Nicholas Zeisler
Don’t excuse it…solve it
Customers don’t care about why you can’t get it done; they just want you to get it done. Before you say that that sounds unfair, I’m not suggesting they want you to defy the laws of physics and make the impossible possible (well…usually they...
CX…inside Customer Support?
Where is your CX function located? The more I found the answer to be “within the Customer Support organization,” the more puzzled I became. Isn’t the goal of CX, to a degree at least, to drive support out of business?
Goodhart’s Law and clarity of goals
I’d written previously about Goodhart’s Law, which goes along the lines of, once a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a good measure. Now, I choose the words “metric”, “goal”, and “measure” all deliberately because they mean slightly different things (even if...
Making the best of a bad situation
There’s saturation of Covid-19/coronavirus blogging these days, so I’m mostly avoiding it. Naturally with a caveat like that, this’ll be a post about…Coronavirus of course. But this isn’t about coping or stress or health-in-a-lockdown or how-everything-will-be-different or whatnot. Right as everything was beginning to hit,...
Customer Success is not CX
I’ve written previously about different job postings with CX-sounding titles. One of those jobs is in the family of “Customer Success” positions. If you’re like me, and work in CX, you may have wondered, What, exactly, is, Customer Success? From a CX perspective, it...
Engendering a risk-taking culture
Business philosophers, book writers, keynote speakers, and basically anybody with an opinion on the subject will say that one key to success for an organization is to foster and encourage creativity and curiosity. That’s surely a good start, but where the rubber really meets...
More on CX ROI: Save AND make money
I have written previously a couple times about return on investment for CX. In fact, there are volumes of articles and books written about it. It’s almost as though there’s a sense of having to prove ourselves as CX professionals constantly. Now, in previous...
Lead and lag measures
You know I’m all about metrics and measures. One of the things that made entering the CX profession so attractive to me was that this is a field of study that’s not only based in numbers, it’s starving for people who have an affinity...
Do You Trust Your Customers?
One important facet of efficiency and positive CX is making it easy for Customers to deal with you and navigate your processes. The reason this is important is because corporations are necessarily defensive entities: we create processes to protect our organizations from risk and...
Close the loop on your feedback
You’ve likely heard about the concept and practice of “closing the loop” or a “closed-loop feedback” (CLF) cycle. What is it, and how does it work? There are actually a couple types of closed-loop feedback systems depending on whether you’re talking about internal or external...
Transactional and relationship surveys: They’re different
“Well, it’s because they’re different.” The not-deliberately snarky, yet somewhat oversimplified tautological response was understandably not satisfying for the support business leader who’d asked me why I thought NPS would be different for the different lines of business his organization supported. But in the end,...
“Treat your employees right” is more than just ‘feel-good’ rhetoric
The world of CX is covered in platitudes and clichés. I don’t say that to denigrate it as a field of study and practice (quite the opposite), but rather just to acknowledge it so as to better combat empty words in favor of making actual...
Showing ROI for your CX efforts
On several occasions I've had the opportunity to share an anecdote about a leader who once, in exasperation during a conversation I was having with him about Customer-centricity sort of threw up his hands a bit and exclaimed, “well, Z, we could just give...
The value of certification
I once had a mentor whose cubicle walls were covered in certificates and evidence of completion of training and qualification. People considered him a bit of an egotist and obsessed with certifications. Credentialism is a thing, after all. But I asked him once about...
How are you segmenting?
I once helped a company which made several different products and offered many different services build out a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. Here were two mistakes they were making: Their first mistake was that they defined their Customers by their own products and...
Building a Customer-centric culture
Here is the final post in a series about building a world-class CX program in your organization. I introduced the component parts here, expounded on aligning your CX strategy here, delved into the Voice of the Customer here, and showed how to put it...
Be hungry for negative feedback
The topic of the Voice of the Customer (VoC) has many branches and sub-categories. Just on the topic of surveys alone (which is only a part of VoC), there are tons of thoughts: We discuss things like the formatting of surveys, the proper response...
Do Something! Process Engineering in your CX program
This is part three of a four-part series of posts about the components of a world-class CX function. I began last week with an overview of the structure. Since then I’ve posted on CX strategic alignment and your Voice of the Customer program. We...
Voice of the Customer Basics
This is part two of a series of posts on the four components of a good CX system. I introduced the concept here and my first post, on CX strategic alignment, is here. Soon I’ll write about Process Engineering and wrap up with notes on...
For a CX leader, don’t hire from within your industry
There’s a meme going around LinkedIn these days about a job posting that requires of the ideal candidate experience that’s physically impossible: a history of use of a platform or programming language that’s longer than the language’s existence in the first place. There’s even...