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Jim Tincher

Interview: Building a World-Class CX Capability

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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):

    • The importance of Customer Experience Management (CEM)
    • Where companies should focus their efforts in the early stages of developing a CEM program
    • Key challenges CX professionals face and how to overcome those challenges
    • Innovations in technology that will shape the future of CX

Read more

Jim Tincher

Contribute to Journey Mapping Body of Knowledge

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Last year, Heart of the Customer and the CXPA partnered to discover the state of the art in journey mapping in our first “Journey Mapping Best Practices” survey. We’re now launching our second annual survey.

Whether you’re a practitioner, vendor or thought leader, we’d love to hear your experience in journey mapping. Please take our survey at:

Journey Mapping Results Survey

You can review the findings from last year – but please take the survey first!

Jim Tincher

Your business doesn’t really care if your customers are likely to recommend you 

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And neither should you.  Read more

Jim Tincher

CX is about action. Is Market Research?

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Three years ago, Nicole Newton (then Director of Customer Experience with Thomson Reuters, now at Heart of the Customer) spoke at a Market Research Association (MRA) conference. The topic was “Moving from Insights to Action,” about making the move from Market Research to Customer Experience (CX), as we both recently had.

Big Transition, New Focuses

The biggest change we discussed was that in traditional market research you’re expected to develop a clear report that shows the research results and the insights generated from the work, and then you’re done.

When we moved to CX, the rules changed. We still needed to do thorough research and generate insights. But CX requires you to go further, and drive customer-focused change. Read more

Jim Tincher

Two-thirds of all journeys maps fail to drive change. Don’t be a statistic.

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Customer journey maps are a customer experience (CX) leader’s best friend. Done well, a journey mapping initiative aligns your teams around a shared vision to an improved customer experience. Effective journey maps engage your entire company to align on your customers’ moments of truth, showcasing how to create more loyal customers.

Unfortunately, these initiatives fail far too often.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the voice of the industry, from our first annual Journey Mapping Best Practices Survey. We surveyed over one hundred journey mapping practitioners and vendors to discover the state of the art in journey mapping.

The results weren’t encouraging. For those practitioners who have had time to evaluate their success, half gave their journey mapping initiative a failing grade. The key reason? A failure to drive action. Read more

Jim Tincher

Every customer experience project is a culture project

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Culture is the biggest determinant of effective customer experience. While that’s especially evident in the service space, it’s also true for every other type of company. When your culture focuses more on its own viewpoint than your customers’, you end up with convoluted processes, terrible return policies, and overly-complicated products.

That’s why I was happy to see some of the results from our first-ever journey mapping survey. We’re finalizing the analysis, which will be available soon. So, here’s a teaser about some of the results that are relevant to building a customer-focused culture. Read more

Jim Tincher

The CXPA and Heart of the Customer want your feedback (Last Chance!)

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tag-433302_640Have you created journey maps? The Customer Experience Professionals Association and Heart of the Customer want to learn more about your experience! The survey is closing soon, so make sure to get your response in before it does!

Whether you created the journey map for your own company or another, we’d love it if you would tell us about it in this survey: http://bit.ly/2beOkXa. All survey participants will receive the full results, so you can learn about the state of the art in journey mapping.

We look forward to your participation!

Jim Tincher

Webinar: Drive Growth by Reducing Customer Effort

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Blog Post BannerNow more than ever, customers are demanding top-notch service. In an age when there are options upon options for any service they could require, customers are taking full advantage of that fact: when they aren’t satisfied with the service they receive at a company, they simply bring their business to another. After a poor service experience, 71% end their relationship with that company, and most of them—61%—choose a competitor to go to.

Customer service is a key component of the customer experience, having a disproportionate impact on a customer’s loyalty. A company that offers differentiated service will retain loyal customers. But what does differentiated service entail? According to a study by Bain, 80% of companies feel that they offer superior customer service—but only eight percent of customers agree.

Common customer service practices, such as service calls, can seem to exemplify quality customer service to the company that provides it. In fact, service calls are nearly four times as likely to decrease loyalty as to increase loyalty, and as this shows, companies are often in the dark when it comes to what customers themselves want from their customer service.

How to Combat This?

When it comes to loyalty, it’s been shown that reducing customer effort and offering a seamless experience works best. Designs and options that are intuitive for a customer to navigate encourage customers to return to the companies that provide the kind of service they can understand and connect to.

BT’s research found that their customers who rated their service experience as “easy” showed a 40% reduction in their propensity to churn. Improving your customer service can show dramatic increases in growth. Increasing customer loyalty by just five percent leads to a profitability growth of 25-90% making superior customer service but important to a company’s growth and profitability.

So, how can you make it easier for your customers? I’ll address this in an upcoming webinar. I’ll be joining Talkdesk on Wednesday, August 19 for a webinar that will dive into these questions. You can register here.

Jim Tincher

Case Study: Using Journey Mapping Workshops to Drive Change in City Government Customer Experience

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2275992Kelly Ohaver is the Client Experience Manager at the City of Centennial, as well as an active CXPA member. Her mission is to introduce customer experience principles to improve the city’s experience for its citizens and clients. She describes her job as “the most fascinating, challenging, and rewarding job ever” as she strives to bring an outside-in focus to the city. “It’s so rewarding when you see people get caught up and excited.”

I could (and probably will) write an entire article just about Kelly’s role. But one particular activity of hers caught my ear. Kelly recently ran a journey mapping workshop that serves as a great case study for how customer experience tools can be used for internal clients as well as external.

A quick refresher: Journey mapping is an exercise to understand your customer’s true steps, as well as the emotions that actually make up that journey. Some organizations use customer research, while others use workshops to help employees try on their customer’s shoes.  Kelly created the internal session after attending a workshop on the topic.

This was her first journey mapping session in her role. It surrounding a challenging IT transition with four newly-elected council members. Read more

Jim Tincher

How does customer experience pay? Check out your portfolio

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Return on CXYou would think that the return on customer experience is obvious.  A better customer experience improves loyalty, and loyalty means you can spend more time serving customers than chasing new ones, resulting in cost savings.

What Do The Numbers Say?

There are a number of studies that support this contention, including: Read more