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.”

Jump to the Full Article here.

6th: Internet Of Things Will Revolutionize Retail

Louis Columbus

Teaching MBA courses in international business, global competitive strategies, international market research, and capstone courses in strategic planning and market research gives Louis the opportunity to research mega trends. Add to his portfolio writing for Forbes establishes his credentials in the space of customer transformation. In this article, he reflects on the coming ‘Internet of Things’ everywhere, and the impact on business and customers.

“87% of retailers will deploy mobile point-of-sale (MPOS) devices by 2021, enabling them to scan and accept credit or debit payments anywhere in the store…”

Jump to the Full Article here.

5th: The expanding role of design in creating an end-to-end customer experience

McKinsey

The second of McK’s into the top seven this time. Lines between products, services, and user environments are blurring. The ability to craft an integrated customer experience will open enormous opportunities to build new businesses.

“As digitization drives more and faster disruptions—and as customers increasingly desire the immediacy, personalization, and convenience of dealing with digital-marketing leaders—the business landscape is undergoing an upheaval.”

Jump to the Full Article here.

4th: The Employee Experience Is the Future Of Work

Jeanne Meister 

Working at Future Workplace, (an HR Advisory and Research firm) Jeanne casts her glow over the changes to the employee role within business today. She is also the co-author of The Future Workplace Experience: 10 Rules For Mastering Disruption in Recruiting and Engaging Employees: 

“Today, almost every company is undergoing a digital transformation. Cloud and mobile computing, artificial intelligence, and increasing automation have created the potential to transform nearly every aspect of a business.”

Jump to the Full Article here.

3rd: United Airlines Changes Its Policy On Displacing Customers

Richard Gonzales
Correspondent, San Francisco, National Desk NPR. With an eclectic style ranging across diverse topics such as medical marijuana, gay marriage, drive-by shootings, the U.S. Ninth Circuit, the California State Supreme Court and any other legal, political, or social development he understands CX first hand. Here we see a well-accounted discussion of, yes again, United Airline’s trials and tribulations.

“United Airlines crew members will no longer be able to bump a passenger who is already seated in one of the airline’s planes…”

Jump to the Full Article here.

2nd: How to Gamify your Customer Experience and Win…

Mike Dillard
Proudly proclaiming himself as a disrupter and innovator Mike’s perspective on Customer Experience is refreshing and unique in a world of sameness. He writes with an entertaining AND well thought out logic.  

“I honestly can’t think of a more difficult industry to get into than candles. You have thousands of manufacturers who are all selling the same thing… A piece of wax with a string in the middle and the only way to differentiate yourself is by changing your label, along with the size, color, and smell of that wax.”

Jump to the Full Article here.

1st: Delivering exceptional customer experiences – an art and science

Luke Shave
Luke works on the Retail partner side of Microsoft and benefits from first-hand experience of the changes in and around Customer Experience.


“Interacting effectively with customers has traditionally been a form of art, especially in face-to-face settings. But now that customers are increasingly shopping on social media, mobile apps, and websites, a bit of science can help win their loyalty. How can retailers combine customer service expertize with advanced technology to create exceptional customer experiences?”

Jump to the Full Article here.

It will be interesting to note your favorite… more soon, meanwhile
Ciao, Steve

www.stevetowers.com

www.bpgroup.org (27 years young this year!)

Denver One Day ACXP – August 15th

Johanessburg ACX Masters September 9-12th

Connecting with Customer Experience

Neat utility that can help with trending Customer Experience topics 🙂 #cx

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Customers are suffering digital distress – Three proven approaches to ensure you delight and deliver.

1. Design digital experiences around the customer needs, not around your customer mythology
Despite mountains of data customer insight remains an elusive animal. As a direct consequence, digital is frequently applied across existing processes without fully understanding customer pain points and the real Successful Customer Outcome.

Making invalid assumptions can irritate and permanently drive customers away. Take grocery checkout for example where retailers digitize an existing experience based on assumptions of customers wants. The resulting experience may still be fractured, with faulty scanners (they break a lot), long lines, and the more than necessary Associates to provide support for glitches. Not a great customer experience. If, however you develop an understanding of customer needs (even when customers do not know them) you may discover the checkout process is not required at all. Eradicating that process meets customer’s desires in terms of speed, convenience, and simplicity.

Amazons (i) checkout-less retail stores, walk in walk out enabled by scanning your phone on entry, scanning goods as you move around the store, and then scanning your phone on departure with automatic billing, provides just such an experience. In addition to improving the experience, costs are reduced and the customers come back for more and thereby grow revenues. In fact, this triple-crown benefit is a sure fire way of measuring any customer experience transformation.

2. Drive digital initiatives to simplify and improve convenience
Customer Research demonstrates the disconnect between what executives think customers value in digital, compared to working out their needs in a more objective and structured way. A technique such as the Successful Customer Outcome Canvas (SCOC)(ii) provides a step by step approach to articulating actual needs and aligning the experiences to deliver them. The resulting insight in terms of a set of objective measures based on needs allows the organization to question every interaction in the context of ‘does this contribute to the SCO?’ and if not, how do we remove it?


Uber(iii) are a terrific example of ‘one click simple’ with the apps user interface designed around understanding the overall Successful Customer Outcome and then delivering an optimum number of interactions. Providing this digital experience helps meet the customer’s desire to move efficiently, pay digitally, and provide feedback in the moment. Part of that ‘Successful Customer Outcome Canvas’ insight was in removing the anxiety of where is the car and how long do I wait? You can see the car and driver speeding towards you on the app.

3. Categorize your customers by need, rather than segmenting by circumstance.
Dealing with customers as segments (age, income, zip code etc.) misses the vital personalisation that digital excels at. By force fitting customers into standardized processes suited to segments creates friction and fractured experiences. Diagnosing objective needs may, for instance, highlight the digital savviness (or not) of a category of customer, and in doing so allow you to create a bespoke experience. Rather than industrial age segmentation, organizations that adopt Outside-In(iv) categorization meet and evolve customer expectations in an informed way with greater empathy and the resulting trust that “you have my back”.

Are you ready? Ask yourself these questions (be honest and not complacent!)

a. Are digital initiatives aligned to Successful Customer Outcomes with optimized touch points, or are they designed around internal functional considerations?
b. Is your approach to innovation Outside-In and not restricted to departments, internal specialisms, legacy systems, regulations and last century mindsets?
c. Are you tapping in-the-moment real-time analytics to understand what your customers are experiencing as it happens, and then course correcting those experiences as they occur?
d. How are you managing your customer’s digital expectations? Are you keeping them informed of developing digital services?
e. What mechanism are you using to incorporate new digital learnings into the customer experiences? And are those learnings (next practices) gathered from outside of your sector, or are they just industry best practices?

References
i. http://bit.ly/goCX2017
ii. http://bit.ly/SCOC2017
iii. http://bit.ly/Uber2017
iv. http://bit.ly/SteveTowers2017

5 Reasons why it is time to wrestle Customer Experience AWAY from Marketing

Traditionally Marketing has played the central role in bringing the Customer Experience (CX) to the attention of the organization, and while the intent is good the impact is often very, very bad.

Why? Marketing is noted for their soft and fluffy approaches and when it comes down to delivering they simply do not connect sufficiently with the rest of the organization. Often times it isn’t their fault. Consider if you have been trained in marketing methods from the last century – why should we then criticize the marketers when those approaches don’t work? especially now in the digitized promiscuous customer age? Seriously, we must get more scientific about the customer experience and be brutally truthful, science and marketing are worlds apart.

Don’t lose hope if you are a victim of a marketing led CX effort.

Based on 2017 research with 300+ global organizations* the BPG distilled winning strategies in terms of what is delivering in our rapidly Uberfying world…

1. Forget the theory.

It was written for a different time and no amount of trying to make it fit will address the challenges of rebellious, promiscuous and impatient customers who are literally connected to social media around the clock. You need to anticipate and navigate the ever-changing environment without calling another meeting, needing to talk with the other C levels, or indeed brief the Public Relations department. Simply put – You do not have the time.

2. Connect the dots across the organization.

Customer experiences create all our work, without exception. Fundamentally, you can link everything that is going on inside your company with an interaction somewhere at some time. Can you see that connection and is it known the rest of the organization? If you can’t then start connecting those dots to explain how everyone is intimately connected to successful customer outcomes.

3. Ensure rewards pay people for the right things.

Here is a paradox. If you pay people for doing things do not be surprised if the stuff they do doesn’t contribute to success for the customer. For instance, call centers are wedded to managing calls. Average Handle Times, Abandon Rates, Failure demand and so on. How much of that relates to achieving an effective resolution for a customer (not the scotch mist type of help desk support and closed calls)? Next practice suggests reward structures based on delivering successful outcomes. It is less about measuring what is done and more about delivering successful outcomes.

4. Dashboards.

Are you Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)pointing you towards success, or are they just number blinding you? Here is a quicky to try… Look at your top 20 KPI’s and mark them red, amber, green. Red is for outputs (how many, where and when), Green is Outcomes (the result of outputs). If the balance is red you need to shift the emphasis, and in doing so the important measures of Outcomes become the ‘beacon on the hill’ to guide all activity to the right place.


5. Learn to see around the corner.

The future isn’t predictable, precise and cast in concrete. If recent times tell us anything it is that the business of prediction is more wrong than right in our turbulent world. You need a team around you that understand no amount of planning and due diligence will get you there. While you are offsite planning the next five years your competitors are winning the ever fickler customers who regard your brand as staid and ‘yesterday’. Up your game and make sure the people around you understand the new dynamic. Stop them relating to 20th-century models and get them thinking and delivering to the new order of business. It is now or never.

If you want to stretch your team join us for the one day ACXP ‘hands-on’ doing session designed to let you take away actionable strategies and techniques fine-tuned in world leading organizations like Apple, Emirates, Zara, Zappos, Bentley, Disney to name a few!

Here’s the place to find out more: http://bit.ly/ACX2017

* The BPG conduct periodic research across its membership of 90,000 professionally qualified registrants based in 116 countries.

NPS damned…

One of the leading customer-centric gurus is sounding off about the viability of NPS  as an effective measure in this interesting youtube snippet: 

The Customer Centrist – Episode 1: James Dodkins
NPS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1owJ5_QZA0

Customer Experience – How to have your cake and eat it…

CEO BPG > Academy of Customer Experience Board > C-Level Advisor > BPM Author & Keynote > OPEX Judge > Customer Obsessed

Astute CEO’s (think Jeff Bezos – Amazon, Tony Hsieh – Zappos, for instance) see a direct connection between Great customer experiences and winning the triple crown, i.e., lower costs of business, greater revenue and enhanced service.

Block Buster Update this week…

Fantastic Testimonial | NEW Webinar | Events Heads Up | New Articles

** Setting up the CX Management Office – NEW Webinar now **
The How to with guidelines and template to create the successful Customer Experience Management Office https://www.cemnext.com/cxmo 

** Upcoming CPP Masters and ACX Masters ** (now in the 25th year!)
Johannesburg | Dubai | Washington | Geneva | Sydney | Brussels
See http://www.bpgroup.org/training.html 

** New ACXP program attracts terrific feedback **We were blown away by this one
(see more recent at: http://www.bpgroup.org/testimonials.html )

“The training was transformative for me personally and also made a huge push in my professional life to define CX Strategy more clearly. 

I would like to thank James Dodkins from BP Group for an amazing learning experience at Accredited Customer Experience Professional Training in Denver. I especially loved his teaching style and CX classroom projects. 

I learned so much. Thank you James! James is a true wealth of knowledge in all areas related to Customer Success, Customer Experience and Customer Centric Process Design.”
Sasha Stewart, Customer Experience Consultant, Logio Solutions LLC

** Recommended Conferences 2017 **
(and yes we are there too!)

Customer Experience Week Australia 2017 – Sydney 23-26 May 2017
http://www.customerexperienceevent.com.au

OPEXweek AUSTRALIA 2017 – Sydney – 25-28 July 2017
http://www.iqpc.com.au

OPEXweek Summer 2017 – San Diego – 21-23 August 2017
https://www.businessperformanceexcellencesummit.com

OPEXweek Global Summit 2018 – Orlando – 22-26 Jan 2018
https://www.opexweek.com

** THREE Articles **
* The 5 Critical Failures of 80% of Customer Experience initiatives
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-critical-failures-80-customer-experience-steve 

** The five crucial things successful CX companies do every day
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-crucial-things-successful-cx-companies-do-every-steve

*** Don’t give the Customers choices? 
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-give-customers-choices-how-easily-provide-best-steve 

I told you that was a biggy eh? See you the inside soon. Cheers, Steve
http://www.stevebtowers.com | http://www.bpgroup.org

Don’t give the Customers choices? How to easily Provide the best Customer Experience.

The smartest companies don’t give you much choice. They don’t ask you what you want, they know what you need and that simplicity, as it turns out keeps costs down, boosts service and grows revenue.
This counter intuitive approach to customer experience is, according to Siegel+Gale, preferred by two out of every three customers. Interestingly we are more likely to recommend a brand that saves us time and makes it easier to buy, hence the German supermarket chain, Aldi, with few choices and focus on quick in-out for the regular shop, tops Siegel+Gales 2017 simplicity league.

Fellow German competitors Lidl are a close second with a similar proposition aligned towards successful customer outcomes – getting in easily, moving around and selecting quickly, paying lower prices, and fast exit. This simplicity isn’t however just the province of global discount chains as the top six for simplicity include Netflix, Google and Amazon whose respective digital experiences all boast ease of use, quick to results and great touchpoints.

As a Netflix customer I am…
review the complete article and access the Simplicity League from Siegal+Gale on LinkedIn Pulse 
Join us to learn the Secrets of Apples, Googles, Zara, Zappos and Emirates success

Accredited CX Professional, Masters & Champions (ACXP, ACXM, ACXC) Program

An internationally recognized program with proven track record delivered by been there and done it coaches more than 180 times, in 64 cities with delegates from 118 countries.
The program, now in its eleventh year, utilizes the BP Groups approaches and framework to help you and your organization win the triple crown – simultaneously reduce costs, grow revenues and enhance service.
Producing Immediate and sustainable business results across any industry and sector.

Become a qualified CPP-Master or ACXP and demonstrate your professionalism http://www.bpgroup.org/training.html

The five crucial things successful CX companies do every day

> Most successful CX companies do these things to lift their game
> Steve Towers shares the winning strategies
> Model your own strategy based on leading CX next practices
This article is a build on terrific feedback from my recent piece ‘5 Critical Failures of 80% of Customer Experience initiatives’.
(You can see that here: bit.ly/CX2017)
George Bernard Shaws observation is pertinent “Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.”
So with that in mind, let’s move beyond the mistakes and uncover the winning strategies and how best can we implement those insightful approaches?
Based on our recent work and research my report from the CX front line should help you rethink your approach in our collective endeavor to get more scientific about the customer experience.
In the earlier article, we identified five major errors and causes of failure. Let’s review how winning CX companies reframe those into successful strategies.  
1. Top teams understand CX success and get out of the way of their people to let them get on with it.
To achieve strategic CX success, it is necessary to understand the limitations imposed by industrial age thinking (getting better at doing the wrong stuff faster, functional specialisms, outdated reward systems) and help the organization migrate to Outside-In thinking and practices. At Zappos, for instance, it is more important to meet the customer (see Zappos hits the road.. http://bit.ly/Zappos2017) and gather insights, and provide input to reshaping the organization. The top team is actually out there “We want to shake the customers hands, give them really big high fives and meet their friends — delivering happiness and memorable experiences along the way,” said Kristin Richmer, Senior Brand Marketing Manager, Zappos.
The task then is not overlaying the new insights onto an industrial age siloed world. It is actually to reshape the organization, its people, the reward systems, processes and systems to better deliver successful customer outcomes. Tony Hsieh reinforces this feed forward approach “we actually want to talk with customers more as 70% of our business are repeat buys. Hiding our contact details and making it difficult to talk is not our way” http://bit.ly/TonyHseih
2. Customer needs are understood and developed to create the organizational alignment towards successful customer outcomes.
Leading CX Companies have developed an a-b-c strategy when boiled down includes
(a) stop asking customers what they want
(b) get your head around current customer expectations, and
(c) articulate customer needs even when the customer doesn’t know what they are.
This effort is not a ‘one and done’, it is about continual learning and then development of services and products that anticipate customer needs, rather than following the outdated mantra of those organizations seeking more and more (often meaningless) feedback.
And Disney provides a demonstration of this a-b-c approach.
Consider this:

Disney World Orlando, is about 43 square miles, about twice the size of Manhattan. 30 million guests per year enjoy 4 theme parks: the Magic Kingdom, the Hollywood Studios, Epcot and the Animal Kingdom.

You can navigate to these parks by car, bus, monorail, boats and a ferry depending on your hotel – and that in itself includes over 20 themed for your delight. Coupled with Disneys new wearable “Magic Bands” (see http://bit.ly/MagicBand) you receive a smooth personalized experience where ever you are.
This collection of entertainment is a dynamic living system focused on successful customer outcomes. With digital real-time feedback, Disney offers an integrated experience built around a co-ordinated set of business and customer outcomes, from the time you think of a trip, to the time you are back home with the kids.
3. Being customer-centric isn’t about projects – it is a state of mind.
A great mistake of many is approaching customer experience as an initiative, something with a clearly defined start and end point. Appreciating CX is a state of mind for the whole company is a major differentiator and allows successful organizations to continually tweak and evolve, rather than live in a permanent state of project stop-start crisis. The guiding principle is, at the heart of CX, change is desirable, welcomed and systematic. It impacts everyone and everything all the time.
4. Successful CX transcends measures and implements a rigorous feedback/feed forward framework.
A recent analysis in the banking industry suggested that more than 85% of the total key performance indicators measured outputs – things that get produced from activities.
Successful CX companies however, have a very different profile and focus, their attention is on measuring outcomes – the result of what is produced. To these companies this is not a semantic distinction, it underpins the total CX strategy. As a result, the measurement systems are simplified, and the focus on results rather than activity moves the dial towards customer centricity so much more quickly. Programs such as Disneys True North set a direction with supporting metrics, and rather than measure everything that moves they focus on the results and outcomes that need to be delivered to achieve successful customer outcomes. In this context, more than 75% of measures are ‘Outcomes’ with less than 25% outputs.
Test this for yourself in the call center. What are your top ten measurements, are they output oriented or outcome based? The former would be things like average handle time, abandon rates, downtime and so on. The latter would be the delivery of customer need, queries completely resolved (not the piece mean partial interim ‘first call resolution’ type things measured with a functional bias).
In summary, CX leaders have fewer measures and the majority are now Outcome-based.
5. CX is both the strategy and the operational objective to overcome needless complexity.
A recent Forrester survey says 81% of CX professionals are mapping experiences from the customers perspective but only 21% are mapping the ecosystem (processes, people, technology). In this context there are two opportunities that successful CX companies exploit:
i. CX can only be successful if you build a complete CX ecosystem map (we call that a CXecomap) which includes cause and effect and connects the people who deliver the customer experience with those people and systems who provide the means for it.
ii. CX Current state crisis. Successful CX companies can clearly articulate the what and how the organization should be doing to deliver great experiences. They do not become mired in the exercise of mapping all the current external and internal processes and systems (which can take years to complete and provides little in the way of direction for what should exist.)
These companies understand the reality that the current structure and systems were never created with excellent CX in mind but were in fact designed around an industrial age, production system based model. Accordingly, next practice is to utilize design principles that envision what should be, and then progressively mature and migrate the organization to that vision.
To conclude CX success doesn’t come from wishful thinking. It is a deliberate and sustained effort to understand and articulate the ever changing customer. To build a new trust with them that goes beyond the platitudes of the past. In the near term it is about becoming more scientific about the customer experience. In the longer term it is a guarantee of business success.
We have codified these CX next practice approaches into the CEMMethod (now version10). You can access that as a resource with others below.
The earlier article can be viewed here: ‘5 Critical Failures of 80% of Customer Experience initiatives’. http://bit.ly/CX2017
Other useful resources on this theme:www.bpgroup.org (workshops, accreditation, and certification)www.stevebtowers.com
www.successfulcustomeroutcomes.net (blog for all things customer experience)
www.cemmethod.com (CEMMethod v10)
www.outsideinthesecret.com (Free copy of ‘Outside-In. The Secret’)
Join us to learn the Secrets of Apples, Googles, Zara, Zappos and Emirates success

Accredited CX Professional, Masters & Champions (ACXP, ACXM, ACXC) Program

An internationally recognized program with proven track record delivered by been there and done it coaches more than 180 times, in 64 cities with delegates from 118 countries.
The program, now in its eleventh year, utilizes the BP Groups approaches and framework to help you and your organization win the triple crown – simultaneously reduce costs, grow revenues and enhance service.
Producing Immediate and sustainable business results across any industry and sector.

Become a qualified CPP-Master or ACXP and demonstrate your professionalism http://www.bpgroup.org/training.html