Crack the Customer Code

To create a great customer experience, we need to peel back the layers of the organization and look at what happens far behind customer-facing parts of the journey. How does offstage customer experience affect your customers?

Well-trained customer service reps are a lot like onstage actors- as great as they are, the audience will not rave about the show if the seats are uncomfortable or the microphones don’t work!

Many companies neglect to connect offstage employees to the actual customer experience. When companies become customer-centric, they often focus on the parts of the journey customers make direct contact with but overlook backstage processes that make a huge difference.

Just like in a theater production, your onstage employees can’t deliver a stellar performance if offstage employees don’t understand how their own roles affect the customer experience.

Are your front-line employees truly able to deliver the experience you want to provide for your customers? Don’t let a disconnect with wardrobe or lighting spoil your show. Listen in!

Sponsor message:

Do you know how to deliver the superior customer experience you visualize? We can help your team become a force for positive change, starting with a customer-centric mission. The Customer Experience Investigators™ at 360Connext specialize in helping companies across industries and around the globe develop and internalize unique and scalable customer-focused missions. To compete with the other 89% of companies staying afloat by providing better experiences, you need a compass for making astounding changes in the customer experience while breaking down the silos that are holding you back. We offer evaluations, workshops, and roadmaps to keep your wheels firmly planted on the road to a customer-centric future.

Join us on our mission to Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers™ today. Visit us at 360Connext.com.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pat Helmers, host of the Sales Babble podcast, discusses the intersection of sales and customer experience.

Sales is tough! And driven by the need to close the sale and move onto the next customer, sales teams often don’t understand how the sales process relates to the overall customer experience.

The best salespeople see the value in building lasting relationships with customers rather than focusing on transactional outcomes. How can you get salespeople to build customer relationships for the long term when short-term sales goals seem more important?

A happy customer is a return customer who will rave about their experience with friends and colleagues. Wouldn’t you like them to help remove some of the heavy lifting from your sales initiatives? Pat explains how optimizing the sales process with customer experience and customer service principles can lead to increased loyalty and referrals.

Pat has some great tips for hiring and training a sales team that builds a great rapport with customers. Listen in to learn some of the best ways to qualify and nurture sales leads for long-term success in the modern sales landscape.

Pat is the author of the Selling With Confidence sales system. He believes great sales is based on having the mindset “I’m here to help and add value”.  He believes that anyone can become a skilled seller with their current personality. By drawing upon their passion for their business, they too can become a master seller.

 Pat is the host of the weekly Sales Babble podcast. He is a former Bell Labs software developer, inventor, account executive, and Vice President of Sales for two start-up technology companies. 

Connect with Pat

Sponsor message:

Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Virtual reality is hitting the markets hard, but it’s mostly just for gamers. Will that change? Today we discuss some surprising possibilities for customer service applications.

Virtual reality (VR) has been a hot topic among geeks and gamers for many years now, but it was all the rage at South by Southwest Interactive this year. Are we on the cusp of a new era when VR tech will have more practical applications?

Adam and Jeannie discuss the different ways companies and customers alike struggle to decode communications and content, and how VR can help bridge the gap.

So what are some ways VR can make its way into customer service? While entertainment and gaming applications were quite prominent at SXSW, a closer look revealed some innovative uses that could prove useful in the business world.

What can we learn from VR applications on the table with cutting-edge organizations like NASA?

Virtual reality is advancing quickly. And before you say “we will never need to tap into that technology,” remember how many leaders were saying the same thing about social media and mobile just a few years ago. Will you be ready to connect this way when your customers are?

Listen in to find out how virtual reality could soon make customer service virtually awesome.

Sponsor message:

Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s guest helps us understand emotional intelligence to bridge the gap between employee engagement and improved customer experiences.

What is the connection between employee engagement and improved customer experience?

Jim Rembach shares some of the most important ways true employee engagement helps the overall experience. It comes down to emotion, and the need to train for it is more important than ever.

Improving emotional intelligence, as Jim explains, is the key to proper employee engagement. And it’s not just for workplace environments that revolve around a product or service that’s particularly emotional. All workplaces are emotional!

 What can business leaders do TODAY to make their organizations more customer-centric from the inside out? Jim draws from real-life experience and shares some great stories of employee engagement successes and failures.

It all points back to improving emotional intelligence, folks. And Jim has some great tips for getting started.

Listen in and bridge that gap!

Jim Rembach is a strategic and tactical adviser and coach who specializes in using analytics for leadership, organization development, employee engagement, and customer engagement to improve customer experiences. Jim is a certified Emotional Intelligence practitioner, Empathy Mapping Expert, a Certified Contact Center Auditor, An Even Better Place to Work Certified Expert, and an Employee Retention Specialist.

Jim holds a U.S. trademark for the Servant Teamwork leadership and organizational transformation methodology. Jim is a speaker and author of nine books on contact center quality, employee engagement, customer experience, and leadership development.

Jim is an Advisory Board Member for Customer Value Creation International, the talent development software company ResultPal and an expert for the Customer Experience Professionals Association and host of the Fast Leader Show podcast.

Connect with Jim

Sponsor message:

Do you know how to deliver the superior customer experience you visualize? We can help your team become a force for positive change, starting with a customer-centric mission. The Customer Experience Investigators™ at 360Connext specialize in helping companies across industries and around the globe develop and internalize unique and scalable customer-focused missions. To compete with the other 89% of companies staying afloat by providing better experiences, you need a compass for making astounding changes in the customer experience while breaking down the silos that are holding you back. We offer evaluations, workshops, and roadmaps to keep your wheels firmly planted on the road to a customer-centric future.

Join us on our mission to Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers™ today. Visit us at 360Connext.com.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam and Jeannie discuss why most innovations fail to effectively address the changing needs of customers and how the innovation process itself can shut out the best ideas.

Innovation is more important than ever in our connected, omnichannel world. And yet, it’s rarely done well. So many innovations have come and gone while the ones that really make a difference are so few.

Why is that?

Too often, innovation is created from the wrong perspective – either because it’s borne of outdated “best practices” for the creative process or because the ideal experience is viewed from the wrong perspective altogether.

How can you keep up with the ideal experience your customers will want tomorrow?

In many cases, the best resources for innovative ideas go untapped. Have you considered how many great ideas and valuable insights are hiding behind cubicles or mentioned in passing in the break room?

Adam and Jeannie talk about how you can expand your horizons for innovation by fostering an environment that encourages creativity, then making sure those unheard ideas make it through the right channels to spark the best customer experience innovations.

Jeff Bezos can do it, and so can you. Find out how!

Sponsor message:

Do you know how to deliver the superior customer experience you visualize? We can help your team become a force for positive change, starting with a customer-centric mission. The Customer Experience Investigators™ at 360Connext specialize in helping companies across industries and around the globe develop and internalize unique and scalable customer-focused missions. To compete with the other 89% of companies staying afloat by providing better experiences, you need a compass for making astounding changes in the customer experience while breaking down the silos that are holding you back. We offer evaluations, workshops, and roadmaps to keep your wheels firmly planted on the road to a customer-centric future.

Join us on our mission to Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers™ today. Visit us at 360Connext.com.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this special 100th episode (yippee!) Adam and Jeannie recall some of the great (and not so great) moments in customer service history.

Have you ever thought about what people will be saying about your customer service in 100 years? Probably not, and we’re guessing some of the brands mentioned in this episode didn’t make their ideas sustainable like Maxwell House did in the ad below.

A look back in time reveals that we’ve come a long way with transparency in our marketing and customer service strategies. Just look at these ads!

A lot has changed! Customers now see past this type of marketing. Have your strategies joined this new era of enlightenment?

Sadly, there are some archaic practices still used today – and some of them are nothing short of cringeworthy! Let’s get up to speed with the trends that matter to real-life customers and lock those flash-in-the-pan advertising tactics up in the time capsule for good. Join us as we make our own history with the 100th episode of Crack the Customer Code.

We wouldn’t be here without you. Thank you!

Sponsor message:

Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What’s the difference between B2C and B2B customer experience? IS there a difference? Adam and Jeannie discuss in today’s episode.

This may sound like a trick question, but it comes up a lot!

Many B2B companies don’t believe it’s important to invest in customer experience, and some even believe it doesn’t apply to them at all.

So is customer experience more important in a B2C environment?

On one hand, you might say companies that sell directly to customers need to make a stronger emotional connection and therefore, have to worry more about the experience. On the other hand, a poor B2B service experience could put a whole lot more at stake at a given time.

It can be challenging for a B2B company to create connections while the relationship is largely process-based. But when played right, B2B companies can see huge returns from investing in customer experience.

So what’s the best way to approach customer experience in a B2B company?

Luckily, both of our hosts have helped many B2B companies create experiences that strengthen lasting connections. Listen in for tips on how to approach customer experience in your business environment.

Sponsor message:

Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A well-known thought leader and futurist, today’s guest barely needs an introduction! Brian Solis discusses his new book and what it means to be entering an experience-driven business world.

3.5 years in the making, Brian describes the arduous process of writing his groundbreaking new book, X: The Experience When Business Meets Design.

Brand interactions exist within mobile apps, cloud-based services, social media, content marketing, and traditional communication in today's world. Experience is so much more than the buzzword it's become, and how to incorporate the right experiences into your customer's journey is what Brian has studied.

The word “experience, as Brian explains it, has attached itself to many problem-solving ideas, but the solutions are often isolated fixes that fail to tie the overall journey together. Brian shares some of the reasons why companies fail to accomplish this.

Do you share Brian’s sense of urgency to unify all of those isolated touchpoints? Therein lies the recipe for breakthrough innovation.

It’s time to bring about the radical changes your customers need now more than ever.

With the right perspective and a few tweaks in the way you communicate and gather insight, you have the power to be the change agent that brings experience and design together to usher your company into the experience-driven future that’s already upon us.

Be a true disruptor. Find those elusive moments of truth where experience meets design. You can start by listening to this episode.

Brian Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders, keynote speakers, and best-selling authors in innovation and digital transformation.  His new book, X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, explores the importance of experiences and how to design them for customers, employees and human beings everywhere.

 As Principal analyst at Altimeter Group, a Prophet Company, a digital anthropologist, and futurist, he also studies disruptive technology and its impact on business and society. More so, through his reports, articles and books, he humanizes technology's effect to help people see people differently and understand what to do about it. Specifically Brian studies digital transformation, customer experience and culture 2.0 and "the future of" industries, trends and behavior.

Sponsor Message:

Develop your customer experience mission

Do you know how to deliver the superior customer experience you visualize? We can help your team become a force for positive change, starting with a customer-centric mission. The Customer Experience Investigators™ at 360Connext specialize in helping companies across industries and around the globe develop and internalize unique and scalable customer-focused missions. To compete with the other 89% of companies staying afloat by providing better experiences, you need a compass for making astounding changes in the customer experience while breaking down the silos that are holding you back. We offer evaluations, workshops, and roadmaps to keep your wheels firmly planted on the road to a customer-centric future.

Join us on our mission to Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers™ today. Visit us at 360Connext.com.

 Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a lot of debate over which customer loyalty metrics tell the real truth. So what’s the answer? Adam and Jeannie discuss the different types of metrics and why they don’t necessarily work for everyone.

Customer loyalty is elusive and difficult to determine. And many business leaders are obsessed with settling the debate over which metrics really tell the real truth about customer loyalty.

Looking for indicators of what we really want to know, which in many cases is largely unknowable, has led many professionals and business owners into a whirlwind of data that doesn’t seem to do them any good.

How did all of this start? People have been boasting about their satisfaction rates for decades, then came the groundbreaking Net Promoter Score (NPS) which many companies swear by. But is this really an accurate way to measure customer loyalty?

We’d love to give you a solid answer! But when you’re dealing with customer emotions, there is no black and white and the success of tracking these different metrics varies from company to company.

So what can you do about this? Listen in and find out how to uncover the actual behavior behind these metrics so you can determine what you should really be tracking and take action.

Sponsor message:

Do you know how to deliver the superior customer experience you visualize? We can help your team become a force for positive change, starting with a customer-centric mission. The Customer Experience Investigators™ at 360Connext specialize in helping companies across industries and around the globe develop and internalize unique and scalable customer-focused missions. To compete with the other 89% of companies staying afloat by providing better experiences, you need a compass for making astounding changes in the customer experience while breaking down the silos that are holding you back. We offer evaluations, workshops, and roadmaps to keep your wheels firmly planted on the road to a customer-centric future.

Join us on our mission to Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers™ today. Visit us at 360Connext.com.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can you leverage customer complaints? Today’s guest shares highlights from his new book, Hug Your Haters, and additional insights from the extensive research it’s based on.

What if you could survey thousands of individuals to find the “who, what, where, why and how” of customer complaints? Jay Baer has partnered with Edison Research to do just that, and he has written his new book “Hug Your Haters” based on intensive study of thousands of consumers.

Jay Baer discusses the concept he calls “the Hatrix,” which breaks complainers down into categories. Jay also shares some shocking facts about what complaining customers expect by channel, and how the outcome can change depending on which channel is used to answer a complaint.

How does the technology your customers use affect the outcome of their complaints? The differences can be more profound than you think.

The findings from Jay’s research far exceed what he was able to fit in his new book. But you’re in luck! Jay shares some of his unrevealed findings in this episode, along with some valuable insights about embracing and leveraging customer feedback.

Jay says customer complaints are a source of “free market research.” The best part is that the insights come from your own real customers.

Are you ready to tap into this valuable resource? Listen to this episode to find out where to start.

Jay Baer is a digital business expert, global keynote speaker, and the New York Times bestselling author of Youtility. He has advised some of the most iconic brands and organizations in the world, including Nike, Best Buy, and The United Nations. He is also a contributor to Inc., Entrepreneur, and Forbes. His Convince & Convert Media division produces the world's #1 content marketing blog, and multiple award-winning podcasts. For more information see www.hugyourhaters.com.

Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com.

 Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices