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.
Swing for the fences! Shoot for the Moon! You got this!
During my many years as a high school and collegiate lacrosse player and coach, I heard (and said) encouraging platitudes like these more times than I can possibly count.
But I think many CX professionals – myself included – could benefit from a reminder of just how much confidence can impact outcomes.
Back in February (which feels like a century ago!), our analyst Diane and I were at the offices of Legrand AV, interviewing VP of Customer Experience Laurie Englert and her team. During a break, I turned to Diane and said, “There’s something here. I’m not sure what it is, but something stands out as different.”
“I know what it is,” she said. “Each one of them mentioned how they talk to customers multiple times a week.”
That was it! And it definitely separated Laurie and her team from the other 82 or so CX professionals we’ve interviewed so far this year. Read more
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
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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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
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
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!
Your 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
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
My wife forwarded me an email from Google. It showed her everywhere she had visited in the last month, which creeped her out. So she removed all the tracking she could from her phone. It didn’t work – she received a similar email the following month.
I received a similar email (see a part of mine above, where they show two restaurants I visited). I agree it’s creepy. Why does Google go out of their way to remind customers they’re tracking their movements? It comes down to a core CX principle of understanding customer needs. Employees focus on what they think is cool, rather than what customers want. Read more
