CXPA Member Blog

Employees are NOT your Customers

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 15 hours ago

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Can I start a controversial article being completely un controversial? Thanks. Here goes: Good employee engagement is an absolute requirement in order to drive good CX. Okay... now, feel free to refer to that as you read on, because I’m not trying to say that engagement isn’t fundamental; in fact, it’s a bedrock necessity if you’re going to provide a good Customer experience that you first ensure you are providing a good employee experience. With that throat-clearing out of the way, I was shocked ( shocked !) when a nontrivial number of contributors (all CX pros) to a forum in which I recently participated seemed confused about the difference between ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of January 25th

By Joy Wedge posted 4 days ago

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Are you passionate about CX in Higher Ed? The CXPA launched a community initiative to develop a list of all institutions of higher learning that offer Customer Experience programs, courses, certificates, or degrees. The first phase in this project relies on the knowledge of the community, so please take a few minutes to complete a survey entry for each college, university or higher education institution that has a "Customer Experience" offering of which you are aware. Complete Survey Here Introducing 'On the Move': A Celebration of Your Career Have you started a new CX role or ...

Processing your survey results

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 4 days ago

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Recently I fielded a question about NPS survey data: How do you process it? How do you use it? I popped off a quick response, but I’d like to go a little deeper on the topic here. First of all, it’s not a specific NPS question. It doesn’t matter what sort of survey you send out or (exactly) what sort of question(s) you ask. I’m also limiting this article to a discussion about survey data per se. There are tons of other sources of data that should be part of your broader Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. But this is just about the data that comes from your surveys. From those surveys, at the end of the day, you’ll likely be faced with two different ...

From Ship to Shore—Patricia Sanchez-Diaz, CCXP, Shares her CX Evolution

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 5 days ago

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Starting out—watching the ships As a young girl growing up in the African town of Ceuta off the Strait of Gibraltar, Patricia Sanchez-Diaz, CCXP, became fascinated with global trade. From the window of her home or the comfort of the local beach, it was hard to miss the massive ships she could see traversing the strait as they carried their cargo to its final destination. When it was time to apply for university, in a turn of fate, Patricia’s application for admission to study marine biology became lost in the mail. She studied business instead, and upon finishing school, began working at a port authority in southwest Spain, eventually obtaining a Master’s ...

How to create a customer-friendly curbside pickup experience

By Mr. Shane Schick posted 5 days ago

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The phrase “kicking someone to the curb” usually means you’re so frustrated with the person in question that you don’t even want them on your property. While the pandemic has kicked pretty much all customers there now, it never seemed to occur to anyone that the curb could be a place you’d actually like to visit. Over the past few weeks I’ve picked up books, clothes and a consumer electronics gadget via curbside pickup and the experience has almost always been the same. Not the actual process of picking item up, mind you — that’s all over the map — but the general atmosphere. Store associates are almost uniformly grim. There is a sense that your arrival ...

Do you hear yourself?

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 7 days ago

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Have you ever had to say to a friend, “it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it”? I remember a client who used that to describe some of the interactions their managers would have with front-line employees as an example of the need for a professional communications course I offered at the time. But aside from your partner or spouse or personal relations, it’s surprising how frequently we come across businesses that seem not to grasp the concept of simple politeness. As an example, in our current age of government-mandated safety and sanitary measures, we’re bombarded by dictates from governors, mayors, and county boards of health levying requirements ...

Introducing “On the Move,” a Celebration of Your Career Success

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 11 days ago

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You may have heard that CXPA has a new mission and vision , and that we aim to be a professional association that supports and celebrates the professional growth of its members throughout their entire career. In support of this mission, we’re introducing “On the Move,” a new initiative to shine the spotlight on CXPA members who are starting in new CX positions. This can include promotions, roles in new organizations, or other new career ventures as CX practitioners, providers, or consultants. "Celebrating and supporting CX professionals at every career stage are two of our favorite things at CXPA,” says Greg Melia, CAE and CEO of the association. “A ...

Stay Connected in 2021

By Barbie Fink,CCXP posted 11 days ago

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Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to 2021! In line with the mission statement CXPA developed towards the end of 2020--“We support CX professionals to share, learn, inspire, and grow throughout their entire career,”--I am excited about the year ahead and our future together. I hope you are, too! I have never been big on New Year’s resolutions because I assess every day how I can be my very best self, but a former colleague posted something on LinkedIn that resonated with me: “Instead of New Year's resolutions this year, I have decided to set a one-word theme for the year. I have thought about what I want most from the next 12 months – how I want ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of January 18th

By Joy Wedge posted 11 days ago

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2021 New Board Members and Officers CXPA is excited to welcome new board members and officers for 2021. We are proud to be led by a Board of Directors drawn from leading organizations across the globe, including 2021 Officers and newly elected Board members: New 2021 Board Members Jayalakshmi Sudarshan, CCXP , Customer Experience Leader, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, India Mark Ratekin, CCXP , Global CX Principal Director, Confirmit Mark Slatin, CCXP , SVP Director of Client Experience, Sandy Spring Bank Roxie Strohmenger, CCXP , Vice President, Customer Experience Strategy, UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group) Stacey Nevel, CCXP , ...

Do you love your Customers as much as your employees do?

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 11 days ago

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We hear all the time that hiring is destiny: You have to be very careful when looking for new team members—especially those who are on the front-line and Customer facing—that they’re empathetic, Customer-focused, and just plain nice. In fact, there’s an entire cottage industry growing around hiring for your support/services/sales teams to ensure you’ve got the right fit. Once they’re in the door, we spend tons of time (and money!) explaining our processes and procedures to our new hires so they can make an impact right away. We may enable them with some of the greatest technology, give them awesome benefits packages, and even stock the fridge in the break ...

Reflections on the Causes of Lousy Customer Experiences

By Howard Lax posted 12 days ago

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These days, it’s hard to find a company that doesn’t say it competes on customer experience. At the same time, we know as both CX pros and consumers that many – some might say most – deliver mediocre experiences on a good day and flat-out crummy experiences most of the time. What is the source of this gap between what companies say and what companies do? Reflecting on this issue, what follows are 10 explanations, which probably are by no means exhaustive. In no particular order, here are 10 causes of lousy customer experiences and tips to help address each challenge. Lack of commitment from the top . Lip service doesn’t cut it. Senior leadership has ...

Why the 'just keep it' return policy may not help your CX in the long run

By Mr. Shane Schick posted 12 days ago

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When companies say things like, “Satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back!” we all know there’s still one extra cost: whatever it takes to return the product for an exchange, refund or store credit. In some cases, especially recently, that cost has involved shipping the product back to whatever brand you bought it from online. A few merchants have made this a little easier by including return shipping labels, or sending some after the fact. Even when returning the product doesn’t cost money, however, there is time and effort, both of which are in short supply for almost everyone right now. That makes a recent trend reported by the Wall Street Journal ...

When you can't answer, "Why?"

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 14 days ago

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I wrote recently about an incident at a local grocery store that sparked some thought about how sometimes we provide excuses instead of offering solutions . Likewise, sometimes at my gym, I come across a piece of equipment that’s out of order for some reason or another. Usually, there’s a note pinned to it alerting us that it’s not to be used. To some degree, I’m sure the team member whose job it is to put that sign on the equipment considered his job ‘done.’ The person whose job it is to fix it? That’s another story. Anyway, the punchline of these and other similar experiences is that Customers aren’t as interested in hearing about why their experience ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of January 11th

By Joy Wedge posted 18 days ago

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Are you passionate about CX in Higher Ed? The Customer Experience Professionals Association has launched a community initiative to develop a list of all institutions of higher learning that offer Customer Experience programs, courses, certificates or degrees. The first phase in this project relies on the knowledge of the community, so please take a few minutes to complete a survey entry for each college, university or higher education institution that has a "Customer Experience" offering of which you are aware. Complete Survey Here 2021 Innovation Award Volunteers Needed The ...

Whose problem are you solving?

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 18 days ago

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I’ve written about Customer Effort Score (CES) before and kind of chided the intractability of defining it specifically. Of course, it’s not fair to pick on CES, as I’ve written in other instances , even common definitions like First Contact Resolution runs into definitional problems when they encounter actual Customer opinions (we all have our own definitions). But specifically, when it comes to Effort (or, as I sometimes will call it, “hassle”), I remember a wise Process Engineer who used to work for me once noted: “we’re defining ‘hassle’ from our own perspective.” And he was correct to point it out in that instance. I wonder: Are you doing the ...

From Customer Experience to Enterprise Experience: Aligning CX and Corporate Strategy for Results

By Amy Shioji,CCXP posted 19 days ago

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I’ve always been a customer experience (CX) professional and advocate. So when my CEO approached me to take on the role of corporate strategy and Chief of Staff, I was immediately intrigued. How would my CX skills and background translate to corporate strategy? What would that mean for my role and passion in driving the customer agenda forward? Corporate Strategy and CX At its core, corporate strategy requires taking an enterprise approach to strategic decision-making by looking across the business at ways to create and maximize consumer and shareholder value. The more I thought about it, the more synergies I saw between strategy and CX. When you work ...

The accidental lesson 'Bean Dad' taught us about moving customers to self-service

By Mr. Shane Schick posted 19 days ago

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Just think of John Roderick as a business and his daughter as a customer and it’s pretty easy to understand why ‘Bean Dad’ went viral on social media. Over the weekend, Roderick — a podcaster and musician — posted a thread on Twitter about how he had asked his nine-year-old daughter to make a can of beans. He didn’t offer any support, other than to direct her to a can opener. She struggled to get the can opener to work. For six hours . Besides making her go hungry, Roderick documented her difficulties (“Eventually she collapsed into a frustrated heap,” “By now we were working on anger management, and perseverance too”). The story was clearly ...

It's the experience, not the channel

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 21 days ago

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Surely I’m late to the game on this but I had always found it curious and interesting to read accounts of peoples’ CX and more specifically support experiences through Twitter. The concept of pinging a business via their public handle and then getting a resolution seemed pretty cool to me. It’s mostly anecdotal but I feel the vast majority of those instances were travel-related. It may be because that’s all I think about these days, what with the world shut down. But if I remember correctly it usually had to do with people otherwise having issues checking into a hotel or in-the-moment flight cancellations and such. The scenario usually went somewhat like ...

Why Customer Memory is More Important than Customer Experience

By Ms. Ozge Koca posted 22 days ago

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There is a big difference between a customer’s experience and their memory of that experience: this has a huge impact on how you design and measure your CX activities. Customers don’t choose your product or service because of the experience they had; they choose it because of the experience they remember. Creating great memories is critical to building customer loyalty. Professor Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist and economist, describes the difference between experience and memory in his TED talk: ‘the riddle of experience versus memory’ . Professor Kahneman explains that we all have two selves: our experiencing self that lives in ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of January 4th

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 27 days ago

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Happy New Year! Office Closing Reminder Our team wishes all of our members, sponsors, and supporters a very happy New Year! In observance of the holiday, our o ffices will be closed from December 31st - January 1st . Coming Next Week CXPA RTP Course: CX Metrics & ROI/CCXP Prep by Lynn Hunsaker When: Thursday, January 7th, 2020, 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM EST More Information Live with CXPA: CX Authority--How to Show It and Grow It When: Wednesday, January 6th, 2020, 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM EST More Information CXPA Topic Guide: ...

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