CX transformations in regulated firms: Integrated Technology Stack; an Agile Operating Model; and an effective Performance Management foundation.