Alex Allwood
Inspirational Books and Applying Learnings in Customer Empathy
In writing my latest book, Customer Empathy: A radical intervention in customer experience management and design, there were four books in particular that helped me shape the narrative and inspired my thinking. So that we’re all on the same page, so to speak, empathy is...
CEO’s Who Are Demonstrating Customer Empathy in Action
Here is the leading indicator that your organisational culture is customer-centric, or moving rapidly towards customer centricity; your CEO is leaning into customer empathy. More than ‘talking the good CX talk’, these CEO’s are demonstrating the right behaviours; setting an example for their leadership teams...
Who Will Serve Me? Looking at Customer Experience Differently
In the not too distant future, you’ll be old too. Just like my dad of 80, you’ll realise that you’ve become invisible to the likes of your bank, telco and utilities service providers. For my dad, his low tech fluency, lack of mobile-savviness, let...
Using Customer Empathy Mapping to Connect and Engage Teams
Getting a cross-functional team to come together, let alone work together for a common cause, such as customers and improving their CX, can be like herding cats. It can feel near impossible! After all, team leaders will likely have many competing priorities, making them time-poor....
Mapping Emotion in the Customer Journey
In my last published article, Customer Journey Mapping, Understanding how customers think, feel and experience, a number of readers wanted to know more about how to capture customer emotion and how to visualise the emotion in mapping their customers’ journey. The connection between emotions and...
Customer Journey Mapping – Understanding How Customers Think, Feel and Experience
The CX leader’s playbook is now brimful of methods, tech and tools to understand customers and their experiences. For many though, deep understanding; how customers think, feel and experience remains elusive. What’s changing this status quo is the rediscovery of customer journey mapping using...
CX Leadership: The Last Word
I think we’ll all breathe a collective sigh of relief when we kiss 2020 goodbye. But just as this year has been like no other, so will next year, 2021, be different from previous years. So much has changed, the transformation initiatives that used to...
Are You Using Empathy Nudges?
What does your team discuss in their daily stand-up? This was a question I asked my LinkedIn connections this week. Typically it’s: 1. What did you do yesterday? 2. What will you do today? 3. What is blocking progress? On Tuesday, I had the pleasure…
Pandemic Perspective: Leadership Decision Making in Uncharted Territory
Research Study: Marketing & CX Leadership in the Crisis Economy – Part Two There is no playbook for this pandemic. Leadership teams in 2020 are navigating uncharted territory to rapidly respond to this crisis with a mandate of keeping employees and customers safe, managing customer...
Research Study: Marketing & CX Leadership in the Crisis Economy – Part 1
Part 1: Keeping employees and customers physically and emotionally safe As CMO’s, CCO’s and CXO’s respond to the COVID-19 crisis, our study captures their priorities, decision making frameworks and strategies in this time of crisis. In this, the first of a 3-part series, we examine...
Crisis Leadership: CX and Marketing Leaders Use DIY Listening
Rather than hibernating during the COVID-19 lock-down, I’ve been running my own ‘listen and learn’ program with CX and Marketing Leaders (CCO’s, CXO’s and CMO’s) to understand their challenges and new-world opportunities. An interesting insight from my first-hand conversations is leaders are undertaking DIY...
Leading with Empathy: Creating New Value for Customers and Employees in a Crisis
COVID-19 has brought upon us frenetic change. Around the world, people have bunkered down. Our homes are now isolated and have become digital eco-systems for living, working and socialising. Our experiences at this time won’t be forgotten. How well organisations respond, or not, will...
CX Leadership: Making Customer Centricity Sticky
This morning started like most. Part of my AM ritual is reading the latest CX news and views. A story on Deloitte’s CMO Survey caught my eye; it revealed that “expenditure on CX has leapt by a huge 71% over the last three years...
CX Leadership Trends 2020: From Little Things Big Things Grow
In 2020, customer experience leaders find themselves at a performance crossroad. While endeavouring to deliver the promise of enhanced value, differentiation, and CX as a driver of sustainable growth they are besieged by CX management challenges that continue to stifle excellence. There are, however,...
Why Customer Empathy is Important in Customer Experience Management
For 20 years now, organisations have worked at delivering customer experience (CX) excellence; appointing a senior CX leader and dedicated team, investing resources into measuring customer satisfaction, mobilising teams to operationalise improvements, reorganising teams to work in new ways and innovating customer touchpoints. However, global...
What’s Causing the Customer Empathy Deficit?
In my work I’ve listened to first-hand customer stories of queuing in forty-degree heat, patients dying in waiting rooms, essential services being cut during billing disputes, 100% increases in licensing costs, petrol tankers bursting into flames, fraudulent tax activity and customers begging for their...
What CEOs Value Most
What CEOs value the most has a ripple effect What’s important to us drives our actions. Our behaviours big and small reflect what we care about. In organisations too, what’s valued by the CEO informs the business’s mindset, language and cultural norms. What the leader...
My Husband’s Customer Hell!
Somewhere along the way, someone forgot to ask; what would our customer think about that? I’ll just give you the abridged version of this story to bring you up to speed. As we all know, in the past ten years or so, the price of...
For GOODNESS Sake
Post the ‘inquires we had to have’ in the banking, insurance and super industries, I’ve been reflecting on what I see as the heart of the problem - when organisations choose growth at any cost. Following the regulator’s advice, these businesses have a laundry list...
CX Insight: What Is The Purpose Of My Work?
In this week’s CX Insight I reflect on an article I read recently in the New York Times Magazine, ‘The Future of Work’. The article explores a prevailing workplace sentiment - what is the purpose of my work? Published earlier this year, the piece...