How a culture of sharing drives customer experience success.

Childhood lessons we forget in business

Do you recall as a child a parent or teacher saying, ‘play nicely, share your toys’?

Now fast forward to your business environment. How many times have others withheld information or sat on insight you needed?

Sharing isn’t a natural state for most of us. The upside of sharing our toys was a more fulfilling, interactive playtime. The downside was the risk of disruption – or worse, broken toys. Subconsciously, the negative outweighed the positive, so we resisted.

In business, it’s a similar story. Sharing what we know can feel like it lessens our value or exposes us to risk. We fear our ideas will be misused or misrepresented.

Why businesses struggle to share

This mindset can become cultural. Many organisations compete for major contracts, so they restrict information to a few people on a need-to-know basis. In that environment, it’s hard to imagine being comfortable sharing customer feedback openly to enable collective improvement.

However, this is exactly what’s needed and expected. A customer experience culture of sharing ensures insight reaches the right people in the right way so they can act on it.

Sharing as part of the Customer Centric Mindset

Sharing is one of the Customer Centric Mindset characteristics shown below. Embracing this mindset allows CX professionals to put customers authentically at the centre of decision-making. That’s only possible when customers share feedback, the business shares where it’s failing, and leadership shares the motivation for being customer-centric. When information flows, trust follows – and people become more open and giving in return.

_{The Customer Centric Mindset model is proprietary to Lexden Limited. You’re welcome to reference or share it with clear attribution.}

Case study: Syngenta and global CX collaboration

In business, sharing isn’t a behaviour that’s celebrated enough, yet it can make a significant difference.

Last year, we picked up the ICXA Gold for Best B2B CX Programme for our work with global agri-chemical giant Syngenta. One reason for this success was the culture of sharing that ran through the programme.

We interviewed over 500 customers across 25 countries. Historically, this insight may have stayed local, but we created a central repository of customer issues, enabling strategic decision-making. Improvements affecting customers in multiple countries were funded collectively, whereas previously they might have been treated as isolated local issues.

With shared insight from various cultures, the improvement design team shaped solutions that addressed common challenges for many customer types – not just a few. This approach led to major operational improvements between Syngenta and its distributing customers. These changes took place ahead of a full SAP migration, ensuring the new system launched free from existing customer issues.

Only through sharing customer insight on this scale was such progress possible.

_{Photo by Pixabay ‘Blue Bright Lights’}

Case study: Airbus and data sharing across partners

Airbus also recognised that they are stronger when working with their supply chain partners rather than solving problems in isolation. They created a data-sharing platform to exchange engineering and design data — once internal — across suppliers.

According to The Royal Academy of Engineering, the £19.2 million project enables partners to design aircraft more efficiently and innovatively to meet future market and environmental expectations.

The consortium, led by Airbus, includes Rolls-Royce, the University of Cambridge, CFMS, MSC Software and GKN Aerospace. Design phases that used to take weeks now take hours because partners have real-time access to trusted data. The result is faster time-to-market, fewer design-manufacturing conflicts, better supplier coordination and lower costs.

Many who didn’t expect to benefit gained significant value, all through a customer experience culture of sharing.

Sharing as a strength

Sharing deserves recognition as a strength. As shown in these examples, it inspires others, stimulates reflection and drives better outcomes. When we share what we know, we demonstrate trust and accelerate learning.

It’s about embracing what’s shared to strengthen it — and benefiting from others’ progress.

For more on sharing and other characteristics of the Customer Centric Mindset, subscribe to Lexden on YouTube, where we are running a series on Collaboration, Celebration, Experimentation and Curiosity. Sign up to be alerted when our episode on Sharing goes live.

Posted by Christopher Brooks, MD of Lexden CX & Lexden Luxe