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.

Jim Tincher

Why Spirit Airlines’ and Ryan Air’s Customer Experience is Better than Yours

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I’m partway through a European holiday with my wife, celebrating 25 years of marriage. Okay, actually 26, but that’s a different story.

When a friend heard we were flying Ryan Air, she told me, “Uh oh. Pay attention to the experience you receive.” Interested, I did pay attention. And I realized that Ryan Air probably has one of the better CX programs out there.

Before you get ready with that hate email, first let me explain! Read more

Jim Tincher

The Bots are Coming!

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Actually, they’re already here. But are you aware of them?

Today, I’m flying back from the CCW’s Executive Exchange. I not only enjoyed speaking at the event, but also the opportunity to attend its presentations. The audience was primarily made up of contact center leaders, each having a lot to say– and do –about the overall customer experience. Based on the silence at the CX conferences I attended, I’m not sure CX has a seat at the bot design table–and this is something you should be thinking about. Read more

Jim Tincher

Reduct: A Great Tool for Sharing Your Customers’ Videos

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I wrote last week about the importance of video in sharing your customers’ experience (Video Interviews=CX Impact).

A major limitation of working with video is the task of managing all of that content. Historically, our process for working with video involved:

Read more

Jim Tincher

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

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  • “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

Jim Tincher

How Journey Mapping Differs from Traditional Market Research

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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

Randy Fath - unsplash
Jim Tincher

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

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Randy Fath - unsplashNote: 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.

Read more

Nicole Newton

Defining Scope: Should You Map an End-to-End Journey or a Specific Sub-Journey?

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Editor’s Note: As we get ready for our book launch in May, we’re previewing the major topics. This post was written by co-author Nicole Newton, HoC’s B2B Practice Lead. You can read more about our book at https://heartofthecustomer.com/book/.

Mapping the Right Journey

At Heart of the Customer, we recommend starting a journey mapping project by answering these five questions:

  1. What is the business problem or opportunity behind mapping?
  2. What is the right journey to map?
  3. Who is the right customer to map?
  4. What is the right approach to gathering the voice of your customer?
  5. Who are the right people to be on your journey mapping team?
Read more
Jim Tincher

Three Common Customer Journey Mapping Business Cases

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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 https://heartofthecustomer.com/book/.

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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Jim Tincher

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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Jim Tincher

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