Driving CX Culture Change

Driving Customer-Centric Culture Change

Customer experience is about more than simply offering great service. It’s about delighting your customers during every interaction with your brand. Driving customer-centric changes into your organizational structure helps your business reach its full potential and sets you apart from your competitors.

Putting your customers at the core of your decision-making processes creates  lasting customer value and loyalty, and increase profitability. Heart of the Customer shares change management best practices to help you drive customer-focused change to transform the way you do business.

Jim Tincher

Empathy.

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A key outcome of our work at Heart of the Customer (HoC) – and the essence of CX as a discipline – is to create empathy. That’s how we help our clients better understand their customers.  

When empathy is high, organizations are more likely to serve their customers better. They invest in the right initiatives and are rewarded with loyalty, which increases profits, which inspires further efforts to improve the journey. That mutually beneficial cycle is the foundational belief behind what we do. And it’s rewarding work.  Read more

Jim Tincher

Need a Presentation With Punch? Think Visually

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“All creativity should communicate in a nanosecond.”

So says George Lois, the “original Mad Man of Madison Avenue,” in his book, Damn Good Advice (for people with talent).

He’s talking about advertising, but his recommendation applies to any organizational communication – especially in customer experience. Read more

Shawn Phillips

Is IT the ‘It Factor’ for CCOs?

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Chief Customer Officers (CCOs) are popping up in boardrooms across Fortune 500 companies in ever increasing numbers. Those chosen for the position often come from Marketing or Customer Support, as those disciplines are thought of as having the most interaction with customers, making them seem like a natural fit. But are those departments really the best pipeline for filling CCO roles? I don’t think so.
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Don’t Boil the Ocean
Jim Tincher

When Eating the Elephant, Don’t Boil the Ocean

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I’ve interviewed about twenty CX pros this year, as we work our way up to 100 interviews exploring the current state of CX as a discipline. What I’m finding is that the massive nature of the end-to-end customer experience makes for some daunting challenges.

CX is the totality of all interactions between customers and your brand. This includes your sales team, your website, your product experience, your customer support, your third-party partners, Google, advertising, etc. Trying to move that big a needle is overwhelming. I’ve spoken with many who have led big initiatives – simplifying experiences, reducing unnecessary touchpoints, training reps to provide a better experience – without budging the company’s overall customer scores. What’s to be done? Read more

The-“Why”-Behind-CX-Pros’-Failure-to-Prove-Business-Results
Jim Tincher

The “Why” Behind CX Pros’ Failure to Prove Business Results

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The-“Why”-Behind-CX-Pros’-Failure-to-Prove-Business-Results

A while back, I posted here on Forrester’s prediction that 1 in 4 CX pros will lose their jobs this year. When CustomerThink reposted my thoughts on this, it generated a great conversation, with Sampson Lee, Shep Hyken, Lynn Hunsaker, Harley Manning, Bob Thompson, and others weighing in in the comments section.  

One issue that came up repeatedly was why  CX Pros don’t tie into business results. Here’s my take in a nutshell (see the post for my full response and what others had to say):  Read more

Heart of the Customer
Heart of the Customer Guest

Exploring Customer Journey Mapping – An Interview with Jim Tincher

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Today’s blog post features an interview of Jim Tincher completed by SurveySparrow, the maker of widely celebrated online survey software. They asked such great questions around Heart of the Customer’s origins, Jim’s involvement in the CXPA, and how to best use customer surveys, we felt like it had to be shared!

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VA CX Framework
Jim Tincher

Creating a Customer-Centric Agency at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

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I heard Lee Becker, Chief of Staff of the Veterans Experience Office (VEO) of the VA speak at a recent Medallia conference and was blown away by his remarks. I reached out for an interview because I wanted to share with a broader audience his thoughts on what it’s like to drive change within a massive organization, what’s at stake, and what success at the VA might mean for government services in broader terms.

A Navy Veteran with a background in medical care and case management, Lee is one of the architects behind a turnaround at the VA, and he believes the same solid customer experience (CX) principles they have implemented there can transform the way other federal agencies work, too.

“The fundamental challenge of government is figuring out how you make room for experience when financials and operations are the focus.” Read more

1 in 4 of you will loose your job this year
Jim Tincher

Why 1 in 4 of You Will Lose Your Job in 2020

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1 in 4 of you will loose your job this yearYour CFO doesn’t care about your customer experience (CX) surveys. She cares about the health of the business, and it’s unlikely she sees a direct link between your survey scores and the measurements she follows.

Meanwhile, your CEO is focused on your customers, but that doesn’t mean he cares about your surveys, either. As one business leader confessed to me, “I keep seeing these survey scores saying we’re doing great. Then I meet with customers who they tell me how frustrated they are. So I don’t believe in the surveys.”

By extension, that means he doesn’t believe in his CX team.

So by focusing on customers’ scores, you’re at risk. Forrester predicts that one in four CX pros will lose their jobs in the year ahead, because they aren’t showing business impact. Read more

Jim Tincher

No News is No Longer Good News

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Domino’s went and spoiled it. And then Amazon made it worse.

It used to be that customers were patient and okay with waiting on your processes. Whether shipping a product, going through underwriting, or applying for a loan, we were okay with waiting in the dark. We didn’t like it. But we accepted that companies put their information into our black box and the results would eventually come out.

And then Domino’s created their pizza tracker. Suddenly, we all had a view of the behind-the-scenes processes that we never knew we wanted. We could see when the sauce went on, when the ingredients were added, and when it came out of the oven. Who cares if the pizza’s mediocre? We just loved the experience! Read more

Jim Tincher

The Bots are Coming!

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Actually, they’re already here. But are you aware of them?

Today, I’m flying back from the CCW’s Executive Exchange. I not only enjoyed speaking at the event, but also the opportunity to attend its presentations. The audience was primarily made up of contact center leaders, each having a lot to say– and do –about the overall customer experience. Based on the silence at the CX conferences I attended, I’m not sure CX has a seat at the bot design table–and this is something you should be thinking about. Read more