This Is CX Paul Hagen, Mike Manfredo

In this episode, Mike is joined by Mazen Ghalayini, Managing Director of West Monroe's new Product & Experience Lab, to discuss three key trends we see for organizations to shift from surviving to thriving in 2021. The trends focus on converging customer experience with digital elements to position organizations for growth, including:
1) accelerate innovation through agile, adaptive business models,
2) connect digital and analog experiences across the customer journey,
and 3) leverage your customer data to drive your CX strategy.
They share two other predictions for what we will see in the world of CX in 2021.

In this episode, Mike and Paul speak with Gainsight CEO, Nick Mehta, to discuss the merging worlds of customer experience and customer success and how COVID is impacting these functions. Listen to hear:
· Mehta’s origin story
· His point of view on customer success (CS) and how it exists within organizations as a capability and function
· Why organizations need to focus on customer outcomes and measurement best practices
· Common challenges organizations face when considering a CS technology solution
· How CS technology is different from traditional CRM and CXM solutions

In this episode, Mike is joined by guest co-host Mike Rowland, Director and Customer Experience Strategy National Lead for West Monroe to have a conversation about how organizations get back to growing their business again while navigating continuous interruptions created by the COVID pandemic. For this discussion, Mike and Mike are joined by Tiffani Bova, Global Growth Evangelist at Salesforce and author of the book “Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business”. Together they talk about:
- The need to be “employee-first AND customer-centric”,
- How the lines are blurring between B2B and B2C and how B2B organizations should look to B2C for signals and lessons learned,
- The “heavy-dose” of listening required to understand how to meet customers' new needs,
- How innovation and the ability to be nimble is the key to success coming out of the pandemic

PLEASE NOTE: This episode was recorded prior to the COVID-19 pandemic that has hit the US this year, but the key takeaways are more critical then ever for organizations to survive and accelerate out of the current market conditions.

In this episode, Paul and Mike are joined by guest Elli Rader, a director in West Monroe's Product Studio, to discuss what's needed for organizations to rethink what they're doing and become digital companies. Some of these shifts include:
- Focus on an outcomes-based vs. deliverables-based approach
- Build comfort with more agile execution practices
- Learn from actual customers usage of products and services and improve through continual iteration
- Bring cross-functional groups to solve specific customer issues
- Just start - there are no perfect conditions to begin improving and transforming

During this episode, Paul and Mike are once again joined by colleague Cindy Garrett, director in our Customer Experience practice, to discuss best practices for customer service organizations to enable their work-from-home professionals and provide the best employee experience, given the current COVID-driven environment. These best practices include:
1) Using cloud-based technology to easily stand-up remote employees, including telephony and knowledge base platforms
2) Increasing the frequency of the use of their Voice of the Employee programs to best understand employees new needs
3) Building a remote-based set of rituals to drive a sense of community, including the use of video chat for team stand-ups and 1-on-1 meetings
4) Supporting employees emotional needs and shielding the service professionals from being “the bad guys” by setting expectations with customers

In this episode, Paul and Mike are joined by Cindy Garrett, a director in our Customer Experience practice who helps organizations optimize their customer service operations. She discusses what companies should and should not be doing in response to COVID-19 to meet new customer needs by adapting their service operations while also containing costs, including:
- Focusing on customers and employees as people
- Increasing transparency and personalization of communication
- Creatively and rapidly innovating on their service delivery model
- Empowering employees to make decisions to meet their customers’ needs