Blogs

The First Key to Creating a Great Customer-Inspired Experience

By Jim Tincher,CCXP, CX Expert posted 2 days ago
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A customer-inspired experience is critical to growth. According to a Temkin Group analysis, a great customer experience increases likelihood to recommend by 19.5% and likelihood to repurchase by 18.4%. And the best way to get that inspiration is through those who talk to customers every day – your front-line employees. In this piece, you will receive the first key to creating a great customer-inspired experience. Keys two and three will follow soon! The First Key to Creating a Customer-Inspired Experience: Identify What Really Matters This seems like a no-brainer. Companies know what matters to their customers, right? In fact, many have it wrong. ...
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Why Don’t People Say What They Mean?

By Colin Shaw posted 2 days ago
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People do not say what they mean or, it seems, what they are thinking. Why? If we aren’t saying what we mean, then what are the implications for our Customer Experience? Honest communication can not only improve communication, but it can also enhance workplace quality and Customer Experience. We spoke with a special guest (and friend of mine), Steven Gaffney, author, Certified Speaking Professional™ and founder of the Steven Gaffney Company about this topic on  our recent podcast.  Gaffney is an expert on teaching organizations to tell the truth and communicate more effectively. Lorraine asked me a question the other day. It’s a question many of you ...
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A lot of data, not enough insight

By Liliana Petrova,CCXP posted 4 days ago
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A month ago I saw a   Forrester   presentation on Customer Experience measurement that began with a great quote from the Global Bank: “We are drowning in data and starving for insight.” Aren’t we all? Most organizations have more data than they ever could have wanted, but that data is either sitting idle in databases or cloud environments, or it is used sub-optimally. Why is it that WeWork can build a tool to manage its 350 properties as a website and digitally view every detail about every building, but Fairway regularly emails me with first time user coupons that I am not eligible for as an existing customer? Make Data Usable The answer to this ...
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Conversocial Fails at Customer Centricity

By Jim Tincher,CCXP, CX Expert posted 4 days ago
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I received a call from Conversocial on Monday. I downloaded a white paper entitled Who’s Ignoring Their Customers , and a fellow with a delightful English accent called from an international number to see if I was interested in their software. He emailed me the previous Friday, and since I didn’t respond within one business day, he made a follow-up call. Not me! All good, with two exceptions. First, he clearly invested no time conducting even the most basic research on who I am. That makes sense with an auto-response email, except this appeared to be personalized. Any rep with an ounce of customer centricity would have realized I’m a very unlikely ...
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Planning for a Successful Customer Experience Journey

By Jim Tincher,CCXP, CX Expert posted 6 days ago
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Today is a special treat - a guest post from Annette of CX Journey.  You should definitely subscribe to her blog - a great read! Planning for a Successful Customer Experience Journey By Annette Franz Gleneicki A customer experience strategy is just a strategy, a roadmap that outlines your approach to creating a customer-centric culture. Customer centricity is a way of life, a way of doing business, a journey. It’s not just a project or something to check off your “To Do” list for this week. It’s woven into the fabric of everything you do as an organization. It takes the entire organization to successfully execute a customer experience strategy, ...
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Dunn Bros Coffee: The Non-Chain Chain

By Jim Tincher,CCXP, CX Expert posted 8 days ago
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“Coffee houses are about neigh­bor­hoods,” Dunn Bros Coffee co-CEO Chris Eilers tells me while we drink light roasts and blues music plays overhead. Dunn Brothers is a popular Midwestern coffee chain with most of its locations in the Twin Cities. The company was started by Ed Dunn and now boasts 83 locations. Whereas Starbucks and Caribou (another Minnesota-grown coffee shop) have primarily corporate-owned locations, Dunn Bros focuses on attracting franchisees, who typically run and work at only one location. This interview discusses the Dunn Bros Coffee history, how they use their franchisees to develop their unique customer experience, and how the company ...
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How Telecom Can Set Themselves Up to Fail at CX at 5G Speeds

By Colin Shaw posted 9 days ago
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I have a real problem with patience as far as my network is concerned. When the internet is slow, I throw all my toys out of the crib. It’s maddening. The good news for me is that the 5G network is coming. The bad news is that the 5G build-out is lagging behind many other countries in the U.S., which means it isn’t coming any time soon—at least not nationwide. The slow rollout of the 5G network in the U.S. could be a Customer Experience fumble for the telecom companies that are touting its arrival, resulting in a loss of emotional engagement, customer loyalty, and revenue. For telecom and device companies launching 5G networks and devices, they could ...
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Celebrating CX Day: Maximize Your Value

By Lynn Hunsaker,CCXP, CX Expert posted 11 days ago
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CX Day is a wonderful opportunity to maximize value. Like a kaleidoscope, "value" is a word that takes on several gratifying interpretations when you shift the lens. Maximize your CX Day value by preparing well in advance to (1) learn, (2) engage, and (3) honor. 1) Maximize CX Day Value: Learn from Peers Every September I frequently check the CX Day website to mark my calendar for as many online and local events as possible. One year I attended 13 events: the #CXchat, live video panel discussions with CX enthusiasts across the globe, case study webinars, live-streamed company celebrations, local networking events and talk shows. This year there's a daily ...
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Experiment Your Way to Growth

By Jim Tincher,CCXP, CX Expert posted 15 days ago
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High-growth companies discover their opportunities differently. They certainly use strategic planning and analytics, as do most of their competitors. But at their core, they do something else. Babson Executive Education asked companies their top method to find revenue or cost savings opportunities, then compared that to their growth rates. Whereas low-growth companies tended to favor analytics or strategic planning, over half of high-growth companies focused on experimentation , as shown in the chart on the right. High-growth companies understand that they can spend endless time debating the latest market research and its implications. They can ...
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Are You Making the Most of Scarcity as a Marketing Strategy?

By Colin Shaw posted 16 days ago
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Scarcity as a marketing tactic is one that works well with customers. However, it is one that many marketers don’t use to their advantage often enough. If you are one of them (and you don’t act now), avoiding scarcity tactics can hurt your bottom line. For our  recent podcast  we invited a special guest to join us. Professor of Marketing at Vanderbilt University, Kelly Goldsmith, Ph.D., is a behavioral scientist who studies how we respond to uncertainty and scarcity as consumers. Goldsmith shared her definition of scarcity with our listeners: “Resource scarcity involves sensing or observing a discrepancy between one’s current level of resources and ...
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Who Creates Your Customer Experience?

By Jim Tincher,CCXP, CX Expert posted 16 days ago
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Most companies are structured as if the 5% of the workforce at corporate knows more than the 95% who actually talks to the customers. Of course, they don’t articulate that. But look at the last twenty changes to your customer experience. Were nineteen generated directly from the field? Or was it closer to one? You certainly believe in listening to the customer (or you wouldn’t be reading a blog called “Heart of the Customer!”). But do you have a structured methodology to collect ideas from the field, deliberately test them, and then roll them out? Or do you have the equivalent to the often-ignored suggestion box? In 2006, when High-Definition TVs were ...
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Why CX Strategy Must Include CX Ecosystem

By Lynn Hunsaker,CCXP, CX Expert posted 19 days ago
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Rainforests aren't alone in health dependent upon an ecosystem. Health of your customer experience strategy depends on how well it reflects your business ecosystem. Think about it: every CX program can only do so much in and of itself -- you'll need cooperation and collaboration of multiple parties, you'll need to time things according to business rhythms, you'll need to embed CX insights into tactical and strategic decision-making across your whole company. In part one of this article, What is Customer Experience Ecosystem? , these inter-dependencies were defined as: Ecosystem = living and non-living things that make up an environment and affect each other. ...
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How To Move Your Customers from Indifference to Recommendation

By Colin Shaw posted 23 days ago
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Customers that recommend you to other people are the gold-standard of successful Customer Experience. How likely they are to tell their friends and family about you is measured by the Net Promoter Score (NPS), a common metric used by organizations to evaluate their performance in Customer Experience. These customers are your most loyal and the most sought-after of the lot, the “Raving Fans” of your organization. However, what do you with a customer that is indifferent? How do you convince a customer to engage and eventually become one of these fanatical customers you work so hard to develop? We discussed this predicament in  a recent podcast  and shared ...
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Temkin Group’s (Exciting) Plans For CX Day 2018

By Bruce Temkin,CCXP posted 24 days ago
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Last year, Temkin Group had a great time  celebrating CX Day .  This year, CX Day will be held on October 2nd and we’re planning another exciting celebration. Temkin Group has labelled 2018  The Year of Humanity  for customer experience. As you’ll see below, we’re continuing that theme in our CX Day plans: Free Webinars . Temkin  Group  will host two free webinars. At noon ET, join us for  CX 101: The Definitive Intro To CX . At 2:00 ET, join us for  Three Strategies For Humanizing CX . Free Research . Anyone who attends the Temkin Group webinars will receive a code for downloading a free copy of the report,  Lessons in CX Excellence, ...
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Redefining the Purpose of Your Company: Nurturing Customer Relationships

By Howard Lax posted 24 days ago
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Huh? What happened to maximizing shareholder value? “Nurturing” sounds pretty soft for the hard-tacks of the business world. The logic, however, is straight forward. Companies strive to create value. But what defines your firm’s value? And what is the source of that value? Investors and M&A folks will talk about market capitalization and a multiplier on profits. Your finance people will be quick to point out the company’s assets, from products and brands to processes and patents to property and facilities. But value is created by customers. In fact, ·         the value of your company is determined by the current and future value of cash flows from ...
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Great Clips - Driving Organic Growth through Customer Focus

By Jim Tincher,CCXP, CX Expert posted 24 days ago
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“At every level in the organization, if people don’t understand what’s going on face-to-face with the customer, it doesn’t matter what else you’re doing.” That’s the advice of Rhoda Olsen, CEO of Great Clips. It’s the same strategy that has driven 30 straight quarters of same-salon revenue growth. But it wasn’t always that way. Back in 2005, “We thought we were a pretty customer-focused organization, as everyone does,” says Olsen. But that year sales and customers dipped for the first time in history. This wake-up call showed Great Clips they needed to better understand the current state of their customer needs. After conducting significant research, they discovered ...
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Service Re-Recovery at Hampton Inn and Barnes & Noble

By Jim Tincher,CCXP, CX Expert posted 25 days ago
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Service recovery is critical for any business.  Of course, the best time to fix a problem is immediately following its occurrence, but this is not always possible.  How do you handle service recovery after the fact, when complaints come from the web, email, or a call?  Let’s look at two very different examples, each based off of previous posts. Several weeks ago I discussed running out of hot water at a Hampton Inn. The manager on duty paid for my room, but never gave me a time to vent before doing so, actually frustrating me more than the original problem. After creating the post, my daughter Becca suggested I share it with the hotel.  I did so, although ...
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Leaning on one another - the power of the CXPA community

By Tabitha Dunn,CCXP, CX Expert posted 26 days ago
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Recently, I had the opportunity to take the next step in my CX career. As part of that transition, I reached out to some of colleagues and friends that I have had the opportunity to meet over the years in CXPA to bounce ideas off of them. Each conversation was thoughtful, and I truly appreciated the willingness of each person to share their insights. I’ve been in a CX leadership role for 17+ years and the people I’ve met in this field over that time continue to impress me with their compassion, their support and their expertise. When CXPA started, I remember thinking that the most significant benefit would be the people and, year over year, that continues to ...
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How Small Things Have Big Influences on Customer Behavior

By Colin Shaw posted 30 days ago
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Non-conscious influence has a significant effect on your customer’s behavior. Non-conscious influences are stimuli of which a customer is not aware. What’s more, these non-conscious influences exist in your Customer Experience even if you haven’t been deliberate about your design of them. In our latest  podcast , we defined some terms that describe the information that influences behavior, including: Subliminal:  Something you sense but that your conscious mind did not register, meaning it is picked up by the subconscious mind. You are unaware that you saw it (or tasted it, or felt it, etc.) but your eye detected it (or tongue, or skin, etc.). Superliminal: ...
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A Review of Barnes & Noble In-Store Recommendations

By Jim Tincher,CCXP, CX Expert posted 30 days ago
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It’s March, which means gift-buying season at the Tincher household.  We have three birthdays in eight days – four if you count the cat.  My wife is a fan of the classics, so I bought her The Count of Monte Cristo at Barnes & Noble. As I went to wrap it the next morning, I noticed something new in the bag – a little slip printed on receipt paper saying “You may also like…” recommending five books based on the three in my shopping cart.  As two of these were gifts, the grouping of recommendations was a bit odd, as you can see here. Recommendations are powerful, providing social proof and motivation to buy more.  I spoke in this post about the ...
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