Leveraging Organizational Values

Let’s take a detour and discuss something I recommend you don’t do: create customer experience-specific values. It might seem like a great way to demonstrate CX commitment, but it leads to confusion and misalignment. Instead, your CX approach should be rooted in your company’s values. These are ingrained in your culture, decision-making, and employee behaviors, making them the perfect foundation for ensuring consistency and authenticity in your CX approach. If you want to define specific CX beliefs and behaviors, save that work for when you develop your CX guiding principles, which I will outline in a future article.

What Are Organizational Values?

You probably already know what organizational values are. They are the core beliefs that shape how a company operates. They guide decision-making, influence culture, and set expectations for how employees work and interact. Simply put, they keep a company grounded, no matter what challenges arise.

Top 3 Takeaways

Use Company Values, Not CX-Specific Values: Anchor your CX efforts in established company values to maintain consistency, as core values rarely change and only evolve during major transformations.

Reinforce Alignment Across Previous CX Framework Layers: Values act as a lens to validate and refine your problem statement, vision, and mission, ensuring cohesion.

Bridge to Guiding Principles: Organizational values inform the creation of CX guiding principles, shaping how the organization delivers its customer experience.

Relevance to Customer Experience Leaders

Values are more than just words on a company website. They serve as the foundation for embedding CX into the organization’s DNA and driving long-term impact.

Empowering CX Leaders to Drive Customer-Focused Initiatives: Organizational values often reflect human values, making them a natural foundation for customer experience. They give CX leaders a way to keep customers, employees, and partners at the forefront, ensuring customer-focused initiatives are embedded in the company’s broader strategic framework rather than treated as add-ons.

Connecting Business Priorities Through CX: Leveraging organizational values alongside a clear CX vision and mission helps align not just customer experience initiatives but all business priorities. This ensures that CX principles contribute to the organization’s overall strategy, reinforcing a unified direction rather than operating as a separate function.

Building an Authentic CX Strategy: CX initiatives grounded in organizational values feel genuine, fostering trust and credibility. This ensures customer experience reflects the company’s true identity rather than being a disconnected effort.

Practical Guidance on Integrating Values

Reaffirm and Integrate Values with CX Strategy: Similar to the problem statement, values should be visible in all aspects of CX framework development, execution, and maintenance. Assess how they influence customer, employee, and partner interactions across the organization. While many companies require values to be considered in projects, investments, and organizational design, simply checking the box is not enough. Reinforce their impact with human stories and additional qualitative and quantitative insights.

Leverage Values to Build Cross-Functional Partnerships: Partner with Human Resources and Internal Communications teams to integrate customer experience into the broader organizational messaging around values. This collaboration reinforces the company’s commitment to living its values by demonstrating its impact on customer and employee experiences. Organizations can strengthen the connection between values and everyday interactions by embedding CX-specific elements into leadership development, training, and internal communications.

Embed Values into Customer-Facing Communications and Policies: Ensure company values are reflected in customer-facing messaging, policies, and service interactions. Beyond marketing and branding, values should shape how policies are structured, how frontline employees engage with customers, and how escalations are handled. For example, if transparency is a core value, CX leaders can advocate for clear, jargon-free communication in billing, terms of service, and customer support scripts.

Questions for Reflection

How do you know your company’s values are more than just words on a wall?

Can you point to specific ways values actively shape customer, employee, and partner experiences, or are they just corporate jargon?

Do your problem statement, vision, and mission demonstrably align with company values, or are you just assuming they do?

Are you measuring customer experience in a way that reflects your company values, or are you relying on generic metrics that miss the bigger picture?

Forging Strong Links for Success

At PodiumCX, we represent values as three linked bicycle chain links, symbolizing strength, connection, and continuity. Just as a well-maintained chain keeps a bike in motion, values serve as the critical link that holds the CX Strategic Framework together while also ensuring alignment with the company’s overall strategy. Ignoring a company’s values is like riding with a rusty, neglected chain, it creates friction, reduces efficiency, and eventually leads to breakdowns in execution. But when CX strategy is anchored in core values, it functions like a well-oiled chain, smooth, efficient, and capable of sustaining momentum toward customer experience excellence.

Visit www.podiumcx.com to see how we can help drive meaningful change with a customer experience strategy tailored to your organization.

PodiumCX, LLC, 2025. All rights reserved.

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