🎟️ The ACXP® Certification: Your Ticket to Customer Experience Mastery 🔍The Accredited Customer Experience Professional (ACXP®)

Coming soon to a city near you 🙂
>> UPDATE: Just added DENVER ACXM in September <<
Latest City and Online Agenda: https://www.bpgroup.org

Upgrading your skills and delivery for 2025-26 will determine your success.
Advance beyond functional industrial age thinking to Outside-In customer-centric practices. Tried and tested this program is a direct descendant of the CPP program with now over 150,000 qualified individuals across 143 countries.

So if understanding and applying the techniques and methods deployed in Apple, Amazon, Zappos, Zara, Emirates and BMW compels you to adopt the ‘next practice’ approaches come and join us in a city near you through 2018:

Here’s someone who enjoyed the session:

The BPGroup Accredited Customer Experience Masters® (ACXM) Program takes BPM & CEM Training to an entirely new level.

Become an Accredited Customer Experience Master (ACX Master®) through learning and experiencing the most practical, successful and proven toolkit for customer-centric change

For 2025-26…

> New Case Studies > 60+ takeaway techniques > 90+ help videos > Fully revised CEMMethod (version 15) > CX Rating (4E’s) integration > All material provided > Dedicated Professional User Group > Ongoing webinars

The Accredited Customer Experience Professional/Master difference

This premier series is designed for those seeking advanced professional skills in customer experience and process management, CX improvement, CX alignment, customer centricity, and innovation.
These are the Outside-In Customer Experience Management, BPM Methods, and Techniques that Deliver!

Uncover CX/Process Improvement opportunities in just hours
Identify Actions that will improve customer experience and associated processes by 15% to 40% within 20 days of deployment
Integrate and Evolve methods such as BPM, Lean, Six Sigma and Operational Excellence to Outside-In thinking and practice
Delight your Customers (making them your greatest advocates) through Successful Customer Outcomes and Customer Experience Management
Innovate to compete, set the market trend and even dominate your industry
Advance Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction to the next level
Release significant costs, improve revenues and enhance service (win the Triple Crown) immediately

See more information here, or book directly to a city of your choice:
https://www.bpgroup.org

Hopefully, we will see you soon!

Steve Towers, BPG’s Chief Experience Officer, is an expert in customer experience and process transformation who enjoys spreading his enthusiasm for this field through coaching, consultancy, keynote talks and books (twelve published).

Through the CEMMethod®, now in version 15, he and the BPG affiliates help companies win the triple crown 👑 —the simultaneous ability to Grow Revenue, Reduce Costs, and Improve service.

With over four decades of experience working with large enterprises worldwide, Steve has distilled the successful strategies of top-performing organizations into a proprietary methodology that can be easily imparted to CX and Process teams and executives.

His forte lies in envisioning the future of customer-centricity, customer experience, process management and realizing long-term benefits from business transformation. Steve’s approach combines customer-focused thinking, cutting-edge technologies, and a human touch.

Steve is also an entrepreneur and an early-stage investor in innovative software companies.

Subscribe to this channel and reach out and connect with Steve via https://linktr.ee/stevetowers

What is & Who is Outside-In? (interview by James Dodkins)

Two-minute bite-sized chunk provides the answer.

Podcast with Roland Naidoo | Live stream – rockstar.cx | Business Awards…

Live broadcast with James Dodkins Rockstar.cx

This was an interview across the continents
(I am currently in Colorado, James is in England)
https://www.facebook.com/JDODKINS/videos/1425739797553815/

Do get along to the link – James will be hosting CX Rockstars from all over the globe 🙂

Business Leader in South Africa provides his views on Customer Centricity

Roland Naidoo, Senior Executive, Multichoice

Roland Naidoo (ACX Master) is a highly respected senior executive in the global entertainments business. As part of a podcast hosted by Futurology…

https://itunes.apple.com/za/podcast/futurology/id1078860959?mt=2&i=1000397468049

You can reach Roland here to progress the discussion:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/roland-naidoo-b403a029/

Award won by yours truly!

I was deeply honoured by the PEX community at the annual conference in Florida last month and received the Global Community 2018 Award. Needless to say (but I will) this is as much down to you guys and your great transformational work, so I graciously excepted the Award on your behalf. Thank you so much :

See the snapshot here: https://buff.ly/2EEE9Im

Next time we will be reviewing highlights of the upcoming 2018 conferences…

Get the inside track with Customer Experience thinking and practice

The once favorite topic for improving business performance was Lean Six Sigma, however, the last two years have seen the ascendancy of Customer Experience (CX) as a focus for top teams. ‘Google trends’ is a good barometer of emerging interests and this graph demonstrates increasing interest in CX (blue) compared with LSS (red).

Curiously the largest interest in industrial age improvement techniques like Lean and Six Sigma is in non-English speaking countries, whereas Customer Experience is strongly represented in North America, UK, Australia and South Africa.

For those using the search term ‘Customer Experience,’ the associated topic list provides additional insight into searchers interests. The % trend reflects the growth year on year with ‘Omnichannel’ and ‘Digital data’ seeing explosive growth.

By way of additional information, a search with Epictions focused on Articles produces these top three pieces in the last three months on the theme of ‘Customer Experience – Omnichannel’.

1. The Future of Car Sales Is Omnichannel (Bain & Co)

http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/the-future-of-car-sales-is-omnichannel.aspx

2. Your Omnichannel Reading Challenge (Genesys)

http://blog.genesys.com/your-omnichannel-summer-reading-challenge

3. Omnichannel Study: Now’s Your Chance to Get Ahead of the Competition for the Holidays (Marketingprofs)

https://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2017/33005/omnichannel-study-nows-your-chance-to-get-ahead-of-the-competition-for-the-holidays

The ‘Reading Challenge’ provides an opportunity to dig deeper with some surprising reads available related to employee engagement and the very latest customer trends.

In the BP Group, we have codified the very best practices of CX leaders in and around Customer Experience into the CEMMethod™.

If you would like to find out more about how to access this learning please visit us at www.bpgroup.org or drop by at www.stevetowers.com

Data and information shared with thanks to Google and Epictions.

The Shocking Truth about Customer Experience

The single biggest piece of advice I give to senior executives setting out on the Customer Experience journey is to STOP. Yes seriously, the vast majority of CX efforts are completely misaligned.

CX Efforts Misaligned

Don’t get me wrong the intentions are good. Unfortunately, it goes something like this:

Top Team are listening and decide they need to get with this customer centricity/Outside-In/working backwards thinking.
Senior Management makes noises that the customer is THE thing the business must focus on.
The Executive engage the marketing and sales guys to get with it and start pushing the message.
Functional leaders hear the noise and bluster. They start using the language, whilst thinking this is just more fluff and nonsense. They make the right noises for now but keep their heads down, because they know this will go the same way as so many other ‘strategic initiatives’.
Fundamentally functional heads carry on working with the out of date reward system that promotes sub-optimal industrial age thinking and practice.
The Executive see the usual inertia, results not coming through, apathy and indifference and decide their business isn’t really an Amazon.
Top Team then reverts to just getting better at what we are doing, then when someone in ‘our industry’ proves it we will follow.
Functional leaders breathe a sigh of relief and invest even more in industrial age systems and training. The illusion of doing something, in this case, is actually worse than doing nothing.
The businesses failure is noted by customers who move to those who do understand and deliver Customer Experience success.
The company becomes another footnote in the history books. Talked about at business schools and picked apart because of the failure to get the new Outside-In customer-centric mindset.

Making Customer Experience Successful everywhere all the time

This isn’t rocket science (unless you are NASA of course). Understanding that the structures and ways of working from the industrial age were NEVER designed to be customer-centric. They were established to make things faster by optimizing production lines.

And oh, don’t think because you are not in manufacturing you are OK. It is likely your complete ways of working will be making everything look like production management systems, with talk of leaning out, waste reduction, standardization, efficiency, productivity. Sound familiar?

Understanding this Customer Experience misalignment is fundamental.

I encourage doing three things before re-joining the CX road-march:

Understand how big the gap is between what you are doing and what Successful Customer Outcomes you need to be delivering.
Audit the current key performance indicators.
Are they mostly about outputs?
Usually, the balance will be 80% output metrics (like calls answered, Average Handle Times, Abandoned Rates, Projects completed on time to budget etc.).
Meanwhile, the really important measures that tell you a Successful Customer Outcome is being achieved will only be a small proportion.
What you measure is what you get and no amount of Customer Experience drum banging will work unless those measures of Outcomes become the most important.
Create an awareness of what real CX success is all about.
This isn’t just the stories. It is about the actual things on the ground that need to change. The WHY and the HOW go hand in hand. Often times upskilling a group of key players at all levels to make them Ambassadors for the Customer achieves way more than massive corporate investment in branding and image.

In conclusion, Customer Experience cannot be treated just like another corporate initiative. To achieve success requires a significant shift in mindsets, and when that is achieved the realignment of the Enterprise to Outside-In can really begin.

Want more guidance and tips like this?

☑ More Articles like this one – visit my CX Obsession resources

☑ Upskilling and mentoring – Every level from the boardroom to the lunch room – BP Group

☑ In person and virtual training – The ACXM™ program

☑ Executive briefings and keynotes – How to get your hands on me and other CXperts (see what I did there?)

The 7 most popular Customer Experience Articles

Google tells us that Customer Experience is a significant and trending topic, the graph below ably demonstrates that point. (See google trends)

However, given all the noise what are THE most popular articles on the theme?
Here we present the seven most popular of the last couple of years.
Read and share

7th: Putting customer experience at the heart of next-generation operating models

McKinsey

This one for is McK’s second in the top seven this time…

“Digital is reshaping customer experience in almost every sector. Digital first attackers are entering markets with radically new offers, disrupting the ways that companies and customers interact and setting a high bar for simplicity, personalization, and interactivity.”