Posts

Interview with Marlanges Simar – Director of CX at Prime Therapeutics

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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.

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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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Why your CX Program isn’t “Winning”

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Two weeks ago, I posted “Is Customer Experience a Missed Opportunity?” and shared CCW’s 2018 Market Survey. The report discussed the fact that many customer experience (CX) programs are failing to drive change. There were multiple takeaways; only 9% of programs said their primary use of journey maps was “to ‘orchestrate’ predictive and/or proactive engagement,” whereas 31% primarily used them “to fix ‘pain points’ in the experience.” This was one of many reasons CX hasn’t been having a strong impact in many organizations.

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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

It’s not Necessarily a Design Issue

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I regularly receive emails that go something like this: 

I have almost completed my organization’s journey map! Can you give me some design suggestions before I share it with my company?

This request comes from a good place, a desire to educate the company about the customer’s journey, but after a few questions, it quickly falls apart. There are at least three problems with this request. 

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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 Best Practices

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The Twin Cities Research Group (TCRG) asked Jean Fasching and me to present on Journey Mapping Best Practices. Jean is a HoC engagement lead with a strong research background, perfect for this audience.

The agenda:

  • Who we are
  • Why journey mapping?
  • What makes journey mapping successful?
  • Case study: Meridian Health

The presentation was given in-person, but the audio and slides were captured below (warning: the sound quality isn’t ideal):

You can also download the PDF of the slides here.

Enjoy!