Are decisions in your organisation being made for the right reasons? Are they based on empathy for the customer’s needs or based on what is going to get someone promoted?
For many leaders if they can bring in some new technology that is the latest trend this firstly looks good on their CV, secondly it makes them sound impressive in the board room. These could be chat-bots or some new form of “AI”.
This often happens without any consideration of whether it will improve the customer experience or actually make it worse.
I’ve seen first-hand management wanting to be seen to be playing with the latest technology so they can appear impressive to their peers both inside and outside of the organisation. I pushed back against this as it would have had a detrimental impact on an already optimised digital customer experience.
The decisions were being driven for the wrong reasons. Someone needs to stand up for the customer.
This sounds crazy to type this as you would expect organisations and their leadership to be focused on what is best for their customers, sadly human ego often gets in the way.
The role of the customer champion therefore can be challenging and even lonely if you are a single voice in the business with empathy and understanding of your customer’s needs and behaviours.
It’s a challenge of evidence vs opinion.
Let me introduce you to the HiPPO. The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.
- The HiPPO acts on opinion because they read about it somewhere online or they see a competitor is doing something.
- The HiPPO wants to get a promotion or be praised for bringing in “the next big thing”.
- The HiPPO just came up with an idea in the shower that morning and has decided without seeking any evidence that the company should suddenly change course.
This puts the customer champions, the people on the front line the closest to the customer in a challenging position where the boss (HiPPO) says “just do it”. Even though the team don’t agree.
Digital Rebels recently surveyed employees from over 30 companies and 52% said they are often tasked with work they don’t agree with.
If you’d like to learn how to tackle these challenges including HiPPO negotiation tactics, find out more about our Chaos to Performance Training.
Credit: Hippo Image by Michael Siebert from Pixabay
Posted in: Digital Workplace and Intranets , Leadership , Teams and Teamwork , User Experience (UX)