The ABCs of CX

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Wordle word cloud of the CX Journey blog

Today I’m writing a fun, whimsical post that takes an A to Z look at customer experience. Let me know if I’ve missed any critical vocab on this topic. I’m happy to update.

Pay attention to your customers and to their needs. Be available, accessible, and amazing. Create Apostles and Advocates. Analyze your data. And don’t forget acronyms (CX, CXO, VOC, CRM, CEM, etc.).

Use bigdata to glean insights that will help you personalize experiences across channels. Best practices and benchmarking are two great concepts, as well.

Culture and communication are key! So is consistency. And who better to drive the customer-centric culture and keep the customer at the center of the company’s decisions than a Chief Customer Officer (CCO). In addition, a centralized team to oversee the VOC efforts is needed.

Discover. Design. Do. Deliver. Delight. And do it again and again. Don’t forget to collect and compile various types of data (survey, behavioral, operational, etc.) to drive decisions. Display the data on dashboards.

Excellent employees, empowerment, empathy, expectations, engagement, executives, EFM – o my!

Customer feedback will drive customer experience design, but don’t forget about feedback from employees, partners, vendors, etc. Treat employees fairly. Consider financial implications of all decisions.

Good is the enemy of great. Do great things and grow the business!

Hire for attitude. Happy employees = happy customers.

Consider what’s important to your customers when designing products, services, experiences. Ideate and innovate to stay ahead of the competition. Use feedback to improve your processes, products, and services. Remember that customer insights should drive your decisions.

Journey maps are designed from the customer perspective and guide you through customer experience design. CX is a journey, not a destination.

The customer is king! Know your customer. Use the Kano model to uncover customer needs for successful product/service offerings.

Consider the customer lifecycle when designing the customer experience. Leadership buy-in is important to the success of a VOC/CX initiative. Leadership drives the culture and sets the tone in the organization. Thanks to Stan Phelps, the CX world was introduced to lagniappe, or that little unexpected gift. What’s it all for? Loyalty. Connect your customer feedback to employee feedback or to financial data to conduct a linkage analysis.

Mystery shop your own stores to ensure moments of truth are being executed perfectly. Measure and monitor the appropriate metrics to ensure the customer experience is consistent and memorable across those moments.

NPS, or Net Promoter System, is a commonly-used approach to tie advocacy to profitability, to segment customers, and to center organizational focus on customers.

O boy. Let’s see. Where is your organization on its customer experience journey? How are you operationalizing your customer feedback?

The brand promise sets the expectations about the experience. Great people are key to a great customer experience. Personalize experiences to the extent that you can. Journey mapping will help you define your touchpoints and your painpoints, especially among your processes. Resolve problems quickly and resolve them correctly the first time. And then there’s the big P – profitability.

Ask the right questions of the right customers to get the right data to make the right decisions! Run queries to analyze your data. And don’t forget to ensure quality, in feedback, financial and operational data, and products and services.

Remember to recruit for attitude, but also recognize and reward your people for doing remarkable things. Respond to customers in a timely manner and make service recovery swift and painless. Run reports to analyze your efforts and to determine ROI. Build relationships with your customers.

Segment customers for a personalized service experience. Conduct surveys to gather feedback about the interactions your customers have with your organization. And don’t ignore social media – a great platform for customers to share feedback and for you to listen and then solve their problems.

Training and re-training of your employees is important to delivering a great customer experience. Make sure they have the tools to do their jobs. Having the right technology that delivers the right insights to the right touchpoints facilitates them in their quest to service customers in a great way. Trust them to deliver exceptional service, and remember that trust is a two-way street.

Undercover Boss is an awesome example of how you can keep an eye on your operations and learn how your employees are treating your customers. Use it in your organization.

Have you created value for your customers today? If not, do you have a vision for creating that value? How are you using your customers’ (i.e., customers, partners, vendors, stakeholders, etc.) voices to drive your important business decisions? VOC, VOE, VOB, VOM, VOP, etc. What tools are you using to visualize your data?

For positive word of mouth, create positive experiences. WOW = WOM!

Hey, it’s all about the eXperience… your customers’ and your employees’!

You know what you need to do! Get started!

Create a Zappos-like atmosphere by defining your values, culture, service approach, etc.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Annette Franz
Annette Franz is founder and Chief Experience Officer of CX Journey Inc. She is an internationally recognized customer experience thought leader, coach, consultant, and speaker. She has 25+ years of experience in helping companies understand their employees and customers in order to identify what makes for a great experience and what drives retention, satisfaction, and engagement. She's sharing this knowledge and experience in her first book, Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the "Customer" in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business).

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