Voice of the Customer

Hearing the Voice of the Customer

At the core of every successful business is a strong focus on customer experience. The voice of the customer is one of the most important things to a business, yet it is too often overlooked. Learn below how to channel the voice of the customer into your business and how to really listen to what they’re saying by using industry-leading analytics.

How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer Journey Mapping Book
Jim Tincher

Introducing “How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? Using Journey Maps to Drive Customer-Focused Change”

/0 Comments/in , , , , , , , , , /by
How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer book

At Heart of the Customer, we’re pleased to introduce our forthcoming book on journey mapping best practices!

Journey mapping opens up extraordinary avenues for business growth, but only when done wisely and well. Through insight from CX pros, extensive research, and real-world case studies, you can learn the best way to capture your customers’ experiences to drive action that gets results, boosting loyalty, satisfaction, and your bottom line.

Read more

Jim Tincher

Ten B2B KPIs to Track, Starting Now (none are NPS) – Business KPIs

/0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

Measuring Customer Experience’s (CX) business impact is hard. It’s one of the biggest challenges in passing the CCXP exam. One reason is that CX pros are very customer-focused; we’re confident that if we just focus on customer needs, the ROI will take care of itself. Unfortunately, our business partners aren’t always so confident.

Read more
Jim Tincher

Interview with Marlanges Simar – Director of CX at Prime Therapeutics

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

Marlanges Simar is the Director of Customer Experience at Prime Therapeutics (Prime) managing their CX (Customer Experience) Architect team. Prime manages pharmacy benefits on behalf of health plans, employers and government programs. I interviewed her to better understand their role, and how they help Prime improve the customer experience.

CX architects play a strategic role in improving the experience of our different customer groups (members and health plan clients), as well as the prescribers and pharmacists we work with. This can range from fixing a problem to reworking or developing an entirely new portion of the experience.

Read more
Jim Tincher

Four Ideas for Navigating Backorders with B2B Customers

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

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:

Read more
Jim Tincher

Journeys are for Action, not Maps

/0 Comments/in , /by

In preparation for the upcoming Customer Contact Week, CCW shared their special report on journey mapping with me. Given our focus and expertise on journey mapping, I’m commonly asked to review these types of reports. Unlike most, however, CCW’s special report truly gets to the heart of the matter – journey mapping is not about creating a map; it’s about driving customer-focused change in your organization.

Read more
Jim Tincher

Survivor Bias is a Big CX Measurement Risk

/0 Comments/in , , , , , , /by

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

Jim Tincher

Create Your CX Vision through Journey Mapping

/0 Comments/in , , , , , , /by

“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

Jim Tincher

Stop Bribing Your Employees for Good NPS Scores

/0 Comments/in , , , , , , , , /by

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.

Read more

Jim Tincher

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

/0 Comments/in , , , , , , , , /by

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

Jim Tincher

Moving up Gartner’s CX Pyramid with Journey Mapping

/0 Comments/in , , , , , , , , , /by

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