This post is the result of a collaboration with Luke Soon. Many customer experience transformations stall because leaders can’t show how their efforts will create value. Customer Experience Managers that patiently build a business case that quantifies the value of their work will secure buy-in, build internal momentum, and ultimately obtain
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Today, I'm pleased to share a guest post by Jeanicka Rhey. Navigating the intensely competitive business landscape of today has made it increasingly challenging for businesses to capture and maintain customer attention. That’s why companies nowadays are recognising the utmost significance of customer loyalty for their long-term success. Amidst this
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I’ve always found CX case studies hard to come by. Organizations tend to play their cards close to their chests when it comes to the challenges they’ve faced, how they tackled them, and what the results were. It’s why I jumped at the chance when I was recently offered the
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I’m pleased to share the second post in this series on deriving insights from feedback. This one was also co-written with Dan Heilbron, Head of Customer Experience Advisory Services, Asia-Pacific and Japan at Qualtrics. In our last post, we took you through a great tool to determine if two variables are
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I listened to a wonderful episode of one of my favourite podcasts, Cautionary Tales, this morning. Titled Office Hell: the Demise of the Playful Workspace, it told the story of the highly successful US advertising agency Chiat/Day who in the early 1990s remodelled their office space to do away with offices and cubicles
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It was my great pleasure to co-author this post with Nate Brown, Senior Director of Customer Experience for Arise Virtual Solutions and founder of CX Accelerator. (more…)
Today I'm pleased to share a post that was co-written with Dan Heilbron, Head of Customer Experience Advisory Services, Asia-Pacific and Japan at Qualtrics. A relatively simple way of deriving insight from customer feedback is through correlation analysis. Correlation analysis is a statistical technique that aims to establish whether a pair
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This post first appeared on the ICMI blog in February, 2022. I started my career in my early 20’s working in the residential contact centre of a phone company. I’d just finished a marketing degree and, upon the advice of my father, I entered the business in a customer service capacity.
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The pandemic and the resultant time spent working from home whilst societies were in lockdown has made millions of people re-evaluate the psychological contract they have with their employers. They’ve been considering what they’re receiving in return for their time, skills and effort and deciding it’s not equitable. What
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Complaint management – the effective handling of customer complaints within an organisation – is a hot topic right now. Go to any online newspaper and search for “customer complaint” and you’ll inevitably find stories on banks, airlines, telco’s, and fast food companies to name but a few. Effective complaint management
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Today I'm pleased to share a post by Ashley Wilson. Image courtesy of Unsplash As a business owner, you know that your business provides great value to your customers. However, in a crowded market, new customers won’t always immediately see why they should choose you over your competitor.
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The following post is an interview provided to ProProfs in December, 2019. The promise of a delightful customer support experience comes with the responsibility of actually delivering it. Just getting new software onboard does not mean that you already provide a great experience to your customers. There are various things
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This post first appeared on CentraCX's blog in March, 2021. Contrary to conventional thought, this phrase never originated as a demand from a customer. It came from London department store owner, Harry Selfridge, in 1909 and was intended to convey to customers that they would receive excellent service at his
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“How do you keep the customer front of mind when everybody is working remotely right now?” This was the question that Annette Franz and I tackled on one of our recent calls. Following is a transcript of that call. BM: Let’s start with how you keep the customer
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This post first appeared on CentraCX's blog in April, 2021. Image courtesy of Unsplash. We all know someone who is unconditionally in love with a brand; they simply won’t stop talking about their latest purchases and recommend that others buy from them as well. Well over a decade ago, when
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I'm pleased to share a guest post by Luis Melo CCXP, author of DoctorCX.org. Technology can manifest itself, or come to life, in a myriad of ways. But when it comes to businesses and their customers, technology often refers to software applications i.e. computer programs designed and programmed to
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Image courtesy of Unsplash. A good friend of mine in the CX community is Jeremy Watkin. We met over Twitter about 5 years ago and it's on Twitter where he posts always-interesting CX Questions Of The Day (#CXQOTD if you're on Twitter and want to see some of them).
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Image courtesy of Unsplash Today's post is a collaboration with Annette Franz, CCXP. Starting in mid-March this year, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries around the globe locked down their residents, requiring them to stay at home for all but a handful of “essential” reasons. Physically going
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Image courtesy of Unsplash As a CX manager there comes a time when you have to start implementing changes within your organisation to help you to meet and exceed your customers’ expectations. These are the initiatives that are going to ensure you reach the goals you’ve defined in your CX
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I recently provided an interview which I thought would be of interest to the CXpert readers. 1. Was it one particular customer service experience (good or bad) that inspired your work? If it wasn’t one experience in particular, could you tell us where your CX passion came from? Everybody
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Today I'm proud to share a post by Annette Franz CCXP, an internationally recognised customer experience thought leader, coach, speaker, and author. She recently published her first book, Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business); it’s available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats.
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Today I'm proud to share a post by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP, a CX consultant in Cape Town. 2019 marks nine years since I packed up my apartment in San Francisco and took a giant leap of faith and moved halfway around the world to Cape Town, South Africa. My
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If you’re running a CX program, you need a way of communicating your progress to your superiors and the broader organisation. We are all guilty of not communicating enough on occasion..so what’s required is something that will break down the walls of the CX department allowing everyone in the business
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I recently provided an interview to Jared Cornell of ProProfs Chat where we explored areas like customer-centric strategies, emotional intelligence and the upcoming role of chatbots. The following is a reproduction of the original interview which can be found here. Q1. Customer centricity - a lot of businesses have finally made this
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"Where do you start when developing a customer experience strategy?" I was recently asked this question by a friend of mine who is new to the profession. She had just been promoted at a company that had never had a CX function before and needed to create everything from scratch. The following post
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) It’s not easy being a manager in 2019. Many, many factors are constantly challenging your ability to focus on what’s important. Staff management, compulsory training, fire drills, employee town halls, email… the list goes on. And then you’ve got everything going on outside of the office!
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Today I'm proud to share a post by Jessica Sparkes, a consultant with KAE, a strategic marketing consultancy based in London. We interact with a plethora of brands every day, all of which want to stand out. With increasing customer expectations and only 7%1 of millennials seeing themselves as brand loyalists,
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Today's post has been contributed by UX specialist and web designer, Lexie Lu. One of the top ways businesses differentiate their brand from the competition is through the customer experience (CX). Gaining someone’s business and keeping it isn’t easy in a global marketplace. Make a misstep, and the consumer simply
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Management expert, Ken Blanchard, once said that “feedback is the breakfast of champions” and I agree. Any company interested in improving its CX will always want to understand its customers thoughts and feelings. More and more companies are surveying their customers - which is great! - but the increase in
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Dr Vadi Vojdani is the Practice Principal at Island Dental, a premier practice in Adelaide, South Australia with a focus on comprehensive care, and both general as well as cosmetic dentistry. Vadi has been practising dentistry for 17 years and continues to learn about new ways that she can deliver more
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Six months ago, you were hired into a Customer Experience Management role within a large company. Since being in the role, you’ve done a ton of analysis, discovered where the major customer-affecting problems are within the company and generated some quick wins. You feel like you’re making headway but know
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Tom Caley is a passionate advocate for employee and customer experience. His working life began in retail and contact centres—and after a short detour through the world of graphic design—he progressed into contact centre management and call quality management. Recently, Tom has been running the Voice of the Customer
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I grew up in Adelaide, South Australia. It’s a vibrant, beautiful, well set-out city where the locals will happily remind you of its status as the only capital in Australia settled by free people and not convicts. My mum hosts walking tours around town on which she talks about
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In our previous post, we focused on why we do what we do. It’s great when we get a successful result in what has become our chosen profession but, as in many others, a number of things can often pop up that will stand between us
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Leading a contact centre is a tough job. When you’re not dealing with unexpected call volumes and unexplained system outages, you’re doing your best to motivate and inspire a multitude of different personalities all while trying to hit a variety of targets. Having worked with many different contact centres, I’ve learned a
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A few weeks ago, Canada, the US, some of the Caribbean islands and Liberia celebrated Thanksgiving. Originally celebrated as a day of giving thanks for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year, it is a day when families come together and humbly count their blessings. We
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A few years ago, I completed an MBA at Melbourne Business School (MBS). As a member of their alumni community, I am often invited to events that are held to further graduates’ knowledge and understanding of specific topics. So when I was recently invited to a presentation titled “Operations Efficiency
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This post originally appeared on Glance Networks' blog in July, 2015. I don’t think I’m going out on on too much of a limb when I say that everyone wants to help customers achieve their goals. We want to be customer-centric. It makes us feel good when a
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This post originally appeared on the CXPA Blog on November 10, 2016. Ben Motteram (BM), Ian Golding (IG) and Karl Sharicz (KS) are three Customer Experience (CX) professionals living on three different continents, all members of the Customer Experience Professionals Association, (CXPA) and each possessing the passion and the
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) We are all customers of someone. No one can get through life without buying something. Being a customer and a customer experience consultant provides a rich source of material from which to draw the occasional blog post. And it was an email I received yesterday
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) Today's post has been provided by Karl Sharicz, CCXP, the Founder and Principal of CX Partners and ex-boardmember of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA). On the cover of the November 2016 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR) in pink uppercase lettering is the headline
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) Today’s post is a joint collaboration between myself and Annette Franz. Annette is a recognised customer experience thought leader and board member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. It was a pleasure and an honour to write with her. There are three main components of any good CX strategy:
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In my previous post, I outlined the history of ITIL, the first four of its guiding principles and how they relate to customer experience. This post contains the final five principles and how they link to the management of CX. The first four principles of ITIL are: - Focus on value,
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Chances are you haven’t heard of ITIL before. In the work I do with IT Helpdesks though it’s very well-known and has been widely adopted by a range of organisations seeking to improve their IT service support and delivery. Here’s the thing I’ve found after studying it: I think it’s
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(Image courtesy of Pixabay) Today I’m pleased to share a guest post by Steve DiGioia who is a thought leader in the areas of customer service, leadership, and management. Don’t hard-sell me. I don’t like it and I promise you won’t change my mind. Touting the benefits of
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Today I'm pleased to share a guest post by Annette Franz, CCXP who is consistently named one of the most active influencers in the world of Customer Experience through her blog, CX Journey. (Image courtesy of Pixabay) I'm often asked about the future of customer experience: What does it
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) Those involved in the customer experience profession will no doubt be familiar with the statistics that demonstrate the benefits of customer retention: - It costs 6 times more to attract a new customer than it does to keep an old one. (Source: “Understanding Customers” by
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I originally wrote this post as a guest post for the Customer Service Life blog. Click here to read the original. I walked past this vehicle in the street the other day and it got me to thinking about Detractors – how could it not? The owner of this vehicle was clearly so
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I looked up loyalty in Wikipedia this morning. Their definition is: devotion and faithfulness to a cause, country, group, or person. Note the glaring omission from that list? A brand. Loyalty DOES exist for companies. People tattoo the Harley Davidson logo on themselves, the cult of Apple is legend,
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Today's guest post is by Jeremy Watkin, the Head of Quality at FCR. In it he argues there is one key determinant of customer satisfaction in contact centres that has nothing to do with many of the things Quality Managers traditionally measure. (Image courtesy of Unsplash) You’ve likely heard the
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Last week I flew into Sydney for a conference and while I was waiting at the baggage carousel I noticed that not far away from me was a famous Australian singer. She was dressed down and had with her a couple of members of her entourage and I heard her
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Today's post has been co-authored by Debbie Szumylo, the Manager, Customer Experience at Thomson Reuters Elite. Follow Debbie on Twitter for a constant stream of great Customer Experience and Customer Service articles: @DebbieSzumylo. In 2015, Watermark Consulting revisited their landmark study on the stock performance of Customer Experience Leaders and Laggards
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) Today's post has been written by Scott Bateman, a passionate CX professional who is the General Manager, Business Performance and Growth at Little Real Estate. I have been working up in Brisbane for the past few months (away from my home in Melbourne) and despite
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) “The world needs tickets, it doesn’t need ticketing agencies.” I’m paraphrasing Bill Gates and praying for some sort of disruption in the ticketing business after another terrible experience this morning trying to buy some tickets to an Australian Football League (AFL) match from Ticketek. Today's post
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) My first post for 2016 was written with companies in mind that were starting out on their customer experience journey. I advised them to focus on just one thing: making it easier for their customers to do business with them. Today, I’m writing for those companies that
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It's the beginning of a new year so no doubt you’ve already read a number of posts containing predictions, resolutions and trends for 2016. I know I have (and for what its worth my favourite so far has been the ever-reliable Annette Franz). I’m not going to jump on the
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Today's post was written by Ebenezer Banful, a customer experience practitioner who has worked with many leading brands on culture change and customer experience. Net Promoter has been around now for about 12 years, but in some countries it’s just taking hold, so what will become of NPS in the
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The difference between your latest CX initiative being a flavour of the month buzzword with little effect and an embedded program that has lasting impact is good change management. Change expert John Kotter defines change management as: “an approach to transition individuals, teams, and organizations to a desired future state.”
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“The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” - Peter Drucker Not all profits are good profits. A bad profit is earned at the expense of customer relationships. It is one that leaves customers feeling misled, mistreated, railroaded or coerced and as a result resentful of
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) Why are you in business if you are not focussed on helping customers achieve their goals? What’s the point of any innovation if it doesn’t add value to your customers in some way? Steve Jobs said “you have to start with the customer experience and work
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INTRODUCTION No matter where you are along the Customer Experience journey, you can always be further along; you can always be doing something else to improve your CX. Annette Franz describes it as a never-ending journey and I’ve borrowed heavily from an infinity symbol for my company’s logo for the
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Today's post has been guest written by Ludivine Kasteleyn from iAdvize. (Image courtesy of Pixabay) Be it over the phone, in person or via live chat, your customer service agents are the face of your brand. Their embodiment of your corporate identity will depend on the style of language they
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If your customers are on social media (and 74% of all internet users are) then it makes sense for your company to be there as well. A social media presence provides companies with an opportunity to engage in a conversation with their customers. They can authentically promote themselves while listening
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) Today's post is written by Debbie Szumylo on the importance of viewing your business from the outside in and tending to the finer details. At least three times a week for the last three years, I have visited the drive-thru of a well known coffee chain
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Today's post is by Holly Chessman. She provides four excellent tips to make it easier for customers to deal with you. As more business moves to the online world, it becomes challenging to differentiate yourself from others. One critical way to do so is by making it clear that you
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Today's post is by guest blogger Jon Burg on how technology can be used to capture feedback, improve customer understanding, and ultimately deliver better experiences. (Image courtesy of Unsplash) The modern, always-on dynamic exchange between businesses and their customers opens new communications channels and marketing opportunities for forward-thinking brands. Marketers that
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Today's post has been provided by Nicole Matejic. Nicole is the CEO of global military think tank Info Ops HQ and is known for her crisis communications acumen as the #SocialFirefighter® at Australia's Social Media Monster. Currently providing social media training to NATO; Nicole's first book 'Social Media Rules of Engagement'
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This post originally appeared on Kampyle's blog earlier this month. Businesses today need to be able to analyse and interpret their customer experience in real-time and then adapt their response to effect positive change. The faster they can do it – the more agile the company is – the better
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Today's post has been written by Chris Luxford, a Senior Partner at The ASPIRE! Group and an old friend and colleague. Chris is passionate about CX and loves helping organisations change to create real innovation and differentiation and deliver their strategic goals. Long ago the service a customer received
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) In today’s post, I’m talking to customer experience managers or team leaders who have either just made a change or are about to which will make your organisation more customer centric. First of all, well done! It takes courage to make changes. And as George
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CXpert associate, Sean Heylen, steps in today to deliver his review of a brand new Customer Experience report from the US. A key study has detailed how leading businesses across a number of sectors have made Customer Experience, or “CX”, their core strategic focus, and how it is providing excellent
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I had the good fortune to win a copy of the brand new book Your Customer Rules! through Sharon Melamed and her company Matchboard a few weeks ago (thank you again, Sharon!). Written by Bill Price (Amazon’s first Global VP of Customer Service) and David Jaffe (Consulting Director and founder
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) The news this week that Comcast’s proposed $45bn merger with Time Warner Cable hangs in the balance because of their poor customer service highlights the cost of poor CX. After 10 years of calling customers names like Bitch Dog, A**hole, Whore and Dummy (in some cases
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(Image courtesy of Pixabay) A lot of times when people talk about improving CX they speak in terms of large, sometimes ambiguous goals. Things like listen to customers, improve employee engagement, or understand your customers better. Over the holiday season I had a chance to talk with a friend
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Social media has effectively turned customers into broadcasters. We all know the old statistics that a satisfied customer will tell 2-3 people about their experience with a company while a dissatisfied consumer will tell 8-10. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter where a post or tweet can be shared thousands of
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I read a story this week about a restaurant customer who posted a negative review on Yelp which the owner of the restaurant then responded to (Woman Leaves Bad Online Review, The Owner Finds Out And Responds). It’s a ‘he said, she said’ situation so one can’t make judgements on
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) Why does your company exist? If you answered “to put food on the table”, you need to look deeper. The money you make at work is the result of the reason. What greater benefit do you deliver to society? The answer to this question is formalised
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I’ve written in the past about the benefits of following a CX strategy and Watermark Consulting did some great analysis a couple of years back on how CX Leaders have outperformed CX Laggards on the stock market. So seeing these benefits, more and more businesses are now following a CX
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I truly believe that customer service people are some of the most passionate to be found in any organisation. Their commitment to customer satisfaction can go well beyond the four walls of the company, the hours of business or their job description. I heard a story this week about a
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(Image courtesy of Unsplash) A Customer Experience Manager (CXM) should be gregarious by nature. Your job is to make people feel cared about so naturally you should be outgoing, fond of company, and sociable. Above all you need to be great communicators because to be successful in your role,
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The CEO of Telstra, David Thodey, joined the company in 2001 after 22 years at IBM. He was elevated to the position of CEO in May, 2009 and immediately stated that improving customer service, culture and innovation would be key areas of focus while he was in the role. Its an
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In a previous post I outlined the importance of having engaged staff in your quest to deliver exceptional customer experience. Staff need to be motivated, competent and innovative in the way they approach customer satisfaction. These thoughts were recently echoed by Rob Markey, co-author of The Ultimate Question 2.0, who
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A cornerstone of any customer experience management program is the solicitation and receipt of customer feedback. To understand your customers you must engage with them and give them the opportunity to provide feedback. You then need to show that you listened to them and did something with what they told
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Before you can set about improving your customers’ experience of your company/brand, you need to understand how they interact with you throughout their entire ‘journey’ with you. This spans from before they recognise a need for what you do all the way through to when they finally no longer require
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So you’ve read my last post on the benefits of managing customer experience and decided to pursue a customer-centric strategy yourself. Congratulations! Deciding to put the customer at the centre of everything you do is a big step and already places you ahead of the majority of organisations today. Now
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Why are companies pursuing the goal of creating exceptional customer experiences? After all, CEM costs money. Lots of money. As with most enterprise goals, it certainly isn’t because they altruistically want their customers to have better lives (although I’m sure deep down they do). No, it does of course have
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What better way to start a new blog about Customer Experience (CX) than to define what CX is. Let’s look at a few of the definitions a quick scan of the internet uncovers: Wikipedia “Customer experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods
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