Crack the Customer Code

We all know the customer onboarding process should be as simple and satisfying as possible, but what about offboarding? The experience customers have when they leave you can have a huge impact for the long term.

In an ideal world, we would never have to say goodbye to customers. So we don’t like to think ahead to customer offboarding. It’s really easy not to think about! But churn rate is all too real.

Do you understand the offboarding process as part of the customer journey? Many companies have a very narrow-minded view of this critical part of the journey – from making it difficult to cancel to treating customers poorly.

Are you turning the relationship sour when customers leave you? Like it or not, customers are going to remember you by what happens last. What would you like them to declare to their thousands of Twitter followers?

Even if you’re sure they will never return, customer offboarding is NOT the end of the journey. How can you make it a part of the otherwise excellent experience you provide? Adam and Jeannie share some helpful tips in today’s episode.

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.

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Becoming a customer-obsessed organization can seem impossible for many well-established companies. Fortunately, today’s guest has had a front-row view of some astounding transformations.

Today’s guest has made a name for himself exploring some of the world’s greatest customer experience brands and giving an insider’s view of how they have successfully turned their customer experiences around.

Joseph Michelli tells some amazing stories of companies that have adopted and mastered the art of “customer-obsession.” These brands have given Joseph exclusive access to various stages of their experience strategies and allowed him to document their transformations.

In his exploration of Mercedes-Benz USA, Joseph identifies the challenges of instilling a customer-centric mindset within an organization that has been largely successful as a product-focused entity.

How can you get buy-in from executives who don’t want to risk an already-satisfactory and seemingly stable bottom line? How can you convince independent dealers and franchisees that these changes will lead to greater success for the long-term?

Brands like Mercedes Benz, Zappos, The Ritz-Carlton and Starbuck’s have paved the way with their own trials and errors, and Joseph Michelli has the inside scoop on what has worked for them. If they can do it, so can you!

Want to learn how these customer experience champions have secured phenomenal returns on investing in customer experience? You’re one click away. Listen in!

Joseph Michelli, Ph.D., CSP, is an internationally sought-after speaker, consultant, and best-selling author of business books about companies offering superior customer experiences, such as Starbucks, The Ritz-Carlton, Zappos, and most recently Mercedes-Benz USA, in his newest book Driven To Delight.

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.

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Jeannie and Adam put the hype and buzzwords aside to discuss what employee engagement really is so you can create a highly-motivated team around a great customer experience.

Employee engagement has been a buzzphrase for the past few years, and with good reason! It’s no secret that positively engaged employees are vital to a strong workplace culture, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

But Adam and Jeannie have some sad news: Despite all the buzz, a national study from Gallup reveals employee engagement was actually no better in 2015 than it was in 2014. What are we missing?

Our hosts discuss some of the common ways companies miss the mark when trying to improve employee engagement.

Many just don’t know where to start, or more importantly, how to create engagement that actually has a positive impact on internal culture and overall customer experience.

It’s not easy, and it’s different for every company. But if you’re willing to invest your time into building rewarding relationships internally, the difference will become evident in the experience your customers are having.

Find out how to ditch the hype and create an employee engagement strategy that gets long-term results.

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.

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We have the advantage of working with 5 generations of business leaders. How can we break the technology barriers and build solid business relationships? It’s all about people, not systems.

An expert on forward-thinking leadership and new ways to work, Ayelet has identified 4 traits for 21st-century leaders, and she shares them with us. Ayelet’s explanations about what they are and why they are important will have you re-thinking the way you communicate, the way you anticipate feedback and changes, the way you look at community, and ultimately, the way you work.

 With so much buzz around transparency, it seems to mean something different to everyone. Ayelet shares the importance of having a shared purpose in order to achieve the level of transparency that keeps business relationships healthy and productive. She believes we can eliminate the need to “manage” people in this century if we create and maintain trusting relationships.

How will you engage with peoples’ hearts and minds as their priorities shift? How can you regain common sense when it comes to business? Listen in and bring the human spirit back into your organization.

Ayelet works with 21st-century leaders to create new ways of working and helps them create a new path for business as a force of social good. Ayelet believes that in the human-to-human purpose driven and experience era, more people are shifting from the myth of work-life balance to LIFEworking. Prior to co-founding CreatingIs, Ayelet was a senior executive with Cisco Systems and an innovator in Residence at Roche/Genentech. Her new book Our Journey to Business Common Sense will be released soon.

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

Training customer-facing employees becomes even more challenging as we scale our businesses. What happens when they need re-training? Can this be done without shutting down?

As companies grow, it becomes harder to be sure employees are connected to the brand values and mission.

Chipotle, Starbucks and others have gone public about temporarily closing their doors for the purpose of re-training their customer service staff or reconnecting with their missions. How can they be sure it’s worth the inevitable losses?  Adam and Jeannie discuss some great ways to approach a customer service reboot, and how to make one worthwhile and sustainable.

Could you afford to hit the brakes for a day or two and do the same? Many organizations don’t have the budget or resources for a sweeping customer service reset. What if, for any reason, you CAN’T shut things down for a day or two?

How can you keep all those dots connected as your organization grows and changes? As busy as things are, you can do this on limited resources without turning customers away.

Adam and Jeannie share some powerful ways to “hack time” so you don’t have to put your business on hold to re-train your employees.

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

You love your customers, but do they know it? Adam and Jeannie have dedicated this special Valentine’s Day episode to showing customers love.

There are many ways people define love, but we’re focusing on what it means to love your customers. The word “love” is used a lot in the context of customer experience, and we’re finding it means different things to different organizations.

So what is customer love? Some may say it’s about delivering those “wow” moments, but Adam and Jeannie think it’s about much more than that.

Showing your love for customers can be simply delivering a consistent customer journey, where your love for customers is reinforced every step of the way. In this episode, we explore some real examples of great ways to show your customers the love.

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

Financial institutions may be starting to review how you use your smartphone to help determine credit-worthiness.  

Adam and Jeannie discuss what all this could mean for mobile privacy on the customer level. Would you hand over your phone or sign off on your usage records?

We use our smartphones for many things nowadays, from banking to shopping to checking our work schedules. Our devices are collecting more data about us than we think! And financial institutions might be accessing that data to judge the credit-worthiness of loan applicants.

Certain startups have discovered that there are correlations between certain mobile behaviors and a person’s likelihood to repay a loan – even something as basic as how often you charge your phone can say something about you to a bank.

How would you feel about bank employees having the ability to access and record your notes, social media posts and email accounts, then deciding whether or not you could get a mortgage based on that data?

This may be reality one day, and when you think of how much data you are actually storing in your mobile records, it can be frightening!

What does this mean for the future of banking? What about marketing?

Adam and Jeannie share some surprising statistics to help you prepare for the potential major shift in mobile privacy.

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

Customer retention and loyalty are critical to the success of your business and maintaining relationships is a key to both. Today’s guest shares 27 years of wisdom to help us create personal connections with customers, no matter how big our organizations grow.

Richard gives us a brief history of his experience working with successful companies, and how their success is largely attributed to customer retention. Drawing from 27 years of experience, he explains the importance of recognizing customers as people.

Knowing their expectations and how they like to do business is not enough.

One of the biggest challenges in scaling any business is finding a way to create lasting relationships with customers. If your company were to become huge, could you still interact with your customers as individuals?

Richard explains how businesses of any size can create valuable personal relationships with customers. If you’re willing to invest in those relationships through personalized communications, the ROI can be tremendous.

Richard says, “There’s never been more competition than there is today.” The need for building relationships with customers is critical.

With a strong focus on the idea of repeat business, Richard explains the principles behind his book, The Endangered Customer: 8 Steps to Guarantee Repeat Business.  Based on extensive research, these 8 steps are geared towards giving you the ingredients for connecting with customers on emotional and psychological levels.

How do your customers feel after the transaction is over?

How will you know?

Listen to this episode to learn how to create relationships so strong, your customers won’t imagine leaving you for a more enticing offer.

Richard R. Shapiro is Founder and President of The Center For Client Retention (TCFCR) and a leading authority in the area of customer satisfaction and loyalty.  For 27 years, Richard has spearheaded the research conducted with thousands of customers from Fortune 100 and 500 companies amassing the ingredients of customer loyalty and what drives repeat business.  His first book was The Welcomer Edge: Unlocking the Secrets to Repeat Business and The Endangered Customer: 8 Steps to Guarantee Repeat Business, will be available February, 2016.

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

Are you pursuing a customer experience leadership role? Maybe you’ve found yourself defaulted to a customer-focused role within your organization… Now what? Adam and Jeannie share expert advice for emerging leaders in the field.

Adam and Jeannie discuss how they came into their customer experience and customer service leadership roles. Did they dream of becoming experts in these fields in their youths? We’re guessing this was not your first choice of career paths but have found yourself fascinated and excited by the idea.  Or maybe you’ve been plopped into these roles by the organization you work for.

How can you really OWN it like Adam and Jeannie, or like many of our guests?

Customer experience education is often a mere day in the very long journey of business training. Today’s customers need more from you.

Typically, customer experience leaders emerge from diverse and surprising academic and professional backgrounds. There are very limited ways to get certificates and degrees with a focus on customer experience, but Adam and Jeannie know the best ways to move forward.

Listen in for tips on how to lay the groundwork for a career in creating outstanding customer experiences.

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

Dr. Ardienne Boissy of The Cleveland Clinic, one of the first organizations to create C-suite responsibilities around the patient experience, shares highlights from her 12 years of leading an enormous shift in how the healthcare system perceives and engages patients.

It’s one thing to possess the wisdom and skills to help patients heal and recover, but understanding how the patient actually feels – not just in regards to their ailments – but in regards to their many experiences as they move through the healthcare system.

Adrienne describes the challenges of explaining how to teach respected professionals who are very good at their jobs that there are better ways to communicate. Some of them are looking for answers, but what about those who aren’t?

The traditional health care system is generally not set up to give patients access to the resources and information patients need. Adrienne highlights some of the resulting challenges and shares some ways to overcome them.

As Chief Experience Officer of Cleveland Clinic, Adrienne helped pioneer their patient experience work. Listen in as she shares some of the key learnings from leading one of the first official patient experience departments.

Adrienne Boissy, MD, MA, is Chief Experience Officer of Cleveland Clinic Health System and a staff neurologist at the Cleveland Clinic Mellen Center for Multiple Sclerosis. In this role, Dr. Boissy leads the Office of Patient Experience and its initiatives to address and improve every aspect of a patient’s encounter with the Cleveland Clinic Health System—from their physical comfort to their educational, emotional and spiritual needs.

Dr. Boissy chairs the Empathy and Innovation summit, the largest independent summit on patient experience in the world. She also guided the development of patient advisory councils across Cleveland Clinic Health System and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Patient Experience.

Did you know that you can hire Adam to speak at your next conference or meeting? Adam’s keynote speeches on customer service and customer experience are designed to energize and inspire your audience, and to provide actionable takeaways that teams could use to immediately deliver hero class customer service – whether to an audience of business leaders or front-line employees, Adam’s talks explore how we interact with customers using some of the latest research in customer experience, psychology and neuroscience. Your audience will leave energized, enthused and ready to take action.

If you want to rock your next event, go to keynotespeaker.rocks

 Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

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