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.
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:
My immediate answer to this is no – there’s a ton of good work happening to improve customers’ experience. But that’s a qualitative response, informed largely by the great work I see our clients doing.
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.
I recently did an interview with Intouch Insight–see below for Part 1.
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We recently sat down with Jim Tincher, founder of Heart of the Customer and Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), to get his take on the customer experience landscape and how it is changing in 2018.
In part-one of this two-part article series, Jim discusses several key topics around customer experience (CX):
One thing we CX-ers have in common: we love our metrics. Go to any CX conference, and the room that’s filled to overflowing is probably talking about metrics.
Metrics are comfortable for us. Whether we’re talking Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, or good old customer satisfaction, survey metrics give us something to share with the business. Even better, in a role that is so focused on intangibles, we have one tangible thing we can point to.
Of course, to get these metrics we need surveys. Lots of surveys. Long relationship surveys, short (but frequent) transactional surveys, and medium-length touchpoint surveys. More data to analyze and report. We need to feed the beast.
I recently ran across some research that suggests that the continuing search for these metrics may actually be hurting your company. Read more
A couple of years ago I had a layover in Philadelphia. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a good electrical outlet – the ones I could I find required sitting on the floor. Annoying.
This led me to wonder: While it’s clearly a bad experience to be stuck for a few hours without a convenient way to charge up, is it truly a customer experience issue that should concern the airport authority? Read more
Image credit: Prosci.com
The primary reason to run a customer journey mapping project is to drive customer-focused change. That’s what we heard when we asked customer experience practitioners to rate their success with their journey mapping project. A successful journey mapping project is one where change is made from the results.
Driving change requires a strong model, and at Heart of the Customer we’re fans of Prosci’s ADKAR Change Management Model. ADKAR stands for:
At Heart of the Customer, our team is reading Influence, the classic book by Robert Cialdini. While it’s an older book, it has a ton to offer to anybody looking to build action, including in the area of customer experience (CX).
This week we’re up to Chapter 3, Commitment. Cialdini uses a ton of examples, including Chinese prison camps in Korea, fraternities, and small kids playing with toys. Through these examples, Cialdini shows how by convincing others to publicly claim their support for a specific philosophy, you are leading people to subsequently act in a manner consistent with that philosophy – even if they previously did not strongly support such a position. Read more
Daniel Kahneman isn’t known as a customer experience (CX) guru. A Nobel Prize winner, sure. Brilliant psychologist and leader in behavioral economics, yes. Author of a fascinating (but really dense) book? You bet. But he’s not really known for his CX chops.
Yet, one of his findings shows why many surveys – as well as quite a bit of other CX research – is flawed from the beginning. Read more
