Lynn Hunsaker: Chief Customer Officer Playbook
Customer Journey Insights Increase Marketing Impact
Customer journey insights are vastly under-utilized. Companies that are reaping full value are using customer experience insights to align their whole business to customers' expectations. Thoughtful planning can spell the difference between limited value and transformational value from customer journey mapping. Hootsuite's Vice President...
Marketing’s Role in Employee & Customer Experience Journeys
Is your Marketing department aligned with customer experience and employee experience? The necessity and logic of doing this was highlighted in a recent presentation by Hootsuite's Vice President of Customer, Kirsty Traill. She pointed out that Marketing Communications is unfortunately the typical focus of...
Is Your Customer Engagement Really Customer-Centric?
Customer engagement can yield short-term or long-term rewards or penalties. Are you tracking all of these? Short-term rewards: uptick once or for one period — engagement value exceeded underlying value Long-term rewards: uptick that sticks or increases organically — engagement fit the customer's expectations and...
Customer-Centric Marketing: Align for Growth
Customer-centric marketing has several layers of meaning. The most popular layer means personalization of communications, toward increasing customer lifetime value. Without the other vital layers, though, much potential customer lifetime value will be squandered. First Layer: All Customer Touch-Points. Communications is only one touch-point...
Customer Experience Strength Depends on Being Customer-Centered
Uncentered pottery will eventually crack, just as management uncentered on customers will lead to costly cracks in customer experience. A primer on using a clay pottery wheel explains: "The pot is only as true and as strong as the centering. This is a very...
What is Customer-Centricity DNA?
What is customer-centricity DNA? Can you develop it, or must your business be "born" with it? DNA means "the fundamental and distinctive characteristics or qualities of someone or something, especially when regarded as unchangeable". And centricity means "being situated at the center; a position...
What is Customer Experience Value Creation?
Customer experience value is seldom quantified from the customer's viewpoint. We explore it through customer journey mapping, customer advisory boards, surveys, user experience testing, and so forth. Even so, we still may not be sizing it up from their perspective. Customer experience value creation...
Customer Experience Treasure Trove via Chronic Issues
What more could you wish for than 288% higher lifetime value of your key accounts? That's really the goal of customer experience management, whereas recommendations, high survey scores, repeat purchases, and so forth are all means to this end. It's all about longer, more...
Customer Experience Collaboration Wins Championships
Imagine your company as a sports team, such as volleyball, soccer, hockey or football: do you truly pull together, have one another's backs, share opportunities and show your opponents and fans you're a well-oiled machine? Collaboration like this across your entire company is what's needed...
Customer Experience Motives Drive Organic Growth
Criteria for promotions, raises, hiring, bonuses, budget expansion and recognition reveal your true motives about customer experience. These criteria drive behavior even more than goals and values. These "business rituals" criteria are the truth about your culture. They're the engine behind your growth. While an...
How Customer Experience Policies Empower Growth
If you love someone, set them free. Do your policies set free your customers and your employees? Policies are designed to protect, but sometimes they disintegrate — rather than protect — customer relationships. And customers' mistrust of companies propels regulations, protests and negative word-of-mouth....
Preventing Customer Experience Process Silos: 4 Prerequisites
What does a ballet (or Broadway musical number) and a business have in common? All the players have integral parts choreographed to deliver a satisfying experience. When a player misses a cue or the choreography isn't polished, all heck breaks loose. Such snafus are...
What is Customer Experience Ecosystem?
When J.C. Penney hired the wiz behind Apple retail stores' success as its CEO, there were expectations that "what worked well there will do so here". Pesky promotional discounts (600 per year) were discontinued in favor of coupon-free, discount-absent everyday-value pricing, along with a...
What is Walking the Customer Experience Talk?
What does it really mean to "walk the customer experience talk"? Executive sponsorship is certainly essential, yet there's so much more to it. An ironic byproduct of any customer engagement effort is that it intrinsically sets up expectations — externally and internally. Walking the...
What is Customer Experience Strategy?
Is "customer experience strategy" like the Wheel of Fortune spinner? The diversity of what it is in practice among companies today kind of feels that way. Ask 10 companies what their customer experience strategy is and you'll likely get 10 very different combinations of...
Customer-Centered Business: 10 Keys to Organic Growth
What is your business centered on? Investors, competition, innovation, or customers? The rule of the game is to follow the money. Sure, it comes from all these motives, but it springs from customers buying your offerings. When customers quit buying, all the rest becomes...
How to Solve Customer Experience Silos
Customer experience silos are kryptonite, weakening your super-friendly staff, touch-points and designs. Smooth customer experiences require silo-solving across the customer journey. If your company wants to become a customer experience super-power, standing out in your industry and reaping those financial advantages, silo-solving must be...
Customer Experience Handoff Silos are the Heart of Success
One of the most profound discoveries from customer experience journey mapping is interdependencies across data, systems, channels, processes and people. Customers experience our companies horizontally. Accordingly, smooth handoffs between departments can make all the difference in poor versus great customer experience. Handoffs are outcomes of...
8 Customer Experience Metric Silos Mask Momentum
Metrics selection can be the most pivotal decision you make in your customer experience management strategy. That's because what gets measured gets managed. There's a science to it. The trick to successful metrics selection is to connect the dots between cause-and-effect. That's why customer...
Customer Experience Goal Silos Are Gotchas
Got it made with loyalty programs, voice-of-the-customer, first contact resolution, and CRM (customer relationship management)? Get a close look at the cost-benefit ratio, and an even closer look at the portion of those costs incurred to deal with your company's and partners' mis-steps that...