Decoding the Customer

The rise of digital technology has brought about an explosion of customer touchpoints. It used to be that if a customer wanted to do their banking, they had to go into a branch, but that’s definitely no longer the case. Now customers have their choice of online banking, app banking, banking through a messenger service, calling a contact center, engaging with their bank on social media or going into the branch. That’s a LOT of different touchpoints, and most of them are powered by tech.

At the same time, companies have integrated technology solutions behind the scenes to improve speed, accuracy and efficiency. If you were to go behind the scenes of pretty much any experience, you’re guaranteed to see a mix of people, processes and technology fueling experiences. The role of technology is only set to grow as applications for things like artificial intelligence become more commonplace. This means that CX professionals need to help their organizations keep the heart and soul of experiences, even as touchpoints and the spaghetti wire behind those touchpoints continues to evolve.

This is easier said than done, but there are several practical approaches that CX professionals can use. 

A customer promise and experience principles can help foster consistency for experiences throughout the journey, regardless of which touchpoint a customer engages with. Episode 69, explored both the customer promise and experience principles. Essentially, a customer promise is a clear definition of what customers can expect and also how teams should deliver experiences. It’s a high-level statement, or a Northstar of what experiences should ideally look like.

The promise can be backed up with more granular or prescriptive experience principles, which outline the “how-to” details behind the promise. An example of an experience principle would be “each customer will walk away from their experience with us knowing we value their business” or “we commit to providing a safe and respectful environment for customers”. These statements are applicable to nearly any touchpoint, and they speak to outcomes or results, so while the approach might be slightly different for a safe and respectful environment in a store vs. online, the way that the customer feels after that interaction should be the same.

Experience principles can be a helpful framework for teams to evaluate experiences, reality-check the journey across touchpoints and assess the relationship between customer experience and technology. If an experience isn’t yielding outcomes that are consistent with the promise, that’s a red flag.

This may sound obvious, but in their haste to launch a new system or platform, it can be tempting for teams to skip the step of testing and refining the user experience. Resist this temptation at all costs. Before any experience is launched into the customer journey, it should be vetted and tested, ideally against experience principles and some sort of customer impact scorecard. An experience should be refined until it receives a passing grade and only then, “released in the wild”. Once an experience is live in the customer journey, the monitoring shouldn’t stop. It’s important to keep tabs on how customers are responding and to keep refining things.

There is a lot of emphasis on user experience testing for customer-facing experiences, but the same customer impact assessment, user interface testing and refinement should happen for the technology innovations that support teams behind the scenes. If an organization wouldn’t launch some horribly clunky experience into the customer journey, why would it launch this into the employee journey? Technology should enable teams to deliver on the customer promise and the brand purpose, not hinder them.

Ensuring that customer-facing and behind the scenes tech enablers are user-friendly will go a long way to maintaining great customer experience, especially as customer experience and technology become more deeply intertwined. For more details on UX and how this differs from CX, be sure to check out episode 56.

As consumers and businesses become more reliant on technology, brands need to be prepared with GREAT experiences when they do happen in person. Customers are increasingly opting for self-help channels before picking up the phone or walking into a store or branch. As a result, human interactions are fewer and farther between. As these moments become more rare, they also become more precious.

Brands would be wise to make these moments memorable and make them count. If technology enables teams to have a little more capacity, let them use that time to deepen customer relationships or deliver a special wow moment. CX professionals need to help business leaders rethink in any point of human interaction as an opportunity to connect with customers. These can no longer be transactional moments, they need to become loyalty-building moments.

CX leaders should go back to their customer journey map, identify any interactions that still happen in-person or specific moments of truth and figure out how to maximize the impact of personal touch. Again, if a team has established a customer promise or experience principles, make sure that these specific moments are an absolute home run in terms of delivering on the CX goals. As long as the basics of the customer journey are sorted, then these moments have the power to pay major dividends in terms of customer loyalty and advocacy.

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. 

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 continuing education requirements. This is episode 84, the second episode for May 2020. Today’s topic comes directly from a listener request, something I’m hoping to do more of in future CX Mini Masterclasses.

This listener wanted to know about how we can ensure that Customer Experience is protected, even as we move to more reliance on technology. And I suppose that we can look at reliance on technology through two lenses. The first is growing consumer reliance on technology and the undeniable fact that many of us default to our smartphones before anything else. And the second, being business reliance on technology, whether that’s behind the scenes automation, the use of chatbots, or something else.

So today, I’m going to look at three ways to maintain integrity and consistency of your Customer Experience when that Customer Experience is delivered by a mix of humans and technology. If you’re interested in some practical actions that you can take to ensure great experiences, even as the Consumer World becomes more digitized and automated, 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 that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

The rise of digital technology has brought about an explosion of customer touchpoints. It used to be that if you wanted to do your banking, you had to go into a branch, but that is definitely no longer the case. Now, customers have their choice of online banking, app banking, banking through a messenger service, calling a contact center, engaging with their bank on social media, or going into that good old branch. That’s a lot of different touch points.

And you’ll notice that most of them are powered by tech. At the same time, companies have integrated technology solutions behind the scenes to improve speed, accuracy, and efficiency. If you were to lift up the hood or go behind the scenes of pretty much any experience, you’re guaranteed to see a mix of people, processes, and technology fueling those experiences. And the role of technology is only set to grow as applications for things like artificial intelligence become more commonplace.

So what does this mean for the CX professionals out there? In the simplest terms, it means they need to help their organizations keep the heart and soul of experiences, even as touch points and the spaghetti wire behind those touch points continues to evolve. So today, I’m going to share three ways that you can do this. The first is by establishing experience principles and implementing these across the customer journey so you can create some consistency for experiences, regardless of which touch point the customer engages with.

In episode 69, I explored the customer promise and experience principles. If you’re curious about this topic, I’d encourage you to go back and check out that episode in its entirety. But essentially, a customer promise is a clear definition of what customers can expect and also how teams should deliver experiences. It’s a high level statement, kind of like a Northstar, of what experiences should ideally look like.

It can be backed up with more granular or prescriptive experience principles, which outline the sort of how-to details behind the promise. An experience principle would be something like, each customer will walk away from their experience with us, knowing we value their business. Or something akin to, we commit to providing a safe and respectful environment for customers. These statements are applicable to nearly any touchpoint, and they speak to outcomes or results.

So while the approach might be slightly different if you were looking to create a safe and respectful environment in a store versus online, the way that the customer feels after that interaction should be the same. Experience principles can be a helpful framework for teams to evaluate experiences and reality check the journey across touchpoints. If one of your experiences isn’t yielding the outcomes that are consistent with your objectives, then it’s time to tweak things. As more experiences shift into the digital realm, this is one way to protect customer experience integrity.

My next strategy for protecting customer experience integrity may sound obvious, but it never ceases to amaze me how many organizations don’t do it. And that’s test and refine the user experience. Episode 56 explored the definition of user experience, or UX, and how this differs from CX. There’s a whole world of talented UX specialists out there whose professional purpose is to help organizations test and improve experiences.

I’d go so far as to say that most of them specialize in digital experiences. Before any experience is launched into the customer journey, it should be vetted and tested, ideally against experience principles and some sort of customer impact scorecard. It should be refined until it receives a passing grade, and only then released into the wild, so to speak. Even once an experience is live and in the customer journey, the monitoring doesn’t stop.

It’s important to keep tabs on how customers are responding and keep refining things. There’s a lot of emphasis on user experience testing for customer facing experiences, and we all understand why. But I think the same customer impact assessment, user interface testing and refinement, should happen for technology that supports teams behind the scenes. You wouldn’t launch some horribly clunky experience into the customer journey, so why would you launch it into the employee journey?

Technology should enable teams to deliver on the customer promise and the brand promise, not hinder them. Ensuring that your customer facing and behind the scenes tech enablers are user friendly will go a long way to maintaining customer experience, even as tech becomes a larger and larger piece of the puzzle. My third and final tip for how to protect customer experience integrity even as we become more reliant on technology is to be extra prepared with great experiences when they do happen in person. We know that customers are shifting more and more of their activity into the digital realm.

That’s no surprise for anyone. They’re seeking self help channels before picking up the phone or walking into a branch or store. That means those in-person interactions are fewer and farther between. They’re a little more rare, which makes them that much more precious.

Make these moments memorable and make them count. If technology enables teams to have a little more capacity, let them use that time to deepen customer relationships or deliver a special wow moment. We need to rethink in-person experiences as an opportunity to connect with our customers. These can no longer be transactional moments.

They need to become loyalty building moments. I’d suggest that teams go back to their journey map, identify any interactions that happen in person or specific moments of truth, and figure out how to maximize the impact of personal touch. Again, if your team has established a customer promise or experience principles, make sure that these specific moments are an absolute home run in terms of delivering on your customer experience goals. You won’t regret it.

And as long as you’ve got the basics of the customer journey are sorted, then these moments have the power to pay major dividends in terms of customer loyalty and advocacy. I hope I’ve answered this listener question about ensuring customer experience is protected even as we move to more reliance on technology. I’d love to do more shows inspired by listener questions. So if you have one, please send it through.

And if you’re looking for help keeping the heart and soul in your brand’s customer experience, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show. I’ll be back next week with another episode.

See you then.

Jennifer Wright is a customer experience transformation expert who designs and grows CX capabilities that generate actionable insights for business leaders. Through her experience building multiple CX capabilities across both the public and private sectors, she has developed a deep understanding of the common challenges faced when creating a superior customer experience. Jennifer delivers innovative solutions to these challenges by leveraging cross-industry knowledge and service design methods. Jennifer is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and holds a doctorate in industrial-organizational psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Her work in the field of customer experience spans multiple industries. Jennifer has worked in the financial services sector, helping writers, data scientists and psychologists to leverage behavioral economics or ‘nudge’ techniques to help homeowners through the post-mortgage crisis period in keeping their homes. She served as the Branch chief of business analytics at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, building and leading the Voice of the Customer (VoC) team within this US Federal government agency. And most recently she’s worked at Magellan Health where she’s led the customer analytics function for this managed healthcare company.

Jennifer Wright, Phd, CCXP

If you’d like to learn more about Jennifer’s work, be sure to follow her on LinkedIn, where she often shares insights about customer experience and more.

Covid-19 has changed everything. In a mater of a few short weeks, this health pandemic has brought entire sectors of the economy to a standstill, closed schools, forced a good chunk of the world’s population into some form of lockdown, and brought the term “social distancing” to the forefront of everyone’s mind. It has left a lot of CX professionals wondering what’s next.

Jennifer anticipates that the next 1-2 years will be very fluid. We’ve seen a dramatic swing to remote and digital experiences, but the impact will be different for various industries. Within healthcare, the overnight transition to telehealth has been one of the biggest changes, but it’s just one of many experiences that has moved from the in-person to the digital realm. Jennifer points out that once people get used to the convenience and safety factor, these changes may remain permanent.

Experiences that can’t be completely moved to the virtual space, such as dining out or going to the grocery store, have been significantly impacted, and Jennifer suspects there will be some lingering changes in consumer preferences, even after the Plexiglas barriers are removed. She anticipates that consumers will be hesitant about things like touching surfaces for some time. This will fundamentally alter the sensory aspect of physical customer experiences and attitudes towards these interactions. Time will tell if these attitudes and preferences become permanent.

Honestly, it’s going to be a tough call for probably the next year to two years. We’re going to see a lot of different impacts and probably differences by sectors.

Being home-bound will also change the types of products and services that people consume. Yes, there was an initial rush on survival basics like toilet paper, but now that the panic-buying has mostly subsided, we’ll likely see waves of product popularity as people decide they want different products as part of their new home-bound life. For example, there has been a rise in the popularity of baking, and as a result, the supply chain for baking flour has had to shift from a model largely reliant on wholesale demand to one that includes more retail sales. Organizations across industries will need to keep their finger on the pulse of these evolving trends and their ripple-effect through the marketplace. 

Even amid the human tragedy and chaotic uncertainty in the business world, there have been some small silver linings. Jennifer points to telehealth as a change that may bring healthcare access to more people in the long run.

Those who are housebound due to disabilities, live in rural locations or don’t have access to reliable transportation have historically encountered challenges accessing healthcare. Telehealth and video -based doctor consultations may provide these patients with more reliable and sustainable access to healthcare. Virtual healthcare solutions also bring about efficiencies for doctors and healthcare providers, enabling them to see more patients during their working hours.

The benefits of telehealth are just one example in one industry, but the combination of imposed government restrictions and changing consumer preferences has catalyzed many organizations to rethink experiences from the ground up. Covid 19 and customer experience needn’t be foes. Some experiences will be redesigned in ways that benefit consumers and providers for many years to come.

The shift to more digital or virtual experiences will result in greater opportunities for data collection. IoT technology has introduced new possibilities for gathering insights about in-person customer experiences, but these technologies have yet to be widely adopted. As a result many customer journeys still have considerable data blindspots. Experiences that move from the physical world to the virtual space will create additional data points that organizations can use to understand customers and respond. But only if they collect and use that data wisely.

Jennifer believes that even small businesses like local restaurants can use new sources of data to be smarter about planning their operations and stay agile while consumer preferences and behaviors are still in a state of flux. The key will be to ensure that new technology solutions are collecting the right kind of data, and that this information is used to drive action.

If you’re really smart about it, when you implement some of these solutions, you could actually have the analytics baked into your implementation plan, so that you are collecting data as part of how you implement your technology solution. And you’re getting data from day one, that gives you more ability to be adaptable.

In her parting words, Jennifer reminded CX professionals that it’s important to keep helping others build relationships across team lines. CX professionals can do their job most effectively when there is strong cross-functional collaboration. The sooner one starts building these bridges, the better. By building a robust network, CX professionals are doing a service to their company, and that network will in turn benefit CX professionals. The stronger these bonds, the better equipped organizations will be to respond in a time of crisis. 

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.

Touchpoint maps are often confused with journey maps, much to the frustration of CX professionals. In fact, the word “touchpoint” is so frequently misused, that many CX professionals have an aversion to it altogether. That said, a good customer touchpoint map can serve an important purpose. These maps help teams understand how a customer interacts with a brand. They can be useful complements to journey maps, as touchpoint maps can serve as a the link between the outward-looking perspective of the journey map and the inward-looking perspective of a process map or service blueprint.

First off, it’s important to understand the concept of a customer touchpoint, and how this differs from a customer experience. Touchpoints are the conduits for experiences throughout the journey. They are the channel or mode of interaction, not the interaction itself. For example if a customer is on a journey to get medical treatment and one of the experiences is calling their health insurance company to check on the status of a claim, the experience is calling in, and the touchpoint would be call center. To take things a step further, one could break down the specific touchpoint components within the call center like the IVR system, the agent and maybe even the phone connection itself. These would also be considered touchpoints.

A customer journey is the series of events or experiences that a customer has as they are trying to fulfill some need in their life. Sometimes this need is referred to as a “job to be done”. A Journey map is the visual representation of this series of experiences, presented from the customer’s point of view. (If you are at all unsure about the definition of the terms touchpoint, experience or journey map, be sure to check out episodes 14, 15 and 16, which cover these concepts in detail.)

Example Journey map (Source: Jim Tincher)

A touchpoint map is a visual representation of the channels of interaction that a customer interfaces with throughout their journey. To understand the touchpoints you have to first understand the journey. And the touchpoint map is the representation of a customer persona’s journey, not all the possible touchpoint possibilities out there (which would be more of a touchpoint matrix). It’s also not the touchpoints that you want the customer to interface with (which would probably be considered a touchpoint design).

Example touchpoint map (Source: Synegys)

It’s easiest to think about the touch point map as a byproduct of the customer journey map. A team will be best-positioned to build a touchpoint map only after they’ve crafted their journey map. Once the journey map is built, a team can then create an overlay of the touchpoints that a customer interacts with, delving into deeper levels of detail as needed. 

When considering possible touchpoints, keep in mind that customer journeys don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen in the real world and so they are rarely isolated to interactions with just one brand. As a result, you may want to include touchpoints that aren’t in your control. In the example of the call to the health insurance company, the customer’s phone is an important touchpoint in the journey, even though that isn’t something that the health insurance provider can control.

Touchpoint maps are surprisingly versatile tools, though most frequently when used in conjunction with other CX artifacts like journey maps and service blueprints. Here are just some of the ways they can be used by CX professionals.

Prefer to read? Here’s the 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 listening towards certification renewal credits. So be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to so that you can submit these towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 82, the fifth episode for April 2020.

This month’s podcasts have taken us on a journey exploring everything from CX maturity to ROI and voice of customer. The last two CX Mini Masterclass episodes have focused on strategies for understanding customers, a critical component to any customer experience management program. And today, I’m going to round out the month with an episode exploring one of the many ways that you can use voice of customer data once you have it. And that’s touchpoint mapping.

Touchpoint maps are often confused with journey maps, much to the frustration of CX professionals. This mix up is so common that I’ve had clients show me what they thought were journey maps, only to have to be the one to tell them that what they actually had were touchpoint maps. As frustrating as it can be to see these concepts confused, touchpoint maps do serve an important purpose. Touchpoint maps help teams understand how a customer interacts with a brand.

They can be a helpful complement to journey maps, since touchpoint maps serve as part of the link between the outward looking view of the journey map and the inward looking view of a process map or service blueprint. CX professionals should be able to distinguish between these two different types of maps and understand each one’s place in the CX toolbox. So, if you’re interested in learning about touchpoint maps, their role in customer experience management, and tips on how to build one, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and here’s something 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. Some of my first CX Mini Masterclasses focused on the clarification of terms like customer experience, customer journey, and touchpoint. These words get batted around in the business world, and when they’re misused, it makes it harder for CX professionals to do their job. If you are at all unsure about these definitions, be sure to go back and check out episodes 14, 15, and 16.

But in essence, a customer journey is a series of events or experiences that a customer has as they’re trying to fulfill some need in their life. Sometimes this need is referred to as a job to be done. A journey map is the visual representation of this series of experiences presented from the customer’s point of view. Touch points are the conduits for experiences throughout the journey.

They are the channel or the mode of interaction, not the interaction itself. So for example, if I’m on a journey to get medical treatment, and one of my customer experiences is calling my health insurance company to check on the status of a claim, the experience is calling in, and the touch point would be the call center. If you wanted to get really granular, you could break down the specific touch point components within the call center. Things like the IVR system, the agent, and maybe even the phone connection itself.

A touch point map is a visual representation of the channels of interaction that a customer interfaces with throughout the journey. To understand the touch points, you have to first understand the journey. The touch point map is the representation of one customer persona’s journey. Not all the touch point possibilities out there, which would be something more of a touch point matrix.

It’s also not the touch points that you want the customer to interface with, which would probably be considered something like a touch point design. When considering possible touch points, keep in mind that customer journeys don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen in the real world, so they’re rarely isolated to interactions with just one brand. As a result, you may want to include touch points that aren’t in your control.

In the example of my call to the health care insurance company, my phone is an important touch point in the journey, even though this isn’t something that my health insurance provider can control. So how do you build a touch point map and when are these useful? I think it’s easiest to regard a touch point map as a by-product of a journey map. After you map the journey, go through each phase or step of the journey and tease out the touch point that’s used.

If you don’t know, go back to your data or go back to the customer and ask. Create an overlay map that just includes the points of interaction. As mentioned before, you can use this map to take things one step deeper and call out more granular touch points that would be way too much detail on a full journey map. Touch points are where the customer interacts with the company which often creates a data trail.

So touch point maps can be really helpful for validating the volume of customers who are having a specific experience. You can then use this to prioritize journey improvements, quantify impact or make the business case for a specific customer experience intervention. You might also use a touch point map to help with your root cause analysis of customer experience pain points. Perhaps the common denominator of several journey pain points is a faulty touch point that just isn’t supporting the experience as it should.

Or maybe you identify that a touch point outside of your immediate control is the source of customer experience issues later on in the journey. Either way, these maps can be helpful diagnostic tools because they strip out some of the complexity and let you hone in on one facet of the experience. A touch point map can also serve as a helpful reality check for business leaders about how many touch points exist and the variation of experiences through different channels. In the corporate world, touch points are frequently managed by different teams, which can result in inconsistent experiences across the journey.

A touch point map can be used to help plan for consistency across channels, maybe by bringing in some standards or experience principles for all touch points. When I interviewed the CEO of Ivoclar Vivadent back in episode 65, he shared that their journey mapping had yielded more than 200 touch points. So as you can see, it’s common to have a lot of touch points, and it’s important to manage these. Finally, when it’s time to start implementing changes to the journey, a touch point map can also be used to start flushing out a service blueprint or the other process maps that support customer experiences.

Again, since touch points represent the channels of interaction, it’s a nice place to start building the understanding of how an organization supports experiences. Each touch point is likely to have a web of teams, processes, and technologies behind it. So as you can see, the touch point map can be a useful link between the outward-looking view of the customer journey map and the inward-looking view of how an organization manages and improves the customer journey. You can use these maps to build the story about the impact of customer experience, to engage with leaders, build plans for delivering the journey, and to vet experience improvement opportunities.

And that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. If you found another helpful use for touch point maps in your organization, please let me know. I’d love to hear about it. If you’re looking for help turning voice of customer insights into experience improvements, please get in touch.

I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or Decoding the customer.com. I hope that you’re enjoying the show.

Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show. I’ll be back next week with another episode. See you then.

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. 

Stephanie has amassed deep expertise through her diverse professional background in the field of customer experience. While she’s often best known for her experience as one of the US federal government’s first agency CX leads, she has also been a practitioner and consultant in the B2B world, working with small and mid-sized companies and was one of the founding members of the CXPA. She’s a CCXP and has remained active with the association, even spending some time as part of the association’s HQ team. She’s written an ebook, Where Customer Experience Practices Haven’t Landed in Business. If you’d like to get in touch, connect with her via LinkedIn or Twitter.

If you’d like to hear more of Stephanie’s insights on the show, be sure to check out her previous episodes. In episode 45 Stephanie re-framed how organizations should think of customers and shared practical ideas on how to do this. In episode 50, Stephanie dove into her area of expertise and covered trends with how CX is taking hold in government organizations. And in episode 55, she provided a step-by-step guide to CEOs on how to lead customer-centric change. In episode 63 she explored some of the most pervasive missteps organizations make with their CX metrics and how to avoid these.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer for Voice of Customer. Industries and journeys are different, so each organization needs to craft its own best strategy for understanding customers and their needs. When planning your voice of customer approach, there are many different methodologies to choose from. Episode 79 covered 3 lesser known methodologies, but surveys, focus groups and interviews still reign supreme as the dominant research approaches. And with good reason. If done correctly, they can yield amazing insights.

Customer surveys are especially popular for collecting customer experience feedback in the B2C world. But in B2B, where human-to-human, long-term relationships and RFPs make or break the journey, collecting feedback sometimes needs to take on a more human touch to have a meaningful impact. In this case, Stephanie advocates for a client interview program as a great way to gain customer insight.

Client interviews are just that, face-to-face or telephone conversations with a selected group sample of clients or customers. Interviews are more flexible than surveys. Often an interviewer will come prepared with a set of planned, yet adaptable, questions about the customer or client’s business and their experience with the brand. The objective of the conversation is to glean insight about client needs, how the client views the business relationship and how the supplier organization’s products or services help address these business challenges.

The selection of clients should be guided by the objectives of the research. If the research is designed to gain customer insight across the entire portfolio of customers, the sample should be reasonably representative of this. If the objective is to dive into the needs of a specific customer segment or product opportunity, the sample should be tailored accordingly. 

Stephanie provided 5 recommendations for any CX team that is looking to integrate client interviews into their Voice of Customer research program:

Prefer to read? Here’s the 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 81, and today I have another mini master class presented by leading customer experience expert and friend of the show, Stephanie Thum.

It’s a pleasure to have Stephanie back on the podcast again. She’s a seasoned CX professional, a CCXP, and is one of the founding members of the CXPA. She’s remained closely involved with the association, even spending some time as part of the association’s staff team. In her career as a customer experience practitioner, she’s amassed deep expertise through her diverse professional background.

She’s had the opportunity to drive customer-centric change within government. And while she’s known for her background as one of the US federal government’s first agency customer experience leads, she’s also been a practitioner and consultant in the B2B world, working with small and mid-size companies. She’s given a number of excellent CX mini masterclasses since I launched these shorter format episodes. And it’s so great to be able to share her insights with you once again.

We all know that a robust approach to voice of customer is absolutely key to customer experience management. If you’ve listened to previous episodes on this topic, you’ll know that I’m an advocate for a multi-pronged approach to understanding customers. Industries and journeys are different, so each organization needs to craft its own best strategy for understanding customers and their needs. When planning your voice of customer approach, there are many different methodologies to choose from.

In episode 79, I covered three lesser known methodologies. But I also noted that surveys, focus groups, and interviews are some of the most popular approaches out there. And with good reason, if done correctly, they can yield amazing insights. So today, Stephanie is taking us on a deep dive into the ins and outs of customer interviews.

She shares when and where this voice of customer strategy can be most useful, as well as best practices for conducting customer interviews and five practical tips for designing an interview program. If you’re looking for some tangible advice about how to leverage interviews to better understand your customers, then this episode is for you. And as always, if you happen to be making dinner or out for a jog, 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.

I’ll also include links to find out more about Stephanie’s work and how you can get in touch with her. So with that, I’ll let Stephanie take it away. Hey, Julia, thanks for having me back on the Mini Masterclass podcast. So customer surveys, they may be all the rage when it comes to collecting customer experience feedback data in the B2C world.

But in B2B, where human-to-human long-term relationships and RFPs rule the day, collecting feedback usually needs to take on a more human touch to have a meaningful impact. So enter the client interview, a low-volume, high-impact feedback collection approach that can fuel CX data insights in the B2B space in ways that electronic surveys simply cannot. All right, so what is a client interview program? Well, client interviews are just that, face-to-face or telephone conversations where you’re asking questions and cultivating insights from clients, decision makers, and others who influence buying decisions.

You go one-on-one with a sample of your biggest clients, or your high potential clients, or maybe it’s your at-risk clients. Maybe it’s a combination of all of those. But client interviews are not simply a regurgitation of questions you might ask on an email survey. Instead, an interviewer asks well-chosen interviewees a series of planned, yet flexible questions about their experiences with your company’s policies, processes, service, people, and products.

The point is to understand your clients’ perspectives on the nature of your business partnership and how that relationship intersects with their business challenges. So how do you set a client interview program up? Well, setting it up seems simple, right? But the reality is that great client interview programs don’t just happen.

They’re deliberately designed and systematically deployed. Here are five things to think about when you’re setting up your program. Number one, I always come back to this as being the most important part of a successful client interview program. An impartial, skilled interviewer should conduct the client interview, not a sales executive.

This is always my top recommendation for companies that want to start a client interview program. And it’s usually a point of hesitation on the part of clients I advise. But the client feedback session is not, nor should it ever be, anything like a sales call. The idea is to gather feedback that can help your company to reduce friction for the client and get ahead of issues that can cause clients to leave.

But unfortunately, sales and service team members that are too closely connected to the client can sometimes feel they have too much to lose if negative feedback surfaces in that interview. And there can be a tendency to disregard, dismiss, or even bury certain clients’ ratings and comments. Number two, take a programmatic structured approach. You’re going to want to work with the boss and with stakeholders from throughout the company to create a target client list, an interview policy, a client interview and debrief process, template communications for clients you’re targeting for an interview, a standard survey or dialogue guide with well thought out questions, and at least one punctuating metric derived from a question that’s answered by all interviewees.

You’re going to want to develop template reports for each interview or series of interviews and plan a cadence for presenting trends to leadership across client segments or verticals. Number three, make the interview mutually beneficial. Don’t waste the client’s time with superficial questions. For me, I’ve never been able to glean much from answers to questions like, how knowledgeable was our staff?

And please rate the quality of our product. Sure, the answers to those questions will tell you about your company, but that’s not enough. Use the interview to understand more about the outcomes the client is after. A favorite interview question of mine has always been, what are your business challenges coming up in the next one to two years?

And where do you see our firm fitting in? Client’s answers almost always shed light on problems and opportunities you’ll never get from a survey or a press release. Number four, create artifacts. Take good interview notes and store those notes in an organized fashion somewhere where the right people can review them at the right time, like any other source of client intelligence.

It’s common for some executives to want to skimp on documentation, which is another reason why you want a skilled interviewer conducting those interviews because they also know how to take good notes. But in the instances when you’re navigating potential client loss, you’ll be glad you wrote down the feedback somewhere besides the back of a bar napkin. And number five, don’t get mad. The only thing more dangerous than not asking clients for feedback is asking and getting angry at the client for what you hear or simply not following up at all.

So make sure a multidisciplinary team goes to work on follow-up conversations and activities immediately after that interview and start to close the loop with the clients you’ve talked to. I used to sit down once a year or so with certain clients, and for every repeat interview, the first question was always, the last time we talked, you mentioned A, B, and C. Getting very specific about what they had said previously. Then to what extent do you feel our team followed up on those things?

If the client doesn’t think you followed up, that’s a red flag. It’s time to apologize to the client and get your teams moving. In the B2B world, feedback from one-on-one client interviews can help your company to stay ahead of issues and opportunities in ways that surveys, press releases, and newspaper articles simply cannot. So ask the right questions to the right interviewees.

Get a skilled interviewer to work with you. Listen carefully, document your findings, and share insights across the organization, and of course, take action. Thanks for listening and hope to talk to you again soon. Bye for now.

So there you have it. Special guest, Stephanie Thum, taking us through the benefits of customer interviews, and five best practices to keep in mind if you want to include this methodology as part of your Voice of Customer program. To hear more of Stephanie’s pearls of wisdom, be sure to check out her previous CX Mini Masterclass guest appearances. In episode 45, she shared insights on reframing how organizations think of customers.

episode 50 featured her take on the status of CX in government. episode 55 included her advice to CEOs on how to lead customer-centric change. And in episode 63, she talked about how to maximize the impact of customer experience metrics. Links to all of these podcasts will be available in the show notes for this episode, along with a summary of her five tips from today and information on how to get in touch with Stephanie.

If you’re on Twitter, her handle is at Stephanie Thum. She’s active on this platform and is always sharing great gems and insights. Plus, adorable photos of her dog, Dash. I’ll be back next Thursday with another CX Mini Masterclass episode.

If you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back next week.

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 customer insights, CX measurement, leadership alignment and CX change implementation) or get in touch via email. 

Michelle is a Customer Experience Design Partner with Verizon Business Group.  In this role, she helps Verizon’s business customers create better customer experiences for their customers. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) as well as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt (LSSBB). Prior to joining Verizon, she led multiple CX organizations and has received many awards for her work in CX, including the esteemed CX Impact Award for Outstanding Practitioner in 2014, as well as the CX Innovation Award for her unique work titled, Pay It Forward – Improvements in CX through Employee Engagement. Her work has been cited in more than 20 industry publications including a featured case study by Forrester, “The CX Transformation Success Secrets of Crowe”, May 22, 2019. Michelle is currently serving as a board member for the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) board since January of 2020. Although her passion today is in Customer Experience, her roots as a Chemical Engineer with 6 patents adds innovation, creativity and passion to her work.

Michelle Morris, CCXP

Michelle has been working in CX roles just about as long as anyone can say that they have. She established the CX organization at the laser printing and imaging company Lexmark in 2008, and went on to do award winning work at the accounting firm Crowe before moving to Verizon. It’s a pleasure to hear insights from someone who has been leading formalized CX teams for as long as Michelle has. If you’d like to learn more about Michelle’s work, be sure to follow her on LinkedIn, where she often shares insights about customer experience, the CXPA, and much more.

During her career, Michelle has seen the field of CX evolve, but the foundational critical success factors for meaningful CX change have remained a constant. CX transformation is still a lengthy process for most large or established businesses, and Michelle cited leadership support as one of three critically important components for the success of customer-centric transformation.

If your CEO, your board or the leadership of your company isn’t really investing and caring about customer experience, then you’re beating your head against a wall because you’re not going to make a lot of progress.

Michelle added that it’s possible to win over the hearts and minds of senior leaders, but that it can be incredibly time consuming. If embarking on a campaign to win hearts and minds, CX leaders need to bring in solid change management principles and understand what motivates leaders. Also, don’t underestimate the power of a little peer pressure to help rally unified support.

Michelle highlighted grassroots support for CX as a second key success factor. Everyone in the organization needs to believe in the mission that the organization is there to create great experiences for customers. Communication and employee education can be effective ways to get the message across, but there should also be mechanisms to engage employees and reinforce the right behaviors. While at Crowe, Michelle’s team developed the award winning “Pay it Forward” campaign, which enabled client-facing team members to recognize others within the value chain who contributed to client outcomes. These types of efforts reinforce messaging and keep CX top of mind for the broader organization.

Finally, Michelle pointed out that even if you have leadership and grassroots support, it’s still important to have a solid plan for your organization’s CX transformation. This starts with understanding where an organization is in terms of CX maturity and establishing a framework for measuring progress.

Utilizing maturity models or index assessments to understand where you are is a key and then really putting a plan in place to get to the next level. 

For more on CX maturity models, be sure to check out episode 78, a recent CX Mini masterclass covering this topic in detail.

While Michelle highlighted executive support as a critical success factor for CX transformation, she was also quick to point out that business leaders will expect to see results. It’s a requirement that is all too familiar for CX professionals. Yet, demonstrating customer experience ROI is a challenge for many. 

While at Crowe, Michelle used the “4-R” model for demonstrating ROI. This multi-pronged approach highlights different facets of customer experience ROI to build a robust story about the positive impact of customer experience:

Regardless of which approach you use to quantify customer experience ROI, Michelle pointed out that it’s important to identify your data sources and ensure that you collaborate with others in your organization to get the data that you need. Often this means working together with someone in finance or possibly business intelligence.

During the interview, Michelle touched on ideas for those who are keen to get involved with customer experience, but may not be in a “customer experience” role. She suggested identifying how one might impact CX from within their current responsibilities as a way to gain exposure to CX and get involved. She also pointed out that the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) can be an amazing resource for self study, professional community support and continued learning.

It’s great to see a grounded, yet experienced CX leader involved with the CXPA board. She reiterated the association’s support for the next generation of CX leaders and noted that collaboration with higher education institutions is on the CXPA’s radar, so stay tuned.

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.

Surveys and focus groups have long reigned supreme as the most popular Voice of Customer (VOC) approaches. And with good reason. If done correctly, they can yield valuable insights about customer experience. But, they have some limitations. They can be expensive and time consuming to facilitate. Both rely on customers reporting on what they think they do (which may differ from what they actually do). Surveys allow researchers to engage a large number of customers, but are always subject to bias and may yield limited insights. Focus groups provide a deeper look, but a group setting can impact what participants say.

Think of surveys and focus groups as the wide-angle lens of customer understanding. They’re essential, and you’d be lost without them. But qualitative research gives you something different: depth. It lets you get close enough to see what customers actually do, not just what they say they do, and that gap can be significant.

No single VOC methodology is perfect, and each one yields unique customer experience insights. That’s why it’s important to have a multifaceted approach that utilizes a mix of qualitative and quantitative tactics. 

Customer interviews are a tried and true qualitative research method (and if you want to go deeper on what interviews can unlock, Episode 81 is a great listen). But there are other, less-obvious qualitative research approaches that are worth having in your VOC toolkit. Here are three more methodologies that are often overlooked, but easy to execute and surprisingly rich in what they reveal.

When exploring these unique customer experience research approaches, it’s not uncommon to get questions about sample size. Anyone who’s taken a stats course knows that is important when you are looking at things like probability and predictive modeling.

On the spectrum of Voice of Customer methodologies, there is narrow-but-deep at the one end and wide-but-shallow at the other. A massive survey, for example, would be wide-but-shallow. There is the opportunity to reach a larger sample size, but limitations in the depth of perspective about a customer’s life. On the other hand, something like a Day in the Life Of study is narrow but deep. It’s obviously not feasible to shadow thousands of customers, but researchers can be smart about picking a few participants who are representative of a customer segment, and then back the findings up with a statistically significant survey campaign.

Think about observations, shadowing and journaling as complements to, not replacements for, traditional VOC research like surveys and customer activity data analysis.

Prefer to read? Here’s the 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.

This is episode 79, the second episode for April 2020. Today, I’m going to share three ideas for gathering voice of customer insight. These are methodologies that are often overlooked, but can provide unique insight into customers and the context of their lives. We all know that customer understanding is so important for CX management.

In fact, customer insight is often the very first port of call for organizations that are just getting started with their CX evolution. That’s because if we don’t understand our customers, there’s absolutely no way we’ll be able to deliver a good experience. Let’s put it this way. If customer experience management were plotted on a monopoly board, voice of customer would be where you pass go and collect $200.

We’re all familiar with surveys, focus groups, and even customer interviews as great ways to collect customer insight. But I sometimes think that these are overplayed and that there are countless other methodologies that yield rich insights, often different insights than you would get through these more traditional approaches. So if you’re interested in learning about three voice of customer approaches that you might not have thought of before, but are simple, low cost, and yield different insights than what you get from surveys and focus groups, 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. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to say that surveys and focus groups aren’t useful. They absolutely are.

And it’s for good reason that these methodologies are so incredibly popular. That said, each Voice of Customer research approach has its advantages and its disadvantages. That’s why I think it’s important to use a variety of approaches so you can get a more robust and comprehensive understanding of your customers, their needs, their motivations, and the context for their life. So today, I’m sharing three unique, alternative Voice of Customer methodologies that you might want to think about adding to your arsenal.

The first is called fly on the wall observations. It’s amazing what you can learn about customers just by watching what they do. This is particularly helpful for filling in blind spots along the customer journey that don’t leave a traditional data trail. For example, retailers often have a lot of insight about what customers purchase because that information can be gathered through loyalty card programs and at the point of sale.

But before that point, there’s little insight about how customers move through the store, what they pick up, what they might consult to make their decisions, etc. I’ve also used this fly-on-the-wall observation approach in a banking context to understand how clients move through a branch and what they do while they’re there. I think this is a great place to start your voice of customer research. Understand your objectives, grab a clipboard, find a discreet spot, and just absorb.

You’ll probably find that this approach generates questions. Resist the urge to intervene. But, think about how you might be able to answer those questions through another approach, like follow-up interviews, a focus group, or an analysis of customer activity data. Observations won’t yield all the answers, but it may open your eyes to new aspects of the customer experience that you hadn’t thought of.

The next voice of customer approach goes by several names. Job shadowing, a day in the life of, walk a mile in their shoes, whatever you want to call it. This VOC methodology is about deep immersion in someone’s life, work, or their routine. It’s pretty straightforward.

A researcher spends time with a research subject while they do a particular task or just go about their day. The researcher should have clear direction on the objectives and what they’re looking to learn. But they should also have latitude to ask questions and engage with the research subject. As with fly-on-the-wall observations, I find that this approach often yields insights about things that you’ve never suspected.

I found it to be particularly useful in a B2B context where customers often view their suppliers as partners and are open to job shadowing as a way of helping suppliers gain insights that can improve products and services. The third and final voice of customer methodology that I’d like to cover is journaling. The first two approaches rely heavily on researcher observations, but this last approach is all about unleashing the customer with a mandate to record their thoughts, feelings, emotions, actions, and their observations on a specific topic. If you’re a food manufacturer, perhaps you’re looking to glean insights on customer eating habits and their feelings about their choices.

Asking customers to log this over the course of a week can yield some pretty cool insights. The prevalence of smartphones has opened up a lot of options to make journaling easier for you and your research subjects. For example, you could ask your research participants to take photos, screen grabs, or make video testimonials about a specific activity related to your area of interest. This approach can yield some fascinating insights about the context of customers’ lives, particularly if you open it up to photo or video journaling.

As you might imagine, a challenge with this methodology can be getting the research subject to engage with journaling and to do it consistently. This might be an instance where it’s worthwhile to look at incentives or possibly even a panel of participants that have agreed to take part in this type of research. If that’s not an option, see if you can engage with some of your brand advocates or super users, those who have a stake in the success of your product offering. They might be more willing to consistently participate.

Before I wrap things up, I’d like to address the question of sample size. Because it’s an important one, and where I think many CX professionals get pushback on some of these lesser used Voice of Customer research approaches. On the spectrum of VOC methodologies, you have at the one end narrow but deep, and at the other, wide but shallow. A massive survey would be wide but shallow.

You can reach a larger sample size, but you’re limited in the perspective that you can glean. On the other hand, something like a day in the life of is narrow but deep. It’s obviously not feasible to shadow thousands of customers, but you can be smart about picking a few participants who are representative of a customer segment. And then, back up the findings with something like a broader survey if you think you’ll get pushback on the sample size.

Think about observations, shadowing, and journaling as complements to, not replacements for, surveys and customer activity data analysis. If you’re looking for help with voice of customer research or turning insights into experience improvements, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message.

My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show.

I’ll be back next week with another episode. I’ll see you then.

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. 

Truth be told, when the Age of the Customer arrived, most established businesses were ill-prepared. They were inward-looking and had been set up to solve business problems, not customer problems. The process for companies to change, adapt with the times and become customer-centric was just that, a process. And generally speaking, the larger the business, the longer that tends to take.

There isn’t a cut and paste solution for customer-centric transformation. This will be a unique journey for each organization, but if a leadership team wants to achieve a particular goal, it’s helpful to understand where things are and the work that awaits them to get to where they want to go. CX Maturity models help business leaders and CX teams understand the typical mileposts along the way.

As more and more businesses began responding to the new market conditions of the Age of the Customer, CX professionals started to see patterns and similarities within these business transformations, which gave rise to the development of CX maturity models. These models normally track the different phases of CX evolution from outright denial of customer experience as a strategic imperative to a fully integrated customer-centric business utopia. Some of the most popular models out there have been developed by the likes of the Temkin Group, Forrester, Gartner and other big name research houses. Many of the popular models are conceptually similar and vary mostly in their terminology. The magic is in how you use the model, not which one you pick.

Bruce Temkin’s CX maturity model is one of the most popular and a great example

A CX maturity model might sound like some sort of convoluted strategic thing at first, but it’s actually incredibly useful as a means to move from goals to action.

CX diagnostic – evaluate where your organization stands in terms of its CX evolution. Use this as a conversation starter with leadership.

Understand your strengths (and weaknesses) – most CX maturity models assess different competencies. CX leaders can use this level of granularity to evaluate what might be holding them back from progressing towards their customer-centric goals.

Prefer to read? Here’s the 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-sized 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.

This is episode 78, and it’s the first episode for the month of April 2020. Regular listeners of the program will know that the first Thursday of the month is usually an interview episode, but the coronavirus pandemic has thrown a bit of a wrench into some of my interview scheduling. But I do have an interview episode headed your way later this month, so stay tuned for that. Today is a CX mini master class, and we’re going to be looking at CX maturity and some models for charting progress with customer centric evolution.

The CX profession was born out of the age of the customer, a confluence of market factors that led to the rise of empowered customers and a shift in power from companies to consumers. As companies responded and became more customer centric, there needed to be ways of measuring, evaluating, and charting the progress. This gave rise to CX maturity models, which can be valuable tools for any CX professional to help their organization plan for and drive CX change. In this episode, I’m going to explain CX maturity, talk about some of the most popular CX maturity models that have been developed over the years, and provide you with some practical ideas on how you might be able to leverage these in your work as an agent of customer centric change.

If you’re interested in learning more about a tool that is fundamental to customer centric evolution and goes straight to the heart of the CX profession, then this episode is for you. 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. Truth be told, when the age of the customer arrived, most established businesses were ill-prepared.

They were inward-looking and had been set up to solve business problems, not customer problems. The process for companies to change, adapt with the times, and become customer-centric was just that, a process. Generally speaking, the larger the business, the longer that tends to take. There isn’t a cut and paste solution for customer-centric transformation.

This will be a unique journey for each organization. But there are some similarities in key milestones that can be charted along the way. As we progressed into the age of the customer and more and more businesses were responding to the new market conditions, CX professionals started to see patterns and similarities, which gave rise to the development of CX maturity models. These models normally track the different phases of CX evolution from outright denial of customer experience as a strategic imperative at the very lowest level to a fully integrated customer-centric business utopia at the highest level.

Plus, all the steps in between. Some of the most popular models out there have been developed by the likes of Forrester, Gartner, and some of the other big name research houses. Most of the models in high rotation are conceptually quite similar, and vary mostly in their terminology. So personally, I think the magic is in how you use the model, not which one you pick.

I often reference Bruce Temkin’s model, and I’m going to use that as my example here, but I just want to stress that I’m not endorsing one maturity model over another. Temkin’s model includes six stages. Stage one is ignore, in which an organization does not place importance on, or really pay much attention to customer experience. Stage two is explore, where an organization might start some efforts to learn a bit more about customers and improve customer experience, possibly through some ad hoc voice of customer research, maybe a little one soft journey mapping, something like that.

The next is stage three, or mobilize, where CX management begins to take some permanent shape through the creation of a CX team and possibly some CX governance. Next is operationalize, which is stage four. Here, we see more visible leadership support for customer experience, though not unanimous, and the CX team gains influence across the organization. Stage five is Align, where some leaders start to prioritize customer experience as a strategic driver and a core value.

Again, not all the leaders, but maybe most of them. In this stage, CX teams would expand and maintain their distributed skills. Finally, stage six is embed, where leaders uniformly support customer experience as a top priority and a core value. Customer experience becomes the responsibility of the entire organization, and it’s just what everyone does.

See what I mean about CX Utopia? As you see, a CX maturity model helps us understand how an organization moves through its customer-centric transformation and how each of these phases is quite unique. For each of these phases, one can evaluate different criteria or competencies. The Temkin model looks at purposeful leadership, compelling values, employee engagement, customer connectedness, and CX organization across the different stages as their competencies for evaluation.

If you want to move the dial with overall CX management and customer centricity, you can’t just focus on one or two of these. So, for example, customer connectedness or employee engagement. You have to look at how to drive change across all the competencies. And organizations may have some areas where they’re more advanced than others.

That’s definitely not uncommon, and in fact, I’d say it’s probably the norm. CX maturity models can be really useful both as diagnostic tools for establishing where an organization is, as well as formulating the strategy for driving transformation going forward. If you’re a CX professional, the approaches that you might use to move from ignore to explore would be very different than those that you would use to move an organization from Operationalize to Align. So understanding where you are is helpful in charting where you’re going to go.

Doing a CX maturity diagnostic can be a great reality check for leaders to understand where they are and what they need to do. So if you haven’t done so already, I suggest sitting down with your leadership team to have a frank discussion about your organization’s CX maturity. In advance of this conversation, you might want to pull cross-functional leaders, get some feedback from them, or come prepared with some examples to share and discuss. In my experience, these can be very eye-opening conversations, but you’ve got to plan ahead for them.

As mentioned previously, it’s unrealistic to expect a business to jump from stage one to stage six overnight. And a CX maturity model might be something that you can use to craft the right approach for your organization. So for example, if you identify that the lack of clearly defined customer promises is what’s keeping your organization from moving from explore to mobilize, you can plan some actions to address this. Maybe in the other competencies, you’re doing just fine.

If your team is also responsible for day-to-day management of customer experiences, it’s especially important that you create a plan for driving CX maturity. I’ve seen time and time again. It’s just too easy for these teams to get wrapped up in the day-to-day and lose sight of the bigger picture. A CX maturity model might sound like some sort of abstract convoluted strategic thing at first, but it’s actually an incredibly useful and very practical tool for moving from goals to action.

If you’re looking for help with a CX maturity diagnostic strategy formulation or figuring out how to drive tangible CX change, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show. I’ll be back next week with another episode.

I’ll see you then.

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. 

Love it or hate it, social media is part of the fabric of our modern world, and it is here to stay. The platforms have evolved over time, their popularity ebbing and flowing, but the overall trend of global social media usage has steadily moved in one direction, and that’s up 📈. The 2020 Hootsuite/We are Social Digital Report, found that there were over 3.8 Billion social media users globally. This is up from 3.5 Billion global social media users in 2019. The report also found, unsurprisingly, that social media is a huge part of our lives. Internet users who are on social media spend an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes on various platforms.

In the late 1980s, the White House Office of Consumer Affairs conducted a research study, which found that only 1 in 26 consumers actually says something when they’re unhappy with a brand. The vast majority, or 97% of people, stay silent. This study might yield slightly different results in a modern context. With social media, the barriers to providing feedback are much lower, but it’s likely that most consumers still say nothing.

Reflect on your own experience for a moment. How often do you provide feedback when you have a bad experience? Certainly not all the time. Probably not even most of the time. That means that unprompted inbound customer feedback, like what we see on social media, is still just the tip of the iceberg. Below the waterline, there are a lot of unhappy customers who said nothing.

Every bit of customer feedback is a gift. It provides an opportunity for the brand in question to rectify their relationship, and look for the root cause of customer experience pain points. Through what they say, customers are highlighting what’s important to them. Plus, the presence of unprompted feedback also indicates that a customer cares enough to say something. Again, reflecting on your own experiences as a customer, how often did you remain silent because you didn’t care enough or thought the feedback would fall on deaf ears? If customers are providing feedback on social media, it means both that they care enough about their relationship with the brand in question, and that they have some faith that the situation will be fixed. CX teams shouldn’t let these tiny gems from customers go to waste.

Social media has brought about challenges and opportunities for customer experience management. It’s not surprising that CX leaders often have mixed emotions about social media. On the one hand, it’s a public forum for consumers to share their feelings about brands, which means it can be a real sore point for CX leaders. On the other hand, it’s an incredible source of data about customer perceptions, opinions and priorities. The key is to effectively harness that information.

Topic and trend analysis – if customers are organically telling a brand, en masse, that they love or hate something, that’s incredibly valuable information. Teams can leverage this insight to identify trending feedback topics which could become opportunities for product innovation or journey enhancement. It’s very difficult to get this information through a survey, as surveys nearly always contain some element of bias. If you ask a customer to rate or prioritize particular attributes of the customer journey, they are already confined to predetermined categories of what is important, potentially excluding aspects of the journey the research team hadn’t thought of.

Sentiment analysis – like analyzing incoming data about topics and trends, sentiment analysis allows brands to take a pulse on how happy or unhappy customers are with particular aspects of the journey or the brand as a whole. On its own, broad sentiment analysis might be more of a CX metric, but when combined with topics, trends or ethnographic insights, sentiment becomes an incredibly powerful source of aggregated VOC insight.

Prefer to read? Here’s the 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.

This is episode 77, and it’s the fourth episode of March 2020. For those listeners who are discovering this show sometime in the future, I sincerely hope that the coronavirus pandemic is a distant memory. But those who are listening to the episodes as they’re released are highly aware that we are amid a strange and unprecedented time of global crisis. Last week’s episode focused on approaches for managing customer experience during a time of crisis.

This week, I’m going to shift gears a little bit, not focusing on the crisis, but on a topic that is both timely for this moment and when things finally normalize again. And that’s social media as an avenue for voice of customer data. Twitter announced a few days ago that amid all of the global lockdowns, engagement with their platform has increased during the last quarter. This shouldn’t be surprising since social distancing means that social media has now become many people’s main avenue for engagement with friends, family, and the rest of the outside world.

Global health crisis or not, social media usage is on the rise across the board. When I speak to CX leaders about social media, they often grimace. It’s a public forum for consumers to share their feelings about brands and can be a real sore point for CX leaders. I’d argue the power given to consumers through social media is one of the reasons that customer experience is now a focus for businesses.

So while no one enjoys dealing with the fire drill associated with a disgruntled customer who also happens to be a social media influencer, social media has its benefits as well. One of these is that it’s a valuable and I think often underutilized source of voice of customer insights. So today, I’m going to talk about some practical approaches for leveraging social media data to learn about customers and engage with teams around CX. If you’re looking for tips and ideas on how to turn a thorn in the side of the business into a rich fountain of customer insight, then this episode is for you.

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. Love it or hate it, it seems like social media is part of the fabric of our modern world and is here to stay. The platforms of choice have evolved over time, but the overall trend of global social media usage has steadily moved in one direction, and that’s up.

One of my favorite reports on this topic, the Hootsuite We Are Social digital report collaboration, found that there were over 3.8 billion social media users globally as of 2020. This is up from 3.5 billion global social media users in 2019. The report also found, unsurprisingly, that social media is a huge part of our lives. Internet users who are on social media spend on average 2 hours and 24 minutes on various platforms.

When I work with clients, they often tell me that engagement through social media is still much smaller than engagement through other channels like call centers, but that it’s growing exponentially. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see it surpass engagement through some of the traditional channels in the near future. Way back in the late 1980s, the White House Office of Consumer Affairs conducted a research study which found that only 1 in 26 consumers actually says something when they’re unhappy with a brand. That leaves the vast majority, or 97% of people, silent.

I’d love to see this study replicated in the modern context. I suspect that the barriers to providing feedback are much lower, so we’d probably see a reduced percentage in silent consumers. But I do still think that they would represent the majority. Even though it’s easier now to voice your opinion, most consumers still say nothing.

Reflect for a moment on your own experience. How often do you provide feedback when you have a bad experience? Certainly not all the time. Working in the field of CX, I often feel like I have some sort of karmic responsibility to respond to surveys and provide feedback.

And even I’m silent most of the time. That means that what we hear from customers is still just the tip of the iceberg. Below the waterline, there are a lot of unhappy customers who said nothing. Every bit of feedback, therefore, is a gift.

It provides an opportunity for the brand in question to rectify their relationship with that customer, and to look for the root cause of customer experience pain points. Through what they say, customers are indicating what’s important to them. Plus, this also tells us that the customer cared enough to say something. Again, reflecting on your own experience as a customer, oftentimes, we just don’t say something because we don’t care enough, or because we think that our feedback is going to fall on deaf ears.

If customers are providing feedback on social media, it means both that they care enough about their relationship with the brand in question, and that they have some faith that the situation will be fixed. So next time you or one of your colleagues is staring down the barrel of a complaint from a particularly grumpy customer, just remind yourself of that. Now that we’ve covered some of the redeeming qualities of customer feedback and how more and more of this feedback is and will be coming from social media, I’d like to look at how brands can leverage social media as a source of rich voice of customer insight. The first is as a window into what’s important to customers through topic and trend analysis.

If you have all of these customers organically telling you, en masse, that they love or hate something, or that a particular aspect of the customer journey is broken, that’s incredibly valuable information. Teams can leverage this insight to identify opportunities for product and service innovation or to enhance the customer journey. It’s very difficult to get this type of information through a survey because surveys nearly always contain some element of bias. If we’re asking a customer to rate or prioritize a particular attribute of the customer journey, we’ve already confined them to what we’ve decided is important, and we might be missing out on aspects of the journey that we just hadn’t thought of.

The next way that social media data can be used to gather voice of customer insight is through sentiment analysis. Like analyzing incoming data about topics and trends, sentiment analysis allows brands to take a pulse on how happy or unhappy customers are with particular aspects of the journey or the brand as a whole. On its own, broad sentiment analysis might be more of a CX metric, but when you overlay this with topics, trends, or ethnographic insights, it becomes an incredibly powerful source of aggregated voice of customer insight. Many of you are probably thinking, geez, how can we ever sort through all the social media commentary that’s out there and get to sentiment or trends?

The good news is that text analytics capabilities are constantly evolving and getting better. Some of the robust solutions out there blend AI technology with human review of social media posts to catch things like sarcasm. As more and more engagement with customers moves into the realm of social media, I suspect that technology solutions will only continue to improve. The last point I’d like to cover is what I call the digital cookie crumb trail.

Topic and sentiment analysis both look at customer feedback on a macro level. But social media also provides us with an opportunity to do a deep dive into a customer’s journey and their experience with a brand. And why is that? Because we can see the engagement history right there in front of us.

We can see the back and forth and read the emotion. When customers are providing us with feedback about a bad experience, they sometimes also share their backstory. And if they don’t, you can ask them and then piece it together. If they tell you that they called the call center or made a purchase in store, then go and find that call recording or dig up the transaction history.

Follow the cookie crumb trail and bring the picture together. These cookie crumb trail stories can become incredibly emotive examples of where and why a particular aspect of the journey needs improvement. They can become powerful examples that make the customer journey very real for executives or others who are behind the scenes but play a key role in shaping the journey. I completely understand why CX teams get frustrated with social media.

No one likes dealing with angry customers, and it can be a little confronting to have your company’s customer experience weak points laid bare in front of the entire Internet. That said, we can still harness this information to unearth real gems in customer experience insights. The technologies that help teams make sense of unstructured, inbound data are constantly improving. So I hope that more and more brands will begin tapping into social media to listen to their voice of customer.

If you’re looking for help with voice of customer insight, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps other people find the show. I’ll be back next week with another episode.

See you then.

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.

The world is currently facing an unprecedented global health crisis in the form of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Over the course of the last week, the spread of this virus has skyrocketed in Europe and the US. It’s become a global pandemic, travel restrictions have been put in place, industries such as the travel sector have had the rug pulled out from under them, global stock markets have tanked and businesses are scrambling to respond.

Some businesses face total shutdown during government lock-down, but many others such as pharmacies, retailers and grocery stores are still providing essential services. B2B services providers are pivoting to change how they support customers whose workforce is now either operating on reduced capacity or working from home.

This crisis will (hopefully) pass, but one thing is guaranteed, this time of uncertainty is not the first and it won’t be the last. CX leaders and practitioners need to be prepared to jump in and redirect customer journey management when the unexpected happens.

Interactions in times like these can be the ultimate moment of truth for a customer. It’s an opportunity for brands to demonstrate their loyalty to the customer in a time of need, but it’s also a moment when the relationship is especially susceptible to damage. The key to success is for brands to listen and respond quickly. There will likely be aspects of the customer journey that need immediate attention and change.

Regardless of the nature of the crisis at hand, there are several aspects of CX management that are especially important. CX leaders should consider these when deciding how to guide changes to customer journey management.

When a “new normal” arrives, it brings with it a whole new set of needs and concerns. CX leaders need to understand how customer perspectives and priorities have changed. Something that might not have mattered yesterday is now important, and what was top-of-mind yesterday is now on the back burner.

Changing priorities bring about a heightened awareness both in terms of individual behavior and what consumers expect of others. In the case of the coronavirus, health hygiene has been thrust to the front of everyone’s minds. Consumers expect brands to provide experiences in the safest context possible, and they are suddenly scrutinizing the details of cleanliness. Brands need to respond to this new expectation by altering their actions and communication with customers.

Today it’s cleanliness, but the next crisis might bring about a different set of priorities, concerns and expectations. Brands need to be dialed into Voice of Customer Data so they can stay attuned to these changes as they happen and modify the journey appropriately.

Brands should also consider how customers’ needs have changed, and what this means for the customer journey they deliver. It might be helpful to ask: what aspects of customers’ lives are they leaning on more now than they used to before? How does this impact the customer experience we deliver?

Taking another example from the current coronavirus crisis, more customers are practicing “social distancing” and living their lives from within the confines of their home. This means they are relying heavily on remote channels of interaction and phone or internet connectivity as their gateway to the world. From a customer support perspective, many organizations can expect a shift in support from physical to digital and phone touchpoints. In response to social distancing, many food delivery providers now offer special drop-off services to accommodate those who need food, but want to limit possible germ exposure or have been infected with the virus and are on self-quarantine.

To spot these changes in needs, organizations can tap into voice of customer data and/or customer activity data to see how patterns are changing, and then quickly respond with the appropriate customer journey management steps.

Deciding which data are important in a crisis is a massive topic unto itself. CX thought leader and frequent show contributor, Stephanie Thum just published an excellent article on measuring CX during a crisis. I’d encourage you to check it out.

A time of crisis presents the opportunity for brands to rise to the occasion and provide compassion through living their values. Ideally, all brands should be doing this every day, but when the world is uncertain, they need to dial it up. When everyone is stressed and tensions are high, it doesn’t bring out the best in people. That’s why during a crisis, it’s time for an extra dose of patience and empathy. More than ever, leaders should encourage teams to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and live the values while delivering the customer journey.

On the flip side, it’s also a time for organizations to pay extra attention to looking after employees, by setting boundaries that protect them, encouraging self-care and giving people the space to just process the human experience of living through uncertainty and change. Richard Branson famously said that brands need to first look after their employees, and that’s never more true than in a time of crisis.

Prefer to read? Here’s the 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-sized 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.

This is episode 76, the third episode of March 2020. For those listeners who are discovering the show sometime in the future, maybe a year or two from now, I sincerely hope that the coronavirus pandemic is a distant memory. But for those who are listening to the episodes as they’re released, you’ll know that over the course of the last week, the spread of this virus has skyrocketed in Europe and the US. It’s become a global pandemic.

Travel restrictions have been put in place, industries such as the travel sector have had the rug pulled out from under them, and global stock markets have tanked. Businesses are scrambling to respond. For me, this feels just as much, if not more, stressful than some of the other major events in modern memory, such as 9-11 or the global financial crisis of 2008. So today, we’re going to talk about customer experience in times of crisis, how the customer perspective changes, and what businesses need to do.

Interactions in times like these can be the ultimate moment of truth for a customer. It’s an opportunity for brands to demonstrate their loyalty to the customer in a time of need, but it’s also a moment when the relationship is especially susceptible to damage. So if you’re looking for insight, guidance, and practical ideas on how to modify customer experience in times of unprecedented uncertainty, then this episode is for you. If, on the other hand, you are looking to escape thinking about the global crisis and wrap yourself in a cocoon of positivity and customer experience learning, then I’d encourage you to check out any one of the other 75 episodes of the show.

As always, if you happen to be busy folding laundry, making dinner, or cleaning up after your family who’s stuck on lockdown with you, 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 we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode. Which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. In times of crisis, our priorities and our perspective changes.

A new normal presents itself, and with that, a whole new set of needs and concerns. What might have been important a day ago no longer matters. And what now matters is something we didn’t care about before. With the coronavirus outbreak, personal hygiene, travel restrictions, and the ability to survive a two-week quarantine, plus figuring out how to manage lives with the new concept of social distancing, have all been thrust to the front of most consumers’ minds.

People are adjusting to these new needs and the ripple effect they will have on everything else. These changes also bring about a heightened awareness, both in terms of individual behavior and what consumers expect of others, which gets to the heart of how customer experience needs to adjust during a time of crisis. Hygiene is a prime example of this. Over the weekend, I went to one of my favorite health food cafes to pick up some food, and while I was there, I requested a glass of water.

I found myself watching the actions of the employee with extra interest and was totally mortified when she grabbed a used glass from next to the register. How could you possibly do this during a global health pandemic? Had I had this interaction two weeks ago, I might not have paid attention to what the employee was doing or even checked the glass so closely to confirm that it was clean. But the time of crisis has changed both my behavior and my expectation of others.

I have upped the ante with my personal hygiene and awareness of germs, and I expect others to do the same. Brands need to be asking themselves, what are customers expecting now that they weren’t before? Are we delivering on this? And if not, what can we change?

Organizations should be tuning in closely to their voice of customer channels to pick up on changing expectations so they can quickly respond. In the case of the coronavirus, hygiene would undoubtedly be a changing expectation that a brand would pick up on. And staff training in this area would be just one of many things that organizations should do to respond to rapidly evolving expectations. Brands should also consider how customers’ needs have changed.

What aspects of their life are they leaning on more now than they used to before? How does this impact the customer experience? Taking another example from the current crisis, more customers are living their lives from within the confines of their home. This means they’re doing more through remote channels and are relying heavily on phone or internet connectivity as their gateway to the world.

This means that many organizations can expect a shift in support from physical to digital or phone channels. Another need that’s come out of the current crisis is the need to create physical distance between ourselves and others. In response, we’ve seen food delivery providers offer special drop-off services to accommodate those who need to eat but want to limit possible germ exposure or have been infected with the virus and are in self-quarantine. To spot these changes and needs, organizations can tap into Voice of Customer Data and or customer activity data to see how patterns are changing.

The topic of which data are important in a crisis is a massive topic unto itself. Customer Experience Thought Leader and frequent show contributor Stephanie Thum just published an excellent article on this. I’d encourage you to check it out and will include a link in the episode show notes. Finally, my last point is that a time of crisis presents the opportunity for brands to rise to the occasion and provide compassion through living their values.

Ideally, all brands should be doing this every day. But when the world is uncertain, we need to dial it up. Everyone is stressed, tensions are high. These situations don’t always bring out the best in people.

It’s time for an extra dose of patience and empathy. A little kindness and a time of need goes a long way. More than ever, encourage teams to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and live the values. On the flip side, it’s also a time for organizations to pay extra attention to looking after employees.

By setting boundaries to protect them, encouraging self-care, and giving people the space to just process the human experience of living through uncertainty and change. Richard Branson famously said, the brands need to first look after their employees, and that’s never more true than in a time of crisis. Whether it’s a time of crisis or not, if you’re looking for help delivering business value through customer centricity, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help.

You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share it with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast.

This helps others discover the show. I’ll be back next week with another episode. Stay safe and healthy in the meantime. I’ll see you then.

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. 

As an organization progresses up the CX maturity curve and customer experience moves from being a “project” to a permanent fixture within the way of doing business, a key component is establishing a mechanism for ongoing management and improvement of the customer journey. This framework is known as the VOC feedback loop (also sometimes called an insights-to action feedback loop or customer journey optimization).

The underlying idea is that organizations must have an ongoing, sustainable process for unearthing insights about where to improve the journey, prioritizing solutions, implementing change and measuring the impact. This process is continual. As journey improvements are implemented, it creates an opportunity for measuring results and listening to how customers respond. This in turn creates insights that might lead to future improvements, hence the term “feedback loop” and not “improvement process”.

The VOC Feedback Loop is not to be confused with Closed Loop Feedback, which is the process of getting back to a customer, after they’ve provided feedback about their experience. For more detail on Closed Loop Feedback, be sure to check out episode 42. 

When an organization launches a customer insights initiative or maps the journey for the first time, this undoubtedly highlights opportunities to improve experiences. The natural reaction is for the organization to establish a project or a task force to identify, prioritize and implement possible solutions. This can be an effective way to raise the profile of the customer journey, but the challenge with ongoing sustainability is twofold.

First, the list of identified improvements is often overwhelmingly long, so much so that it’s not really suitable for a 3, 6, 9 maybe even an 18-month project. The second challenge is that the journey and underlying needs of customers aren’t stagnant. They’re ever-evolving. If a CX team were to do customer research or map the customer journey today, 6 months later there would be new needs and issues. Why? Because products, services and customers are always changing.

For these reasons, CX leaders can’t expect to just map the customer journey every few years, come up with a big list of fix-it items, go to work on those and call it good. Ultimately, to establish sustainability and realize the business benefits of customer journey optimization, there needs to be a Voice of Customer Feedback Loop so that issues with the customer journey are constantly being scrutinized, solutions developed and improvements deployed.

As with most things, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for ongoing customer journey optimization. That said, there are best practices that CX teams can adapt to their context:

For all phases of the VOC Feedback Loop, consistency is key.

Prefer to read? Here’s the 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.

This is episode 75, a bit of a milestone for the program. It’s also the second episode of March 2020. Today, we’re going to talk about voice of customer feedback loops, what these are, and why they’re important for any organization that wants to improve customer experience. It’s one thing to map the customer journey, it’s another thing to manage and improve the customer journey on an ongoing basis.

That’s where the rubber really meets the road. Yet, establishing the right framework is something I’ve seen many organizations struggle with. So today, I’m going to cover an overview of the concept and some dos and don’ts. If you’re looking for guidance and ideas on how to move customer journey management from haphazard to gold standard, then this episode is for you.

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 we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. As an organization progresses up the customer experience maturity curve, and customer experience moves from being a project to a permanent fixture within the way of doing business, a key component is establishing a mechanism for ongoing management and improvement of the customer journey. Otherwise known as the Voice of Customer Feedback Loop.

I sometimes call this an Insights to Action Feedback Loop. But the idea is to create a continuum from customer insights to new ideas about where to improve the journey, to actual implementation of vetted and approved customer journey improvements. Note that this is not the same as Closed Loop Feedback. Closed Loop Feedback, which I covered in episode 42, is getting back to a customer after they’ve provided feedback about their experience.

Usually, this entails letting the customer know that they’ve been heard, the actions that have been taken or will be taken, and if appropriate, some form of resolution. Once again, we have customer experience terminology that sounds very close, but is actually pretty different. If you’re struggling to differentiate between the two, you can think of a Closed Loop Feedback as an intervention at a micro level that impacts one customer and their experience. The Voice of Customer Feedback Loop is a macro approach to managing large quantities of customer insights from different sources and turning these into journey improvements that impact many customers.

When an organization launches a Customer Insights Initiative or maps the journey for the first time, it undoubtedly highlights opportunities to improve experiences. The natural reaction is for the organization to establish a project or maybe a task force to identify, prioritize, and implement possible solutions. All of this is great. I’m rarely going to voice concern about efforts to improve the journey, but the challenge here is twofold.

First, the list of identified improvements is often overwhelmingly long. So prepare yourself for that if you’re embarking on your organization’s maiden voyage for journey mapping. Usually, this list of improvements is so long that it’s not really suitable for a 3, 6, 9, maybe even an 18 month project. The second challenge is that the journey and underlying needs of customers aren’t stagnant.

They’re ever evolving. If you were to do customer journey research or to map the customer journey today, six months later, there will be new needs and issues because products, services, and customers themselves are always changing. For these reasons, we can’t expect to just map the journey every few years, come up with a big list of fix-it items, go to work on those, and call it good. No.

Customer experience leaders can use that approach to initially raise the profile of customer experience and journey management. But ultimately, to establish sustainability and realize the business benefits of customer experience management, there needs to be a voice of customer feedback loop, so that issues with the customer journey are constantly being scrutinized, solutions are being developed, and improvements are being deployed. Now that we’ve covered a broad definition of the voice of customer feedback loop and why we should care about it, I’d like to share some tips and suggestions for establishing an effective and sustainable feedback loop. Let’s start with insights.

My suggestion here would be to establish an ongoing process for aggregating customer insights from across the organization. That’s generally the global best practice. You might have raised awareness about customer issues through a once-off effort, but to make this sustainable, you need to be continually sourcing, consolidating, and reviewing voice of customer data. Voice of customer is a huge topic unto itself.

I’ll refer you back to episodes 39 through 42 for more detail. And, the answer to where to get this data will be different for every organization. But the point is, you’ll need to establish a process for gathering an array of insights about the customer journey. To keep this going, insights analysis will need clear ownership and someone to champion the message.

I’ve seen this be most successfully implemented as a key job responsibility for someone like an insights manager. Next, is development and prioritization of journey improvements. Here, you need both governance and creativity. Cross-functional participation in the process will be key, as will a regular structure for evaluating issues and developing solutions.

I’ve seen some organizations successfully implement customer councils or steering committees whose responsibility is managing journey improvements. They can be creative problem solvers, the gatekeepers, and the taskmasters all rolled into one. The key here is to get a respected senior leader to chair this and to remain committed, and also to establish a regular cadence for the governance group to convene. Journey improvements are rarely relegated to one silo within the business, so you need to have cross-functional representation.

This also is a major best practice for this. Your steerco or governance group should have a clear mandate and objective. Perhaps that’s as simple as improving the customer journey to enhance customer lifetime value. But whatever it is, a clear objective will be the guiding light for all decisions and how you measure success.

As solutions are vetted, they should be prioritized based on impact to the journey and to the business. Again, that’s a big topic on its own, and I dedicated episode 54 to an approach for prioritizing journey improvements. But the bottom line is to ensure that you have some prioritization process in place that ensures you’re putting your efforts where they will have the biggest impact, both in terms of return on investment and creating a better journey. The next step of the feedback loop is implementing the journey improvements themselves.

You can leverage the same leader-led governance to establish accountability and planning for implementation of journey fixes. If your organization has a project management office, perhaps you can plug into that for expertise and project management support. It’s important that customer experience management as a whole not be treated like a project or a program. But individual journey improvement opportunities can definitely be tackled in this way.

I’d also urge you to borrow a page from Design Thinking and ensure that as you prototype and deploy improvements to the customer journey, that you also plan for phases of listening, testing, and refinement. After journey improvements are implemented, it’s time to measure the results and the impact. If journey improvements are crafted with a clear goal in mind, then measuring success will be fairly straightforward. I’d recommend establishing metrics that are in line with your objectives.

If the goal of your Voice of Customer Feedback Loop is to improve the journey or customer lifetime value, then you’ll want to measure things like retention, growth of customer base, and profit per customer. Plus, whatever factors influence these. As with the management of the insights phase of things, your measurement approach will require clear ownership and a regular cadence. Often, this takes the form of some monthly or quarterly reporting that is part of someone’s job responsibilities to create.

These measurements become your success stories back to the rest of the business. So don’t forget to factor in return on investment, customer testimonials, and whatever else will resonate with your stakeholder audience. Remember that consistency is key. So establish a regular cadence for communicating this back to the organization.

And finally, changes in metrics and measurement will probably raise new questions, catalyzing hypotheses that may become items for voice of customer research. And this is where we see that the loop continues back to where we started. Voice of customer feedback loops are complex. There are a lot of moving pieces, and it’s clear that governance, consistency, and stakeholder management all play important roles.

It’s not surprising that customer experience teams find it challenging to establish a voice of customer feedback loop. But I hope that this episode, and the others mentioned along the way, provides some helpful food for thought. How does your organization manage its voice of customer feedback loop? Do you have any best practices you’d like to share?

I’d love to hear about it. If you’re looking for help establishing a voice of customer feedback loop, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message.

My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I hope that you’re enjoying this show. Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another episode.

See you then.

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.