Decoding The Customer podcast

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Dodano eight lat temu

Treść dostarczona przez Julia Ahlfeldt, Certified Customer Experience Professional, Julia Ahlfeldt, and Certified Customer Experience Professional. Cała zawartość podcastów, w tym odcinki, grafika i opisy podcastów, jest przesyłana i udostępniana bezpośrednio przez Julia Ahlfeldt, Certified Customer Experience Professional, Julia Ahlfeldt, and Certified Customer Experience Professional lub jego partnera na platformie podcastów. Jeśli uważasz, że ktoś wykorzystuje Twoje dzieło chronione prawem autorskim bez Twojej zgody, możesz postępować zgodnie z procedurą opisaną tutaj https://pl.player.fm/legal.

We Have The Receipts

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Battle Camp: Final 5 Episodes with Dana Moon + Interview with the Winner! 1:03:29

2 dni temu1:03:29

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1:03:29

Finally, we find out who is unbeatable, unhateable, and unbreakable in the final five episodes of Battle Camp Season One. Host Chris Burns is joined by the multi-talented comedian Dana Moon to relive the cockroach mac & cheese, Trey’s drag debut, and the final wheel spin. The Season One Winner joins Chris to debrief on strategy and dish on game play. Leave us a voice message at www.speakpipe.com/WeHaveTheReceipts Text us at (929) 487-3621 DM Chris @FatCarrieBradshaw on Instagram Follow We Have The Receipts wherever you listen, so you never miss an episode. Listen to more from Netflix Podcasts.…

Decoding the Customer

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Interviews and perspectives from global customer experience experts

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#Business #Customer Experience #Julia Ahlfeldt, Certified Customer Experience Professional #Certified Customer Experience Professional #Julia Ahlfeldt

Decoding the Customer

15 subscribers

updated 5 lat temu

Udostępnij

Źródło serii•Feed

Interviews and perspectives from global customer experience experts

52 odcinków

#Business #Customer Experience #Julia Ahlfeldt, Certified Customer Experience Professional #Certified Customer Experience Professional #Julia Ahlfeldt

Wszystkie odcinki

1
Rebroadcast of Moments of Truth: CX Mini Masterclass – E46 8:48

5 years temu8:48

8:48

This CX Mini Masterclass explains customer “Moments of Truth”. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, shares where the concept came from, and how you can use your understanding of Moments of Truth to improve customer journeys and foster loyalty. These moments can make or break a customer journey, so if you’ve heard this term used as a buzzword, but want to learn how to translate jargon into business results, then this episode is for you. Enjoy the best of the archive The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I’ve curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including VOC research and customer insight) or get in touch via email .…

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Rebroadcast of Measuring customer experience through leading and lagging indicators: CX Mini Masterclass – E32 9:21

5 years temu9:21

9:21

This CX Mini Masterclass explains the role of leading and lagging indicators in measuring customer experience. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, shares examples for how you can build a balanced view of customer experience with the right mix of CX metrics and measures. If you are wondering how to move beyond a one-metric view of CX, this episode is for you. Enjoy the best of the archive The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I’ve curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. And if you are looking to super-charge your CX skills and continue learning, be sure to check out CX University . They have a great array of CXPA accredited training resources available on a flexible monthly subscription plan. Use the code PODCAST10 to get 10% off your first month’s subscription and support this podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX measurement, insights, leadership alignment and CX change implementation) or get in touch via email .…

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Rebroadcast of Calculating Customer Lifetime Value: CX Mini Masterclass – E22 7:01

5 years temu7:01

7:01

This CX Mini Masterclass covers the concept of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), how to calculate this, and why it’s an important metric for the CX profession. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, will help you understand how to leverage CLV to demonstrate the ROI of customer experience and foster buy-in for customer-centric strategy. Enjoy the best of the archive The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I’ve curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, leadership alignment and CX business case assessments) or get in touch via email .…

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Conversation with the godmother of customer experience: interview with Jeanne Bliss – E90 33:14

5 years temu33:14

33:14

Customer experience expert and industry pioneer, Jeanne Bliss , shares insights about the origins of the CX industry as well as where it’s going. Jeanne, also known as the godmother of customer experience, provides listeners with a unique window into her career path from becoming one of the first Chief Customer Officers, to founding the CXPA and becoming a transformative force in field of CX. Jeanne and show host, Julia, discuss the enduring challenges facing all CX professionals and what’s next on the horizon for customer experience in the years to come. If you’re looking for some insight, inspiration and guidance from one of the most prominent and respected voices in customer experience, then this episode is for you. Meet the godmother of customer experience Jeanne Bliss has always been an important figure in the CX industry. She is truly a pioneer in this field and has spent 35 years transforming companies, where she’s led organizations to earn 98% customer loyalty rates. Jeanne Bliss helps companies and people become the best version of themselves. She guides them to define, build and live the behaviors and actions that will fuse customers to them, and ultimately create deep and memorable relationships. Creating these deeper bonds has been Jeanne’s singular mission for over 35 years. First, as the inaugural Chief Customer Officer at Lands’ End, Coldwell Banker, Allstate and Microsoft Corporations. Then since 2002, guiding over 20,000 leaders around the world to understand that improving lives should be their most important strategic vision. She has shepherded a whole new breed of leader into the marketplace prepared to lead this change through her pioneering years as a practitioner, experience coaching global leaders, her four game-changing books, and as co-founder of the Customer Experience Professional’s association. If the proof is in the pudding, then there is certainly no doubt why Jeanne is one of the most prominent and respected thought leaders in the world of customer experience. Jeanne Bliss, CCXP, CEO of Customerbliss If you’d like to learn more about Jeanne’s work, be sure to follow her on LinkedIn , where she often shares insights about customer experience and more. Her blog is second to none as a resource for aspiring CX professionals. Her books provide foundational knowledge about customer experience, and her podcast , The Human Duct Tape Show, is well worth a listen! From shoes to the C-suite Jeanne’s father set the tone for her career in customer experience. As the owner of a local she store, he became not just a part of the community, but a part of people’s lives. Putting shoes on children’s feet and welcoming families into his store as though they were part of his family. When he retired, there was a line of customers 3 blocks long, waiting to thank him and wish him well. Customer experience was in Jeanne’s bones and it encouraged her to ask questions about how brands can create those special experiences that fuse customers to them. What’s your three blocks long? How will you be remembered? And that’s really so much of what’s missing for me as we get into customer experience. – Jeanne Bliss After acquiring degrees in marketing and apparel design, and working in the retail industry for several years, Jeanne’s role at Lands’ End really catapulted her into her career in customer experience. At Lands’ End she worked closely with the CEO Gary Comber, whose enthusiastic support for focusing on the customer enabled Jeanne to learn, experiment and implement concepts that would become the core foundation of her “CX kit bag”. Jeanne went on to lead customer experience efforts at organizations across a diverse array of industries. Each one presented unique challenges and opportunities, but she identified her gift for being the “glue” that unites teams around an end state. Tips for aspiring CX professionals Jeanne recommends that those who aspire to a CX leadership role first focus on how and where they can drive change at the ground level. She encourages CXers to get involved with operations, get their fingernails dirty and identify their unique gifts for improving customer’s lives. She also highlights that it’s important to elevate the work and connect CX efforts to business outcomes. If you have a passion, it’s fantastic. But you need to be able to package the passion into simplicity, pragmatism and an understanding for leaders on why it’s important to do this work. – Jeanne Bliss What underpins this work Jeanne highlights 3 things have have underpinned the longevity and success of CX or a heightened focus on customer experience. First, Jeanne points to “customer math”, or the acceptance by business leaders of customers as assets. This was accelerated during the economic downturns of the early and late ’00s, and it encouraged senior stakeholders to rethink their prioritization of customer experience given the benefit to the bottom line. The rise of social media has also impacted the focus on CX, by shifting the megaphone from companies (or their advertising agencies) to consumers. This has forced organizations to establish clarity around who they are and then fortify the reliability of their operating model to deliver. When customers talk on social media, they really say three things: Did you do what you said you were going to do? Did you improve my life? And how did you make me feel? – Jeanne Bliss Finally, the godmother of customer experience says leaders are starting to understand that business silos don’t unite themselves. This realization has given rise to the role of the Chief Customer Officer, but Jeanne warns that CX teams cannot become another silo, or it will defeat the purpose. She fears what could happen if CX professionals become too focused on the mechanics of CX and lose sight of the meaning of their work. Covid pushes businesses in the right direction In her parting words, Jeanne suggests that a missing link has been getting leaders to align their own behavior and messaging to the vision of what they want their company’s brand to be. Covid has force fed the business world with an extra dose of humanity. CEOs are having frank conversations with employees and customers, thinking outside of the box and acting quickly to help improve the lives of their customers. These adaptations have become essential to brand survival, and the godmother of customer experience hopes these attributes will endure beyond the crisis to help elevate and solidify the work . Want to keep learning about CX? Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business define customer experience strategy that delivers results, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email . To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here .…

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Customer impact scorecard: CX Mini Masterclass – E89 9:17

5 years temu9:17

9:17

This CX Mini Masterclass explains a simple yet effective CX tool for driving customer-centric change and ensuring that business decisions support an organization’s overall CX goals. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, explains the customer impact scorecard, how to build one and then how to use it to ensure that business changes work for – not against – CX. Julia also shares some news about a planned hiatus for the show. If you’re looking for a practical approach to help cross functional teams stay the course towards shared customer experience goals, then this episode is for you. A simple tool for an important job We’ve all seen it happen. Someone in IT, sales or operations makes a decision about a new product or a process with the best intentions, but the resulting change has a negative impact customer experience. When these things happen, it’s rarely out of malice. After all, no one (or at least we hope no one) goes around intentionally making customer experiences worse. More often than not, the team that implemented the change just wasn’t thinking about the downstream impact on customer experience. This is bound to happen, because honestly, most businesses are geared to solve business problems. The customer may be the guiding light for CX departments and some executives, but historically that hasn’t been true for all teams. Additionally, the more removed a team is from the customer, the more difficult it can be to draw a connection between day to day responsibilities and customer outcomes. In this scenario, a little assistance and structure are in order. And a customer impact scorecard is a great tool to for CX leaders to have in their toolbox. A customer impact scorecard is a rating or evaluation tool that prompts the user to assess how something – be that a change to people, processes or technology – will eventually turn into customer outcomes and if these outcomes are desirable, neutral or adverse. The idea being that a scorecard becomes a quick and easy check and balance to avoid decisions which might inadvertently damage customer experience. It encourages stakeholders to pause and make an honest assessment of the impact on customer experience by moving the thinking from inside out to outside in. Some organizations already have risk assessment scorecards in place for any business change or major investment, so why can’t the same assessment be done for customer experience? Surely customer experience is just as important to the long-term viability of any business. (And if you’d like to know a little bit more about helping your organization balance business risk and CX, then be sure to check out episode 36 .) Building and using your customer impact scorecard Identify which attributes to evaluate – These could relate to your customer promise , CX principles or what is known to be important to the customer. It’s helpful to identify 5-10 points to evaluate and phrase them as thought-starter questions. E.g. Will this change impact how easy it is for customers to do business with us? Set your rating scale – The ratings for each attribute should range from positive to negative. A 3 or 5 point scoring scale usually works nicely. Regardless of which size scale is used, a negative impact should yield a negative score, a neutral impact should yield a score of zero, and a positive impact should yield a positive score. When the overall evaluation points for the business change are tallied, a positive rating indicates a change with a net positive impact on CX, while a net negative score should raise red flags about something that would potentially have an adverse effect on CX. Identify the right forum for implementation – Pinpoint the process for vetting or prioritizing new initiatives and see if a customer impact scorecard can be included in that process. Project management, finance and legal are some of the typical gatekeepers for business change. It’s important to keep the customer impact scorecard simple and straightforward. The goal is to guide cross functional leaders to consider the customer before they make a business decision, but to avoid creating complex red tape that stakeholders end up resenting. News about the podcast As shared with listeners at the start of the episode, I’ll be taking a hiatus from publishing new CX Mini Masterclasses for the next few months. The show will be back later in 2020. Keep an eye out for periodic re-broadcasts of favorites from the archive and possible new content from guest contributors. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email .…

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How to build a world class CX dashboard: CX Mini Masterclass – E88 9:54

5 years temu9:54

9:54

This CX Mini Masterclass explores best practices for building a CX dashboard, a critically important tool for any CX program. Special guest and customer experience expert, Ben Motteram takes listeners through the benefits and uses of a CX dashboard, he provides insights on how to build one with the end user in mind, and he also speaks about how best to distribute your dashboard once it’s up and running. If you’re looking for a one stop shop for expert guidance on why and how you should build a CX dashboard, then this episode is for you. Insights from a special guest Ben Motteram is the Founder and Principal of Melbourne-based CX consulting company, CXpert . With 25+ years of experience working with some of Australia’s most recognizable brands, he has helped many organisations to become more human in the way they deal with customers and employees. Ben assists clients in areas such as CX strategy, Voice of the Customer, and employee engagement. In December 2018, Ben was the only Australian named on a list of global thought leaders to follow on Twitter and his blog has been independently recognized for its insight on all things CX. Ben Motteram This episode was Ben’s third guest appearance on the show. If you missed his previous Mini Masterclass episodes on CX Strategy and the Foundations of a Great CX Program , be sure to listen to those. Best practices for building a CX Dashboard Check out Ben’s tips for creating a CX Dashboard in this article he wrote for CX Accelerator. It covers many of the same insights shared with listeners in this episode. I’d encourage you to explore the other insights and thought leadership on CX Accelerator , as well as Ben’s blog . Both resources are packed with all sorts of other great gems and CX thought leadership. Want to keep learning about CX? Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including employee engagement, leadership alignment and CX strategy) or get in touch via email .…

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Measuring digital customer experience: CX Mini Masterclass – E87 11:15

5 years temu11:15

11:15

This CX Mini Masterclass explains the importance of measuring digital customer experience and some of the most popular metrics for doing this. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, provides an overview of what metrics and measures are typically captured at various digital touchpoints, ideas on how to use these to understand the journey, and tips on where you might be able to find this data within your organization. If you’re looking for some ideas about how to leverage digital experience metrics and measures to better understand the holistic customer journey, then this episode is for you. The importance of measuring digital customer experience So many experiences now happen in the digital realm. Whether that’s through a website, an app or via social media, most customer journeys have become at least somewhat digitized. And it’s probably safe to say this is becoming an even bigger trend with each passing year. Within that context, CX professionals need to understand how to integrate an understanding of experiences through digital touchpoints into the larger understanding of the overall customer journey. These metrics for digital experiences aren’t new, most of them have been around for a while, often used by digital operations, marketing or user experience teams, but it’s high time that CX professionals harness them as well. There are a LOT digital experience metrics. It would be impossible to cover all of them in a Mini Masterclass. The following includes a curated selection from different digital touchpoints based on both their prevalence and usefulness in the CX context. Digital footfall Footfall and conversion can be difficult to track for traditional in-person experiences. That’s definitely not the case online. From a web context, the key customer high level engagement measures would be page views, session duration and bounce rate . A bounce is any visitor who lands on a page, but doesn’t take any action. (Note: it’s not always a bad thing). Websites and apps can also track detailed behavior flows , or how customers navigate the different pages or actions. These measures are basically the digital equivalent of footfall and conversion, but the context of digital enables CX professionals to get so much more data about how consumers act and what interests them. Often this data can be tracked back to specific users as a way of measuring digital customer experiences over time. Because many of these measures relate back to the sales funnel, marketing teams are a helpful first port of call if you are looking for website experience data in your organization. Email is still relevant CX professionals should also stay abreast of email marketing metrics, because this touchpoint still plays an important role in customer experience, especially if one is trying to stitch together an entire journey including inbound and outbound communication. Some of the most popular measures include, open rate , which indicates if people are reading the message, unsubscribe rate, sharing or forwarding rate and the click through rate . This last measure highlights if customers are engaging with any calls-to-action within the message. Some marketing teams put together timelines of customer engagement across email, text, call and other notifications, which can be very helpful for building a comprehensive customer journey. Of these, the digital touchpoints should yield the most readily available data about engagement. Remember that just because someone received a communication doesn’t always mean they engage with it, but it’s helpful for CX professionals to understand these points of interaction so they can be brought into the bigger picture. Social media Email can feel old school these days, but it’s undeniable that social media is on the rise as a part of many customer’s digital journeys. The great news is that social media has opened up a whole new world opportunities for measuring digital customer experience and understanding new dimensions of the journey. It can be helpful to understand digital social media metrics or measures through two different lenses, a push and a pull. Marketing teams love to measure success of their curated content through things like Social Share of Voice, or mentions compared to competitors , the engagement rate relative to total followers, and the applaud rate , which tracks approval actions (likes, favorites and whatnot). These provide a glimpse into customer engagement with an organization’s social media presence and outbound messaging. Social media “push” metrics help CX teams understand possible points of interaction with a brand or where consumers might be getting information about products and services. Increasingly, social media is also being used to provide service support and even to sell to customers. Standard sales and service metrics or measures like conversion rate, response time, resolution time and first contact resolution can all apply to social media touchpoints, as well as email, messenger or wherever sales and support are offered. Advanced text analytics also provide organizations with the ability to evaluate sentiment and conduct topic analysis to understand trends in the nature of engagement through social media and other channels. Usability testing Usability testing metrics are especially important if CX professionals are hoping to understand an app-based experience or a web portal where a customer might go to complete one of their jobs to be done , like paying their cell phone bill or checking a credit card statement. These are great for understanding the digital customer journey after the point of conversion. Usability metrics are all based on a user’s experience completing a specific task, so they are journey-specific and you’ll need to identify what that task is first. Metrics include task completion rate , which is just what it sounds like. The error rate , or how many times a customer made an error or had to repeat an action. Average time to complete a task is also often gathered. Generally speaking, customers want things to be quick, easy and seamless. So CX teams will want to help their organizations work towards digital experiences that enable quick task completion, with minimal errors and low abandon rates. Digital operations teams should be able to pull samples of this information if they don’t already have some of it on hand. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email .…

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3 ways to foster empathy among teams: CX Mini Masterclass – E86 10:32

5 years temu10:32

10:32

This CX Mini Masterclass explains the importance of establishing empathy for the customer among all employees and 3 practical ways CX professionals can help teams do this. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, covers 3 tried-and-true empathy building activities that you can use with nearly any team from service reps to the c-suite. If you’re looking for ideas and inspiration on how to help team members at all levels foster empathy and get in touch with the needs of the customer, then this episode is for you. Establish a culture of empathy There is a lot of focus on building empathy with customer-facing teams. This makes sense, but we can’t forget that customer-centric culture is about rallying an entire organization around the customer, not just a few select teams. It’s great if employees on the front lines can connect with others, remain in touch with the context of customers’ lives and demonstrate this through their actions. But to maximize the impact of customer-centric culture, those team members who are defining experiences, building platforms or making strategic decisions also need to be able to relate to the customer. CX professionals need to have a multi-pronged approach to foster empathy. The following 3 activities have been curated with a wide ranging audience in mind. Empathy is a difficult thing to “teach”, so these activities are designed to gently guide people to the “ah-ha” moment where they see this for themselves. Once team members connect with what it means to feel empathy towards another, the next step is to help them apply this to the context of customers and then flex and train this muscle so they know how to use it. Activity #1: time traveler This activity involves explaining a modern object, like a TV, car or cell phone to someone who lived 200 years ago (or 500 years ago or who comes from a different planet). The group should be divided into teams of two. One team member role plays the modern day person describing the object, while the other person asks clarifying questions based on the perspective of someone who lived 200 years ago. After a few minutes, ask them to swap roles and repeat the conversation about a different object. To wrap up, facilitate a brief group discussion, asking the participants how it felt to put themselves in the shoes of someone who lived so long ago, as well as what it was like trying to explain a normal everyday object to a person who has a completely different context for the world. The idea is to get participants thinking about context of others and what it means to relate to someone with a different perspective on life. During your debrief discussion, connect the activity back to your customer base by asking participants what disconnects might exist between their frame of reference and that of your typical customer. This activity is quick and easy. It’s a fun icebreaker and can sow the seeds that foster empathy or reinforce the right empathetic mindset. Activity #2: persona scenarios This activity requires a little bit of preparation, but it’s totally worth it. It’s another great activity for a broad group of participants, and works well for a team offsite or another setting where facilitators have the luxury of time. To prepare, establish several customer personas (if you’re unsure about what customer personas are, be sure to check out episode 40 ). Next, identify a typical job to be done or customer journey for each persona and a possible hurdle the customer might face. To facilitate the activity, assemble your group of participants and divide them into teams of 4-5 people. Provide each team with an example persona and scenario. Ask one person within each team to assume the role of the persona. This team member should introduce themselves as the persona and explain their customer journey, as well as the scenario information that you’ve provided. Their team has the opportunity to ask questions and get to know the fictitious example customer before working on a course of action to address the issue they are facing along the customer journey. Depending on the group, I’d suggest giving them anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to get to know their team persona and discuss an intervention. To conclude the activity, each team can present their persona and suggested next steps to the large group. During the debrief, be sure to probe with questions about how the team understood and related to the customer’s wants, needs, feelings and expectations, as well as how this influenced their course of action. This activity should not only foster empathy, but also get people thinking about how they can translate an empathetic understanding of the customer to improvements in the customer journey. When preparing for this, remember that the facilitator should have as many personas and corresponding journey challenges as there are teams. Pro tip: marketing departments sometimes have personas on hand so that facilitators don’t need to build these from scratch. Activity #3: everyone has a backstory This activity is truly the Goldie Locks of empathy building exercises. It works with nearly any audience, can be facilitated as a quick ice breaker or a longer activity with the inclusion of an in-depth discussion. When all participants are present, as them to write down the most ridiculous or outlandish customer request they’ve ever heard. It could be something they’ve heard from one of their customers or something they’ve observed in their own personal experience as a consumer. After they’ve written down their outlandish customer request on a piece of paper, they should pass this to the person on their right, who now needs to come up with a backstory that justifies the seemingly strange request. The reasoning and backstory can be as outlandish as the customer request itself. It doesn’t matter. The point is to get people thinking about what might have motivated an otherwise bizarre-sounding customer request and then relating to the customer’s situation. The act of understanding another can foster empathy and trigger a totally different emotional response to a situation. To close out this activity ask participants to turn to the person who gave them the customer request scenario and explain the backstory they came up with. If you have time, select a few participants to share their examples and discuss as a group. Fostering empathy takes long term commitment Creating a culture of empathy won’t happen overnight. These activities won’t magically flip the switch on team culture and mindset, but if they become part of a CX professional’s arsenal of employee engagement efforts, they will start to make an impact over time. The key is to be consistent and to help create those “ah-ha” moments, along with subtle reinforcement. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email .…

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The ultimate guide to customer experience metrics: CX Mini Masterclass – E85 11:15

5 years temu11:15

11:15

This CX Mini Masterclass covers a roundup of the key insights on CX metrics from previous episodes. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, covers everything from the basic definitions of the most popular metrics to the strategies for putting these to use, plus a step by step guide on where you can go to learn more. Customer experience metrics have always been a hot topic in the industry, so this episode is for new CXers and seasoned experts alike. If you’re interested in an expert-curated guide to customer experience metrics and their role in CX management, then this episode is for you. THE hot topic If you get a group of CX professionals together, at some point the conversation will turn to metrics and measures. It’s inevitable. Largely because metrics and measures are the core of how CX teams validate insights, track their progress, and prove their worth the business. So it should come as no surprise that this is a keen area of interest for continued learning and that conversations on the pros and cons of different metrics have been known to stir up emotions. Given the importance of CX metrics, the topic has been covered quite extensively on the podcast. At least 7 Mini Masterclass episodes to date have featured topics related to CX metric. It was high time for a round up guide to customer experience metrics, and no better way to mark the milestone of the 85th episode. Kicking off the guide to customer experience metrics In episode 28 , guest expert, CX thought leader and former CEO of the CXPA, Diane Magers , outlines the difference between metrics, measure and business value. These are terms that many CX professionals use interchangeably, but it’s important to clarify what these are and how they apply to customer experience management. No guide to customer experience metrics would be complete without baseline definitions of the key terms. Diane broke down her definitions of each: Measures – anything you can count (e.g. number of clients that come into your store, call length, frequency of purchase) Metrics – outcomes of something that’s happened, including a customer’s perception of those outcomes (e.g. customer satisfaction, customer effort score) Value – the financial levers that you can pull in an organization and/or the resulting financial impact (e.g. cost to serve, revenue, expense, profit per customer) For more on this, be sure to check out episode 28 . Understanding the “Big 3” metrics Episode 31 explored 3 of the most common CX metrics out there, Customer Satisfaction or CSAT, Net Promoter Score, otherwise known as NPS and a newer kid on the block Customer Effort Score. Each one has a unique methodology and brings as different type of insights to the table. Be sure to listen to episode 31 if you want an overview of the 3 juggernaut metrics of the CX world. Episode 33 was a special deep dive into the pros and cons of Net Promoter Score, as it is undoubtedly the most controversial metric of the bunch. NPS was developed by Fred Reicheld, a notable thought leader and management consultant. The metric was introduced to the world through a Harvard Business Review article, so it caught the attention of executives and helped shine the spotlight on CX, but many CX professionals now feel increasingly shackled to a metric that doesn’t explain the full picture of customer experience, which by the way – no single metric will ever be able to do in isolation. There are many well documented issues with the way that NPS is measured and used. My professional opinion is that NPS has its place as a CX metric, but only in the right context. It is better suited as a dipstick on customer perceptions of a brand across their entire journey and not as performance measure for customer-facing teams. That recommendation only stands if the right methodology is used, which it’s often not. Check out episode 33 for more details. Interpreting metrics One metric used in isolation won’t provide the full picture of an organization’s performance or progress towards customer-centricity. There isn’t a singular guide to customer experience metrics, but it is widely acknowledged that CX teams should leverage a variety of metrics to create a full picture of CX. Episode 32 explores how different metrics and measures can be used in concert by classifying them as leading or lagging indicators and then bringing them together to establish a holistic understanding. Leading indicators are measures that precede or feed into a customer experience. These should indicate whether or not an experience will be successful. E.g. wait time, processing time, product availability, system downtime, product quality. These are all components that might contribute to customer experience. Leading indicators help predict the outcomes of experiences and many of them can be measured and monitored before experiences even happen. They can be used to proactively intervene when experiences start going sideways and make for great CX KPIs (see more on that below). Lagging indicators follow a customer experience. These should indicate whether or not an experience was successful. Customer retention and the “Big 3” metrics covered in episode 31 are all examples of lagging indicators. They help us understand “how we did” and are important for monitoring progress or for tracking the impact of customer experience efforts over time. When teams use leading and lagging indicators together, it empowers them take charge of delivering good experiences and then monitor the outcomes. Putting CX metrics to work A guide to customer experience metrics wouldn’t be complete without some ideas on how to put these CX tools to work. Episodes 53 and 73 do just that. Metrics can be very helpful for driving organizational alignment around customer centric-goals. Episode 53 , looked at CX KPIs as an application for CX metrics and measures. The key is to find metrics or measures that connect a team or individual’s day to day responsibilities to customer outcomes. This is generally easier to do for customer-facing teams than those working behind the scenes, but ideally everyone should be accountable to a KPI or two that connects their work back to the customer mandate. For more detail on establishing CX KPIs and potential pitfalls to look out for, be sure to check out episode 53 . CX professionals can get so worked up about metrics, because they’re the way that CX teams prove the worth of their efforts to the business. Episode 73 provides some recommendations on how CX leaders can use those metrics and measures to demonstrate the impact that customer experience is having on the business. Customer experience metrics can be used to highlight efficiency gains, quantify the value of referrals and demonstrate how a better understanding of the customer has led to improved business outcomes. Those are just a few of the recommendations covered in episode 73 . Avoiding the common pitfalls In episode 63 , special guest and CX expert Stephanie Thum shared 4 common mistakes with how teams use metrics and what CX leaders can do to avoid these. If you are in the process of setting up a CX metrics framework or are busy reflecting on how you can improve the one currently in place, be sure to check out episode 63 . Stephanie covers everything from how to share metrics that you think might make the situation look bad to establishing the right cadence for measurement. Stephanie has become a special ongoing contributor to the show, and ALL of her episodes are well worth a listen! When CX metrics aren’t enough If you’ve reached the end of this guide to customer experience metrics and are thinking “I’m applying all of the CX metrics best practices, but my executive team still isn’t listening” , you might just be speaking the wrong language. CX metrics carry weight with CX professionals because we understand their value (and pitfalls!). If you want to your message to resonate with business leaders, consider framing CX performance in terms of business results, aka the ROI of CX. For more on this, including how you can leverage existing CX metrics to demonstrate business impact, be sure to check out my Ultimate Guide to the ROI of Customer Experience. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including journey mapping, CX strategy development, experience innovation, leadership workshops and CX ROI measurement) or get in touch via email .…

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3 tips for balancing consistent customer experience and technology innovation: CX Mini Masterclass – E84 10:25

5 years temu10:25

10:25

This CX Mini Masterclass comes directly from a listener request about how organizations can ensure that CX is protected, even as customers and companies move to more reliance on technology. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, explains the relationship between customer experience and technology, and 3 ways to maintain the integrity of CX amid a changing landscape. If you’re interested in some practical actions that you can take to ensure great customer experience even as the consumer marketplace becomes more digitized and automated, then this episode is for you. Balancing customer experience and technology The rise of digital technology has brought about an explosion of customer touchpoints . It used to be that if a customer wanted to do their banking, they had to go into a branch, but that’s definitely no longer the case. Now customers have their choice of online banking, app banking, banking through a messenger service, calling a contact center, engaging with their bank on social media or going into the branch. That’s a LOT of different touchpoints, and most of them are powered by tech. At the same time, companies have integrated technology solutions behind the scenes to improve speed, accuracy and efficiency. If you were to go behind the scenes of pretty much any experience, you’re guaranteed to see a mix of people, processes and technology fueling experiences. The role of technology is only set to grow as applications for things like artificial intelligence become more commonplace. This means that CX professionals need to help their organizations keep the heart and soul of experiences, even as touchpoints and the spaghetti wire behind those touchpoints continues to evolve. This is easier said than done, but there are several practical approaches that CX professionals can use. 1. Establish your experience principles A customer promise and experience principles can help foster consistency for experiences throughout the journey, regardless of which touchpoint a customer engages with. Episode 69 , explored both the customer promise and experience principles. Essentially, a customer promise is a clear definition of what customers can expect and also how teams should deliver experiences. It’s a high-level statement, or a Northstar of what experiences should ideally look like. The promise can be backed up with more granular or prescriptive experience principles, which outline the “how-to” details behind the promise. An example of an experience principle would be “each customer will walk away from their experience with us knowing we value their business” or “we commit to providing a safe and respectful environment for customers”. These statements are applicable to nearly any touchpoint, and they speak to outcomes or results, so while the approach might be slightly different for a safe and respectful environment in a store vs. online, the way that the customer feels after that interaction should be the same. Experience principles can be a helpful framework for teams to evaluate experiences, reality-check the journey across touchpoints and assess the relationship between customer experience and technology. If an experience isn’t yielding outcomes that are consistent with the promise, that’s a red flag. 2. Test the user experience This may sound obvious, but in their haste to launch a new system or platform, it can be tempting for teams to skip the step of testing and refining the user experience. Resist this temptation at all costs. Before any experience is launched into the customer journey, it should be vetted and tested, ideally against experience principles and some sort of customer impact scorecard. An experience should be refined until it receives a passing grade and only then, “released in the wild”. Once an experience is live in the customer journey, the monitoring shouldn’t stop. It’s important to keep tabs on how customers are responding and to keep refining things. There is a lot of emphasis on user experience testing for customer-facing experiences, but the same customer impact assessment, user interface testing and refinement should happen for the technology innovations that support teams behind the scenes. If an organization wouldn’t launch some horribly clunky experience into the customer journey, why would it launch this into the employee journey? Technology should enable teams to deliver on the customer promise and the brand purpose, not hinder them. Ensuring that customer-facing and behind the scenes tech enablers are user-friendly will go a long way to maintaining great customer experience, especially as customer experience and technology become more deeply intertwined. For more details on UX and how this differs from CX, be sure to check out episode 56 . 3. Make in-person experiences extra special As consumers and businesses become more reliant on technology, brands need to be prepared with GREAT experiences when they do happen in person. Customers are increasingly opting for self-help channels before picking up the phone or walking into a store or branch. As a result, human interactions are fewer and farther between. As these moments become more rare, they also become more precious. Brands would be wise to make these moments memorable and make them count. If technology enables teams to have a little more capacity, let them use that time to deepen customer relationships or deliver a special wow moment. CX professionals need to help business leaders rethink in any point of human interaction as an opportunity to connect with customers. These can no longer be transactional moments, they need to become loyalty-building moments. CX leaders should go back to their customer journey map, identify any interactions that still happen in-person or specific the moments of truth and figure out how to maximize the impact of personal touch. Again, if a team has established a customer promise or experience principles, make sure that these specific moments are an absolute home run in terms of delivering on the CX goals. As long as the basics of the customer journey sorted, then these moments have to power to pay major dividends in terms of customer loyalty and advocacy. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email .…

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The impact of Covid 19 and customer experience in the new normal: interview with Jennifer Wright – E83 45:19

5 years temu45:19

45:19

Customer experience transformation expert and Director of Experience Analytics at Magellan Health, Jennifer Wright , shares insights on CX in the age of Covid 19 and beyond. Jennifer leverages her knowledge of consumer behavior and experience as a CX leader across multiple sectors to provide insights about how customer experience is changing in response to the current global health pandemic. Jennifer and show host, Julia, discuss what “good” customer experience looks like these days, some examples of organizations that have been able to quickly pivot, and how the pandemic may change the way organizations measure and manage CX. If you’re looking for insight about Covid 19 and customer experience, and what you can do to help your organization prepare for CX management in the “new normal”, then this episode is for you. Expert insights Jennifer Wright is a customer experience transformation expert who designs and grows CX capabilities that generate actionable insights for business leaders. Through her experience building multiple CX capabilities across both the public and private sectors, she has developed a deep understanding of the common challenges faced when creating a superior customer experience. Jennifer delivers innovative solutions to these challenges by leveraging cross-industry knowledge and service design methods. Jennifer is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and holds a doctorate in industrial-organizational psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Her work in the field of customer experience spans multiple industries. Jennifer has worked in the financial services sector, helping writers, data scientists and psychologists to leverage behavioral economics or ‘nudge’ techniques to help homeowners through the post-mortgage crisis period in keeping their homes. She served as the Branch chief of business analytics at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, building and leading the Voice of the Customer (VoC) team within this US Federal government agency. And most recently she’s worked at Magellan Health where she’s led the customer analytics function for this managed healthcare company. Jennifer Wright, Phd, CCXP If you’d like to learn more about Jennifer’s work, be sure to follow her on LinkedIn , where she often shares insights about customer experience and more. Covid 19 and customer experience Covid-19 has changed everything. In a mater of a few short weeks, this health pandemic has brought entire sectors of the economy to a standstill, closed schools, forced a good chunk of the world’s population into some form of lockdown, and brought the term “social distancing” to the forefront of everyone’s mind. It has left a lot of CX professionals wondering what’s next. Jennifer anticipates that the next 1-2 years will be very fluid. We’ve seen a dramatic swing to remote and digital experiences, but the impact will be different for various industries. Within healthcare, the overnight transition to telehealth has been one of the biggest changes, but it’s just one of many experiences that has moved from the in-person to the digital realm. Jennifer points out that once people get used to the convenience and safety factor, these changes may remain permanent. Experiences that can’t be completely moved to the virtual space, such as dining out or going to the grocery store, have been significantly impacted, and Jennifer suspects there will be some lingering changes in consumer preferences, even after the Plexiglas barriers are removed. She anticipates that consumers will be hesitant about things like touching surfaces for some time. This will fundamentally alter the sensory aspect of physical customer experiences and attitudes towards these interactions. Time will tell if these attitudes and preferences become permanent. Honestly, it’s going to be a tough call for probably the next year to two years. We’re going to see a lot of different impacts and probably differences by sectors. Being home-bound will also change the types of products and services that people consume. Yes, there was an initial rush on survival basics like toilet paper, but now that the panic-buying has mostly subsided, we’ll likely see waves of product popularity as people decide they want different products as part of their new home-bound life. For example, there has been a rise in the popularity of baking, and as a result, the supply chain for baking flour has had to shift from a model largely reliant on wholesale demand to one that includes more retail sales. Organizations across industries will need to keep their finger on the pulse of these evolving trends and their ripple-effect through the marketplace. Silver linings Even amid the human tragedy and chaotic uncertainty in the business world, there have been some small silver linings. Jennifer points to telehealth as a change that may bring healthcare access to more people in the long run. Those who are housebound due to disabilities, live in rural locations or don’t have access to reliable transportation have historically encountered challenges accessing healthcare. Telehealth and video -based doctor consultations may provide these patients with more reliable and sustainable access to healthcare. Virtual healthcare solutions also bring about efficiencies for doctors and healthcare providers, enabling them to see more patients during their working hours. The benefits of telehealth are just one example in one industry, but the combination of imposed government restrictions and changing consumer preferences has catalyzed many organizations to rethink experiences from the ground up. Covid 19 and customer experience needn’t be foes. Some experiences will be redesigned in ways that benefit consumers and providers for many years to come. New sources of data The shift to more digital or virtual experiences will result in greater opportunities for data collection. IoT technology has introduced new possibilities for gathering insights about in-person customer experiences, but these technologies have yet to be widely adopted. As a result many customer journeys still have considerable data blindspots. Experiences that move from the physical world to the virtual space will create additional data points that organizations can use to understand customers and respond. But only if they collect and use that data wisely. Jennifer believes that even small businesses like local restaurants can use new sources of data to be smarter about planning their operations and stay agile while consumer preferences and behaviors are still in a state of flux. The key will be to ensure that new technology solutions are collecting the right kind of data, and that this information is used to drive action. If you’re really smart about it, when you implement some of these solutions, you could actually have the analytics baked into your implementation plan, so that you are collecting data as part of how you implement your technology solution. And you’re getting data from day one, that gives you more ability to be adaptable. Time to dial up the diplomacy In her parting words, Jennifer reminded CX professionals that it’s important to keep helping others build relationships across team lines. CX professionals can do their job most effectively when there is strong cross-functional collaboration. The sooner one starts building these bridges, the better. By building a robust network, CX professionals are doing a service to their company, and that network will in turn benefit CX professionals. The stronger these bonds, the better equipped organizations will be to respond in a time of crisis. Want to keep learning about CX? Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business define customer experience strategy that delivers results, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email . To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here .…

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Understanding the customer touchpoint map: CX Mini Masterclass – E82 9:30

5 years temu9:30

9:30

This CX Mini Masterclass explains customer touchpoint maps, how these differ from journey maps, and their place in the CX professional’s toolbox. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, breaks down what a touchpoint map is (and is not) and this tool’s role in helping teams build and manage customer experiences. If you’re interested in learning about touchpoint maps, what they’re used for, and tips on how to build one, then this episode is for you. The #1 misused term in CX Touchpoint maps are often confused with journey maps, much to the frustration of CX professionals. In fact, the word “touchpoint” is so frequently misused, that many CX professionals have an aversion to it all together. That said, a good customer touchpoint map can serve an important purpose. These maps help teams understand how a customer interacts with a brand. They can be useful compliments to journey maps, as touchpoint maps can serve as a the link between the outward-looking perspective of the journey map and the inward-looking perspective of a process map or service blueprint. First off, it’s important to understand the concept of a customer touchpoint, and how this differs from a customer experience. Touchpoints are the conduits for experiences throughout the journey. They are the channel or mode of interaction, not the interaction itself. For example if a customer is on a journey to get medical treatment and one of the experiences is calling their health insurance company to check on the status of a claim, the experience is calling in, and the touchpoint would be call center. To take things a step further, one could break down the specific touchpoint components within the call center like the IVR system, the agent and maybe even the phone connection itself. These would also be considered touchpoints. Touchpoint map vs. Journey map A customer journey is the series of events or experiences that a customer has as they are trying to fulfill some need in their life. Sometimes this need is referred to as a “job to be done”. A Journey map is the visual representation of this series of experiences, presented from the customer’s point of view. (If you are at all unsure about the definition of the terms touchpoint, experience or journey map, be sure to check out episodes 14 , 15 and 16 , which cover these concepts in detail.) Example Journey map (Source: Jim Tincher) A touchpoint map is a visual representation of the channels of interaction that a customer interfaces with throughout their journey. To understand the touchpoints you have to first understand the journey. And the touchpoint map is the representation of a customer persona’s journey, not all the possible touchpoint possibilities out there (which would be more of a touchpoint matrix). It’s also not the touchpoints that you want the customer to interface with (which would probably be considered a touchpoint design). Example touchpoint map (Source: Synegys) It’s easiest to think about the touch point map as a byproduct of the customer journey map. A team will be best-positioned to build a touchpoint map only after they’ve crafted their journey map. Once the journey map is built, a team can then create an overlay of the touchpoints that a customer interacts with, delving into deeper levels of detail as needed. When considering possible touchpoints, keep in mind that customer journeys don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen in the real world and so they are rarely isolated to interactions with just one brand. As a result, you may want to include touchpoints that aren’t in your control. In the example of the call to the health insurance company, the customer’s phone is an important touchpoint in the journey, even though that isn’t something that the health insurance provider can control. Putting your touchpoint map to use Touchpoint maps are surprisingly versatile tools, though most frequently when used in conjunction with other CX artifacts like journey maps and service blueprints. Here are just some of the ways they can be used by CX professionals. Validate the volume of customers who are having a specific experience. Touchpoints are where a customer interacts with a company, and these experiences often generate a data trail, so a touchpoint map can be quite helpful for identifying data sources to be used in quantifying the impact of experiences on the customer base. Root cause analysis on customer experience pain points. Perhaps the common denominator of several journey pain points is a faulty touchpoint that just isn’t supporting experiences as it should, but this isn’t obvious looking at the journey map. A touchpoint map can be a helpful diagnostic tool because is strips out some of the complexity and lets you hone in on one facet of the experience. A reality check for business leaders about how many touchpoints exist and the variation of experiences through different channels. In episode 65, Diego Gabathuler, CEO of Ivoclar Vivadent shared that their journey mapping had yielded more than 200 touchpoints. A touchpoint map can be used to help plan for consistency across channels, perhaps by bringing in standards or experience principles for all touchpoints. Fleshing out a service blueprint or the other process documentation that supports customer experiences. Since touchpoints represent the channels of interaction, it’s a logical place to start building the understanding of how an organization supports experiences. Each touchpoint likely has a web of teams, processes and technology behind it. This can be especially useful when it comes time to start translating journey findings into experience improvements. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email .…

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Using interviews to gain customer insight: CX Mini Masterclass – E81 11:51

5 years temu11:51

11:51

This CX Mini Masterclass explores the benefits of interviews as an effective approach to gain customer insight. Special guest and CX thought leader Stephanie Thum shares when and where this Voice of Customer (VOC) strategy can be most useful, best practices for conducting customer interviews and 5 practical tips for designing an interview research initiative. If you’re looking for some tangible advice about how to leverage interviews to better understand your customers, then this episode is for you. Insights from a special guest Stephanie has amassed deep expertise through her diverse professional background in the field of customer experience. While she’s often best known for her experience as one of the US federal government’s first agency CX leads, she has also been a practitioner and consultant in the B2B world, working with small and mid-sized companies and was one of the founding members of the CXPA. She’s a CCXP and has remained active with the association, even spending some time as part of the association’s HQ team. She’s written an ebook, Where Customer Experience Practices Haven’t Landed in Business . If you’d like to get in touch, connect with her via LinkedIn or Twitter . Stephanie Thum, CCXP If you’d like to hear more of Stephanie’s insights on the show, be sure to check out her previous episodes. In episode 45 Stephanie re-framed how organizations should think of customers and shared practical ideas on how to do this. In episode 50 , Stephanie dove into her area of expertise and covered trends with how CX is taking hold in government organizations. And in episode 55 , she provided a step-by-step guide to CEOs on how to lead customer-centric change. In episode 63 she explored some of the most pervasive missteps organizations make with their CX metrics and how to avoid these. Many ways to gain customer insight There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer for Voice of Customer. Industries and journeys are different, so each organization needs to craft its own best strategy for understanding customers and their needs . When planning your voice of customer approach, there are many different methodologies to choose from. Episode 79 covered 3 lesser known methodologies, but surveys, focus groups and interviews still rein supreme as the dominant research approaches. And with good reason. If done correctly, they can yield amazing insights. Customer surveys are especially popular for collecting customer experience feedback in the B2C world. But in B2B, where human-to-human, long-term relationships and RFPs make or break the journey, collecting feedback sometimes needs to take on a more human touch to have a meaningful impact. In this case, Stephanie advocates for a client interview program as a great way to gain customer insight. Understanding the methodology Client interviews are just that, face-to-face or telephone conversations with a selected group sample of clients or customers. Interviews are more flexible than surveys. Often an interviewer will come prepared with a set of planned, yet adaptable, questions about the customer or client’s business and their experience with the brand. The objective of the conversation is to glean insight about client needs, how the client views the business relationship and how the supplier organization’s products or services help address these business challenges. The selection of clients should be guided by the objectives of the research. If the research is designed to gain customer insight across the entire portfolio of customers, the sample should be reasonably representative of this. If the objective is to dive into the needs of a specific customer segment or product opportunity, the sample should be tailored accordingly. 5 expert tips for setting up an interview program Stephanie provided 5 recommendations for any CX team that is looking to integrate client interviews into their Voice of Customer research program: An impartial, skilled interviewer should do the client interview—not a sales executive . The client feedback session is not a sales call. Interviewees may not feel comfortable sharing feedback if they fear retribution. Additionally, sales and service representatives may feel pressured to disregard or bury clients’ comments if they are worried about the implications of surfacing negative feedback. Both of these are counter intuitive to the entire reason for doing the interviews. Create structure. Research teams will need a target client list, an interview policy, an interview and debrief process, template communications for clients, a standard dialogue guide, and template reports for each interview or series of interviews. It’s also important to plan how and when findings will be presented to leadership and management. Make the interview mutually beneficial. Use the interview to understand the outcomes the client is after. The interview should be mostly about the client, not the product or service provider. Here’s a favorite question: “What business challenges are coming up for you in the next 1-2 years and where do you see my firm fitting in?” Answers to this question shed light on opportunities that would be nearly impossible to yield from a survey response. Create artifacts. Good interview notes are essential. They should be organized and stored where the right people can review them at the right time. Survey documentation should be treated like any other source of client intelligence. It’s common to want to skimp on documentation, but this data can be invaluable in cases of navigating potential client loss, etc. Don’t get mad. The only thing more dangerous than not asking clients for feedback is asking and getting defensive about the findings or not following up after the the interview. Make sure a multidisciplinary team goes to work on follow-up activities right away and closes the loop with interview participants. Communication is key. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including customer insights, CX measurement, leadership alignment and CX change implementation) or get in touch via email .…

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Cracking CX success and customer experience ROI: interview with Michelle Morris – E80 46:51

5 years temu46:51

46:51

Seasoned CX leader and Customer Experience Design Partner with Verizon Business Group, Michelle Morris , shares insights from her rich and varied career in customer experience. Michelle helped shape one of the earliest formalized customer experience organizations in corporate America and has led CX teams at global brands from across a diverse array of industries. Michelle and show host, Julia, dive into the critical success factors for making CX change “stick”, approaches for calculating the ROI of CX including what Michelle calls the “4-R model”, and some ideas for those who are interested in pursuing a career in CX. If you’re looking for some insight, inspiration and practical advice from an acclaimed CX leader who has been working in this field about as long as anyone can say they have, then this episode is for you. Expert insights Michelle is a Customer Experience Design Partner with Verizon Business Group. In this role, she helps Verizon’s business customers create better customer experiences for their customers. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) as well as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt (LSSBB). Prior to joining Verizon, she led multiple CX organizations and has received many awards for her work in CX, including the esteemed CX Impact Award for Outstanding Practitioner in 2014, as well as the CX Innovation Award for her unique work titled, Pay It Forward – Improvements in CX through Employee Engagement. Her work has been cited in more than 20 industry publications including a featured case study by Forrester, “The CX Transformation Success Secrets of Crowe”, May 22, 2019. Michelle is currently serving as a board member for the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) board since January of 2020. Although her passion today is in Customer Experience, her roots as a Chemical Engineer with 6 patents adds innovation, creativity and passion to her work. Michelle Morris, CCXP Michelle has been working in CX roles just about as long as anyone can say that they have. She established the CX organization at the laser printing and imaging company Lexmark in 2008, and went on to do award winning work at the accounting firm Crowe before moving to Verizon. It’s a pleasure to hear insights from someone who has been leading formalized CX teams for as long as Michelle has. If you’d like to learn more about Michelle’s work, be sure to follow her on LinkedIn , where she often shares insights about customer experience, the CXPA, and much more. The key to customer-centric transformation During her career, Michelle has seen the field of CX evolve, but the foundational critical success factors for meaningful CX change have remained a constant. CX transformation is still a lengthy process for most large or established businesses, and Michelle cited leadership support as one of three critically important components for the success of customer-centric transformation. If your CEO, your board or the leadership of your company isn’t really investing and caring about customer experience, then you’re beating your head against a wall because you’re not going to make a lot of progress. Michelle added that it’s possible to win over the hearts and minds of senior leaders, but that it can be incredibly time consuming. If embarking on a campaign to win hearts and minds, CX leaders need to bring in solid change management principles and understand what motivates leaders. Also, don’t underestimate the power of a little peer pressure to help rally unified support. Michelle highlighted grassroots support for CX as a second key success factor. Everyone in the organization needs to believe in the mission that the organization is there to create great experiences for customers. Communication and employee education can be effective ways to get the message across, but there should also be mechanisms to engage employees and reinforce the right behaviors. While at Crowe, Michelle’s team developed the award winning “Pay it Forward” campaign, which enabled client-facing team members to recognize others within the value chain who contributed to client outcomes. These types of efforts reinforce messaging and keep CX top of mind for the broader organization. Finally, Michelle pointed out that even if you have leadership and grassroots support, it’s still important to have a solid plan for your organization’s CX transformation. This starts with understanding where an organization is in terms of CX maturity and establishing a framework for measuring progress. Utilizing maturity models or index assessments to understand where you are is a key and then really putting a plan in place to get to the next level. For more on CX maturity models, be sure to check out episode 78 , a recent CX Mini masterclass covering this topic in detail. Quantifying customer experience ROI While Michelle highlighted executive support as a critical success factor for CX transformation, she was also quick to point out that business leaders will expect to see results. It’s a requirement that is all too familiar for CX professionals. Yet, demonstrating customer experience ROI is a challenge for many. While at Crowe, Michelle used the “4-R” model for demonstrating ROI. This multi-pronged approach highlights different facets of customer experience ROI to build a robust story about the positive impact of customer experience: Revenue – looking at increases in customer revenue that can be attributed to happy or satisfied customers. This can be as straightforward as identifying correlations between satisfied customers (measured through your index of choice) and revenue. Recognition – if given the opportunity, will customers recognize individuals who help provide a great experience and can this be connected to satisfaction/engagement/loyalty metrics that drive revenue? Reputation – evaluating if satisfied customers are more likely to recommend the brand to others and what those recommendations might be worth to the business. Realization – profitability in the professional services space (connected to billable hours). CX teams in other industries could implement a cost-to-serve measure as a profitability component for customer experience ROI. Generally speaking, happy customers usually have a lower cost to serve. Regardless of which approach you use to quantify customer experience ROI, Michelle pointed out that it’s important to identify your data sources and ensure that you collaborate with others in your organization to get the data that you need. Often this means working together with someone in finance or possibly business intelligence. CXPA as a resource for CX professionals During the interview, Michelle touched on ideas for those who are keen to get involved with customer experience, but may not be in a “customer experience” role. She suggested identifying how one might impact CX from within their current responsibilities as a way to gain exposure to CX and get involved. She also pointed out that the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) can be an amazing resource for self study, professional community support and continued learning. It’s great to see a grounded, yet experienced CX leader involved with the CXPA board. She reiterated the association’s support for the next generation of CX leaders and noted that collaboration with higher education institutions is on the CXPA’s radar, so stay tuned. Want to keep learning about CX? Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business define customer experience strategy that delivers results, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email . To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here .…

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3 unique customer experience research approaches you might not know: CX Mini Masterclass – E79 8:41

5 years temu8:41

8:41

This CX Mini Masterclass explores 3 low-cost unique customer experience research methodologies. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, explains the benefits of expanding VOC efforts beyond the survey and focus group, several ways you can do this, and how to deal with potential push back around sample size. If you’re interested in learning about 3 simple VOC approaches that will help you gain new insight into the lives and experiences of your customers, then this episode is for you. Unique customer experience research Surveys and focus groups have long reigned supreme as the most popular Voice of Customer (VOC) approaches. And with good reason. If done correctly, they can yield valuable insights about customer experience. But, they have some limitations. They can be expensive and time consuming to facilitate. Both rely on customers reporting on what the think they do (which may differ from what they actually do). Surveys allow researchers to engage a large number of customers, but are always subject to bias and may yield limited insights. Focus groups provide a deeper look, but a group setting can impact what participants say. No VOC methodology is perfect, and each one yields unique customer experience insights. That’s why it’s important to have a multifaceted approach that utilizes several different tactics. Some of the lesser-known methodologies are easy, low-cost, and great complements to the traditional VOC favorites. Fly on the wall observations – Understand your objectives, grab a clipboard, find a discrete spot and just absorb. This is particularly helpful for filling in blindspots along the customer journey that don’t leave a data trail (e.g. retail before the point of purchase, a customer waiting area). It’s a great starting point for VOC research, as it normally generates additional questions that can be included in supplementary research. Job shadowing or “day in the life of” – A researcher spends time with a research subject while they do a particular task or just go about their day. The researcher should have clear direction on the objectives, but also the latitude to ask questions and engage with the research subject. This approach often yields surprising insights about things the research team never expected. It can be particularly useful in a B2B setting, where customers sometimes view their suppliers as partners and might be open to job shadowing as a way of helping suppliers gain insights that can improve products and services. Journaling – this last approach is all about unleashing the customer with a mandate to record their actions, thoughts, feelings, emotions or observations on a specific topic. It’s a great window into customers’ lives and what they actually do . The age of smartphones opens up many options to make journaling easier for researchers and participants. Instead of logging actions in a physical journal, participants can take photos, screen grabs or video testimonials about a certain activity related to the area of research interest. Commitment to participation is key, so this might be a place where it’s appropriate to use incentives or engage with a professional panel of research subjects. Dealing with push back on sample size When exploring these unique customer experience research approaches, it’s not uncommon to get questions about sample size. Anyone who’s taken a stats course knows that is important when you are looking at things like probability and predictive modeling. On the spectrum of Voice of Customer methodologies, there is narrow-but-deep at the one end and wide- but-shallow at the other. A massive survey, for example, would be wide-but-shallow. There is the opportunity to reach a larger sample size, but limitations in the depth of perspective about a customer’s life. On the other hand, something like a Day in the Life Of study is narrow but deep. It’s obviously not feasible to shadow thousands of customers, but researchers can be smart about picking a few participants who are representative of a customer segment, and then back the findings up with a statistically significant survey campaign. Think about observations, shadowing and journaling as complements to, not replacements for, traditional VOC research like surveys and customer activity data analysis. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email .…

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