Interviews with CX Experts

Interviews With CX Experts

CX is the backbone of every business – any CX expert can tell you this. And what better way to learn about CX than from the experts themselves. We’ve interviewed a variety of CX experts from around the world and gathered their valuable insights below.

Jim Tincher

A Case Study in Loyalty: The Cabela’s CLUB

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Cabela's Logo How do you create a world-class customer loyalty program? Focus less on providing best-in-class benefits and more on creating a great customer experience. That’s the advice of Sean Baker, the incoming CEO of Cabela’s World’s Foremost Bank and leader of the Cabela’s CLUB program.

I interviewed Sean to learn more about Cabela’s CLUB and its critical role in driving their customer experience. The lessons certainly apply to retailers as a class, but also have something to teach anybody wanting to create better relationships with customers.

CLUB Components

First, a quick background on the program. The Cabela’s CLUB is a loyalty program paired with a Visa card. It began as a partnership with a small regional bank as a way to give their best customers free gear, but in 2001 Cabela’s brought the program in-house. They are now one of only two retailers who entirely own their own bank to run their loyalty program (Nordstrom’s is the other). Read more

Jim Tincher

Dunn Bros Coffee – the Non-Chain Chain

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“Coffee houses are about neigh­bor­hoods,” Dunn Bros Coffee co-CEO Chris Eilers tells me while we drink light roasts and blues music plays overhead.

Dunn Brothers is a popular Midwestern coffee chain with most of its locations in the Twin Cities. The company was started by Ed Dunn and now boasts 83 locations. Whereas Starbucks and Caribou (another Minnesota-grown coffee shop) have primarily corporate-owned locations, Dunn Bros focuses on attracting franchisees, who typically run and work at only one location.

This interview discusses the Dunn Bros Coffee history, how they use their franchisees to develop their unique customer experience, and how the company uses market research and social networking to learn more about their customers. It concludes with an analysis on how they do in creating a customer-inspired experience, as measured through the Heart of the Customer model.

Read the interview in Dunn_Bros-the_Non-Chain_Chain-White_Paper.

Jim Tincher

Great Clips – Driving Organic Growth through Customer Focus

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“At every level in the organization, if people don’t understand what’s going on face-to-face with the customer, it doesn’t matter what else you’re doing.”

That’s the advice of Rhoda Olsen, CEO of Great Clips. It’s the same strategy that has driven 30 straight quarters of same-salon revenue growth. But it wasn’t always that way. Back in 2005, “We thought we were a pretty customer-focused organization, as everyone does,” says Olsen. But that year sales and customers dipped for the first time in history. This wake-up call showed Great Clips they needed to better understand the current state of their customer needs.

After conducting significant research, they discovered their brand wasn’t very well-defined and category confusion was significant. Customers had a difficult time distinguishing Great Clips’ value proposition from other salons. Read more the full interview, including an analysis of efforts, in Great Clips – Driving Organic Growth through Customer Focus Interview with CEO Rhoda Olsen.