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Change management: how to bring it all together [CHECKLIST]

Posted by Perceptive Insights Team - 14 September, 2015

What does successful change management look like? We couldn’t write about change management without referring to Dr. John Kotter, the famous Harvard Business School professor. 

Quoting Dr. Kotter's 8-Step Process for Leading Change, there are eight critical success factors for change management in general. We've collated them into a checklist to ensure you’re on the right track in your efforts and are asking the right questions.

Change management - how to bring it all together [checklist]

1. Creating a sense of urgency

Help others see the need for change and they will be convinced of the importance of acting immediately.

An everyday challenge for customer experience professionals is helping both leadership and employees understand that the sooner they focus on the customer experience, the sooner the business will benefit.

 

2. Build your cross-functional team

Assemble a group with enough power to lead the change effort, and encourage the group to work as a team.

This has to be a company-wide effort, it is not a one-person project. This team will ensure that the initiative is a success.

 

3. Developing a change vision

Create a vision to help direct the change effort, and develop strategies for achieving that vision.

This is where you get your senior team together and develop a customer experience vision. This needs to be inspirational and ideally future focused, outlining what sort of customer experience you plan to deliver. It also acts as a guide to shape your strategy.

 

4. Communicate your vision to get buy-in

Make sure as many as possible understand and accept the vision and the strategy.

As we’ve stated before, communication is the way to success, and this needs to happen early and often -  before, during and after the implemented change.

 

5. Empowering broad-based action

Remove obstacles to change, change systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision, and encourage risk-taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions.

This one is about making it as easy as possible for everyone. Removing any barriers to change is crucial. This is where measuring your employee feedback is so important, as it’s about knowing about the barriers in the first place. Ask yourself, are your employees empowered  do what's right for your customers? 

 

6. Get short-term wins

Plan for achievements that can easily be made visible, follow-through with those achievements and recognise and reward employees who were involved.

Usually winning over senior leadership and getting buy-in needs proven results, which are generated by short-term wins. This is what builds your business case and ideally these results need to be visible for everyone. 

 

7. Keep developing further

Use increased credibility to change systems, structures, and policies that don't fit the vision, also hire, promote, and develop employees who can implement the vision, and finally reinvigorate the process with new projects, themes, and change agents.

It's all a journey. This goes for the customer experience as much as company-wide change initiatives. Change is really an evolution, more so than one actual event, and this is something to keep in mind when thinking about planning your customer experience program and measuring results.

 

8. Incorporate changes into the company culture

Articulate the connections between the new behaviours and organisational success, and develop the means to ensure leadership development and succession.

This is where you bring it all together—the values, objective, and the vision need to be ingrained into the core building blocks of the organisation. This is the only way you'll be able to not only implement but also sustain any changes you make. In order for this to happen, your policies, processes, recruitment, training and every other procedure in your business needs to be based on what's best for the customer.

Everyone's job must contribute to the customer experience. If you've implemented this successfully, you've done an awesome job and can truly become a customer-focused company.

 


Check out our ebook on change management to learn effective strategies to implement change in your business. Get it for free here:

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Topics: Brand Health


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