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.

When Eating the Elephant, Don’t Boil the Ocean

February 13, 2020/in Driving CX Culture Change /by Jim Tincher

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

February 7, 2020/in CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change /by Jim Tincher

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

Exploring Customer Journey Mapping – An Interview with Jim Tincher

January 30, 2020/1 Comment/in Driving CX Culture Change, Interviews with CX Experts /by Heart of the Customer Guest

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!

1 in 4 of you will loose your job this year

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

December 5, 2019/in CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change /by Jim Tincher

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

No News is No Longer Good News

October 2, 2019/3 Comments/in Customer Experience Vision, Driving CX Culture Change /by Jim Tincher

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

Google is Creepy

August 1, 2019/1 Comment/in CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change /by Jim Tincher

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

Stop Playing CX Whack-A-Mole

July 11, 2019/in Customer Experience Vision, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change /by Jim Tincher

“All happy customers are alike; each unhappy customer is unhappy in its own way.”

Okay, that wasn’t really my quote – I’m paraphrasing Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, where he wrote “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But it does fit at least some companies’ experiences.

This is especially true with a client we’re working with right now. The happy customers sound so similar that it’s almost boring. Almost. They like the people; the product does what it’s supposed to do, and customer expectations are set appropriately. Unfortunately, that description only applies to half their customers. Read more

How Hard is it to Be Your Customer Book Cover

Develop a Killer Metric to Drive CX Action

June 19, 2019/in CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Metrics & ROI /by Jim Tincher

As our book gains traction, readers tell us they appreciate our focus on starting journey mapping by targeting an identified business problem and using this to drive customer-focused change.

We interviewed dozens of CX leaders on how they did this, including Mark Smith, formerly of Element Fleet Management Corporation. Mark spoke on multiple topics, but my favorite was the need to develop a Killer Metric.

The Killer Metric isn’t NPS, Trust, or Customer Satisfaction. It’s one business KPI (Key Performance Indicator) that you use to rally the team to focus on meaningful change. He discussed how Amazon uses contacts per order – the more people call or chat, the worse the experience (in Amazon’s world – notice that Zappos, owned by Amazon, has a very different philosophy). Delta uses canceled flights, which has the biggest impacts on their customers. Read more

What Wells Fargo (and the Rest of Us) Can Learn from Samsung

June 10, 2019/0 Comments/in Customer Experience Vision, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Employee Experience /by Jim Tincher

“Who knows what happened to us two years ago?” Wells Fargo’s Chief Marketing Officer Jamie Moldafsky (I originally wrote about this here)
“Who’s heard of our product, the Note 7? [pause] Yes, pretty much everybody, in every plane trip, for about a year.” Michael Lawder, SVP, Customer Care, Samsung Electronics America

Both these speakers began their speech with a similar attempt at humor to grab the audience’s attention, referencing an event that happened in late 2016, but a small difference speaks volumes to their contrasting attitudes. This small difference shows why Samsung has fully recovered while Wells Fargo continues to falter.

Problems can happen in even the best-run company. Pixar, Amazon, GE – all have experienced problems. This post isn’t about preventing problems (although many of these – particularly Wells Fargo’s problems – should have been avoidable). Instead, it’s about what to do once it happens. Read more

Collecting Information About Your Customer’s Journey: What’s the Right Approach?

April 11, 2019/1 Comment/in Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Surveys & Feedback, Voice of the Customer /by Nicole Newton

Note: We’re celebrating the upcoming launch of our new book, “How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? Using Customer Journey Mapping to Drive Customer-Focused Change,” by Mapper-In-Chief, Jim Tincher and B2B Practice Lead, Nicole Newton. In the book, we introduce five journey mapping questions to answer as you launch your customer journey mapping effort.

Three weeks ago, Jim walked through “What’s the Business Problem or Opportunity?,” two weeks ago Nicole introduced the topic of “What is the Right Journey?” and last week Jim wrote about “Who’s the Right Customer?”

Interested in the five journey mapping questions? Watch the intro to our youtube series on the topic here.

Once you’ve defined the customer and the journey you would like to map, you will need to select the best approach to collect information about the experience.