The Five Qualities of Change Ready, Change Willing Organizations
by Kate Kompelien
A successful change management transformation begins with one core tenet: enabling a change sponsor who can pinpoint people’s strengths and align them to the project goals, while sharing pertinent information along the way.
Failing to consider the change management aspect of CX transformation can translate into less-than-stellar results. According to Harvard Business Review, roughly 75% of corporate transformations fail or are abandoned. There’s huge risk involved in not aligning the right people to the right tasks and projects. Take IT distributor Tarsus Distribution as an example. The company switch from manual data entry to robotic process automation did not go well. Why? The reasons for the shift were not shared with employees in a clear manner, leading to distrust and resistance.
To take care of your people and company without falling prey to wishful thinking and insufficient strategies, look to tried and true change management and customer experience (CX) transformation models as your guide.
One such model is the RACI chart, which helps leaders organize people according to the roles they will have in a particular project as the person responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed along each milestone.
For employees to embrace change, they first have to be aware of what’s coming. Position the upcoming change to your employees in a way that creates desire to make it successful, and empower your employees with the right amount of knowledge and information they need to make—and then support—that change.
No change management approach is perfect for every type of organizational change. Re-org announcements require one approach, new technologies and process adoption might require another. As a result, there have been a handful of different strategies that have emerged to help organizations respond to these challenges in the way that works best for them. A few common models include:
No matter what change management model you use to spearhead your CX transformation, pulling in key stakeholder groups before starting the transformation can do wonders. Here you’ll find a people-focused change management strategy using the RACI chart. Each person’s role and tasks within a project are clearly defined, along with milestone tracking and places where decisions must be finalized and approved.
Before we dig into some of the best practices we’ve observed when it comes to organizing and mobilizing your team around CX transformations, let’s get more familiar with the RACI model first:
For a winning change management and customer experience transformation process, one of the key pieces before you get started is to truly understand who is on each cross-functional core team and channel. Decide where they should be aligned on the RACI chart. Then you can prepare for the project, create your approach, and kick it off. If you don't do this work up front, things can become more complicated later and lines of communication will often break down.
To get a better feel for how RACI can help support a more successful CX transformation, let’s use the RACI model and apply it to an on-premises contact center migration to the cloud. In a cloud migration, there are several teams to consider. From deciding who the main stakeholders should be to lining up the internal teams—such as IT and internal communications—decide who will be responsible for the rollout. Using the RACI change management model can serve as a stepping stone to a smooth implementation.
Responsible parties may be your IT, customer service, and communications professionals who will help spread the word and provide training about the cloud migration.
Accountable parties for this transformation may include people on your leadership team and also external consultants who are shepherding the CX transformation. These individuals should serve as the CX champions across your organization.
Consulted parties would be those part of the pilot group, employees who will use the systems daily or often, or other executives who are creating the vision and goals for the project and company.
Informed parties may be those at the highest levels of leadership and others who should know what’s going on, but not pulled into the day-to-day activities of the migration.
As with any migration, you’ll want to check in with customers and employees who are customer-facing to capture real-time feedback. By having these clearly defined groups, your organization should be able to much more quickly to adapt to implementation and rollout changes on the fly.
With a small-scale cloud migration or larger-scale CX change management transformation, planning is everything. While technology is critical to CX success, buy-in from your people and organization are just as important.