Customer Experience Patterns Podcast

Great conversation with Mark Levy this week about best practices for getting a CX team, program or transformation off the ground. Mark shares his 4 priorities at the start of a CX transformation, and how he determines when it's time to move from listening to action.

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DCX Accountability Coaching - 1:1 coaching for customer-obsessed business leaders to unleash their full potential

365 Days of Accountability – Inspiration and motivation on your journey to success

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Stated preferences or revealed preferences? Which should you honor? It's complicated, but in this mini episode of the podcast, I offer my suggestion on how to strike the right balance.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Zanna van der Aa is back for Part 2. She talks us through the importance of humanity to great customer experience, how to bring the human touch to digital experiences, how to measure humanity in a customer experience, why that human touch makes employee experience and company culture better, and why NPS is overrated.

It's an action-packed episode!

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Happy CX Day. Let's recommit to creating great customer experiences.

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Thanks to Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Zanna walks through her approach to identifying the most important drivers of customer experience outcomes. This conversation is at once scientific and deeply practical. How does Zanna do it? Listen to find out.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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More on how partners can help you deliver great customer experiences, but only if you enable and empower them to do so. Sam Karpinski shares more knowledge.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Sam Karpinski and I talk about how companies can work well with their partners and intermediaries to deliver great customer experiences, including figuring out what you want your partners to do for your customers, whether you're treatingt them more likely employees or customers, and how to enable partners to be successful.

McDonald's Menu Items From Around The World

Hilton Hotels Brand Standards

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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The Map May Not The Territory, but it still helps you plot a path forward.

Thanks to Steve Mannino for the suggestion!

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Part 2 of my conversation Kelly Price. This time we talk about the right way to do research for customer journey mapping, and the importance of knowing the limitations of journey maps, so that you make benefit from their tremendous insight.

It was Alfred Korzybski who cautioned that "The Map Is Not The Territory"

And George Box who coined the beautiful paradox: "All Models are wrong, some are useful."

 From Sylvie and Bruno Concluded by Lewis Carroll, first published in 1893.

 "That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"

"About six inches to the mile."

""Only six inches!"exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"

"Have you used it much?" I enquired.

"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."

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Peak / End Rule

GE MRI Machine Adventure Series

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Kelly Price

Sam Stern

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Welcome back to the CX patterns podcast with Sam stern in this loose threads, missing threads mini episode, I'm returning to my conversation with Kelly Price, where we talked about designing experiences for the peak end rule.

Kelly And I talked to a lot about addressing negative experience peaks. And tackling those first. For many of those negative peaks in the experience, the answer as Kelly said is to fix them so that they are smooth and unmemorable, and that's right. And Kelly had some great suggestions for how to do this. But I also wanted to note that some of these peak moments are avoidable. So you don't have to redesign them. You don't have to fix them. You don't have to obsess over them. You can just avoid them altogether. For example. Heavy equipment manufacturers think  caterpillar, John Deere, and similar. They now have sensors on their equipment that collect data and can help predict when key parts will wear out or break. I'm sure there are other examples of this in other industries, too. This is just One I'm familiar with. Anyway, the goal is to use the sensors, to provide forewarning of needed parts, maintenance, or replacement, and to do that proactively. This avoids equipment downtime for the farmer, the construction company, or whomever owns the equipment and completely sidesteps that negative peak of a broken piece of equipment. So imagine that they could have fixed the repair experience. But instead they're avoiding the repair experience. So it's now not only not a negative peak. That you're lessening the severity of, or smoothing out. It's one that you've avoided altogether. And a repair experience like in this example is not only a negative peak for the customer. It's also usually expensive and consuming a lot of resources for the manufacturer. So I wanted to  share this example because sometimes the answer to a negative peak is not to fix the moment or , that discrete journey, but to make the moment or that journey irrelevant to the overall experience. Second, a loose thread, something we touched on, but didn't quite cover the point I wanted to highlight today. What gets remembered about the experience are the peak moments, either good or bad, and how the experience ends either good or bad. We talked about that, you know, this. And Kelly alluded to this additional point in the episode related to peak and moments in memory. And I didn't pick up on her point as well as I could've. It's not just how good or bad those moments are that make them memorable. It's also about how they stand out from the rest of the experience. Peaks are peakier. That's a word. When they come out of nowhere. To stick with the metaphor for a second. Mountain peak appears taller. When it's surrounded by a flat plane. Then when it's nestled in among other peaks in a mountain range. So now I can come back to Kelly's advice to address negative peaks first. And in many instances, maybe even most instances. Making them as unMemorable as you can, is the right approach. And then the remaining positive peaks will look even better by comparison. They stand out more. That's it for now. I'll be back with a full episode next week, Kelly Price and I in a second conversation this time talking about design research, another good one with Kelly. Talk to you soon.

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