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.

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, 2019/0 Comments/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, 2019/0 Comments/in Driving CX Culture Change /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

Nicole Newton and Ben London-Customer Journey Mappers

Two Days to Journey Mapping Mastery

May 9, 2019/0 Comments/in Customer Journey Mapping, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Minneapolis CX /by Nicole Newton

The Heart of the Customer blog is a place where we share our insights on journey mapping, offer best practices based on our experiences, and share CX practitioner interviews – and we don’t normally place promotional items here. We are making an exception this week; as Jim Tincher and I prepare to release our journey mapping book this month, we want to get the word out about a new Heart of the Customer offering: a two-day, hands-on journey mapping workshop that will provide all you need to map journeys that drive action in your own organization.
Read more

How to Recruit and Interview B2B Customers for your Customer Journey Mapping Project

April 30, 2019/0 Comments/in B2B Journeys (or B2B2C), Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Interviews with CX Experts, Minneapolis CX, Surveys and Feedback, Voice of the Customer /by Corey Pawlak

This post, written by Heart of the Customer Project Manager Corey Pawlak, is the first in a week-long series about some of the ways journey mapping differs from traditional market research. Guest authors Corey Pawlak, Cathy McLane and Nicole Newton will share their expertise in recruiting and interviewing B2B customers, why 10-page reports are better than 50-page reports, and using video to bring the customer experience to life.

In journey mapping, customer interviews are used to validate, refine and revise internal beliefs about customer perception and experience with your firm. It’s essential for understanding and reflecting the voices of actual customers. Therefore, recruiting customers to interview for the customer journey mapping process is a crucial—yet potentially time-consuming—step.

The first step is to define the targeted interview pool criteria.

How Journey Mapping Differs from Traditional Market Research

April 29, 2019/3 Comments/in Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Employee Experience, Minneapolis CX, Surveys and Feedback, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

We find a lot of confusion in the marketplace around journey mapping. Some think that journey mapping is just a workshop where you take all the people who created your broken, siloed experience, give them Post-It Notes, and Bam! You have a journey map. Others go the opposite direction, considering journey mapping to be traditional market research with a nice-looking report. It’s this latter group that we’re focusing on this week in a series of posts about what exactly is different between traditional market research and best-practice journey mapping. Read more

The Most Important Question: Who’s on your Journey Mapping Team?

April 16, 2019/0 Comments/in Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Employee Experience, Minneapolis CX, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

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.

First, Jim walked through “What’s the Business Problem or Opportunity?;” Nicole introduced the topic of “What is the Right Journey?,” Jim wrote about “Who’s the Right Customer?” and Nicole documented how to select the right approach.

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

Now we come to the fifth question, and, as they say, “last, but not least,” but in our case, the last question is actually the most important to answer. That’s because we’re working to ensure that journey mapping drives change, but we know that usually, it doesn’t.

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 and 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.

Who’s the Right Customer to Map? Your Third Journey Mapping Question

April 3, 2019/0 Comments/in Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, Customer Personas, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

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. We’re using the launch as a cheesy excuse to walk through the Five Journey Mapping Questions.

Two weeks ago, Jim covered “What’s the Business Problem or Opportunity,” and, last week, Nicole introduced the topic of “What is the Right Journey?”