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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Unnecessary escalations

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 14 hours ago
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This spring and summer have been rough on travel.  My partner and I actually had a hotel cancel   our   reservation after the world ended.  It was complicated by the fact that we’d used a combination of credit card points and cash to make the reservation for two different rooms, one for us and one for my partner’s mother. It was probably the somewhat complicated nature of the way we originally placed the reservation that made getting our refund such a mess.  Over the course of two months and four separate interactions, we spent upwards of six hours on the phone or in a chat with agents; some credit card people, some ‘points’ people (a lot of folks don’t ...

Could your Customer Experience surveys be more ‘Netflix’?

By Ms. Ozge Koca posted 2 days ago
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Personalisation is key to Netflix’s success. The same can be said for Spotify, Amazon, Google and a host of other tech giants. They have become experts at leveraging the vast amounts of data they collect from their customers. They track every search we make, every product we buy, every post we share, and every film we watch. This helps them to deliver more tailored content and build stronger relationships with us. As a result, we feel more connected and engaged and these brands are more likely to retain our long term custom. This is behavioural personalisation at its best. And, it’s a big step up from the more traditional demographic personalisation, ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of November 30th

By Joy Wedge posted 5 days ago
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CXPA's Bright Future Starts with New Mission and Vision Have you seen our new mission and vision statements? The CXPA Board and staff spent several months listening to members and reflecting on CXPA and its future. The CXPA as an organization is dedicated to the success of CX professionals. Our new mission and vision statements reflect these commitments. See our new Mission and Vision .   New Online Learning Opportunities Available CXPA modular courses are a collaborative curriculum developed by top industry ...

Reasons to Be Grateful--Reflections from CXPA Members and Staff

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 6 days ago
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Disruptive. Trying. Chaotic. Stressful. And everyone’s favorite—unprecedented. All are adjectives that have been attached to one of the strangest years any of us have collectively experienced. With residents of many countries around the world celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, and many others soon beginning to celebrate the winter holidays, CXPA asked its members and staff to throw away these tired, negative descriptors and instead think about what they are most grateful for in the CX world in 2020. Here’s what they said.   Adrienne Bryant, CAE, Digital Experience/CCXP Program Director, CXPA In the association space, ...

Can sinking customer survey response rates ever be revived?

By Mark Ratekin,CCXP posted 6 days ago
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Response rates have always been a challenge for the insight community but now more than ever we need to focus on what can be done to reverse the downward trend that’s been witnessed since the late 1990s and which has, in some cases, been exacerbated by the pandemic. What are some of the reasons for the decline in response rates? For starters, people are deluged with surveys and feedback requests. When we consider that their time is at a premium, day-to-day challenges are prioritized. Adding to this is the fact that the ROI for respondents is not always clear. To understand this point, put yourself in the customer’s shoes – if I spend time providing feedback, ...

Getting CX Right: Sears PartsDirect

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 6 days ago
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There’s plenty of bad CX out there.  But I had an experience not long ago with a company that was so good it’s inspired me to start a new feature in my writing (and new category on the blog) today called “Getting CX Right” to celebrate those organizations (naming names!) that knock it out of the park.  Here’s the first installation: The top rack of our dishwasher needed a replacement part (how’s that for esoteric?) so I looked up the model number on the sticker in the doorjamb and got to Googling...  I came across Sears PartsDirect  where I entered that number and was taken to a page with a series of “exploded” diagrams of all the areas of the ...

Why Improving Lives Is Value Creation At It's Finest

By Brian Kabisa,CCXP posted 8 days ago
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As customer experience professionals, you are surely well aware of the skepticism that organizations have when it comes to investing in designing purposeful experiences. While operators certainly hope that their organizations are delivering interactions that satisfy their customers, making it a priority becomes a great challenge when it's connection to bottom line outcomes isn't made abundantly clear. Even the notion of studying customers to understand the key attributes that drives their decision making often gets confused as altruism for the sake of it. But that is where we come in. As practitioners, advocates, and lifelong students of customer experience ...

Linking the Employee & Customer Experience: A Practical Guide to the Holy Grail

By Howard Lax posted 10 days ago
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Pundits and CEOs have long debated the relative merits of whether to focus primarily on the Customer Experience (CX) or the Employee Experience (EX). Should the emphasis be on the direct experience of customers, who are the source of the revenues that fuel the firm, or should the company concentrate on employees, who essentially are the “delivery system” for the Customer Experience? On one point they all agree: there is an inherent connection between the two. Recently there has been a flood of materials espousing the need to “break down the data silos” and connect EX and CX. The problem is that virtually all of these materials agree on the importance but ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of November 23rd

By Joy Wedge posted 11 days ago
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CXPA's Bright Future Starts with New Mission and Vision Have you seen our new mission and vision statements? The CXPA Board and staff spent several months listening to members and reflecting on CXPA and its future. The CXPA as an organization is dedicated to the success of CX professionals. Our new mission and vision statements reflect these commitments. See our new Mission and Vision .   CXPA Topic Guide: Customer Journey Mapping Our Topic Guides--CXPA members who are Certified Customer Experience Professionals--have ...

Good CX Principle #5: Every Customer Elite

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 11 days ago
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We’re now up to the last of the Five Principles of CX (you can find an introduction to this series here , and parts one , two , three , and four at these links), Every Customer Elite.  This may sound like the usual boilerplate feel-goodery that comes with CX leaders and writers all the time:  Put the Customers first!  Make every Customer experience perfect!  Always and everywhere at every time and in every instance do whatever it takes to completely and totally amaze the Customer!  Put your Customers at the center of your operations!  (Wait, what is it?  Put them first ? Or put them at the center ?)  It goes on and on... But this principle applies ...

What Do The Pioneers of Customer Experience See for the Future: And What Should You Do About It?

By Colin Shaw posted 12 days ago
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From time to time, I participate in speaking engagements and, in the time of COVID-19,  virtual  speaking engagements. I recently participated in a Customer Experience Day webinar with two other leaders in our field, Joe Pine and Lou Carbone. I learned a few things that I would love to share with you, and discussed on my most recent podcast, regarding where we are now with Customer Experience and, perhaps more importantly, where we are heading.  So, me, you know. You might remember how I came to this field of Customer Experience almost 20 years ago after years of working in the corporate world. Furthermore, you have likely read my schtick about how we ...

Good CX Principle #4: No near-misses

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 12 days ago
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We’re up now to the fourth of the Five Principles of CX:  No Near Misses.  We’ve covered already how it’s our responsibility to avoid issues in the first place (Principle 1, Get It Right ) and how important it is to keep the lines of communication open and take on the stress of our own internal processes so our Customers don’t have to (Principles 2 and 3).  This principle has as much to do with impressions as it does with the actual experiences we deliver for our Customers. We’re all familiar with the joke about the window of time to expect service for utilities at your home being huge compared to the time it may take to do the work:  “We’ll be there ...

Good CX Principle #3: Take on the stress

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 14 days ago
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Today I’m posting the third article in a five-part series on the Principles of Good CX.  There’s an intro to the series  here , and parts one and two are  here  and  here , respectively. I’ve previously mentioned the tongue-in-cheek observation that our jobs would all be a  lot  easier without the Customers, right?  (Forget that our jobs would not  exist  without Customers, of course, but that’s part of the joke.)  One reason some of our front-line team members feel that way is because they’re usually trying to help Customers navigate our own internal processes when they need help.  Forget that, well, it’s our  job  to do that, and let’s concentrate on ...

Customer Experience Indexes: Modern Thinking

By Lynn Hunsaker,CCXP posted 14 days ago
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Why are customer experience indexes powerful?  To paint a concise picture of growth strength. An index is like an executive summary of your voice of the customer research. It says: overall, our propensity to grow is increasing or decreasing.  One size does not fit all. There are many types of customer experience indexes, and they each communicate something specific, based on certain assumptions, with greatest usefulness to one or more groups in your company. Each index conveys value as seen by your company or by your customers.  These differences among customer experience indexes are pivotal to shaping mindsets and driving behaviors and business results. ...

“Inspiring Racial Equity” Event Organizers Win CXPA’s Extra Mile Award

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 18 days ago
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The murder of George Floyd, and the subsequent protests in the United States and globally, caused individuals and businesses to reflect on their own role in effecting positive racial and social change. But for a group of CXPA members in Boston and Atlanta, reflection wasn’t enough—it was time to act. "In the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and many others, it felt imperative to me to address CX’s role in racial justice and how CX practitioners could help their companies identify and eliminate inequity within the experiences they design for their customers," said Charlotte Reel , who organized the event. Reel convened ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of November 16th

By Joy Wedge posted 18 days ago
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CXPA's Bright Future Starts with New Mission and Vision Have you seen our new mission and vision statements? The CXPA Board and staff spent several months listening to members and reflecting on CXPA and its future. The CXPA as an organization is dedicated to the success of CX professionals. Our new mission and vision statements reflect these commitments. See our new Mission and Vision . If you are excited by these directions and would like to be involved at a leadership level, please consider nominating yourself for the CXPA Board of Directors. Nominations are due November 13th. Get all the details ...

Good CX Principle #2: Communicate

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 18 days ago
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In this, the second installment of a five-part series on the Principles of Good CX (Intro here , and Part One here ), I’ll present the principle of Communication.  It’s pretty obvious that this is important, but that makes it even more surprising that so many organizations get it so wrong. I recently spent literally two weeks waiting to hear back from my insurance company on a property claim.  It was a complicated issue (for me, at least, as the Customer) that entailed my insurance company, my neighbor’s insurance company, and the insurance company that covers my HOA.  There were all sorts of complicated (again, for me, I’m not in insurance) dealings ...

The 5 Rules for Designing a Great Digital Experience

By Colin Shaw posted 19 days ago
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Digital experiences are a crucial part of your Customer Experience, especially during the pandemic. Some organizations are excelling, while others could use some work. No matter where you fall on that spectrum, we have some essential considerations for designing your digital experience in the form of 5 rules.   On a recent podcast about these 5 rules, I shared a recent digital experience that was definitely on the "could use some work" side of the spectrum. It was Glasses Direct, which is where you order the frames you want with your prescription, and then they send you the glasses. The experience started to trigger some uneasy feelings when they asked ...

Good CX Principle #1: Get it Right

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 19 days ago
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In my time as a CX professional, I’ve developed what I call the Five Principles of CX.  I’ll go through them over the course of five articles starting here with the first one:  Get It Right (GIR).  (I posted an introduction to the series  here .)  Although not universally the case, and it’s not a good idea to limit it just this way, a lot of folks consider CX in terms mostly of Customer  support .  That is to say, that most of the time when we consider improving CX, we look to how we handle Customer requests when something’s gone wrong. This is a narrow view, and we should avoid considering CS as the totality of CX.  A Customer’s experience begins before ...

An introduction to the Principles of Good CX

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 21 days ago
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I wouldn’t be a self-serving, self-promoting consultant if I didn’t have a few frameworks to show you, so at the risk of shaming myself and losing my membership card, here’s another one.  Over the course of five articles, I’ll get into each of them, but here I’ll lay out what I term the Principles of Good CX. We’ll start with Getting It Right, or GIR.  This series and this framework are pretty much concentrated on Customer support (although they also apply generally to CX overall as well).  Most times when someone interacts with your CS organization it’s because something’s gone wrong.  That may be a catastrophic incident like a failure of your ...