Are you looking for a way to enhance your customer experience? Do you want to become a qualified Accredited Customer Experience Master?
Look no further than our 4-day online live program! Our program introduces and coaches you with ‘state of the art’ tools and techniques from the CEMMethod, a proven, tried and tested approach to enhancing customer experiences.
You will complete offline exercises, ideally based on your work, and on successful completion of ten exercises, you will become a qualified Accredited Customer Experience Master®.
Through your work you will then immediately be able to deliver the Triple Crown of benefits – lowering costs, growing revenues, improving service and increasing customer loyalty.
Imagine having the ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences through your organization’s processes, people, and systems. Our program connects you with the means to do just that. You’ll have access to the latest insights and strategies to take your customer experiences to the next level.
Join over 140,000+ professionals who have already taken the first step towards becoming Accredited Customer Experience Masters. Sign up for our 4-day online live program today and start transforming your customer experience success!
Review the Twelve Frequently Asked Questions associated with Customer Experience Management are discussed with supporting videos and decks at www.bpgroup.org/cxfaq.html
Customer Experience Frequently Asked Questions – the first we look at is ‘What is Customer Experience Management?”
This and eleven other Frequently Asked Questions associated with Customer Experience Management are discussed with supporting videos and decks at www.bpgroup.org/cxfaq.html
So what exactly is Customer Experience Management (CEM)?
Customer Experience Management (CEM or CXM) is a strategic and operational approach commonly used as a competitive differentiator. It involves aligning every aspect of an organisation towards delivering customer needs and successful outcomes no matter how far removed the customer is perceived to be.
This includes:
Customer journey – what the customer does, expects and feels.
Customer Interactions.
Supporting internal process.
Associated team and hierarchy structures.
Performance metrics.
Digital capabilities.
Vision, mission & strategy.
Typically, companies who engage in Customer Experience Management activities outperform those who do not.
Customer Experience Management (CEM) is the practice of proactively managing customer interactions, perceptions, and emotions to create positive customer experiences throughout the customer journey.
It involves understanding customer needs, preferences, and expectations and then creating tailored experiences that meet these needs, that are memorable and leave a lasting impression.
CEM also requires connecting the customer experience to the means of delivery, such as the organisation’s people, processes, and systems. This means that CEM requires a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey and ensuring that the organisation’s people, processes, and systems can work together to provide a seamless experience that meets customer needs and expectations. Additionally, CEM requires a focus on developing customer relationships and fostering loyalty by providing ongoing support, feedback, and value
Review the Twelve Frequently Asked Questions associated with Customer Experience Management are discussed with supporting videos and decks at www.bpgroup.org/cxfaq.html
Overview of customer experience featuring 23 must attend conference in 2023
As a business leader, you know the importance of customer experience (CX) and its impact on your success. But do you know about the must-attend customer experience conferences for 2023?
Must-Attend Customer Experience Conferences in 2023
Now that you know the importance of customer experience, let’s take a look at the must-attend customer experience conferences in 2023:
These conferences are great opportunities to learn the latest strategies in customer experience, network with other industry professionals, and gain invaluable insight into the customer experience industry.
Conclusion
Customer experience is an essential part of any business’s success. It involves understanding customer needs and developing strategies to meet those needs. It also involves creating customer-centric strategies, setting customer goals, and measuring customer satisfaction.
Attending customer experience conferences is a great way to learn the latest strategies in customer experience, network with other industry professionals, and gain invaluable insight into the customer experience industry.
Review these 23 top-rated CX Conferences for 2023 to start your journey to become a customer experience expert!
In just 60 minutes we will evaluate the 4 elements of a Customer Experience Management Ecosystem and how they can provide your organization with a company-wide ecosystem of CX management that focuses all of your team’s efforts and resources on delivering amazing customer experiences.
We are doing a CX POWER Hour this coming Wednesday 1 PM EDT/ 10 AM PDT Expert hosts include James Dodkins aka CX Rockstar, Doug Bell, Mitch Belsley (The Experience Manager) and Steve Towers BP Group.
In just 60 minutes we will evaluate the 4 elements of a Customer Experience Management Ecosystem. We will review how the 4 elements can provide your organization with a company-wide ecosystem of CX management. This then focuses all of your team’s efforts and resources on delivering amazing customer experiences.
What we will cover
1. Operationalizing Experience Designs
(How do you create and socialize simple experience designs that everyone in the organization will be able to understand?)
2. Measuring successful customer outcomes instead of business outputs
(Are you still relying on subjective NPS and VOC data to drive your CX analytics program?)
3. Focus every employee in the company every single day on CX innovation and improvement
(Are you harnessing the power of feedback and ideation from your employees?)
4. Evolve and improve your experiences in days not months.
(How long is it taking you to go from idea to implementation?)
James Dodkins, one of the hosts, has keynoted in the USA, Argentina, Mexico, UK, Australia and Germany in the last six months.
You will Win the Triple Crown
When you align your business around an understanding of your customer, you can increase your ability to grow revenue, significantly reduce cost, radically boost customer loyalty and engagement, tighten controls – and increase your competitive strength.
The Panel of Global Experts
Meet and discuss with our world-renowned team of Customer Experience Management innovators including… Doug Bell, James Dodkins, Mitch Belsley and Steve Towers will share proven strategies, tactics and tips to help position your customer ‘front and center’ – while addressing your real-world challenges of limited resources and competing priorities.
I very much hope you can join me and my colleagues! Here is the registration link
All the Very Best! Steve
Your team in Colorado
Doug Bell, CEO The Experience Manager
Steve Towers, Chief Evangelist, BPG
Mitch Belsley, CEO The Experience Manager
P.S. I suggest you follow The Experience Manager on LinkedIn and stay up-to-date on how to radically improve your customer and employee experiences. We focus the ‘next practices’ of the world’s leading CX companies that will help your organization do a better job designing, developing and delivering great customer and employee experiences.
It is good to have a guide in life. Many of us share political creeds, religious beliefs and codes of honor to guide our decision making. Wouldn’t it be crazy good to have the same for the doctrine of Customer Experience? When I co-authored the best selling book “CEM Success without Exception” back in 2006 Customer Experience Management was in its infancy.
Now thirteen years later we have the accumulated wisdom of the giants of Customer Experience Management, proof that focus on Successful Customer Outcomes, Outside-In and working backwards are fundamental to becoming a winning organization.
It is with these thoughts in mind and the worthy experience of many that I set pen to paper to craft these tenets as guidelines for all of us seeking to maximise our deployment of Customer Experience Management.
1. Customers are first, front and center for everything.
Understanding that all the work an organization undertakes ultimately stems from a customer interaction is key. Work to engineer every experience to the optimum.
2. Listen to the questions customers ask you.
Resist the subjective ‘voice of customer’ surveys (they are biased and unrepresentative) and focus on understanding and articulating needs – the Needs of the Customer.
3. Stop selling and let people buy.
Customers are now prosumers and most know what they want and how to get it. You will not win them if you force sell; in fact, you will make enemies of them.
4. Map the Complete Experience.
Connecting the dots across every interaction, inside and out, to ensure everything is aligned
This is both the stuff the customer sees (the customer journey and the brand promise) and the work that takes place across the rest of the organization to support all interactions. Combine those the Employee Experience and the Customer Experience you are nearing the Complete Experience; these are not separate things but should be viewed through the same lens.
The CEMMethod.com can help you in seeing the Complete Experience.
Customers develop trust when you say what’ll you do, and then do what you say. Conversely, do not project yourself as something you are not.
6. Be consistent and truthful across all your channels.
Customers will interact in ways and times that suit them, so ensure you keep a coherent message across all experiences.
7. Act on People liking people.
Do not hide behind automation, whether that is voice systems, web interactions or even text messaging. The most intimate relationships are formed with people, not computers.
Keep in front of the song.
8. Creating memorable experiences requires anticipation and coordination.
Fix problems before they happen, and when problems do arise (they will) pull out the stops to put things right.
9. Design every customer experience for the category of customer.
You should never ever treat all customers in the same way. Personalization and direct communication are proven winners in an era of standardization.
10. Employees are your first customers.
Happy Employees Create Happy Customers who come back for more, thus pleasing shareholders
If they ain’t happy your paying customers won’t be either. Treat your people well and let them know they are the most critical part of the brand and the complete customer experience.
”Let’s not beat around the bush… Customer experience is the new battleground. At The Experience Manager, BP Group, and Rockstar.cx we know the art of this new war. We have the tools, the technology and the strategies to remorselessly create victories for our clients as we build a more customer-centric world, one experience and one enterprise at a time”.
Steve Towers
Join us for Complete Experience Management with coaching, training, consultancy and Certification at www.bpgroup.org
If you are looking for Innovative leadership then this will inspire you onwards and upwards. Shared by one of South Africa’s most progressive business leaders, Roland Naidoo:
Having just left the football field with my 5 year old son I was finally motivated to write this blog. Why? Trying to teach him to kick the football in the correct way, it dawned on me in that moment I was doing to him what every organised structure is designed to do.
As I caught myself I paused, looked at him and said, “My boy, you figure it out, play, have fun, and find new ways to kick a football.”
Be the doctrine of the how and the why.
Be the standard of the where and the when.
Be the one and only way.
Have the right answers!
New Realisation
The dawning of that realisation underpins why innovation is so important to me. Innovation should by definition not be defined Ior it will simply succumb to every other conformity we know. It should live in every one of us.
This is the need to ask ourselves ‘why?’. Why am I doing this in this way? Is there a better way? Is there a different way? Is there even a need for this at all?
A spirit of innovation is not technology or wonderfully bombastic ideas, but the courage to question our education, rules, bonafide truths and all so-called absolutes in between. Know that your bravery will be rewarded with knowledge; am I. Know you were courageous enough to acknowledge you were wrong and move forward.
In the future when you find yourself saying or even thinking thoughts like this is how it’s always been; this is the way we do things; there is no other way; this is impossible; these are the rules; some things can’t be questioned, stop, take a breath, and find a new way to kick a football.
Roland
Footnote (from Steve)
So go find that ball and a new way to score for your team!
I was keynoting a conference in Europe recently, and senior executives in the room were getting the rationale behind moving Outside-In. However, there seemed to be two perplexed groups in the place.
One was what a refer to as the ‘traditional process guys’, and the other ‘the customer is first people’, and interestingly they both asked the same question “Where do we start?”
My honest and most direct answer is “You do not have a choice. You have got to start where you are and go from there!” OK, I get what you’re thinking, how could they take that away and begin to transform their organizations?
So, I walked them through TWO distinctly different ways to navigate to Outside-In working and practice, depending on your mindset, enterprise history and maturity. For the two categories of customer in the room, the NEEDS are the same, just the way they navigate to achieving them is different.
What are the Results?
From a results perspective, both approaches focus on winning the triple crown, that is Improving Service, Growing Revenues and Reducing Complexity (and hence lowering costs).
Approach
Process Engineering
Customer First
Focus
Process is the starting point
Starts with Customer Needs
Scope
Reengineering the Processes
Aligning everything to Customer Needs
Intention
Build out from Process to Department to Division to Enterprise
Articulate Successful Customer Outcomes and Remove the complexity of things that do not contribute to it
Benefits
Local wins building to business-wide transformation
Immediate delivery against Triple Crown benefits
Executive Buy-in
Slow burn, however when they see the benefits and ‘get it’ the support is significant
Starts at the strategic level so influences everything the organization does
Recommendation
If your remit is just ‘improving processes’ this approach will get you their steadily, however, the challenges facing traditional business are seismic so is there time? So, make immediate gains but push hard for more quickly.
By demonstrating the value of ‘customer first’ in terms of the triple crown the enterprise can align quickly and effectively. Importantly avoid the ‘soft and fluffy’ sentiments expressed by many in the customer experience world.
How can I Implement?
Back in 2006 the BPG launched the CEMMethod™ and built out an approach, using the 50+ techniques based on global next practice from companies like Virgin, Zara, BMW, Zappos, Apple and Emirates. Since then more than 3,000 companies in 116 countries have become accredited and certified to transform their processes and organizations.
Now in version 11, the choice you make in deployment is based on your ambition and remit within the enterprise. If you are a leader needing to embrace the digital customer ‘Customer First’ leaps out as the main option. Alternatively, if you are in a traditional process-based business (lean, six sigma, BPM etc.) the more conservative ‘process engineering’ approach may be preferred.
You can access the following resources that will help you make an informed choice:
Dr W. Edwards Deming’s famous quote “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing” is truer today than ever in an increasingly customer-centric Outside-In world.
Perhaps we should upgrade the quote to encompass the focus on the customer?
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as relevant to a Successful Customer Outcome, you shouldn’t ought to be doing it”
Progressive Outside-In businesses understand this truth (think Amazon, Starbucks, BMW and Emirates) who are connecting everything they do to delivering these Successful Customer Outcomes. If activities and systems do not explicitly contribute to customer success they scrap them, and in doing so costs fall away, service improves and naturally, revenues grow.
Think about that for a moment from the customers perspective. It is certainly more pleasurable if interactions are simple and smoother. And if these experiences involve buying stuff, customers come back again and again for more. Even in public service, it stands to reason that reducing complexity will release more resources to do more meaningful work that delivers greater value to citizens.
So how would you approach your existing Customer Experiences and associated processes to move in this direction? Is there a formula that can be applied that is easy to use and produces immediate results?
Indeed, there is! We refer to this formula within the CEMMethod™, an approach developed originally in association with companies like Virgin and Southwest Airlines. The method, originally released in 2006, is now in version 11 and includes 50+ techniques that significantly improve business performance and customer success.
One of these techniques within the CEMMethod™ is referred to as the ‘Disruption Factor’ and quite simply allows you to calculate the potential for improvement in any Customer Experience. Additionally, it helps you pinpoint the areas that would benefit from immediate attention, and in doing so win the triple crown (lower costs, improved service, higher revenues).
If you want to know more about applying the Disruption Factor in your organization join us at the upcoming webinar register your interest here.
> One Day CX Transformation in Denver
> Customer Experience & Process Improvement transformation
> SIX proven steps to introduce the CX Management Office
> Successful Personal Outcomes Relaunches
>> BPG PRIZE DRAW For JULY <<
The winner for this month is (drum roll) ** Craig Burtenshaw ACXM® **
from Australia who will now receive the USD 500
So how do you get your hands on five hundred bucks?
Simple, put your qualification after your name!
Here is the list:
ACXM® – Accredited Customer Experience Master®
ACXP® – Accredited Customer Experience Professional®
ACXC® – Accredited Customer Experience Champion®
CPPM® – Certified Process Professional Master®
CPP® – Certified Process Professional®
CPPC® – Certified Process Professional Champion®
So change your LinkedIn title, drop me a note on LinkedIn to say you have done it and we will put you in the monthly draw… oh and good luck!!
Next month we are featuring some of the recent Rockstar CX interviews from James Dodkins
See you very soon!
Cheers,
Steve Towers, CEO, ACXC and CPP Champion
** Craig Burtenshaw ACXM® **