Customer Experience Management

The Customer Experience Group

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Credits: HelpScout

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if everyone's looking at the same stuff, interpreting it in the same way, coming to the same conclusion, you'll all be the same. And the point of a brand is to be different.

John Hegarty, Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) on Big Data

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If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.

General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army

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Marketing: What Lies Behind The Next Corner

A great description on what all marketers need to be working on today by Gerd Leonard, referred to by The Wall Street Journal as "one of the leading media-futurists in the world",

By 2020, most interruptive marketing will be gone. Instead, marketing will be personalized, customized, and adapted to what I have expressed as my wishes or opt-ins — which essentially means that advertising becomes content. Data will be essential, and as users, we'll be paying with our data — bartering a bit of our personal information in return for the use of platforms and services. Customers will be forming relationships with brands that are built on trust, and if a company breaks that trust, it will be very quickly viral and very quickly over. By 2020, unauthorized targeting of consumers will essentially be useless. I, as a consumer, am going to choose who I want to hear from. I'm going to like things, or I won't like them, and you will have to earn that from me.

The idea of having a separate marketing department is going to vanish. In the future, the "reason to buy" will be socially motivated. If a product is great and everybody loves it, it will sell. And you're going to stop buying things from companies that don't fit your values, just because you can't see giving them the money.

Location-based services will be immensely valuable and useful, but not until we have some kind of a privacy bank — some authorized authority or entity that will keep the public safe, and that has a neutral objective. Because clearly, I'm not going to offer up my location if I don't feel safe.

Companies are going to try to predict how people feel about their brand, and then adjust in real time by changing features, and starting new conversations with customers in real time. All of the companies of the future will have one big job: to make sure that the customer feels cherished and safeguarded. As Amazon calls it, "customer delight," will be the number one mission. If you screw that up, everyone will leave.

Companies can collect all the data they want, but data alone will never be enough. You still need to reach consumers on an emotional level. The bottom line for marketers will be that if a product or service isn't humanized, it won't sell — because buying something isn't an intellectual process of saying "this could be useful"; it's saying "I really want this."

Source: HBR

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Image credits: Gapingvoid

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Millennial Employees and Meaningful Experiences: Hitting the Intergenerational Sweet Spot

Improving your ability to relate to Millennials will make you a better manager of all your employees. Because despite what the stereotype might suggest, effectively engaging Millennials is not about letting employees wear jeans and bring their dogs to work, dude. The key is providing challenging, meaningful work, communicating, helping employees to see their contribution, and making sure they have opportunities to learn and grow. The best manager for Millennials, GenXers, and Baby Boomers is a person who has a coaching orientation, who is aware of employees' talents and interests, who both supports them and pushes them to perform at higher levels than they believed they could, and who cares about the quality of their experience. Work towards that, and you'll hit the intergenerational sweet spot.

Source: HBR

Image credits: HBR

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Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

Steve Jobs

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Two weeks ago -- in the wake of Ron Johnson's ouster as JC Penney CEO and Myron Ullman's return -- JC Penney apologized to customers. The apology ad it released marked a bold admission that the retailer had failed in its turnaround efforts and went too far afield from its heritage. But now the retailer is declaring victory with a spot thanking consumers for returning to stores. A case of too little, too fast?

Impatience runs deep in corporations, something all CX initiatives have to deal with directly using quick win agendas. But there are clear areas that cannot be rushed without invoking customer disbelieve and scepticism. 

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Employees are Your Most Important Touchpoint

The most important touchpoint between an organization and its customers are its employees. Human to human connections are where relationships are forged, engagement occurs and trust is built.

And yet this is the touchpoint most organizations most neglect. And if they do turn their focus onto this touchpoint the language is far too often sprinkled with words like optimize, efficiency and process reengineering.

Reengineer call center operations

Offshore contact center to reduce costs

Optimize employee productivity

Improve efficiency

Think about this language. It’s firmly rooted in some of the assumptions I led this post with. Have you ever tried to re-engineer your relationship with a loved one in order to increase the efficiency of your interactions? How well did that go?

Instead, let’s talk experiences. Here are a few of the phrases used by organizations who take a people-first experience focus to their business.

Making people’s day (Amy’s Ice Creams)

Magical moments (Disney)

Delivering happiness (Zappos)

Warrior Spirit, a Servant’s Heart, and Fun-LUVing Attitude (Southwest Airlines)

Will it make my customer smile? (FAB)

Do any of these sound rational? Not on the surface. But counter to the assumptions of how to run a profitable company, the impact on the bottom line of people-first experience mindset is significant.

Why are such irrational rallying cries so impactful? Because each employee, through their behavior and attitude, sends out experience clues. Anything a customer can see, hear, taste or smell is a clue. Clues build on each other to tell the story about the service and the organization, influencing how a customer feels. They answer the question “Does the organization really care?”

Employees are in the performance business, something companies like Disney, Amy’s Ice Cream and Southwest Airlines understand well.

And once we understand that employees are in the performance business, we next need to look at how to turn employees into performance artists capable of delivering unique experiences that turn customers into advocates.

And, like theater, this isn't an engineering challenge that can be solved with processing mapping.

Source: CMSWire

Image credits: Tom Fishburne

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Evoking the Magic of Disney to Transform Your Customer Experiences

If your goal is to deliver experiences that differentiate your brand and delight your customers, embrace and nurture the irrationality of your employees. Turn them into performance artists, capable of fulfilling the emotional needs of customers, delivering memories that bring customers back again and again.

Employees first. Customers second. Shareholders third.

Experiences first. Processes second.

Relationships first. Transactions second.

Engagement first. Efficiency second.

Trust first. Policies second.

Magic moments first. Tasks second.

Shifting our language, mindset and approach will unleash organizational creativity, moving past process innovation to experience innovation — allowing us to architect dynamic, creative, responsive organizations that delight employees, customers and shareholders alike.

Source: CMSWire

Image credits: Disneyland Resorts

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Are your Employees Empowered to Deliver Great Customer Experiences?

Here are 9 vital health checks,

What information do employees need to have at their fingertips to make the customer feel welcome?

Do employees have access to the experts they need to resolve an issue quickly when they don’t know the answer to a customer question?

Are employees empowered to use their judgment to resolve customer issues?

Do employees have a deep sense of the brand personality and how to reflect it during their interactions with customers?

Do employees understand how to ask questions, listen and feel empathy for the stories that are running through the heads of each customer that calls in?

Do employees know what emotions to evoke? How to evoke them?

Do employees know how a delightful experience is defined for both your organization and your customers?

Does the employee have at their fingertips information about previous issues and attempts to resolve a current issue?

Are the metrics employees being measured by aligned with delivering the type of experience that makes customers feel valued?

Source: CMSWire

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No one owns the customer, but someone always owns the moment.

Scott Hudgins, VP Walt Disney

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Marketing: Embracing Complexity and Ambiguity

We are moving from the world of the convinced expert to the world of the adaptive thinker. Our new methodologies embrace complexity and ambiguity because they are modeling the true nature of the world. Data and technologies are coming alive through collaboration and constant feedback. There is less and less space for secret and proprietary methods to hide. The new world is one of transparency, empowerment and community.

Source: CMSWire

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Forrester: Transitioning to the Age of the Customer

From Good to Great,

Moving from aspiration to strategy. In emphasizing moments of truth, such as sales opportunities or customer service cases that matter to individual departments, organizations often ignore the handoffs between business units and across channels that may affect customer perception. As a result, they miss key moments that matter to customers—for example, receiving a bill from the accounting department that accurately reflects customer expectations set by a purchase made over the phone with a customer service representative. Enlightened companies define their customer relationship strategies from the outside in, crafting them based on customers' terms. These organizations are moving beyond empty "customer first" slogans, and instead defining clear and actionable CX strategies. To orchestrate a consistent "on-brand" experience, your CX strategy must: 1) define the intended experience, specify the target customers, describe the desired emotional response, and offer unique value; 2) spell out CX guiding principles to direct employee activities and decision-making; and 3) set project priorities and steer resources to the right projects by filtering funding requests using guidelines that include CX criteria.

Embracing the experience ecosystem. Companies in nearly every industry disappoint their customers, especially when customers cross channels. Many CX initiatives don't realize their potential because neither employees nor partners have a complete picture of what the customer experience actually entails or the dynamics that go into creating it. They need a new approach: one that considers the influence of every employee and external partner on every customer interaction. We anticipate that organizations will move to break away from their tunnel vision to embrace the concept of the customer experience ecosystem, which Forrester defines as "the complex set of relationships among a company's employees, partners, and customers that determines the quality of all customer interactions." We foresee that CX designers will have a broad mandate. They will plan and organize complex systems of people, products, interfaces, services, and spaces. Defining customer-journey maps is critical in linking the moments of truth affecting customers' experiences to specific activities that the organization and/or its partners undertake.

Developing a management discipline. Most companies want to differentiate themselves through superior customer experience. Very few do. Forrester's annual Customer Experience Index study shows huge gaps between the most- and least-advanced firms in the same industry. Entire industries are in their CX infancy. We foresee that CX will emerge as a management discipline comprised of a set of sound, repeatable practices that lead to excellence. Leading organizations will focus on strengthening their capabilities in the six categories that comprise Forrester's customer experience maturity framework: customer understanding, governance, strategy, measurement, design, and culture.

Source: Forrester

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Oracle: The Future of Customer Experiences is Virtual Experiences

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Purpose is not derived from products. Products are developed as a result of the purpose. The clearer the purpose, the better the products.

Simon Sinek, Leadership inspiration

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Apple's 5 Steps of Service