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

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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Life Insurance Journey Map
Jim Tincher

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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Jim Tincher

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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Healthcare Customer Journey Map
Jim Tincher

Journey mapping has become a must-have approach to customer experience

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Before it became a business five years ago, Heart of the Customer was a blog I started when I was leading CX at a Fortune 100 company. Along the way I learned about journey mapping, and created the post Customer Journey Map – the Top 10 Requirements to reflect the limitations I saw at the time. That post has since had over 108,000 views, including over 4,000 in the last year. When I started the business, that post drove us to number 1 in any Google ranking on the topic – journey map, customer journey map – even “journey mapping software,” we didn’t even offer software!

Since then, journey mapping has become even more popular, as you can see from the chart on the right.

Journey mapping is now the go-to customer experience tool, and has been discussed in Forbes, the Harvard Business Journal, and countless other journals.

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Jim Tincher

A Successful B2C Engagement Tactic Applied to B2B

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I recently purchased a new phone, so of course, I need a new case. I’ve loved my Carved wooden phone case, so I ordered another, but this time they did something new.

When my new case came, it included something special. In addition to sending the standard packing and instructions, Carved included a “trading card” with information about the designer, Cayla. This created an instant impact. I was no longer a customer of some company. Cayla designed my case! After reading her bio, I liked my case even more.

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Journey Mapping with Post its
Jim Tincher

Brainstorming: Design Thinking vs. Science

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This may not seem like a CX-related post, but bear with me a minute.

I attended a fabulous CXPA event on CX Day this week. Laurie Englert (full disclosure: she’s a client), the VP of Customer Experience at Legrand’s AV Division, shared how her team uses design thinking. We then applied those skills to strategize for Bike.MN. Nearly 100 CX enthusiasts focused together on helping Bike.MN build more business partnerships.

That said, there’s a central component to design thinking that bugs me: its brainstorming approach. As the facilitator (who wasn’t Laurie) shared, brainstorming in design thinking is an active exercise where you quickly put out ideas on Post-It Notes and then build on them with more ideas. This isn’t unique to last night’s presentation – whenever I encounter design thinking it involves this traditional out-loud approach to brainstorming.

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Jim Tincher

Trust: I Don’t Think Wells Fargo Gets it Yet

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I attended an excellent conference today. The Carlson School of Management sponsored their second annual Ignite Conference which focused on “Protecting Trust in Today’s Consumer Journey.”

The opening speaker gave some great stats about trust, including research that 73% of the variance in how customers have trust with you is predicted by team members’ trust of the organization.

At the end of the day, Wells Fargo’s Chief Marketing Officer Jamie Moldafsky spoke on their journey to regain trust. It was a well-crafted speech, showcasing all that Wells Fargo was doing to admit wrong-doing and earn back the trust earned over 150+ years in business.

All in all, it was impressive. But two warning signs have me concerned that they have further to go than they think. Read more

Jim Tincher

Do you have what it takes to succeed at CX?

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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

Interested in workshops? Read more here.

Interested in journey mapping? Read more here.

Interested in improving your CX? Read more here.

Jim Tincher
Jim Tincher

CX Webinar Invitation, August 27th

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Do your employees love your company?

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.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to hire people who care
  2. Keys to maintaining employee engagement
  3. How to map each customer’s journey
Taylor Pipes

About Taylor Pipes and Jim Tincher

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.

Interested in workshops? Read more here.

Interested in journey mapping? Read more here.

Interested in improving your CX? Read more here.

Jim Tincher

How Does a Plant Closure Help Customer Experience?

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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