CXPA Member Blog

CXPA Member Blog

This Blog features thought leadership from CXPA members and staff. All contributions are welcome!  Authors and commenters are reminded to adhere to CXPA's community expectations. Solicitation and direct selling are strictly prohibited, and CXPA has the sole discretion to remove any post for any reason.  For assistance with the CXPA blog, contact gabe@cxpa.org.

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How To Make CX & Voice of Customer YOUR Game Changer

By Stacy Sherman posted 5 hours ago
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Who are your favorite companies, and what makes you brand loyal? People typically answer this question based on how well a business understands and meets their needs.  Buying decisions go way beyond price  as we often pay a higher cost to shop at a particular place. Consider coffee, for example. Customers, including me,  spend triple the price  at Starbucks compared to other local coffee shops. Why would we pay more money on purpose?  The reason is that the most reputable brands, like Starbucks, proactively LISTEN to the voice of customer (also referred to as VoC) and use feedback to deliver personalized experiences that exceed customer expectations. ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of November 1st

By Joy Wedge posted 2 days ago
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Join a CXPA Town Hall Discussion on November 2 nd   As a “by member, for member” association, we want to hear about the challenges you face and your feedback  on the strategic priorities for CXPA.  We also want to provide an opportunity for you to provide feedback on our upcoming 2021 commitments, as well as other topics you may want to address. We hope you will join us to discuss new directions in greater depth and to share your thoughts as we consider next steps and 2021 priorities for CXPA.  Tune in on LinkedIn Live, Monday, November 2 at 12 noon Eastern   ...

CX inside Customer Support?

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 2 days ago
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Where is your CX function located? That’s a common question often used to kick off conversations on many webinars and conference chats.  For a while I found it mildly interesting as a survey question and as an icebreaker or a means of getting people engaged right off the bat.  But the more I found the answer to be “within the Customer   Support   organization,” the more puzzled I became: Isn’t the goal of CX, to a degree at least, to drive support   out   of business? I’ve   written   about the Closed-Loop Feedback system before, and for those not familiar with it, the concept is at the heart of what CX is looking to do:  Improve your Customers’ ...

The Five Rules for Affecting Real Culture Change

By Colin Shaw posted 3 days ago
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You can have a great philosophy, deliberate strategy, and cunning tactics to inspire customer-driven growth, but if you don't change your culture, they won't work. Changing the culture within your organization is vital if you want to deliver a Customer Experience that fosters customer loyalty and retention.   Culture change is not easy. I was running a workshop with a utility client many years ago about the concept of Customer Experience. There were 20 people in the room, and we were kicking around ideas of what changes could deliver an improved experience. One young lady, much younger than her surrounding co-workers, had an idea, several actually. ...

Goodhart's Law and clarity of goals

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 3 days ago
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I’d   written previously   about Goodhart’s Law, which goes along the lines of, once a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a good measure.  Now, I choose the words “metric”, “goal”, and “measure” all deliberately because they mean slightly different things (even if their subject is the same).  A measure is the most generic of the three as it simply represents something that is, well, measured.  It could be any number of things that you pay attention to or not; something reported or not; something you strive to increase/decrease/stabilize.  A metric is a little more specific for this purpose as it’s actually something you are monitoring or at least paying ...

Webinar Review: Conducting Virtual Video Research

By Ms. Taylor Barbieri posted 3 days ago
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Medallia is a 2020 Silver Sponsor of CXPA. This review was conducted at CXPA's request. The opinions expressed herein are from the author, who was not compensated. Webinar link: https://www.medallia.com/mastercast/ Webinar title: Conducting Virtual Video Research The data doesn’t lie: Your surveys aren’t quite as effective as they used to be. Sending researchers from city to city to interview clients is getting expensive. Your customers are exhausted from filling out survey after survey without ever knowing if someone is taking their feedback seriously. So, you’ve been thinking about doing video interviews instead. ...

A New Mission and Vision for CXPA

By Mr. Greg Melia,CAE posted 3 days ago
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“I like the word ‘Inspire’ because it has origins in the concepts of blow into, to bring spark, or to inflame,” remarked Annette Franz, CCXP, CXPA Chair, during a recent strategic planning session. Our Board of Directors reviewed statements and documents that arose out of the planning session to generate new Vision and Mission statements, revisions to CXPA’s value proposition, operating priorities, and Bylaws. Our efforts represent a renewed commitment by the Board and staff to ensure a vibrant, member-centric association as we enter CXPA’s 10th anniversary year. Passion is another concept linked to light or ignite — and an idea that the Board and ...

Making the best of a bad situation

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 5 days ago
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There’s saturation of Covid-19/coronavirus blogging these days, so I’m mostly avoiding it.  Naturally with a caveat like that, this’ll be a post about…Coronavirus of course.  But this isn’t about coping or stress or health-in-a-lockdown or how-everything-will-be-different or whatnot. Right as everything was beginning to hit, I was actually in Las Vegas speaking at a conference.  Of all places, at all times, I know.  It was early March, and we were right at the cusp of realizing that things were not good.  Nothing had really been shut down yet, I recall talk of ‘social-distancing’ as a novelty, people were cautious about shaking hands.  In all, it was a ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of October 26th

By Joy Wedge posted 9 days ago
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  CXPA Topic Guide: CX Metrics It can be overwhelming to find relevant, unbiased CX resources to help move your work forward. CXPA is here to help. Karl Sharicz, CCXP, dives into the world of CX metrics and offers some advice to CX practitioners on the proper role of metrics in their work. Metrics pervade our world in so many ways and within the CX discipline, especially where performance is concerned, they often take center stage.  See the CXPA Topic Guide: CX Metrics Here Nominate Someone for CXPA's Emerging Leaders Award    As the world’s premier organization dedicated ...

Customer Success is not CX

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 9 days ago
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I’ve written   previously   about different job postings with CX-sounding titles.  One of those jobs is in the family of “Customer Success” positions.  If you’re like me, and work in CX, you may have wondered, What, exactly,   is , Customer Success?  From a CX perspective, it may be useful to understand how these roles and their responsibilities differ from ours.  To that end, it’s a lot  like  CX, but it’s not exactly that.  While I’ve not played much a role in this space, I’ve made quite a few connections in the CS world and here’s what I’ve been able to gather from these conversations: First of all, these folks are also incredibly hard-working ...

Small Things That Have a Dramatic Impact on Your Customer's Experience

By Colin Shaw posted 10 days ago
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Oscar Wilde's famous quip shapes my marketing philosophy, "There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." One of the reasons the brilliant quote rings true is because of the concept of Priming. When you bring attention to things, it influences how people act upon them. Priming activates some part of our mind, and that's enough to produce this response out of us. We talked about Priming on a   recent podcast. From a technical perspective, Priming is a term that describes doing a little bit of something that will activate some idea in your mind and getting a response out of it. The word Priming comes ...

Engendering a risk-taking culture

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 10 days ago
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Business philosophers, book writers, keynote speakers, and basically anybody with an opinion on the subject will say that one key to success for an organization is to foster and encourage creativity and curiosity.  That’s surely a good start, but where the rubber really meets the road and awesome things start happening is when members of an organization truly feel free to experiment and take risks.  Of course as with any other theory, simply talking about it doesn’t get it done.  The real show of success is breakthrough ideas and actions that are the hallmark of a culture that really   does   embrace risk taking. Too many business leaders (and not just ...

Nominate Someone Today for CXPA's Emerging Leader Award

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 15 days ago
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"The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders, and continually develops them." -John Maxwell As the world’s premier organization dedicated to the professional development of career-oriented CX leaders, the Customer Experience Professionals Association has created a new “CXPA Emerging Leader” award to recognize those individuals who are new to CX, wish to grow their careers in the field, and who have positively impacted their organizations and customers early in their professional journey. ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of October 19th

By Joy Wedge posted 15 days ago
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CX Day 2020 Special Offer Extended If you know of anyone who is looking for a community of like-minded CX professionals, please invite them to take advantage of our extended special offer. Now available: Join by October 31st to save 20% off New Individual Membership. Use coupon code: CXDay20 The momentum continues around the globe as virtual events continue to spark new ideas. Want to keep the conversations going? Head over to our community discussion forum or see how you can attend events here . Did you miss the CX Day festivities? Local networks held thought-provoking, insightful conversations and inspired CX professionals all throughout ...

Lead and lag measures

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 16 days ago
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You know I’m all about metrics and measures. One of the things that made entering the CX profession so attractive to me was that this is a field of study that’s not only   based   in numbers, it’s   starving   for people who have an affinity for measuring. CX is a study that’s founded on measuring...from survey results to Customer habits and attitudes to top-level improvements in your CX KPIs, numbers are all around us. One topic of confusion I’ve seen a lot over my time is in regard to lead versus lag measures. Everybody’s got their own opinions and there doesn’t seem to be a textbook answer to what’s what, so take this as simply my theory and how I approach ...

Future-Focused Hali-Ma Khatun on the Role of Augmented Intelligence in CX

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 16 days ago
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What does the modern customer experience mean? What are the modern customer experience deliverables? How can organizations not differentiate, but evolve with the right techniques and resources?  It’s these questions, and more, that drive Hali-Ma Khatun in her customer experience career – which has spanned the telecommunications industry, sales, marketing, and software development. And now that every business has been forced to pivot their brands due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hali-Ma is also pondering how user experiences are being impacted – not only now, but in the future.  Ever since she was a little girl, Hali-Ma has been curious about how brands ...

Getting Inside the Customer's Mind

By Colin Shaw posted 17 days ago
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Getting Inside Your Customers' Minds Customer Experience, like everything else in the world, is changing. What customers want and what they do is changing, too. As we prepare for the next generation and level of putting the customer at the center of everything we do for a Post Pandemic world, we should remember that the critical part to achieving what we want (aka, customer-driven growth) is getting inside the customer's mind.  Lewis Carbone, a Customer Experience Management Expert sees [CX] as a fusion of art and science, a science that has evolved over the years.  Lewis Carbone, a Customer Experience management expert, speaker, and founder of ExpereinceEngineering™, ...

Webinar Review: Inception Fertility Engages Hearts and Minds to Create Better CX

By Ms. Taylor Barbieri posted 17 days ago
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Medallia is a 2020 Silver Sponsor of CXPA. This review was conducted at CXPA's request. The opinions expressed herein are from the author, who was not compensated.   Webinar link: https://www.medallia.com/mastercast/ Webinar title: Transforming Hearts and Minds to Create Wow Experiences   You’re looking over a proposal for a new CX initiative. While it’s perfect from a technical and strategic perspective, it feels a little too metric-focused. In fact, it’s hard to see much of a customer focus at all. Basically, you’re in a pickle – you don’t want to abandon your project’s strategic goals, but you also know that ignoring ...

With Your Customer Experience – Can you see the forest for the trees?

By Bob Azman,CCXP posted 18 days ago
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On more than one occasion, I’ve been asked by a CEO to “fix the customer service department” so the organization can improve its customer experience.  The request sounds like this, “We’re getting too many service-related calls in our contact center and that’s giving us poor ratings on our surveys”.  The problem most likely isn’t within the customer service department.  It’s true that these departments need to be properly staffed with well-trained and professional representatives that have the authority and responsibility to achieve first call resolution.  However, they typically aren’t the cause of the problem, they’re just trying to help the organization recover ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of October 12th

By Joy Wedge posted 23 days ago
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CX Day 2020 Celebrations Continue The CX Day buzz continues from celebrations around the globe on Tuesday, October 6th. CX professionals celebrated the customer experience industry, tuned into gain knowledge from virtual events and witnessed a live reveal of Impact Award Winners. Local networks held thought-provoking, insightful conversations and inspired CX professionals all throughout the day.  CXPA Virtual Community Conversations  2020 Impact Award Winners Live Reveal See the 2020 CX Day Highlights The momentum continues around the globe as virtual events continue to spark new ideas. Want to keep the conversations ...