Developing a customer experience vision is a necessary first step in pursuing an organizational change in the way your business provides services to its customers. A customer experience vision defines these aspirations and why they matter to your customers. Learn more below.
Have you taken a look at our latest whitepaper? Also accessible from the resources page, it details strategies and insights for ensuring that your next CX initiative is a successful one that will pay for itself with opportunities for profit and growth.
Access it here: How to Select a CX Platform for Maximum Impact
Jim Tincher joins Shiftonomics to break down the customers’ journey, and how strongly it is impacted by corporate culture and the effort the company puts into empowering its frontline teams.
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Taylor Pipes, an industry specialist from Branch Messenger, is joined by Jim Tincher to talk about the customer and employee experience. With a lifelong passion for customer experience, Jim founded Heart of the Customer to help companies of all sizes increase customer engagement.
Reserve your spot here.
Jean Fasching, Lead Consultant
This is a guest post written by one of our very own Lead Consultants, Jean Fasching
Recently, I ran across a Yahoo Finance post that announced the closure of a plant that produces high fructose corn syrup and industrial starch. In it, an executive mentioned that the closure would help improve Customer Experience commitments. It was a technical and financially dense PR release. But, I wondered, how can a plant closure improve Customer Experience commitments? With a plant closure, production capacity is reduced. This means turn-around-time may increase and trigger an increase in cost. Impacts like this typically don’t lead to an improved customer experience. Just who is this customer? Read more
You probably don’t view Amazon as a competitor. That’s where you’re mistaken.
When we look to build a better CX, it’s natural to focus on our people. After all, they are often the heart of our customer experience.
However, while we need to ensure a strong person-to-person experience, we also need to make sure the experience is strong even when customers don’t want to talk to our people. The research shows that we’re not doing so well there. Read more
I recently moved to a new part of town, and the local Wendy’s has “We love customers” on their placard. My dry cleaner has the same message printed on their hangers.
Who cares?
What is the purpose of such a generic statement? Do other dry cleaners have hangers that say, “We’re really indifferent about customers, but thanks for using us”? Do they expect an emotional connection to result from this supposed outpouring of love? I guess it’s possible – but very unlikely. Read more
Devin Anuzis is Corporate Manager, Customer Experience at Benchmark, the leading provider of senior living services in the Northeast. Serving as the “voice” of the customer program, Devin manages multiple feedback channels and deciphers the feedback for company stakeholders to ensure the customer’s voice is clearly heard and considered in all decisions. In her role, she combines her experience in marketing and communication with her strong, empathic nature to respond to every form of customer input.
Devin joined Benchmark in 2013 as Coordinator of Customer Experience after receiving a master’s degree in business administration from Lynn University with a focus on mass communication and media management. She earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Tampa.
A former Division 1, intercollegiate soccer player, Devin is an eager traveler and animal-lover living in Norwood, Massachusetts, with her husband, George, and their toy poodle, Summer, and cockapoo, Wesley.
Contact Devin at Danuzis@benchmarkquality.com.
Tell me a little about your organization and your role within it.
Benchmark Senior Living was founded in 1997, and we now have 56 properties throughout the northeast, from Vermont to Pennsylvania. Our goal is to provide exceptional care, but our mission focuses on the whole experience of our residents and family members. We provide assisted living, memory care, independent living, and we also have 4 continuing care retirement communities with skilled nursing capabilities.
I oversee the customer experience—more specifically relating to the family members or influencers, but I also support our teams that oversee the experience of our residents. I’m also fortunate enough to be involved in a lot of the more strategic discussions that happen throughout the company—anything that would involve our residents and family members.
We recently did a complete rebrand of the company—a new mission statement, new vision, new values. Our focus is on transforming lives through human connection, and in turn that’s all about the experience we provide to our residents and family members and anyone who interacts with our organization. Our CX is really at the heart now of who we are as an organization. Read more
Delight your customers, or make it easy for them? How do we reconcile two popular CX books with opposite conclusions – The Effortless Experience vs. The Power of Moments?
Consultancy CEB is the driver behind The Effortless Experience. They conducted thousands of surveys after service calls across multiple industries, and this research led to a clear message: delighting customers doesn’t create loyalty – consistent delivery and easy experiences do. The book offers compelling research to back this up, showing why you need to reduce effort in your service experience. It’s a great read, and I highly recommend it. This book also introduces the second version of the Customer Effort Score, which is their preferred way to measure transactions. According to the CEB, companies earn the most loyalty when they move customers from a low to a moderate score.
The Power of Moments is another great book, and I included a Q&A of the authors here. They use data from rival consultancy Forrester to come to the opposite conclusion – that it’s most important to delight your customers. Forrester similarly conducted thousands of surveys across multiple industries to show that companies receive disproportionate levels of loyalty when they delight customers. According to Forrester, companies earn the most loyalty when they move customers from a moderate to a high Customer Effort score.
Wait, what? How can both be true? Read more
I had the opportunity to join The CX Show, with SaleMove co-founder and CEO, Dan Michaeli. Here’s their summary:
Jim defines customer experience as the overall experience customers have with you across all touchpoints and even beyond. It typically begins in the call center and extends to the company website, apps, your sales representatives, your advertising, and all the different touchpoints a business has with their customers. To take it a step further, Jim says that customer experience is broader than just the deliberate interactions a customer has with a brand, it includes everything that impacts your business, including backend policies. In other words, the perception of the company through the customer’s eyes is also part of the experience.
One particular project that was highlighted in the podcast was Jim’s work with Meridian Health (now Hackensack Meridian Health). The problem that Meridian was facing was understanding the advanced radiology journey (CT scans, ultrasounds, and MRIs) and what that looked like. They wanted to improve that experience in order to build more customer loyalty, because the patients loved the hospital itself, but they were not necessarily choosing them for radiology. Once Jim and Heart of the Customer had worked out a customer journey map with Meridian, the hospital was able to implement a system where they let their patients voice their concerns and opinions and encourage them to take the wheel on their own personal journeys.
When asked about the future of customer experience, Jim said he believes that the future of CX is not surveys or NPS, but instead, it is better internalizing your customers’ emotions and linking that back to the business. In addition, the future of CX is really about action, rather than focusing on reporting information, businesses need to be driving action to improve the overall customer experience.
If you’re interested in learning more about the customer journey mapping experience at Meridian Health, you can listen to our full podcast here!
Image credit: Prosci.com
The primary reason to run a customer journey mapping project is to drive customer-focused change. That’s what we heard when we asked customer experience practitioners to rate their success with their journey mapping project. A successful journey mapping project is one where change is made from the results.
Driving change requires a strong model, and at Heart of the Customer we’re fans of Prosci’s ADKAR Change Management Model. ADKAR stands for:
In any customer experience, certain phases have more impact than others – either positive or negative – and create a measurable impact on the rest of the relationship. Positive results lead to customer who trust you, are more willing to forgive mistakes, and are more interested in your other products or services. But if they don’t go so well, customers are more likely to stray; they pounce on every mistake, and they’re very reticent to use your other offerings.
The moments that matter vary by experience, and even by individual. Effective journey maps show these Moments of Truth. But even if you don’t have a journey map – or if yours just isn’t very good – there’s one area that is consistently important in B2B experiences: The new customer onboarding journey. Read more
