Getting CX right with CTMA (hosted by Paul Linnell)

Paul Linnell

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Getting CX right with CTMA (hosted by Paul Linnell)

The customer experience podcast series to put the power of success in your hands and help you expose the myths, master the methods, conquer the challenges, and enjoy the benefits of having happy, loyal, and supportive customers – by getting customer experience right!

2022-08-31

How to Lose Customers - without really trying!

You can’t help noticing today that some organisations seem to have “stopped bothering about customers”. Perhaps it’s an indication that some in our “throw-away society” now consider that an existing customer is no more than a passing encounter that can be simply cast aside, and easily replaced with a new one. In the past few weeks I’ve been personally reminded several times, how rare it has become for customers to experience good service, and there’s a danger that some organisations are simply taking advantage of that fact and simply not bothering anymore. Not bothering to return calls, not bothering to provide quotations when they promise to not bothering to provide an after-sales service for their products, not bothering to tell their account holders that their bank branch has closed down not bothering to provide comprehensive operating instructions for their products, or... not even bothering to provide a number to call if they need help Incredibly, all of these have happened to me in the past three weeks, and I know I’m not alone. But what it does reveal, is that there's now an incredible opportunity for organisations to differentiate themselves by simply paying attention to the needs of their customers. What you’ll learn in this episode: In this episode I’m going to tap into our customer experience research again, and give away the secret of how you can make your organisation incredibly successful at what it does, by getting CX right. It’s how a business can out-perform its competition, and how a public service can build incredible public support. But first I want to take a look at what NOT TO DO. I’m going to look at three key things our research confirms about: “How to lose customers – without really trying!” Also mentioned in this episode Establishing a customer experience baseline Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

14 min
2022-07-31

Getting CX right, when everything seems to be going wrong!

At the time of recording this episode, many businesses and public services are finding it a great challenge to satisfy customers. It has particular relevance while many parts of the world are recovering from a global health crisis, and suffering from disrupted international supply chains, travel disorder, economic instability, domestic and geo-political tensions. (Huge kudos to all those involved in travel, hospitality, health, energy, food distribution and retail – and all the other industries suffering from current uncertainty and turmoil). But being ready to “get CX right when everything seems to be going wrong”, is just as important when everything seems to be going well. With Murphy’s Law stating that: “Anything that can go wrong - will go wrong”. and Finagle’s Law stating that when it does go wrong, it’ll happen, at “the worst possible time”, and with so many variables at play when you’re dealing with real live customers, you must always be ready for Murphy’s and Finagle’s Laws to strike. All it takes, for your systems, processes, customer journeys, and desired customer outcomes to be thrown off course, is for a customer or member of staff to take a small step in an unplanned direction, or an unplanned event to occur. And it can be a challenging and expensive task to get things back on track. Even a simple incident can seriously undermine productivity, customer satisfaction, and staff wellbeing. In other words, in “Getting CX Right”, you always need to be ready for everything to go wrong. What you’ll learn in this episode: I’m afraid I can’t help with the prevention of unplanned events, but in this episode I'll be looking at a selection of some of the guiding principles we use in our customer experience transformation programmes to help our clients to be in a much better position to respond to their customers when problems do occur. These guiding principles can be used to underpin your business-as-usual strategy, and also relied upon to support how your organisation responds to unplanned events or a crisis. They can help you to reduce costs, reduce reputational risk, and recover faster from unplanned events or a crisis, whilst improving productivity, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, and improving staff capability and wellbeing. Workshop: “Guiding Principles for getting CX right - even when everything seems to be going wrong!” We’ve created a workshop to help you get a jump-start towards “Getting CX Right, when everything seems to be going wrong” Delivered live and online directly to your organisation, we review a series of key Guiding Principles and discuss how they might be applied to your organisation to help you to continue to satisfy and impress your customers - even when everything seems to be going wrong. Please click here to schedule a call to discuss when your organisation would like to take part in this event: www.CTMAworld.com/murphy Also mentioned in this episode Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

18 min
2022-06-30

The Four Alternate Realities of the Corporate-Customer Universe

I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently about how hard it is for customer experience professionals to get buy-in for investment in customer experience improvement programmes. This, at a time when business, public services and customers are all experiencing so much change and so many challenges. It’s almost as though the huge efforts and sacrifices that so many made during the global health crisis, to keep responding to their customers, has been forgotten. During the global health crisis, customer service functions needed to duck and weave to keep their organisations afloat. In record time, they had to change their operating procedures, adopt new practices and new technologies, and many moving to remote working. There wasn’t time to go through a lengthy business justification and an ROI calculation. It was a case of survival for those who could adapt the fastest and best to do whatever was needed to serve their customers. But now, as the world slowly returns to normal, many organisations have moved on to what they see as a new crisis of change. It’s one driven by a cascade of issues like increased prices, limited finance and resources, and problems of shipping and supply. But there’s a risk, that the customer is now being missed out of the equation and that organisations may have forgotten that their success is, and always has been, driven by their ability to satisfy the needs of their customers. For customer experience professionals to succeed in the current environment, they are having to rebuild the rigour of disciplines and frameworks to describe and justify where customer experience investment is needed to support this, and future crises of change. What you’ll learn in this episode: So, I’d like to turn to one of the diagnostic frameworks we use in our customer experience transformation programmes to help demonstrate the role that positive customer experiences have on an organisation’s success, and the cost of getting things wrong. In this episode we look at the four alternate realities of the corporate-customer universe. By the end of this episode you should have a better insight into the dynamics at play that undermine value, add unnecessary costs, and the steps you need to take to get the information you need, to make the best decisions, to set the right priorities, and take the right actions, for your organisation to succeed in these challenging times. Practice guide We’ve prepared a CTMA Practice Guide “The Four Alternate Realities of the Corporate-Customer Universe” that summarises the key points in this episode. Request your copy here Also mentioned in this episode Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

18 min
2022-05-31

Questions your Leadership Team needs to get Answered - even if they haven’t yet asked

Many big businesses and public services today have adopted an approach to customer feedback and measurement that only produces a proxy performance score that’s hard to translate into dollars, and often fails to identify what went well and where things went wrong with customer experience. You know the scene - someone will ask “What’s the score?” Then someone else will announce that it’s “28”, or “82%”, or “93”. Then everyone checks to see if it’s higher or lower than last month, and then they all move on. No wonder they find it hard to take actions to make sure the good things keep happening and the bad things stop. If “customer experience” and “ways to improve it” isn’t a scheduled leadership and board-room topic in your organisation, it may be because it hasn’t yet been given the vocabulary, metrics or agenda to make it measurable, accountable and actionable. In this episode I want to close that gap by offering a set of baseline questions your leadership team needs to get answered – even if they haven’t yet asked! And indeed, if you are a member of the leadership team, these are the key customer experience questions you should be asking. The answers to these questions will empower your leadership team to give your customer experience improvement programme the energy and support it deserves. Practice guide We’ve prepared a CTMA Practice Guide “Baseline Questions your Leadership Team needs to get Answered” that summarises the key points in this episode. Request your copy here Also mentioned in this episode Establishing your customer experience baseline Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

15 min
2022-04-29

It’s time to stop juggling and start creating value

The world changed in 2020 and it forced businesses, their staff and their customers, to each recalibrate the needs, the value, and the loyalties of their relationships. We’ve been seeing businesses, public services, staff, and customers, all coping with EXTREMES - and many, stepping into unknown territory to go the extra mile to HELP one another. In this episode, I want us to look at THE BIG PICTURE of why customer experience has become so important today, and why - “It’s time to stop juggling, and start creating value” It’s taken a global crisis to re-focus businesses and public services on creating genuine value instead of the old way of simply juggling the needs of the business, against the needs of customers and against the needs of staff - a situation, where in the end – NOBODY wins! It’s time to start creating genuine value with organisations adopting deliberate outward-facing strategies, that provide valued products and services, delivered by engaged and knowledgeable staff, empowered to meet and sometimes exceed the needs, wants and expectations of customers - resulting in mutually assured success. As the world embarks on a protracted journey of recovery, this shift towards value-centred relationships has created a new urgency for organisations to build a more sustainable environment that aligns the needs to the business, with the needs of customers, and the needs of staff, to create more genuine relationships – focused on creating mutual value and driving mutual success. Organisations, that will do well in the future, will be those that have learned from this change and avoid falling back into the ways of the past. In this episode we draw a big picture to represent this change, and consider a five step transition programme to “stop juggling, and start creating value”. Practice guide We’ve prepared a CTMA Practice Guide “Exploring the Keeping Improvement Continuous challenge” that summarises the key points in this episode. Request your copy here Also mentioned in this episode Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

22 min
2022-03-31

The Keeping Improvement Continuous Challenge

The need to keep up the momentum of continuous improvement, and keep pace with the changing needs, wants and expectations of customers, never ends. The drive to improve what customers experience has been around for so long that by now, most organisations have “given-it-a-go” several times! Over the years, these projects and disciplines have been know by many names: “customer service”, “customer satisfaction”, “customer loyalty”, “service quality”, “customer first”, “customer centricity”, “first choice” and “CX” to name but a few! Each time a new customer experience initiative is launched, very often with another new name, there’s typically a mix of: interest, suspicion, enthusiasm, mixed benefits, and eventual disappointment. The cycle seems to take between 18 and 36 months, to wax, and then wane. So what goes wrong? Why don’t they last? Why do they so often, need to be re-started over-and-over-again? What you’ll learn in this episode: In this episode, I want to look at why, once they do start, they often seem to fizzle out and come to a STOP. I’ll be looking at number six, in our series of BIG “BOULDERS” that often block the path to sustainable customer excellence. It’s the one I call the “Keeping Improvement Continuous Challenge”. Practice guide We’ve prepared a CTMA Practice Guide “Exploring the Keeping Improvement Continuous challenge” that summarises the key points in this episode. Request your copy here Also mentioned in this episode Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

17 min
2022-02-28

The People Engagement Challenge

The ultimate success of a customer experience improvement programme, depends on the successful involvement, development and nurturing of leadership, skills, collaboration and the engagement of all the people who work in an organisation, and its suppliers and business partners. So many customer experience improvement programmes, underperform, get stuck, or fail to start, because they are not treated as a significant business transformation, and they didn’t place enough attention on involving everyone in the transformation process. That’s why, when it comes to Getting CX Right, we put so much emphasis, on the importance of conquering the People Engagement challenge. Yet another reason why so many organisations seem to have a history of multiple attempts to launch projects to improve “customer service”, “service quality”, “customer satisfaction”, and “customer experience”, with each ending in eventual frustration and disappointment. What you’ll learn in this episode: In this episode, I look at how to get, and keep, everyone “on board” and actively, willingly and effectively participating in driving the CX mission. I discuss how the prospect of “change” and the “unknown” can be oppressive and damaging and often triggers a defensive response, especially if it’s seen as a potential source of loss. For example, a loss of status, comfort, familiarity, control and perhaps power. Conquering the People Engagement challenge involves intensified communication, consultation, collaboration and co-development in the transformation process. Practice guide We’ve prepared a CTMA Practice Guide “Exploring the People Engagement challenge” that summarises the key points in this episode. Request your copy here Also mentioned in this episode Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

13 min
2022-01-31

The Enterprise Engagement Challenge

It’s a major challenge to transform an organisation, its departmental and hierarchical mindset, its processes and disciplines, its expertise, talent and creativity into a successful, unified and adaptive, Customer-Driven Enterprise. But organisations that don’t treat their customer experience programme as an enterprise-wide transformation, are typically hindered by a lack of strategic purpose, limited cooperation, and an absence of measurable benefits. It’s no wonder that so many organisations seem to have a history of multiple attempts to launch projects to improve “customer service”, “service quality”, “customer satisfaction”, and “customer experience”, with each ending in eventual frustration and disappointment. What you’ll learn in this episode: In this episode, I look at three key elements that should be included in a customer experience improvement programme to help make it become an enterprise-wide, self-sustainable and successful transformation that truly embraces customer excellence, and gets everyone involved with a shared sense of purpose, collaboration and accountability in the process of customer-driven continuous improvement, innovation and value creation. Practice guide We’ve prepared a CTMA Practice Guide “Exploring the Enterprise Engagement challenge” that summarises the key points in this episode. Request your copy here Also mentioned in this episode Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

13 min
2021-12-31

The Setting Priorities and Taking Action Challenge

A staggering finding from one of our benchmarking studies of top 200 companies showed how few organisations effectively use data from customer feedback and surveys to drive improvements and take action. Many seem to have their CX improvement “take action switch” set to a default setting of “INACTION”, instead of a setting of “LET’S TAKE ACTION”. They’re almost stuck in a groove, looking for reasons and excuses for “WHY we CAN’T do anything about it” instead of actively looking for “WHAT CAN we do about it”. The “INACTION” setting often comes about because people think they are far too busy to take action, or they think there’s nothing they can do to improve it. But INACTION invariably means that they waste far more time dealing with the problem over-and-over again, than if they had taken action to address it in the first place. The reoccurrence of the problem will continue to have an impact on staff, customers and the organisation, until eventually some type of action IS taken. What you’ll learn in this episode: In this episode, I want to focus on a key technique you’ll need to call upon, over and over again, as part of your customer experience improvement programme. I’m going to talk about “Strategies for Taking Action” and how to keep INACTION completely “off the table”. We’ve also prepared a CTMA Practice Guide that summarises the “Strategies for Taking Action” that we discuss in this episode. Request your copy here Also mentioned in this episode Leadership training and coaching programmes Benchmarking for better service

14 min
2021-11-22

The Measurement and Accountability Challenge

There seems to be something very wrong with the way many businesses, and public services, measure their customers’ experience. Their customer experience metrics seem to mask potential failure, mystify effective management, absolve accountability, and do nothing to drive actions to improve. There’s no shortage of metrics used to measure customer experience, but decades of measuring it has left the boardroom, and entire businesses, spending more time debating “what NUMBERS to use” to MEASURE it, than “what ACTIONS to take” to IMPROVE it. Many organisations seem to suffer from this same frustration. They say they get regular scores from their measurement programmes, but they’re still left wondering: How those scores really relate to business outcomes? How can they measure the impact it has on the organisation’s success? How can they identify what actions to take to improve it? Who should be responsible for taking those actions? and How can they measure the effectiveness of the actions they do take? So, if you’re investing in voice-of-the-customer and measurement programmes, and not yet seeing many improvements – you are NOT ALONE. What you’ll learn in this episode: In this episode I want to focus on the second of our “Six Key Reasons why Customer Experience Improvement Programmes Underperform, Get Stuck or Fail to Start”. It’s the one I refer to as: “The Measurement and Accountability Challenge” Specifically, it’s about: The way organisations measure their customers’ experiences, What they learn from this, and Where accountability rests for taking action to improve it. I’ll be looking at how so many organisations waste a great deal of time and money doing no more than chasing trends and scores, whereas a few manage to achieve a very positive return on their investment by using good measurement wisely, and by assigning accountability for customer experience to drive continuous improvement, innovation and value creation. We’ve prepared a Practice Guide called: “Exploring the Measurement and Accountability Challenge”. It lists some of the typical symptoms an organisation may be experiencing, the risks it may suffer, and the three action points I discuss in this episode to help you devise a plan to master it. Request your copy here Also mentioned in this episode Leadership training and coaching programmes Establishing a customer experience baseline

20 min
2021-10-27

The Reality-Clarity Challenge

Everyone agrees that it’s nice to give customers a good experience, but there’s often a lack of clarity quantifying WHY it’s important, and then justifying WHY it should be improved. This can be a big enough challenge for business - where there’s an intuitive link between satisfying customers and getting them to come back to buy more, but it can be an even greater challenge in the public sector where customers seldom have a choice of an alternative supplier. What you’ll learn in this episode: In our launch episode, I left you with Practice Guide to use as a simple self-diagnostic tool to help you assess where your organisation’s customer experience improvement programme may be at-risk. It listed from our experience, “Six Key Reasons why Customer Experience Improvement Programmes Underperform, Get Stuck or Fail to Start”. In this episode I want to focus on the first of those six big “boulders” that may be standing in the way of your success. It’s the boulder I refer to as “The Reality-Clarity Challenge” or alternatively - “Why should we bother with customer experience?” “The Reality-Clarity Challenge” is possibly one of the most common, least understood, most plagued-by-myths, and the most important challenge to get right. If an organisation can’t clearly define a business justification for improving customer experiences, it’s programme is very likely to underperform, get stuck or fail to start! This challenge may be standing in the way of your success, so let’s “dig out this boulder”, see what it’s all about, and devise a plan to master it. By the end of this episode, you should be in a really strong position to: Define your organisation’s purpose in terms of the needs it solves for its customers. Define your desired customer outcome behaviours and the benefits they bring to your organisation, and Describe the business justification for providing your customers with a great experience Join me in this episode where I’ll be using examples from the airline industry, food manufacturing and local government, to illustrate how this clarity can be achieved in business and the public sector, and I’ll be sharing three key steps to help you create some customer experience REALITY and CLARITY in your organisation. We’ve prepared a Practice Guide called: “Exploring the Reality-Clarity Challenge”. It lists some of the typical symptoms an organisation may be experiencing, the risks it may suffer, and the three key steps I discuss in this episode to help you devise a plan to master it. Request your copy here Also mentioned in this episode Leadership training and coaching programmes Establishing a customer experience baseline Customer experience research findings and insights

30 min
2021-10-18

Welcome to: “Getting CX Right with CTMA”

In this launch episode I want to let you know what this podcast series is all about, and why it’s so important to you and your organisation now. We’re on a mission: to demystify customer experience and put the power of success in your hands, so you can take control and manage your customers’ experiences, before they ‘take over the wheel’ and manage yours. Customer experience has become one of the most talked-about, but high-risk and reluctant areas of business investment, where everyone seems to agree it’s important, but seldom really agree on why it’s important, why it should be improved, how much should be spent on it, and even, what it should be spent on. In this podcast series, I’m going to tackle some of the big challenges that often block the path to delivering effective customer experiences, and answer some of the big questions standing in the way of progress: Why should we bother to improve customer experience? Why does it seem that customer excellence is so rare and so hard to achieve? What’s the right way to measure customer experience so that: You know the impact it has on your organisation’s success, and... You know what to do to improve it? How do you set priorities for improvement, and calculate the ROI? How can you break through the organisation’s hierarchies and departmental barriers and get everyone involved? And then, how do you keep everyone involved? During the series, I’ll be revisiting some of the tough moments I’ve shared with clients over the past 25 years, in a wide range of industries, from airlines to banks, local government to passenger ferries, pharmaceutical and railway companies, telcos, power companies, government agencies and more… I’ll be sharing some of the strategies and frameworks we’ve developed to help them unblock their path to customer excellence, and some of the techniques we teach during our leadership training and coaching programmes. I’ll also be using some of the findings from our industry-wide customer experience studies and ongoing measurement programmes - to help you put some real numbers into why it’s so important to get customer experience right. We’ve prepared a short CTMA “Practice Guide” to help you assess where your organisation’s customer experience programme may be at risk. It summarises, from our experience, “Six Key Reasons why Customer Experience Improvement Programmes Underperform, Get Stuck or Fail to Start”. Requests a copy here Also mentioned in this episode CTMA’s leadership training, coaching programmes and events CTMA’s customer experience research findings and insights

8 min

12 Episodes

The customer experience podcast series to put the power of success in your hands and help you expose the myths, master the methods, conquer the challenges, and enjoy the benefits of having happy, loyal, and supportive customers – by getting customer experience right!

Creator

Paul Linnell
Years Active

2021 - 2022
Episodes

12
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© CTMA New Zealand Ltd
Show Website

Getting CX right with CTMA (hosted by Paul Linnell)