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 change within 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 increases profitability. Heart of the Customer shares change management best practices to help you drive customer-focused change to transform the way you do business.

Will a Four-Day Workweek Boost EX & CX?

June 23, 2022/in Driving CX Culture Change, Employee Experience/by Jim Tincher

Conventional wisdom holds that a great employee experience promotes a great customer experience. That – combined with a growing body of evidence that the traditional 40-hour workweek may not be the most effective or healthy model – has inspired me to institute a four-day workweek for all Heart of the Customer team members. [Insert blaring trumpets here!]

As a data-driven organization, we’re starting cautiously. We’ve committed to this new schedule on a 90-day trial basis for now, from mid-June through Labor Day. We won’t make the change permanent until we can gather enough data to reliably gauge the impact on our company and our clients.

But we have every reason to believe that this trial period we will be a success. Read more

The Customer Journey Mapping Process That Drives ROI

April 29, 2022/in Customer Journey Mapping, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change/by Jim Tincher

Customer journey mapping lays a strong foundation for the success of your customer experience initiatives. But only if it’s done right. So having a research-backed customer journey mapping process is critical.

Unfortunately, that’s where most journey mapping initiatives go wrong. Almost two-thirds fail to drive action. That’s not all that surprising, since most neglect to include a change management approach.

Empathy in Action: A Primer on Effecting Change

March 29, 2022/in CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change/by Jim Tincher

Change management is a critical skill when leading company growth and responding to digital disruption. As the processes, policies, technology, and culture needed to drive improved experiences shift, customer experience (CX) must shift, too.

Utilizing and combining these elements effectively is what makes customers want to spend more with you, stay longer, and actively refer others.

But of course, driving this transformation is easier said than done.

Effecting change is challenging enough in our personal lives, when we have only our own actions and goals to contend with. To guide an entire organization through a customer-centric transformation…well, like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is the picture that scenario brings to mind: Read more

ICYMI, Part 2: 2021 Impact Roundup

December 30, 2021/in CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Metrics & ROI/by Jim Tincher

Last week, I spotlighted some of our best tech-related posts from 2021.

This week, as we close the book on this challenging year, I’m focusing on 2021 posts about the most important outcome of our work in CX: showing business impact.

We know we can do this by improving the experience for customers, but to get the necessary support for from leadership to make that happen, we have to be able demonstrate that it works! Read more

A Wonkish Look at Hiring a CX Leader

November 18, 2021/in CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change/by Jim Tincher

I’m pretty sure I’m going to take some flak for my recommendations, but today I want to talk about what it takes to be a successful customer experience leader, and how to hire the right person for the role.

Before I get into our findings, let’s stop by my bookshelf…

There you’ll find Outliers from Malcolm Gladwell, which popularized the 10,000-hour rule. That’s Gladwell’s contention that to be successful in a domain, you need 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. Read more

A Wonkish Look at First-Principles Thinking

November 10, 2021/in CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Metrics & ROI/by Jim Tincher

I’ve been thinking lately about why we measure things like, for example, Net Promoter Score (NPS).

What are we actually doing?

These thoughts are prompted by Reid Hoffman’s great new book, Masters of Scale. (In addition to writing books and hosting a podcast, Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn and serves on the boards of Microsoft and PayPal, among others.) Read more

Execs: It’s Time to Raise Your Expectations!

October 21, 2021/in Driving CX Culture Change, Journey Analytics & Orchestration/by Jim Tincher

As I wrote previously, the jostling in the customer experience (CX) technology marketplace over the summer saw Kitewheel purchased by CSG, Usermind purchased by Qualtrics, and Medallia taken private by Thoma Bravo. Then Qualtrics bought Clarabridge, too.

Earlier this month, Genesys acquired Pointillist and Exceed.ai.

And there’s likely more to come.

All that activity might have escaped your notice, but that doesn’t mean you’ll escape the ramifications.

So what do these developments mean for you? Opportunity, if you play your cards right; danger, if you sit out this hand. Read more

Your Next CX Hire…Shouldn’t Be a CX Hire

September 17, 2021/in CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change/by Jim Tincher

As we interviewed hundreds of customer experience professionals across scores of organizations for our research initiative last year, we looked for what indicated the ability to drive impact.

We’ve documented the top items a few times in the past: linking everything to business value, understanding the technology and data, measuring and improving emotions, and using change management. Read more

Three Ways to Make Your Case

September 8, 2021/in CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Metrics & ROI/by Jim Tincher

“We’ve all seen those studies where it says a one-point increase of CSAT equals this revenue, but to a Commercial Officer, a CEO, or a CFO, this doesn’t sound real. So it doesn’t put CX in a credible position. We need to prove this based on our own data: ‘These are the scores for the past year, and this is the revenue or the growth in revenue and the growth and shipments for these exact countries. And this is what it looks like. This is the correlation between the revenue and customer satisfaction and NPS.’” – 2020 interview participant

I bet that like me, you love to read research that shows that CX pays. Luckily for both of us, there’s plenty of industry data on the topic. The most compelling is Watermark Consulting’s tracking of stock prices. Read more

CX Needs Change Management

August 27, 2021/in Customer Experience Vision, Driving CX Culture Change/by Jim Tincher

You probably moved into customer experience (CX) because of a passion for customers. You chose this space because you know that if you can improve customers’ experiences with your company, they will be happier, they’ll stay with you longer, and both the business and your customers will prosper.

But actually improving the experience is hard.

If you’re like most of the CX professionals we interviewed last year, the reality has hit you that it’s incredibly difficult to move your silos enough to substantially improve the customer experience. That’s where change management, the missing element in most CX programs, comes in. Read more