Getting customer experience management into corporate DNA is sometimes a survival strategy. Case in point: the video game maker Electronic Arts (EA).

By all accounts, EA was once one of America’s most hated organizations a few years ago. By 2013, the company’s once stellar portfolio had degenerated into derivative games with hasty, unsatisfying endings. Customer relationships fell apart as complaints were met with arrogant dismissals. Modularization of storylines to expand sources of income disrupted game play. And the sales-driven culture introduced to grow revenue killed innovation and staff morale. EA’s stock price collapsed by two-thirds over a six-year period and the firm was voted “Worst in America” by Consumerist two years in a row.

That second vote shook the firm awake. Senior leadership called an emergency meeting, appointed a gamer CEO, and developed a plan centered on customer experience. Quick wins included full refunds for any reasons and the removal of piracy protections that prevented customers from sharing games. Deeper changes included using data and qualitative customer feedback to recreate customer touchpoints (146 senior managers actually spent hours silently listening to complaints). And the opening of development doors let dedicated players beta test new titles for free, something 1.7 million did in late 2014 and another 7 million did in early 2015.  Profits soared, rocketing up more than 100 fold to nearly $900 million in just one year.

Given the rising importance of Customer Experience management– which emphasizes exceptional branded customer journeys – to the bottom line, it is valuable to look at what CXM looks like at a CX mature organization. (I wrote about assessing CX maturity in a prior post.)

EA serves as an as example to aspire to. While it still has room to improve, it represents a rapidly maturing CX organization. Just like Trader Joes, Apple, CostCo, and Chick-fil-A, it has placed the customer and customer experience at the center of its external communications, products, and internal capabilities, organizational structure, and culture.

Maturity Means Listening

In a mature CX organization, one of the key capabilities that build competitive advantage is the ability to continuously monitor, manage, and improve customer experience journeys in a structured cross-functional operational process.  Such a process can be split into two inter-linked feedback loops.

On an individual customer level, there are processes and feedback loops in place to identify those customers who are dissatisfied, or those critical high value customers for whom the organization wants to maintain customer delight, to reach out to them individually to remove the dissatisfaction or provide them with incremental delightful experiences.

The same is also true on a structural level. When the same issue is repeated among multiple customers, the issue is escalated to the structural CX feedback loop where the issue is assessed to understand the structural root-causes and cross-functional solutions developed and implemented.

The net effect is a company that is constantly anticipating customer needs and incrementally improving its various customer journeys.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

Creating an integrated approach to branded and memorable customer journeys takes time. For some firms, it could take months to do the initial maturity assessments. It may take several years to then implement a plan that works CX into the company’s DNA. Setbacks and false starts are part of the process. Both can be minimized through deployment of a framework that breaks out the core components , and a strategy for kick-starting the move towards integration , of customer experience into corporate DNA. It may seem a daunting task, but it pays off in terms of revenue, staff attitude and motivation, and of course customer satisfaction. For service-oriented firms, it is definitely worth the effort, something EA learned the hard way.

See if our Customer Experience Management Consulting Practice can help you.

Customer Experience and how to implement it at your organization, download Synergy Consulting Group’s White Paper: From Satisfaction to Emotionally Connected.