By Andrew Warnock, senior consultant at Clarasys.
At Clarasys, we understand the importance of committing strategic focus to customer experience (CX). Especially for those in the not-for-profit sector, where the idea of a ‘customer’ is often overlooked or misunderstood. Getting CX right means reaching your desired impact with efficiency and positive beneficiary sentiment. Strategically, this is vital for a charity looking to meet its purpose and mission. We see countless examples of charities committed to well-defined missions, without ways to measure whether the outputs they deliver drive an impact connected to that very mission.
A customer, depending on the impact proposition of the charity, can mean a beneficiary, volunteer, donor or any other actor that interacts with the charity. Focusing on the experiences of these actors provides a cross-cutting view that leaves all teams singing from the same purpose-centred hymn sheet.
We recently ran a round of bespoke not-for-profit CX workshops with different charities covering various personas. Investigating experience alongside industry incumbents provided unrivalled insight into the challenges, risks and opportunities that charities face today.
We believe any charity should underpin its executive strategy with a well-understood and communicated CX strategy. Based on our expertise in the market and from listening to those who attend our workshops, here’s why it’s so important and how to get started:
Understanding where CX sits within your charity
Customer experience is a cross-functional enterprise. This means you do not need a CX team, but each of your teams should understand the overall experience the charity is looking to deliver to a customer – what does each interaction feel like for customers to engage with? While other business principles carry more classical caché in the eyes of conventional organisation structures, a focus on CX puts you in a unique position to create value for beneficiaries where other projects, in isolation, cannot.
CX is often seen as a philosophy only, a mantra, without charitable connotations. However, it is a vital part of any long-term strategy that a culture of customer-centricity is woven through the senior tiers of charity leadership, and that driving this emphasis from the top-down can lead to excellent people-led outcomes. Adopting a customer-centric leadership approach means more than projects and sporadic exercises. CX represents an opportunity to embed a new culture/mindset. From customer service to finance, from marketing to fundraising and donor management, everyone should be able to answer the questions: “why do we do what we do? And for who?”
Linking your mission to impact
The role of a proper, top-down CX strategy is to convert goals into frontline (inter)action. Whatever differentiates the organisation must be grounded in the interaction between charity and stakeholders. Where profit-led organisations’ differentiator is their revenue proposition, charities’ differentiator should be the ability to make measurable and meaningful impact.
Meeting the biggest needs of a charity’s priority personas means making that meaningful impact. Often assumptions are made about the outputs that drive this impact: e.g. “this event will inspire increased fundraising” or “giving people access to technology will inspire digital literacy”. Proper due diligence of the persona jobs, needs and outcomes required by a charity’s activities are far more likely to lead to effective experiences and missions-met.
Many charity sector professionals will recognise these principles as parts of the Theory of Change framework. We utilise this process in prioritising key outcomes that contribute most effectively to the desired impact that underpins the charity’s mission.
We have established the importance of embedding CX in a charity and introduced the principles of creating impact for targeted “customers”. But how does this strategic shift look in practice?
Start by understanding your customer base
All CX discoveries need to start with a fundamental understanding of who your people are.
Customer, as we have already discussed, can mean a lot of things to a lot of people in the third sector. Start by asking, who are the expected recipients of the impact you are looking to deliver? Does this match your core beneficiaries today? Start by building personas, using the voices of your employees. This is a cost-effective way to draft personas and is often overlooked in place for time-consuming customer research.
Once a clear idea of existing and target personas is known, further research (interviews, focus groups, surveys, etc.) should be completed into the detail of the needs, experiences, journeys and sentiments of these personas. Well-designed personas describe customers in a tangible way that allows your teammates to relate to them without assigning them to a certain business unit. The best way to analyse the needs of your personas is to build a persona discovery plan that collates all applicable ‘voices’ (customer, business, employee and planet).
Designing activity through customer-centric analysis
Analysis shapes the design of the experiences targeted at making an impact. Customer journey mapping and mental models link the business model to the experiences of the beneficiary.
Effectively mapping and re-designing a journey is understanding the most effective route to beneficiary impact. Highlighting the key jobs of your target beneficiaries throughout their journey leads to a set of required interventions, that should be organised into programmes of work, communicated with, and delivered by the whole charity.
How do I know if changes in customer experience have the desired effect?
To effectively embed any change in customer experience, a charity has to have the business capabilities in place to do so. Capabilities are a set of business jobs designed to generate the desired customer outcomes. For example, a more effective customer service process will underpin a happier experience for someone visiting an animal shelter or more effective sales CRM can lead to far richer donor dialogues.
Executing changes can be extremely challenging when pressed with funding, trustee or external pressures. Whilst strategic, changes at any scale become more manageable once downsized and delivered in an agile fashion. Select priority personas, journeys, and capabilities and begin a model of continuous experience improvement with a single step.
A crucial facet of any successful change, particularly if the change resembles a cultural shift, is senior sponsorship or advocacy. The entire charity ought to know why changes happen, and improved customer experience often resonates far more than protection of the bottom line.
Excited to get started?
Better understanding your customers means better understanding yourself, and taking leaps towards diminishing the gap between intended impact and current effect. We love helping those who want to take this leap but know that the first step can be difficult, so feel free to get in touch with any questions at notforprofit@clarasys.com.
