There are few things more powerful than a well-crafted Customer Experience Mission Statement. After all, a mission drives everything else.
A Customer Experience Mission Statement defines how you as an organization show up for your customers, no matter what. It’s a guiding statement that provides a consistent “North Star” for your employees regarding the customer experience you want to deliver.
Learn More: Why a CX Mission Statement Matters & And How to Create One
But a Mission Statement that’s never used is simply a bunch of words. The best missions are used as a tool, and in many different ways.
This is typically the result of intentional, proactive work from CX change agents (like you!) to introduce the mission statement on the inside of your organization from job postings and employee onboarding and beyond.
Where should you begin?
Well, it begins by taking the CX Mission Statement out of the abstract, and making it more of a visible part of your company culture.
I call these Mission Moments: Those moments where we can see the CX Mission reflected — or not — in your company through true stories of customer interactions and feedback.
While there are infinite ways to incorporate Mission Moments into your workplace and culture, here are three of my favorites.
3 Ways to introduce Mission Moments into your organization (and turn words into actions)
1. Share and ask for mission moments when interviewing
Job candidates should know if their values are well-aligned with the organization.
A great way to articulate this is by discussing the CX Mission Statement and what it means to the organization during the interviewing process.
Better yet, share a few Mission Moments and ask the candidate if they can recall a time when they could relate.
Let’s look at an example:
A client has a CX Mission Statement focused on ensuring customers, employees, and partners feel proactively valued throughout their journey. They introduce this idea into the interviewing process and share several examples of when they felt they had lived up to this mission – and when they hadn’t.
One Mission Moment they like to share during an interview is how they knew about a customer issue but passed the buck for months before fixing it. Once they aligned with the mission, they realized the issue was completely against the mission, and therefore fixing it became a priority.
By sharing how they corrected an issue by leaning into the mission, they’re transparent about how they used this mission as a reminder and learning tool.
They then ask the candidate to consider a time when they had helped someone feel valued.
By aligning the interview with the CX Mission Statement, the organization in this example emphasized the importance of the mission and how it’s used.
Candidates who connected with this mission were more likely to carry it forward in their employee journey.
Employees want to work where their values and priorities align with the organizational culture.
Making the mission part of the interviewing journey reflects those values in real, tangible ways for prospective team members.
Learn More: CX Education for Employees: Why it Matters & How to Develop Your Program
2. Create a habit in the first 90 days
Some employee onboarding journeys feel like they end in two days of training, during which they might meet with HR, review the handbook, and maybe sit in on a training session or video course.
The best employee journeys start with a focus on the customer experience. And the CX Mission Statement is a great way to start that journey with the right focus.
Yes, the mission should be covered in the training and handbooks. Maybe you’ve even shared an internal video course about it – which is great! But the goal is for each employee to really internalize the mission. We want something they can tuck into their hearts and minds and know that it’s just how business is done here.
This is a great opportunity for Mission Moments: The Game.
One of my favorite ways to help employees internalize the CX Mission is to create a game of it for their first 90 days. A simple way to implement this is by awarding points when new employees either witness others living up to the mission or when they themselves see an opportunity to do so.
This can be handled with a simple form to submit that asks:
- What Mission Moment did you witness or deliver?
- Why do you think it lived up to our mission or not?
- Is there an employee or team to celebrate for living up to the mission?
- Is there a lesson or idea to improve things for the future?
By inviting employees to record what they see, it encourages them to keep their mission “radar” on to recognize when the principles of the CX Mission are fulfilled — and when they’re not. The format also encourages actions once the Mission Moment is acknowledged.
One of our workshopping clients incorporated recognizing Mission Moments in the hands-on training for their learning management system (LMS). This reinforced not only how to use the LMS and access all of the educational offerings, but also why learning this way was important.
3. Start key meetings with a Mission Moment
CX team meetings are an easy opportunity to revisit the CX Mission and bring it to life.
I talk a lot about team meetings and CX Management , and integrating mission moments into your meetings is one of the simplest ways you can level-up your CX meetings.
There’s really only one step: Ask a different team member to bring a Mission Moment to each meeting.
As a reminder, these can be stories of moments employees and the organization overall lived up to the CX Mission, or when they didn’t.
One organization focused on empowering leaders, so they often had lessons learned by discussing when they didn’t deliver on that mission. With each story, a culture of honesty and accountability was reinforced.
Learn More: How to Run an Effective Customer Experience Team Meeting
A final note: Look for small ways to make Mission Moments part of each day
The goal of the CX Mission is to inspire the right decisions and actions throughout the organization on behalf of your customers.
Those decisions and judgment calls happen in lightning speed, and the mission only works if everyone in the organization genuinely sees it as the truth of the culture.
While the three methods we reviewed here can help you deliver on that, you also need to be true to the mission in everyday interactions.
For example: If employee empowerment is part of your CX Mission, then employees need to feel like they are empowered in their daily lives.
If the culture itself feels oppressive, but the Mission Statement is all about freedom, employees will feel that lack of alignment. The result? the Mission Statement will likely start to feel like more of a platitude than something the organization truly lives by, and employees are more likely to lose faith in it.
On the other hand, if employees can see the Mission Statement applied and reflected in Mission Moments — if they see the organization walking the walk, and not just talking the talk — they’re much more likely to buy in and better apply the CX Mission to their own daily activities.
It’s a positive feedback loop that can be slow to start, but picks up lots of steam as more people in your organization buy in.
And when they do, everybody wins: A well-aligned mission and culture is reflected in both the employee experience and the customer experience. And that alignment translates into better priorities, improved decision-making, and happier employees.
Get our free Customer Experience Mission Workbook
Are you using a CX Mission in your organization? If so, that’s great!
If not, my team and I created a free step-by-step guide to follow: Get the CX Mission Statement Workbook here.
Jeannie