Howard Lax
For “Rational” CX, Focus on How Your Customers FEEL
My first brush with what was then called customer satisfaction was with a mega B2B firm in financial services. Both the CEO and President were Harvard-trained economists, not exactly lightweights. Every time I presented the data on what mattered to our customers and...
Customer Experience Maturity: Part II
The CX maturation process needs to start with a clear articulation of business objectives. Regardless of how narrow or broad the scope of those first CX projects, they should be driven by specific objectives, be they defined in terms of functional processes (say, satisfaction...
Customer Experience Maturity: Part I
Customer Experience (CX) is not a “switch” that companies simply flip to the “on” position. This is not a binary condition, where a firm either is or is not customer-centric. This is a world of grays, of degrees of maturity along a continuum from...
The User Experience & Customer Loyalty Mobius Strip
Every user interaction is an opportunity to deliver on the brand promise, to strengthen the planks of the customer relationship. And with every interaction comes the risk of a disappointment that might partially, perhaps totally, undermine the larger relationship. Ideally, the user experience (UX)...
The ROI of CX (RoCX)
If you want your CX efforts to be taken seriously at budget time, in the C-Suite, or the Boardroom, you must be able to quantify in some way the value of improving the customer experience for your company. This is non-negotiable. If you can’t...
The Human Experience = Human Economics: CX and EX in the Real World
Homo Economicus – the characterization of people as rationally guided wealth-maximizing missiles in their behavior -- never really was more than a textbook stick figure characterization. This one-dimensional theoretical view, however, dominated economic and business thinking for the past century and remains strong even...
The Lake Wobegon Effect: Employee Performance and Customer Experience
“Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Those closing words from Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion radio show monologue echo in my head whenever I hear companies make unrealistically laudatory (AKA...
Making CX Cexy
Process improvements in the call center, easier online search facilities, more efficient order fulfillment, easier to navigate stores, more helpful staff. None of these or countless other performance criteria sound especially sexy. Customer Experience or CX may sound sexy, but much of the real...
18+ Questions To Assess Your Firm’s “CXness”
References to Customer Experience are everywhere, from annual reports and analyst calls to job descriptions and performance appraisals to business plans and operating procedures. There is a gaping chasm, however, between embracing CX as a core dimension of strategy and infusing CX thinking into...
Emotions, Memories, and the Customer Experience
If you don’t remember an experience, did it really happen? Sure, lots of things happen to us that we don’t remember. If you don’t remember an experience, does whatever happened really matter? That is a much thornier question. To some extent we all are...
The Fundamentals of the Science of Customer Experience
Customer Experience is a science. CX isn’t a “hard” science like chemistry or physics because people don’t behave like chemicals or atomic particles. But CX – or at least CX done right – is systematic in measurement, design, and application and sits squarely in...
Integrating Employee and Customer Experience Data: Blueprint for a Business Imperative
The overwhelming majority of companies talk about connecting EX (Employee Experience) and CX (Customer Experience), but they are not integrating their employee and customer experience data. They look at the data side-by-side, create conceptual frameworks, draw pictures and arrows, pontificate, but then fail to...
Leading from the Front on CX: A Legend and a Challenge
Talk, as they say, is cheap. You can’t pick up an annual report or listen to an analyst call without hearing how companies profess to be rededicating their efforts to improve the customer experience. Companies and organizations with reputations for absolutely lousy experiences boast...
Raising the Bar: Getting Aggressive on CX
Z-Z-Z . . . That is the sound of many CX programs. Capture scores. Report scores. Celebrate or commiserate. Repeat. Face it: for many firms, CX is little more than a score-keeping activity. Mired in their legacy work and unwilling to make changes, programs...
Customer Experience Hyperbole
If you listen to some CX firms you’d think that their tools/platforms/approaches are panacea cure-alls for everything from the common cold to revealing the meaning of life. I don’t know if they are smoking their own dope or just think that the rest of...
The CX Metrics Agnostic: Does it Matter Which Metric You Use?
So unless you are “results agnostic” and don’t care about the success of your CX efforts, the next time someone tells you they are CX metrics agnostic, shrug your shoulders and move on.
Stickers, Switchers and Shoppers: Lessons from the Auto Insurance Industry
Some people display a propensity to be “stickers,” that is to “stick” with companies they use, while others are prone to be “shoppers” and others yet tend to be “switchers.” To the extent marketers understand this predisposition, they can use such insights in targeting...
Patching the Leaky Bucket: Satisfice, Remediate and Improve
It may be a trite and overused metaphor, but everyone knows what I am talking about: lost customers. Churn, defection, leakage – call it what you may, lost customers translate into lost value for a company. Lost customers represent lost profits and cash flow...
Beyond Closing the Loop: VoC/E
“Closing the loop” – the process of responding to customers who provide weak feedback scores or critical comments to address or resolve the customer’s issue – is a standard feature of Enterprise Feedback (EFM) platforms. This near real-time risk mitigation approach is one of...
The Science of CX
Customer Experience is still regarded by many as a soft-and-fluffy activity. There is a tendency to reduce it to simplistic statements: make customers happy; be nice; smile; apply the Golden Rule. Some managers merely glance at their NPS score, cheering when it moves north,...