Decoding the Customer

Julia Ahlfeldt, Certified Customer Experience Professional
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Interviews and perspectives from global customer experience experts

  1. 03.09.2020

    Rebroadcast of Moments of Truth: CX Mini Masterclass – E46

    This CX Mini Masterclass explains customer “Moments of Truth”. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, shares where the concept came from, and how you can use your understanding of Moments of Truth to improve customer journeys and foster loyalty. These moments can make or break a customer journey, so if you’ve heard this term used as a buzzword, but want to learn how to translate jargon into business results, then this episode is for you. Enjoy the best of the archive The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I’ve curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including VOC research and customer insight) or get in touch via email.

    9 мин.

  2. 20.08.2020

    Rebroadcast of Measuring customer experience through leading and lagging indicators: CX Mini Masterclass – E32

    This CX Mini Masterclass explains the role of leading and lagging indicators in measuring customer experience. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, shares examples for how you can build a balanced view of customer experience with the right mix of CX metrics and measures. If you are wondering how to move beyond a one-metric view of CX, this episode is for you. Enjoy the best of the archive The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I’ve curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. And if you are looking to super-charge your CX skills and continue learning, be sure to check out CX University. They have a great array of CXPA accredited training resources available on a flexible monthly subscription plan. Use the code PODCAST10 to get 10% off your first month’s subscription and support this podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX measurement, insights, leadership alignment and CX change implementation) or get in touch via email.

    9 мин.

  3. 06.08.2020

    Rebroadcast of Calculating Customer Lifetime Value: CX Mini Masterclass – E22

    This CX Mini Masterclass covers the concept of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), how to calculate this, and why it’s an important metric for the CX profession. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, will help you understand how to leverage CLV to demonstrate the ROI of customer experience and foster buy-in for customer-centric strategy. Enjoy the best of the archive The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I’ve curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, leadership alignment and CX business case assessments) or get in touch via email.

    7 мин.

  4. 25.06.2020

    Conversation with the godmother of customer experience: interview with Jeanne Bliss – E90

    Customer experience expert and industry pioneer, Jeanne Bliss, shares insights about the origins of the CX industry as well as where it’s going. Jeanne, also known as the godmother of customer experience, provides listeners with a unique window into her career path from becoming one of the first Chief Customer Officers, to founding the CXPA and becoming a transformative force in field of CX. Jeanne and show host, Julia, discuss the enduring challenges facing all CX professionals and what’s next on the horizon for customer experience in the years to come. If you’re looking for some insight, inspiration and guidance from one of the most prominent and respected voices in customer experience, then this episode is for you. Meet the godmother of customer experience Jeanne Bliss has always been an important figure in the CX industry. She is truly a pioneer in this field and has spent 35 years transforming companies, where she’s led organizations to earn 98% customer loyalty rates. Jeanne Bliss helps companies and people become the best version of themselves. She guides them to define, build and live the behaviors and actions that will fuse customers to them, and ultimately create deep and memorable relationships. Creating these deeper bonds has been Jeanne’s singular mission for over 35 years. First, as the inaugural Chief Customer Officer at Lands’ End, Coldwell Banker, Allstate and Microsoft Corporations. Then since 2002, guiding over 20,000 leaders around the world to understand that improving lives should be their most important strategic vision. She has shepherded a whole new breed of leader into the marketplace prepared to lead this change through her pioneering years as a practitioner, experience coaching global leaders, her four game-changing books, and as co-founder of the Customer Experience Professional’s association. If the proof is in the pudding, then there is certainly no doubt why Jeanne is one of the most prominent and respected thought leaders in the world of customer experience.   Jeanne Bliss, CCXP, CEO of Customerbliss If you’d like to learn more about Jeanne’s work, be sure to follow her on LinkedIn, where she often shares insights about customer experience and more. Her blog is second to none as a resource for aspiring CX professionals. Her books provide foundational knowledge about customer experience, and her podcast, The Human Duct Tape Show, is well worth a listen! From shoes to the C-suite Jeanne’s father set the tone for her career in customer experience. As the owner of a local she store, he became not just a part of the community, but a part of people’s lives. Putting shoes on children’s feet and welcoming families into his store as though they were part of his family. When he retired, there was a line of customers 3 blocks long, waiting to thank him and wish him well. Customer experience was in Jeanne’s bones and it encouraged her to ask questions about how brands can create those special experiences that fuse customers to them. What’s your three blocks long? How will you be remembered? And that’s really so much of what’s missing for me as we get into customer experience. – Jeanne Bliss After acquiring degrees in marketing and apparel design, and working in the retail industry for several years, Jeanne’s role at Lands’ End really catapulted her into her career in customer experience. At Lands’ End she worked closely with the CEO Gary Comber, whose enthusiastic support for focusing on the customer enabled Jeanne to learn, experiment and implement concepts that would become the core foundation of her “CX kit bag”. Jeanne went on to lead customer experience efforts at organizations across a diverse array of industries. Each one presented unique challenges and opportunities, but she identified her gift for being the “glue” that unites teams around an end state.  Tips for aspiring CX professionals Jeanne recommends that those who aspire to a CX leadership role first focus on how and where they can drive change at the ground level. She encourages CXers to get involved with operations, get their fingernails dirty and identify their unique gifts for improving customer’s lives. She also highlights that it’s important to elevate the work and connect CX efforts to business outcomes.  If you have a passion, it’s fantastic. But you need to be able to package the passion into simplicity, pragmatism and an understanding for leaders on why it’s important to do this work. – Jeanne Bliss What underpins this work Jeanne highlights 3 things have have underpinned the longevity and success of CX or a heightened focus on customer experience. First, Jeanne points to “customer math”, or the acceptance by business leaders of customers as assets. This was accelerated during the economic downturns of the early and late ’00s, and it encouraged senior stakeholders to rethink their prioritization of customer experience given the benefit to the bottom line.  The rise of social media has also impacted the focus on CX, by shifting the megaphone from companies (or their advertising agencies) to consumers. This has forced organizations to establish clarity around who they are and then fortify the reliability of their operating model to deliver. When customers talk on social media, they really say three things: Did you do what you said you were going to do? Did you improve my life? And how did you make me feel? – Jeanne Bliss Finally, the godmother of customer experience says leaders are starting to understand that business silos don’t unite themselves. This realization has given rise to the role of the Chief Customer Officer, but Jeanne warns that CX teams cannot become another silo, or it will defeat the purpose. She fears what could happen if CX professionals become too focused on the mechanics of CX and lose sight of the meaning of their work. Covid pushes businesses in the right direction  In her parting words, Jeanne suggests that a missing link has been getting leaders to align their own behavior and messaging to the vision of what they want their company’s brand to be. Covid has force fed the business world with an extra dose of humanity. CEOs are having frank conversations with employees and customers, thinking outside of the box and acting quickly to help improve the lives of their customers. These adaptations have become essential to brand survival, and the godmother of customer experience hopes these attributes will endure beyond the crisis to help elevate and solidify the work.  Want to keep learning about CX? Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business define customer experience strategy that delivers results, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email. To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here.

    33 мин.

  5. 18.06.2020

    Customer impact scorecard: CX Mini Masterclass – E89

    This CX Mini Masterclass explains a simple yet effective CX tool for driving customer-centric change and ensuring that business decisions support an organization’s overall CX goals. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, explains the customer impact scorecard, how to build one and then how to use it to ensure that business changes work for – not against – CX. Julia also shares some news about a planned hiatus for the show. If you’re looking for a practical approach to help cross functional teams stay the course towards shared customer experience goals, then this episode is for you. A simple tool for an important job We’ve all seen it happen. Someone in IT, sales or operations makes a decision about a new product or a process with the best intentions, but the resulting change has a negative impact customer experience. When these things happen, it’s rarely out of malice. After all, no one (or at least we hope no one) goes around intentionally making customer experiences worse. More often than not, the team that implemented the change just wasn’t thinking about the downstream impact on customer experience. This is bound to happen, because honestly, most businesses are geared to solve business problems. The customer may be the guiding light for CX departments and some executives, but historically that hasn’t been true for all teams. Additionally, the more removed a team is from the customer, the more difficult it can be to draw a connection between day to day responsibilities and customer outcomes. In this scenario, a little assistance and structure are in order. And a customer impact scorecard is a great tool to for CX leaders to have in their toolbox. A customer impact scorecard is a rating or evaluation tool that prompts the user to assess how something – be that a change to people, processes or technology – will eventually turn into customer outcomes and if these outcomes are desirable, neutral or adverse. The idea being that a scorecard becomes a quick and easy check and balance to avoid decisions which might inadvertently damage customer experience. It encourages stakeholders to pause and make an honest assessment of the impact on customer experience by moving the thinking from inside out to outside in. Some organizations already have risk assessment scorecards in place for any business change or major investment, so why can’t the same assessment be done for customer experience? Surely customer experience is just as important to the long-term viability of any business. (And if you’d like to know a little bit more about helping your organization balance business risk and CX, then be sure to check out episode 36.) Building and using your customer impact scorecard Identify which attributes to evaluate – These could relate to your customer promise, CX principles or what is known to be important to the customer. It’s helpful to identify 5-10 points to evaluate and phrase them as thought-starter questions. E.g. Will this change impact how easy it is for customers to do business with us? Set your rating scale – The ratings for each attribute should range from positive to negative. A 3 or 5 point scoring scale usually works nicely. Regardless of which size scale is used, a negative impact should yield a negative score, a neutral impact should yield a score of zero, and a positive impact should yield a positive score. When the overall evaluation points for the business change are tallied, a positive rating indicates a change with a net positive impact on CX, while a net negative score should raise red flags about something that would potentially have an adverse effect on CX. Identify the right forum for implementation – Pinpoint the process for vetting or prioritizing new initiatives and see if a customer impact scorecard can be included in that process. Project management, finance and legal are some of the typical gatekeepers for business change. It’s important to keep the customer impact scorecard simple and straightforward. The goal is to guide cross functional leaders to consider the customer before they make a business decision, but to avoid creating complex red tape that stakeholders end up resenting. News about the podcast As shared with listeners at the start of the episode, I’ll be taking a hiatus from publishing new CX Mini Masterclasses for the next few months. The show will be back later in 2020. Keep an eye out for periodic re-broadcasts of favorites from the archive and possible new content from guest contributors. Transcript Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript. Click to expand full transcript Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome. If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional. And, an added note to those who are already CCXPs, the Customer Experience Professionals Association is now recognizing CX Podcasts listening towards certification renewal credits. So, be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to so that you can submit this towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 89, the third episode of June 2020. And my last CX Mini Masterclass episode, before I take a little hiatus to go on maternity leave. Yes, my wonderful listeners, big changes are afoot, but I will be back. I have a very special interview episode with one of my CX heroes next week, so I’m very excited about that. After that episode, I’ll be taking a couple of months off from my weekly schedule of new episodes, but we’ll try to periodically repost a few past favorites from the archive and potentially some fresh content from a few of the show’s guest expert contributors before I’m back in the saddle later this year. I wanted to take us into this hiatus on a high note, so I’ve been saving one of my favorite topics for this episode. Today, I’m going to share a simple, humble tool that I’ve found to be incredibly effective for driving customer-centric change, and that’s the Customer Impact Scorecard. At the time of recording this episode, the world is grappling with a global health crisis. Business operations are changing in real time, and there has never been a more important moment to keep tabs on how business decisions impact customer experience. So I’m going to share a simple tool that will help any team in your organization evaluate how changes to people, processes, or technology might impact customer experience. If you are looking for a practical approach to help cross-functional teams stay the course towards shared customer experience goals, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I’ve seen this happen many times over. Someone in IT, sales or operations makes a decision about a new product or a process with the best intentions, but the result has a negative impact on customer experience. Maybe it was a change to a policy that resulted in extra steps on the part of the customer, or a new platform that made it more difficult for teams to provide service support. Whatever the example, these things happen, and I find it’s rarely out of malice. After all, no one, or at least I hope no one, goes around intentionally making customer experiences worse. More often than not, the issue is that the team that implemented the change just wasn’t thinking about the downstream impact on customer experience. Because let’s be honest, the customer may be the guiding light for CX teams and some executives, but historically, that hasn’t been true for all teams. Also, the more removed an employee or a department is from the customer, the more difficult it can be to draw the connection between someone’s day-to-day responsibilities and customer outcomes. In this scenario, a little assistance and structure are in order, and this is where the Customer Impact Scorecard can be your best friend. A Customer Impact Scorecard is a rating or evaluation tool that prompts the user to assess something, be that a change to people, processes, or technology, that will eventually turn into customer outcomes, and if these outcomes are desirable, neutral, or adverse. The idea being that a scorecard becomes a quick and easy check and balance that helps prevent decisions which might inadvertently damage customer experience, or at least it pushes the stakeholders making these decisions to have an honest assessment of the impact on customer experience by moving the thinking from inside out to outside in. I’ve seen many organizations implement risk assessment scorecards for major business changes or investment spending, so why can’t the same assessment steps be done with customer experience in mind? Surely, customer experience is just as important to the long-term viability of any business. And if you’d like t

    9 мин.

  6. 11.06.2020

    How to build a world class CX dashboard: CX Mini Masterclass – E88

    This CX Mini Masterclass explores best practices for building a CX dashboard, a critically important tool for any CX program. Special guest and customer experience expert, Ben Motteram takes listeners through the benefits and uses of a CX dashboard, he provides insights on how to build one with the end user in mind,  and he also speaks about how best to distribute your dashboard once it’s up and running. If you’re looking for a one stop shop for expert guidance on why and how you should build a CX dashboard, then this episode is for you. Insights from a special guest Ben Motteram is the Founder and Principal of Melbourne-based CX consulting company, CXpert. With 25+ years of experience working with some of Australia’s most recognizable brands, he has helped many organisations to become more human in the way they deal with customers and employees. Ben assists clients in areas such as CX strategy, Voice of the Customer, and employee engagement. In December 2018, Ben was the only Australian named on a list of global thought leaders to follow on Twitter and his blog has been independently recognized for its insight on all things CX. Ben Motteram This episode was Ben’s third guest appearance on the show. If you missed his previous Mini Masterclass episodes on CX Strategy and the Foundations of a Great CX Program, be sure to listen to those. Best practices for building a CX Dashboard Check out Ben’s tips for creating a CX Dashboard in this article he wrote for CX Accelerator. It covers many of the same insights shared with listeners in this episode. I’d encourage you to explore the other insights and thought leadership on CX Accelerator, as well as Ben’s blog. Both resources are packed with all sorts of other great gems and CX thought leadership.  Episode Transcript This transcript is AI-generated and may contain minor errors. For the best experience, please listen to the audio. Click to expand full transcript Welcome to Decoding the customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome. If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills and performance to stand out as a CX professional. And an added note to those who are already CCXPs, the customer Experience Professionals Association is now recognizing CX Podcast Listing towards certification renewal credits. So be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to, so that you can submit this towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 88, the second episode for the month of June 2020. And today, I’m featuring insights from a returning guest contributor, global thought leader, and Australian customer experience expert, Ben Motteram. Ben is the founder and principal of Melbourne-based CX consulting company, CXpert. With over 25 years of experience working with some of Australia’s most recognizable brands, he’s helped many organizations become more human in the way they deal with customers and employees. His previous guest appearances on episodes 29 and 60 covered CX strategy and the foundations of a CX program. Today, Ben shares his insight on building and utilizing a great customer experience dashboard. It was a topic request from me as Ben has done some excellent work in this space, and it builds nicely on the insights that he shared in episodes 29 and 60. A dashboard, after all, is about tracking and monitoring the progress of your CX strategy, and it’s a critically important tool for any CX program. In this episode, Ben discusses the benefits and uses of a CX dashboard. He provides insights on how to build this with the end user in mind, including the types of metrics, the length, and the format. He also speaks about how to best distribute your dashboard once it’s up and running. If you’re looking for a one-stop shop for expert guidance on why and how you should build a dashboard, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Ben regularly shares his thoughts on all things related to customer experience, customer service, and employee engagement via his blog and on social media. So I’ll also include links to his blog and information about how to get in touch with Ben. Enjoy the show. Thank you, Julia. It’s an honor to be back again today. Ever since you gave me today’s topic, I’ve been looking forward to talking about it. So let’s get into it. So if you’re running a CX program, you need a way of communicating your progress to your superiors and the broader organization. All of us are guilty of not communicating enough sometimes. So what’s required is something that will break down the walls of the CX department allowing everyone in the business to see how the organization is performing relative to customer expectations and the targets that the company has set for itself. This is both as a whole and within specific departments responsible for different parts of the customer journey. The instrument that many companies use to do this is a CX dashboard and these dashboards have many benefits. Number one, they’re an easy to understand report card on your organization’s CX that enables readers to look at a variety of sources of information to gain a holistic understanding of how the company is performing. Number two, they facilitate organizational responsiveness because red flags or declining trends over time are easily picked out. Number three, they raise awareness about customer experience and engage employees in what you’re trying to achieve in the CX department by connecting achievement of CX outcomes to business success. And finally, four, they help you as a CX manager, focus on the metrics that are most important. If you’re creating your company’s first CX dashboard, the first question you’re probably going to ask yourself is, okay, so what needs to be on it? But I actually think you should take a step back from there and ask yourself who will be reading it. The information that goes on to your CX dashboard is going to be determined by who’s going to be consuming that information. Now, your executives are going to want headlines. They’re going to want your customer satisfaction or what some people call perception metrics, such as NPS, customer satisfaction, CSAT or customer effort score. And these are normally shown overall and by journey stage. Your execs are also going to want to see key operational or what some people call descriptive metrics. And these are going to differ for every company. But I’ll try and help you identify which ones you need to be tracking in a couple of minutes. Finally, they’re also going to want to see key outcome metrics which measure what action customers took as a result of their perceptions. These are the metrics that tie customer experience to organizational goals and can include things like sales figures, the number of complaints received, the number of positive online reviews that have been left, the number of demos requested if you own a car dealership, the number of test drives that have been requested. So yeah, these are the actions that customers took. So that’s your executives. Other recipients of your dashboard may want the information broken down in more detail, for example, by customer journey stage, product type or customer segment, or they may want more than the headline metrics. They may, for example, be the head of a department that is responsible for a specific part of the customer journey who wants to dive deeper in that particular area. Now how do you select which operational metrics you display on your dashboard? just as not every touch point is equal on a customer journey map, some touch points, most moments of truth, have a higher impact on customer perceptions than others. Some metrics will measure things that have a higher impact on customer satisfaction than others. The key here is to understand the drivers of customer satisfaction in each of your journey stages. Now how you gain that understanding involves regression analysis on customer feedback data, which is well outside the realm of what we’re talking about today. So I’m going to leave that for another day. The point I’m trying to make here is show the top one or two operational metrics that have the highest influence on customer satisfaction in each of your journey stages. When I was managing the CX Program for a large nationwide telecommunications company, I created a dashboard which had all of the headline metrics on the first page, which satisfied executives and 90% of the readers of the dashboard. But I also had an additional four pages of data to satisfy the needs of the other 10% who wanted more granular detail. And I also added some commentary on the front page of the dashboard to provide context to the data both overall and by journey stage. So there you go, guy

    10 мин.

  7. 04.06.2020

    Measuring digital customer experience: CX Mini Masterclass – E87

    This CX Mini Masterclass explains the importance of measuring digital customer experience and some of the most popular metrics for doing this. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, provides an overview of what metrics and measures are typically captured at various digital touchpoints, ideas on how to use these to understand the journey, and tips on where you might be able to find this data within your organization. If you’re looking for some ideas about how to leverage digital experience metrics and measures to better understand the holistic customer journey, then this episode is for you. The importance of measuring digital customer experience So many experiences now happen in the digital realm. Whether that’s through a website, an app or via social media, most customer journeys have become at least somewhat digitized. And it’s probably safe to say this is becoming an even bigger trend with each passing year. Within that context, CX professionals need to understand how to integrate an understanding of experiences through digital touchpoints into the larger understanding of the overall customer journey. These metrics for digital experiences aren’t new, most of them have been around for a while, often used by digital operations, marketing or user experience teams, but it’s high time that CX professionals harness them as well. There are a LOT digital experience metrics. It would be impossible to cover all of them in a Mini Masterclass. The following includes a curated selection from different digital touchpoints based on both their prevalence and usefulness in the CX context.  Digital footfall Footfall and conversion can be difficult to track for traditional in-person experiences. That’s definitely not the case online. From a web context, the key customer high level engagement measures would be page views, session duration and bounce rate. A bounce is any visitor who lands on a page, but doesn’t take any action. (Note: it’s not always a bad thing). Websites and apps can also track detailed behavior flows, or how customers navigate the different pages or actions. These measures are basically the digital equivalent of footfall and conversion, but the context of digital enables CX professionals to get so much more data about how consumers act and what interests them. Often this data can be tracked back to specific users as a way of measuring digital customer experiences over time. Because many of these measures relate back to the sales funnel, marketing teams are a helpful first port of call if you are looking for website experience data in your organization. Email is still relevant CX professionals should also stay abreast of email marketing metrics, because this touchpoint still plays an important role in customer experience, especially if one is trying to stitch together an entire journey including inbound and outbound communication.  Some of the most popular measures include, open rate, which indicates if people are reading the message, unsubscribe rate, sharing or forwarding rate and the click through rate. This last measure highlights if customers are engaging with any calls-to-action within the message. Some marketing teams put together timelines of customer engagement across email, text, call and other notifications, which can be very helpful for building a comprehensive customer journey. Of these, the digital touchpoints should yield the most readily available data about engagement. Remember that just because someone received a communication doesn’t always mean they engage with it, but it’s helpful for CX professionals to understand these points of interaction so they can be brought into the bigger picture. Social media Email can feel old school these days, but it’s undeniable that social media is on the rise as a part of many customer’s digital journeys. The great news is that social media has opened up a whole new world opportunities for measuring digital customer experience and understanding new dimensions of the journey. It can be helpful to understand digital social media metrics or measures through two different lenses, a push and a pull. Marketing teams love to measure success of their curated content through things like Social Share of Voice, or mentions compared to competitors, the engagement rate relative to total followers, and the applaud rate, which tracks approval actions (likes, favorites and whatnot). These provide a glimpse into customer engagement with an organization’s social media presence and outbound messaging. Social media “push” metrics help CX teams understand possible points of interaction with a brand or where consumers might be getting information about products and services. Increasingly, social media is also being used to provide service support and even to sell to customers. Standard sales and service metrics or measures like conversion rate, response time, resolution time and first contact resolution can all apply to social media touchpoints, as well as email, messenger or wherever sales and support are offered. Advanced text analytics also provide organizations with the ability to evaluate sentiment and conduct topic analysis to understand trends in the nature of engagement through social media and other channels. Usability testing Usability testing metrics are especially important if CX professionals are hoping to understand an app-based experience or a web portal where a customer might go to complete one of their jobs to be done, like paying their cell phone bill or checking a credit card statement. These are great for understanding the digital customer journey after the point of conversion. Usability metrics are all based on a user’s experience completing a specific task, so they are journey-specific and you’ll need to identify what that task is first. Metrics include task completion rate, which is just what it sounds like. The error rate, or how many times a customer made an error or had to repeat an action. Average time to complete a task is also often gathered. Generally speaking, customers want things to be quick, easy and seamless. So CX teams will want to help their organizations work towards digital experiences that enable quick task completion, with minimal errors and low abandon rates. Digital operations teams should be able to pull samples of this information if they don’t already have some of it on hand.    Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email.

    11 мин.

  8. 28.05.2020

    3 ways to foster empathy among teams: CX Mini Masterclass – E86

    This CX Mini Masterclass explains the importance of establishing empathy for the customer among all employees and 3 practical ways CX professionals can help teams do this. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, covers 3 tried-and-true empathy building activities that you can use with nearly any team from service reps to the c-suite. If you’re looking for ideas and inspiration on how to help team members at all levels foster empathy and get in touch with the needs of the customer, then this episode is for you. Establish a culture of empathy There is a lot of focus on building empathy with customer-facing teams. This makes sense, but we can’t forget that customer-centric culture is about rallying an entire organization around the customer, not just a few select teams. It’s great if employees on the front lines can connect with others, remain in touch with the context of customers’ lives and demonstrate this through their actions. But to maximize the impact of customer-centric culture, those team members who are defining experiences, building platforms or making strategic decisions also need to be able to relate to the customer. CX professionals need to have a multi-pronged approach to foster empathy. The following 3 activities have been curated with a wide ranging audience in mind. Empathy is a difficult thing to “teach”, so these activities are designed to gently guide people to the “ah-ha” moment where they see this for themselves. Once team members connect with what it means to feel empathy towards another, the next step is to help them apply this to the context of customers and then flex and train this muscle so they know how to use it. Activity #1: time traveler This activity involves explaining a modern object, like a TV, car or cell phone to someone who lived 200 years ago (or 500 years ago or who comes from a different planet). The group should be divided into teams of two. One team member role plays the modern day person describing the object, while the other person asks clarifying questions based on the perspective of someone who lived 200 years ago. After a few minutes, ask them to swap roles and repeat the conversation about a different object. To wrap up, facilitate a brief group discussion, asking the participants how it felt to put themselves in the shoes of someone who lived so long ago, as well as what it was like trying to explain a normal everyday object to a person who has a completely different context for the world. The idea is to get participants thinking about context of others and what it means to relate to someone with a different perspective on life. During your debrief discussion, connect the activity back to your customer base by asking participants what disconnects might exist between their frame of reference and that of your typical customer. This activity is quick and easy. It’s a fun icebreaker and can sow the seeds that foster empathy or reinforce the right empathetic mindset. Activity #2: persona scenarios This activity requires a little bit of preparation, but it’s totally worth it. It’s another great activity for a broad group of participants, and works well for a team offsite or another setting where facilitators have the luxury of time. To prepare, establish several customer personas (if you’re unsure about what customer personas are, be sure to check out episode 40). Next, identify a typical job to be done or customer journey for each persona and a possible hurdle the customer might face. To facilitate the activity, assemble your group of participants and divide them into teams of 4-5 people. Provide each team with an example persona and scenario. Ask one person within each team to assume the role of the persona. This team member should introduce themselves as the persona and explain their customer journey, as well as the scenario information that you’ve provided. Their team has the opportunity to ask questions and get to know the fictitious example customer before working on a course of action to address the issue they are facing along the customer journey. Depending on the group, I’d suggest giving them anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to get to know their team persona and discuss an intervention. To conclude the activity, each team can present their persona and suggested next steps to the large group. During the debrief, be sure to probe with questions about how the team understood and related to the customer’s wants, needs, feelings and expectations, as well as how this influenced their course of action. This activity should not only foster empathy, but also get people thinking about how they can translate an empathetic understanding of the customer to improvements in the customer journey. When preparing for this, remember that the facilitator should have as many personas and corresponding journey challenges as there are teams. Pro tip: marketing departments sometimes have personas on hand so that facilitators don’t need to build these from scratch. Activity #3: everyone has a backstory This activity is truly the Goldie Locks of empathy building exercises. It works with nearly any audience, can be facilitated as a quick ice breaker or a longer activity with the inclusion of an in-depth discussion. When all participants are present, as them to write down the most ridiculous or outlandish customer request they’ve ever heard. It could be something they’ve heard from one of their customers or something they’ve observed in their own personal experience as a consumer. After they’ve written down their outlandish customer request on a piece of paper, they should pass this to the person on their right, who now needs to come up with a backstory that justifies the seemingly strange request. The reasoning and backstory can be as outlandish as the customer request itself. It doesn’t matter. The point is to get people thinking about what might have motivated an otherwise bizarre-sounding customer request and then relating to the customer’s situation. The act of understanding another can foster empathy and trigger a totally different emotional response to a situation. To close out this activity ask participants to turn to the person who gave them the customer request scenario and explain the backstory they came up with. If you have time, select a few participants to share their examples and discuss as a group. Fostering empathy takes long term commitment Creating a culture of empathy won’t happen overnight. These activities won’t magically flip the switch on team culture and mindset, but if they become part of a CX professional’s arsenal of employee engagement efforts, they will start to make an impact over time. The key is to be consistent and to help create those “ah-ha” moments, along with subtle reinforcement. Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email.

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Interviews and perspectives from global customer experience experts

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  • Автор
    Julia Ahlfeldt, Certified Customer Experience Professional
  • Годы выхода
    2017 - 2020
  • Выпуски
    50
  • Ограничения
    Без ненормативной лексики
  • Авторские права
    © 2017 Julia Ahlfeldt Podcasting
  • Сайт подкаста
    Decoding the Customer