Delta CX’s 9 Core Principles
9 Core Principles
1. Our Highest Priority Is Customer Satisfaction
2. Quality Over Speed
Great CX absolutely relies on a thorough process that focuses on research, designing based on what we learned from our research, testing our concepts, and iterating until we have the best solution we can create at this time. Great CX can be Lean and Agile, based on the purest definitions of each. And accessibility is a key part of the quality we’re aiming for.
3. Don't Get Trendy
Forget the buzzwords and everything else you’ve read. This book isn’t going to suggest you do design thinking, Lean UX (based on the book of the same name), or design sprints. In a later chapter, we will tell you why these and others are likely to fail your company, goals, initiatives, and customers.
We’re not going to demand that you have more empathy, which has popped up in so many articles it has nearly lost its meaning. You have the empathy that you have, no more and no less. The best course of action is that where empathy is needed in organizations, you hire the people who have boatloads of it and know how to use it for CX purposes.
4. Grounded in Proper Research
Delta CX is about continuous improvement. We’ll need to be reactive in places but must aim to be as proactive and predictive as possible. We can’t achieve this without proper research and testing being done constantly, having the experts to analyze the findings, and having an efficient team who knows how to turn the reports into concrete projects and work items.
Part of this proper research is strategizing and undertaking how we will measure successes and failures. Who has been held accountable when products, services, or experiences are flawed, customers are unhappy, or we burn money on internal design workshops that don’t lead to amazing products, services, and experiences? It’s time to look at how everything can be measured and judged.
5. Success Relies on Action Heroes
There is no reason for your company to hire non-experts in any area out of fear that a bruised ego will call those people negative names. We want to see experts putting their talents, skills, and experience to use at your company.
Their specialties must not be “decentralized” or “democratized,” two words synonymous with disempowerment. It’s no longer collaboration once we are removing people’s abilities to perform their jobs or call the shots in their area of specialty.
6. Collaboration With Respect
There is no other role at your company who is doing their job by committee. Product managers do not hold huge cross-functional team workshops so everybody can sketch out their suggested product roadmaps. DevOps engineers do not hold huge cross-functional team exercises to get people to chime in on how we should build our microservices.
Why do these group workshops only happen with CX or UX and what we should do instead to foster collaboration and share ideas? Delta CX focuses on how cross-functional teams and roles can collaborate better without treating any particular role like they can’t get their job done without a committee. We believe in CX sharing data and information that is too often not shared with our teammates. We’ll break down silos.
7. Play to People's Strengths
Company culture flows best when we play to people’s strengths. We want to see you create clearly defined jobs with healthy boundaries. Our co-workers, managers, and execs have noticed when unqualified “UX workers” did poor jobs. They assumed they hired strong practitioners, so it ends up shaping how they see our industry. We must turn this around by refocusing on our specialties and talents.
8. Customer Touchpoints
We must strategize ways to create loyalty and satisfaction from our customers as well as how our company or products, services, and experiences can be remarkable, desired, and differentiated in a small world with so much competition.
9. "The Cambiata"
We want harmony and collaboration at our workplace. We want beautiful music. We want what will feel simple and be simple for our customers. Getting there requires change in many areas at our workplaces, and possibly a non-linear path. Delta CX practitioners are change agents. We do not show up at a job and just take orders. We are dedicated to conceptualizing, testing, and always refining changes we can make inside our workplaces as well as externally for customers and partners.