Michael Hinshaw
How to Define Your Customer Experience Strategy and Link it to Execution
What exactly is a customer experience strategy? Spend any time online trying to answer this question and you’ll see how easy it can be to become overwhelmed with well-meaning but (in some cases) radically misinformed customer experience strategy definitions. The issue isn’t that the answers...
Customer Experience Analytics and Tracking: CX Metrics 101
The Importance of Measuring the Customer Experience In today’s digital-first-but-not-digital-only, customer-centric world, customer experience (CX) has quickly emerged as a critical differentiator for 9 out of 10 executives. But while many organizations are taking important steps to deliver on the promise of CX, they’re also...
Customer Experience Management (CXM): The Best-Practice Capabilities of CX Leaders
As ever-greater numbers of organizations embrace the age of the smart customer, you might expect Customer Experience Management, or CXM, to be a well-understood term. After all, like ‘customer experience,’ it’s used a lot. However — also like customer experience — it describes...
How “3-Dimensional” Customer Personas Radically Improve CX Design
Customer experience design professionals have recognized the power of customer persona for years. Unlike customer or audience segments—used primarily for marketing, sales activities and data management—personas are fictional characters used to design things that real customers will actually use, and yes, even love. Whether defining...
Fall in Love With Your Customer’s Pain Points—Not With Your Solutions
It’s human nature to fall in love with your solutions. It’s also a common pitfall for business leaders, entrepreneurs, and those responsible for improving customer experiences. Don’t. Because the implications of this mindset are significant. Remember New Coke? Qwikster, from Netflix? And what about Barnes…
Successful Customer Experience: 3 Critical Things CX Leaders Get Right
When we look at customer experience leaders today, it’s not surprising to find they have a number of things in common. From a macro level, we see that many of the individual strategies and tactics these leaders deploy roll up to three high-level areas...
Getting Customer Experience Strategy Right: Best Practices of CX Leaders
Customer experience is clearly a key focus area for the majority of executives across a broad swath of industries, regions and company sizes. This probably isn’t a surprise to anyone reading this article – after all, research shows that nearly 9 out of 10...
Failing Your Customers Can Help You Serve Them Better
Hey, we get it – nobody wants to fail. But the hard truth is that failure is a fact of life. We try, get knocked down, and pick ourselves up to try again. We hold the ‘dust yourself off and get back on the...
How Best-In-Class CX Leaders Get There: The Customer Experience Value Chain
For the last several years, improving customer experience has been rightfully viewed as one of the most important things any organization can do to drive value. In fact, the phrase is used with the same reverence (and lack of clarity) as words like “strategy,”...
Six Common Customer Experience Strategy Pitfalls
For any organization striving to significantly improve customer experience, they need a plan to do so. That’s because the ability to design and deliver great customer experience doesn’t “just happen.” It’s planned. Which is where a customer experience strategy comes into play. Your...
11 Tech Trends You Can Bet Your Customer Experience Budgets On, Today through 2020…
Today, nearly every customer experience in nearly every industry is driven or supported by ever-more-quickly-evolving digital technology. The landscape is changing so rapidly that customer experiences are already being radically reshaped by technologies that are cutting edge today—but will be mainstream tomorrow. In our work...
Lessons from the Upper Crust: How Domino’s Pizza Disrupted the Delivery Game and Became...
Seven years ago, Domino’s Pizza was in the pits. Tasteless, unexciting food and an all-time low in its share price, the company also ranked last in a 2009 survey of consumer taste preferences. The only silver lining: they scored top marks for delivery and...
Where a Digital-First Customer Experience Fails: When it’s Not Designed…
With Thanksgiving turkey a distant memory – replaced by omnipresent holiday Muzak, elves and the tinsel-laden decorations in nearly every retail storefront – the holiday season is officially in full swing. Competition has always been fierce for the holiday consumer dollar, but the success...
In Praise of Incrementalism: A Customer Experience Lesson
I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast recently, titled “In Praise of Incrementalism.” It struck a chord with me on several different levels, not least of which is the fact that as we’ve observed, many customer experience ‘breakthroughs’ are the result of many tiny...
3 Ways Your Customers Might Hate You (And You May Not Know It).
Most companies at least try to serve customers well, even if some don’t succeed. But even the best-intentioned organizations can create problems for their customers, often without even realizing it. Because no matter how good a job you’re doing at relating to your customers,...
8 customer service strategies you can steal from Amazon
Since its founding 22 years ago, Amazon has reached near mythic status for its superior service and customer experience. Says company founder and CEO Jeff Bezos: “I would define Amazon by our big ideas, which are customer centricity, putting the customer at the center of...
Understanding the ROI of Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping is, understandably, a pretty hot topic. Not just for customer experience professionals, but for all businesses. It’s easy to see why. As a proven framework for helping drive greater customer insights and improving internal...
Customer Journey Mapping Hypecycle
Customer Journey Mapping Many of us are familiar with Gartner’s “hypecycle,” representing the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies. At core, the hypecycle is all about helping people understand what’s real – and what’s hype – when new ideas come along that make...
Six Ways to Drive a Radically Better Customer Experience
At heart, customer experience improvement is all about finding those places in the experience where pain exists, and where customers feel that their expectations aren’t met. The art of finding these places and fixing them is at the heart of the discipline of customer...
Case Study: Delta Airlines – When Digital Customer Experience Goes Bad
There’s little debate as to the critical nature of getting digital customer experience right. There isn’t a customer experience professional, IT leader or shareholder-focused senior executive that doesn’t get it. We all know it’s dramatically changing the ways companies need to deliver on customer...