The Traits of Great Customer Experience Leaders | Customer Experience Academy

Here is a link to a great post from The Customer Experience Academy [http://www.cxacademy.org/] on The Traits of Great Customer Experience Leaders | Customer Experience Academy.

Their site is a great resource of insightful reading on Customer Experience globally.

If you are not familiar with their work:

“The Mission

How can we design and deliver better customer experiences?  This is the question that drives the content on this site.   The goal is to better understand how we can identify opportunities in the market space, design concepts that leverage these opportunities and define processes that allow to launch these concepts into markets.”

Great Introduction to Service Design Thinking

This is Service Design Thinking – Book Trailer / Explanimation

Proving your Voice of the Customer Program business case: A conversation starter…

What evidence do I need to “prove” that listening and acting on customer feedback provides a solid ROI?

What examples can I bring to the table to show the measureable value of the program?

How to I turn anecdotal examples of success into the numbers that analytical management processes demand?

These are questions I ask myself regularly [seems like daily…] as I work to build out and develop our Enterprise Feedback Management Program. I have been doing research on best practices in this area for a couple of years now and customer experience professionals seem to have many different ways of proving out their business case. I remember reading a posting of Bruce Temkin on his research at Forrester that laid out great data on what large companies were seeing with a 10% increase in Customer Experience scores. Basically it looked like this: up your Customer Experience score by 10% and you would see a 2.5-3% total lift in revenue. I can do the math. For a $250M company that works out to something like an extra $7M in sales. Nothing to sneeze at for a small/mid-sized company.

If you can sustain and build on your improvements in customer experience, this could easily become an exponential multiplier over the years. Increased customer retention and better word-of-mouth become a force unto themselves. Just think of Zappos’ relationship with its customer base via social media and you get the idea.

So ultimately, what does make the case to place customer experience improvements a priority for your company? According to Bruce Temkin’s latest research, 71% of companies identified “other competing priorities as a significant obstacle to their customer experience efforts” [see his blog at - http://bit.ly/9vj7Ok]. I have seen that first hand in my current role. Balancing limited resources with a long list of needs, wants, and business imperatives means that customer experience professionals must make a strong case for efforts that don’t always neatly tie to the bottom line in the way that a new sales channel does.

So… how do you get customer experience to the front of the list in your workplace? I would love to hear what others are facing in their efforts to make the customer the number one priority.

Company Culture and Change Management

I  just finished reading Zappos CEO Tony Hseih’s new book “Delivering Happiness.” I think it is an interesting story and certainly a lot of good ideas, examples, and suggestions to be found for any customer centric company. I had the chance to visit Zappos last September. Got to spend some time in their contact center talking with some of the supervisors and sitting side-by-side with a phone agent. Actually heard “WOW” from customers on every other call [which honestly kind of freaked me out - but that is another story].

Having working most of my career for very customer service focused companies (previously at Eastern Mountain Sports and Recreational Equipment, Inc.) and now leading the customer experience process in my current role for Sierra Trading Post – I have seen firsthand the benefit of a strong customer-focused culture.  Moving from the retail store side at REI to the HQ /Contact Center side at Sierra has been very eye opening for me on what separation from the customer can cause. Frontline employees be they retail store or contact center staff, almost instinctively know what to do to “do right” by the customer. Honestly, fairness, and a genuine drive to please are easy to find if you empower the staff with the right knowledge and tools. The farther you get from the frontlines – where the staff has little to no actual customer interactions – it becomes harder for folks to conceptualize what the customer actually wants vs. what we assume they want. Bridging that gap is a key part of the role of a customer experience manager or CCO. We have emulated Amazon by having managers and leaders across the company spend a few hours annually sitting in the contact center with phone and email/chat agents to listen have customer conversations as well as just have time to chat with the agents. It was amazing what gems of insight came from those conversations. We have also made a point of putting customer comments in front of frontline staff and managers daily – not just CSAT or NPS scores. Customer comments bring to life the meaning of those numbers. In the end, business is about relationships – between you and your customer, customer to customer, and between employee and employee. Making sure your company culture supports the positive side of those relationships and empowers all employees to “do right by the customer” ensures that customers will keep coming back and tell their friends and family why they should too.

P.S. I have two extra copies of Tony’s book “Delivering Happiness” – free if you want one. Email me and I will send you a copy.

bclark@sierratradingpost.com

Hello world!

Hello indeed. I am late – and very hesitant – entry to the world of blogs, but it is time to jump in with both feet. I have been working as the customer experience manager for Sierra Trading Post since the fall of 2008. We have made some great steps forward over the last 2 years in the shopping experience of Sierra’s customers. I wanted to start sharing my experiences because I believe that many out there in similar professional roles face the same internal and external challenges. To paraphrase some advice I was given at a Right Now Technologies CxP event last June – “take a good idea anywhere you can find one.” I hope that I have something positive to add to the conversation about the impact of making customers the number one priority.