Employee and Customer Engagement

Best Practices in Employee and Customer Engagement

Employee engagement is about creating an environment where employees know their thoughts and actions and valued. They are trained and educated on a regular basis to maintain their professional development. They are committed to the values and goals of their company and are motivated to do their best each day. What does this have to do with customers? A confident employee makes for a very satisfied customer. Read more below.

The First Key Journey Mapping Question: What is the Right Journey to Map?

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Editor’s Note: As we get ready for our book launch in May, we’re previewing the major topics. You can read more about our book at www.HowHardIsIttoBeYourCustomer.com.

What differentiates a mapping program that drives action from one that doesn’t? A major factor is the reason for doing journey mapping in the first place.

We can confidently predict whether a mapping program will be successful in our very first conversation. Does the company have a solid reason they want to do mapping? Or is it because they heard it’s a good thing to do?

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Four Ideas for Navigating Backorders with B2B Customers

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As 2018 wrapped up, we finished mapping three very different B2B journeys – healthcare, manufacturing, and distribution. We found one major consistency: customers in all three reported recent backorder issues.

The customers were all businesses, but that’s where their similarities ended. Some were mom and pop retail storefronts; others were global manufacturers whose names you would immediately recognize, but their stories were similar:

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Survivor Bias is a Big CX Measurement Risk

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AsSurvivorship Bias defined by RationalWiki, “survivorship bias is a cognitive bias that occurs when someone tries to make a decision based on past successes, while ignoring past failures. It is a specific type of selection bias.” Applied to CX, it’s when you focus only on existing customers and ignore those who have left.

Let’s look at an example. There’s a national sports bar which saw its CX scores continually improving. Unfortunately, at the same time, revenue was declining. While CX was celebrating, the rest of the organization was panicked.  Read more

Create Your CX Vision through Journey Mapping

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“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” – Yogi Berra

Yogi’s quote applies to much more than baseball – it gets to the heart of what limits so many customer experience (CX) programs. When I ask most CX leaders what they’re trying to accomplish, I get a general statement like, “We’re working cross-functionally to create a better customer experience, in order to create more loyal customers.”

That’s an awful statement because it doesn’t actually say anything. Read more

Stop Bribing Your Employees for Good NPS Scores

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We’re early in Customer Experience (CX) capability development, and I absolutely love it! We’re discovering the best practices that our successors will take for granted; “of course that’s how you do it.”

Unfortunately, being in this early stage means that some “best practices” aren’t. Some actually hinder the goal of improved CX – to create loyal customers who love your brand and come back time and again.

One “best practice” that can create a terrible customer experience is paying employees to achieve good NPS, or Customer Satisfaction, scores. This needs to stop.

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Move to the Top Levels of the Gartner CX Pyramid with Journey Mapping

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Last week I discussed Gartner’s CX Pyramid and its approach to evaluating your customer experience. Yesterday’s post discussed how to use journey mapping to help you move up the first three levels. Today, I’ll talk about using journey mapping to move to the top of the pyramid – the Proactive and Evolution levels.

Getting to these levels requires significantly more investment in both customer insights and design. Interviews – particularly in-person at your customer’s site – are good ways to help you in the lower stages, but here it requires deeper methodologies to truly understand your customers’ needs. Read more

Moving up Gartner’s CX Pyramid with Journey Mapping

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Last week I wrote about the Gartner CX Pyramid, an interesting maturity model. This week I’ll go into how to use journey mapping best practices to move up the model based on Gartner’s description of the model on their public website.

Selecting the right journey mapping approach requires you to understand where you are on the model and where you aspire to be. An inaccurate assessment will create waste; attempting to create a Proactive-level approach with only a Communication-level infrastructure will be expensive and ultimately frustrate customers instead of creating loyalty. Similarly, using a lower-level approach won’t have sufficient impact with higher-level design capabilities. Journey mapping doesn’t exist in a vacuum – it requires enough staffing and leadership to implement the changes that come out of it. Read more

Journey mapping is still happening in silos.

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This is ironic. Journey mapping is a fantastic tool to break down silos by creating a shared view of the customer experience.

Except when it isn’t. All too often, companies focus on small teams to move quickly. “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” they argue. “Aligning all those teams will take time, and we need to be done in 6/8/12/16 weeks, and we don’t have time to educate HR, IT, Legal, or other groups about what we’re doing. We’ll catch them up afterward.”

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Journey mapping tools don’t address the most critical challenges.

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There are a ton of journey mapping tools out there. I’m most familiar with Touchpoint Dashboard, but I’ve had demos from many others. They all excel at certain components of journey mapping, but they don’t (and probably can’t) address some of the largest problems.

That’s because the biggest reasons journey maps fail have nothing to do with digital problems; they’re analog. As we’ll discuss tomorrow, the biggest problem in journey mapping is that it’s done in silos. Small teams are created to do journey mapping. Those small teams intimately learn the customer experience, but because they don’t control the critical touch points, the effort fails to drive change.

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Too many see journey mapping as an employee workshop.

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What is journey mapping?

That may seem like a strange question from a blogger whose title is “Mapper-In-Chief,” but there’s so much confusion on the topic that it’s a question that needs to be asked.

This confusion is fueled by vendors who offer “journey mapping workshops.” This is a half- or full-day workshop where you gather a bunch of employees who each adopt a customer persona and use Post-It Notes to document your perceptions of that customer’s journey. Oracle hosts this type of workshop, and by all accounts it’s a ton of fun. It’s possible they mention the need to actually talk with customers, but the attendees I’ve spoken to don’t remember them saying that.

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