Decoding the Customer

Regular listeners of the show will know that I’m a huge fan of providing basic definitions. In the business world, we bat around a lot of buzz words, often people establish a basic intuitive knowledge of the meaning through context, but it never hurts to provide a clear, concise definition.

Artificial Intelligence is the ability of a machine to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. This includes things like the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience.

The field of AI research started at Dartmouth College in the US during the mid-1950s, as an intrepid group of researchers developed computer programs that could solve algebra word problems and learn to play checkers. AI technology has evolved leaps and bound since the 1950s, and when you add in the great sea of consumer data that most companies have – courtesy of digital touch points and eCommerce, you create an ideal environment for AI to augment customer experience.

AI has many applications in the field of CX. If we have the power to process lots of information about our customers, it’s not a huge leap to understand that there are many powerful applications for this technology when it comes to improving customer journeys and how experiences are managed.

Within the current AI technology, I see 3 distinct categories of AI application for CX.

If you are thinking about how AI can help your organization’s customer experience, there’s a lot to get excited about. Just remember that the journey should lead the tech, not the other way around. An idea might sound like a great idea on paper – or in a vendor’s pitch presentation, but the important test is if it adds value to the customer journey. And when you’re ready to measure that value, having the right metrics in place is essential — check out episode 63 on CX metrics.

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 64, the fourth episode for the month of November, and the last episode for 2019. I’m taking a little break from publishing new episodes during the month of December. I’m doing this so that I can recharge my batteries and get some great content lined up for you, my valued listener, in 2020.

This month, I’ve been fortunate to feature three amazing guest experts, Ben Matram, Pierre Demmes, and Stephanie Thum. But I wanted to round out the year with a mini masterclass from me. I’ve chosen a topic that has gotten a lot of buzz this year, artificial intelligence. As many of you may know, I do a bit of public speaking at conferences and private events.

And I tell you, 2019 has been the year of artificial intelligence talks. It’s been a great learning experience for me. And today, I’m condensing the highlights into a little express package just for you. So, if you’re looking for an overview of AI and how this is set to impact the world of customer experience, 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. First things first, let’s define artificial intelligence. People throw this term around and just assume that everyone knows what it is.

While we might understand the concept because it forms part of business conversation these days, it’s still important to take a second to clarify the definition. You’ll notice I do that a lot on the program. All right. Artificial intelligence is the ability of a machine to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings.

This includes things like the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experiences. The field of AI research started at Dartmouth College in the US during the mid-1950s. As an intrepid group of researchers, developed computer programs that could solve algebra word problems and learn to play checkers. You may be asking yourself, if AI has been around for so long, why is this a relatively new topic in the world of customer experience?

The answer to this has two parts. First, there was a long road of R&D between the birth of AI in the 1950s and the launch of sophisticated computer systems like IBM Watson in the last 10 years or so. Second, since the power of AI is underpinned by data processing, large quantities of meaningful data are needed for AI to learn from past behavior, predict actions, et cetera. The proliferation of smartphones and popularity of e-commerce have given rise to a great sea of consumer data, but this is also relatively recent.

If we think about the pre-digital consumer world, or even the consumer world we knew five or 10 years ago, we were dealing with a lot less data. The critical combination of customer data and sophisticated AI technology has only really come together in the last couple of years. Hence, this is now a buzzword in the CX world and it wasn’t before. Artificial intelligence has loads of applications in the field of customer experience.

If we have the power to process so much information about our customers, it’s not a huge leap to understand that there are probably many powerful applications for this technology when it comes to improving customer journeys and how experiences are managed. Within the current AI technology, I see several different categories of application for artificial intelligence in customer experience. The first, the most well-known and possibly the most obvious of these, is in personalized customer experiences. To provide a personalized customer experience, we have to understand the user.

Historically, this might have been achieved through a long-standing rapport between a shop attendant and a frequent customer. If we have millions of customers though, that’s a much taller order. Where AI enables us to understand all of our customers as individuals, it unlocks a whole world of possibilities to more precisely meet each customer’s needs. E-commerce’s Recommended Products was one of the first ways that we saw AI apply to mass customization of experiences.

But personalization has evolved beyond this. Disney, ever the customer experience pace setter, uses what they call the magic band wristbands at their parks. These wristbands are smart devices, and they function as a room key, a ticket, and a payment tool, all the while gathering information about what guests are doing. Based on information about guest behaviors, the wristbands can also recommend activities of interest and route people to attractions within the park that are less busy.

Not all personalized interactions are created equal, however. The goal with personalized experiences is for brands to provide relevant information at the right time through the right channel. Personalization should help customers discover new products, services, or experiences that fill their needs, and which they might not have discovered on their own, but without becoming creepy. And that’s the magic word, creepy.

Moving on to another application for artificial intelligence in customer experience, let’s look at service support, and yes, the infamous chatbot. The proliferation of smartphones has given rise to chat-based support, and AI-powered web or messenger-based chatbots have proven to be an effective first line of defense for basic query resolution. Proposed legislation in the state of California may require chatbots to identify themselves as such. Organizations should be prepared to be transparent about the use of this technology, understanding that doing so might impact customer perceptions and their adoption of these technologies.

Chatbots can also be used behind the scenes to tackle more complex issues, ones that still require human intervention. In this context, an in-house chatbot can support the agents who are helping customers. The South African media giant, Multichoice, launched just such a behind-the-scenes chatbot. ToMe, as they named Her, is an on-demand chat-based resource for call center agents, should they have questions while assisting a customer.

Preliminary results show that ToMe, this Her chatbot, has helped decrease both call time and the training runway for new agents. When we think about AI, we should remember to think about applications that the customer sees, as well as those that have been behind the line of customer visibility. And if you’d like to learn more about that, be sure to check out episode 59 on service blueprinting. Finally, I wanted to talk about augmented and virtual reality.

Some say that AR and VR, as they’re known, are the next big frontier in customer experience. And artificial intelligence is the backbone of both. These technologies rely on massive amounts of real-time data processing, at a scale that would be impossible without artificial intelligence. Augmented and virtual reality enable brands to connect with customers in new ways.

Customers can experience products remotely and have immersive brand experiences. Special guest Jacques Oberholzer and I spoke about this in episode 61. But augmented reality and virtual reality is definitely an exciting space. By way of just one example, American beauty retailer Sephora has leveraged this technology to augment the way it helps customers explore and experiment with beauty products.

Through its virtual artist app, Sephora enables customers to virtually try on different makeup products with augmented reality. The customer can use the front-facing camera on their smartphone to superimpose selected products on their face in real time. Much as the makeup counter assistant did in the days of old, the virtual artist app can also recommend products based on the customer’s features or complexion and can reference past purchases to suggest new styles that might match the customer’s tastes. Only time will tell.

But personally, I think this is definitely a space to watch. So there you have it. A little tech talk to round out 2019 CX Mini Masterclasses. If you’re looking for help with CX innovation in your organization, please get in touch.

I’d be happy to explore how I could 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.

All right. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you in 2020.

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 B2B CX strategy) 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.

If you are new to the CX profession, the world of CX metrics can be daunting. Even if you are a seasoned professional, CX metrics can be intimidating. That said, metrics are the lifeblood of any CX initiative, program or department. CX metrics are how we monitor progress and demonstrate impact, so we need to get over any discomfort we might have with this topic and stay attuned to how we can most effectively use the numbers.

Stephanie provided her insights on 4 of the most common missteps that teams make with how they manage CX metrics:

Mistake #1: Top-line revenue tells you everything you need to know about customers’ experiences

Yes, revenue can be a barometer on how happy customers are or how well products are doing in the marketplace, but it won’t tell teams what is going right or wrong. So make sure you are reporting on a balanced mix of metrics and not reliant on just this number.

Mistake #2: Thinking customer experience metrics make you look bad

Sometimes the results might not be flattering, but that’s not a reason to avoid them all together. Ensure that CX metrics are used to start constructive dialogue with your team, not as a policing mechanism.

Mistake #3: Customer satisfaction is the only customer experience metric that matters

There can be alluring simplicity in focusing on just one CX metric, but resist the temptation to do so. As with top line revenue, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) has limited use as a metric-in-isolation. Embrace a wider scope of quantitative and qualitative data points. E.g. customer wait times, transaction completion rates, acceptance rates, types of customer compliments, verbatim feedback.

Mistake #4: A once-per-year customer experience data review is all we need

Customer needs and expectations aren’t static. Service standards like wait times and processing times should keep pace with customer expectations. Look for data sources and CX metrics that are ongoing, so you can monitor how things are changing. Your organization is probably already gathering data that can be used for this purpose.

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 63, and today I have another mini masterclass presented by a leading customer experience expert and friend of the show, Stephanie Thum. If you missed Stephanie’s insights on reframing how organizations should think of customers in episode 45, her take on CX and government in episode 50, or her advice to CEOs in episode 56 on how to take the lead with customer-centric change, then be sure to check those out. They’re great episodes.

It’s a pleasure to have Stephanie back on the show again. She’s a seasoned CX professional and a CCXP, who’s 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 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 CX leads, she’s also been a practitioner and a consultant in the B2B world, working with small and mid-size companies. Customer experience metrics are always a hot topic in our profession. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, if you’re looking to spark a debate with others in the field, a surefire way to do this is to ask a group of your peers what they think about a specific metric.

Drop that question into the mix and you are pretty much guaranteed a lively conversation. For as much as we talk and fret about the theory or calculation methodology, how much time do we spend sharing our mistakes or sharing our lessons learned about how to use the numbers to drive customer-centric change? That’s where Stephanie jumps in today. She shares great insights on mistakes and missed opportunities with how organizations use the data.

If you’re looking for some excellent food for thought on how to launch or fine tune your approach to CX metrics, then this episode is for you. As always, if you happen to be out for a jog or driving to work, 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 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. Hi, everyone. Stephanie Thum here. Some people absolutely love numbers.

They love ratios, percentages, scores, ratings, targets, charts, and spreadsheets. But there are others who simply don’t like the data or the story told by the data. And in the case of customer experience performance metrics, some unfortunately still cling to some long-held lore about what, when, and where metrics matter. They really haven’t caught on to the ways in which customer-focused metrics can help to create a reputable, efficient organization.

Now, maybe you’ve had some pushback or maybe you’ve encountered some mistaken thinking when it comes to talking with your colleagues about metrics that matter. It’s really not uncommon to have these kinds of conversations as you’re building the CX work. Here are four of the most common mistakes and missed opportunities I’ve seen when it comes to customer experience data, along with some truths about what CX metrics can help you to do in your business. My hope is that you’ll find some talking points that can help you in your day-to-day world.

Metrics mistake number one. Top line revenue tells you everything you need to know about customer’s experiences with your organization. It’s just not true. Sure, falling revenue is usually a pretty clear signal that something is probably wrong, but that number doesn’t tell you what’s wrong.

Same with top line revenue. It doesn’t tell you what’s right or wrong. I see this mindset in company cultures that are driven by business development, sales and marketing functions. If customers are buying from you, then they must be happy and you must be doing everything right, right?

Well, not necessarily. Just because you win a new client doesn’t mean things were perfect when they signed the engagement letter and it doesn’t necessarily mean the business relationship in their eyes has sustained any level of value. A great top line also doesn’t mean that customers will continue to do business with you, doesn’t mean your business is running efficiently, and it certainly doesn’t mean your competitors aren’t doing all they can to lure your customer away. That’s mistake number one.

Here comes metrics mistake number two. Customer Experience Metrics Make Us Look Bad. Well, metrics should be viewed as a conversation starter for your team, not as a policing mechanism. The conversation starter mindset though can be a huge obstacle because regulators, auditors, inspectors, or oversight bodies continually scrutinize metrics and data from companies.

And asking a team to sit down together and review customer experience performance metrics can feel like more of that. You really need a strong team leader to set a tone of trust internally with your colleagues surrounding the metrics conversation. And if performance isn’t on track with the standards and targets that you’ve set for your customer’s experiences, don’t play a blame game. Instead, ask genuine questions like why is performance off?

Did we confuse the customer? And if so, how and why did that happen? Do we have a staff personality conflict, an IT problem, a staffing shortage, a skills shortage? How can we team up to fix these customer pain points?

Understandably, these can seem like scary conversations to have with colleagues because they’re very, very honest. But when they’re done with a tone of trust, these conversations can be very bold because you’re not avoiding the problems that the data wants to show you. You’re taking steps to surface the systemic issues. That’s number two.

Here comes metrics mistake number three. Customer satisfaction is the only customer experience metric that matters. For me personally, I’ve never been a fan of customer satisfaction scores. To me, customer satisfaction doesn’t tell you enough about the customer, their lifestreams, what it will take to keep and expand that business relationship, or really that much about the customer’s actual experience with your company.

There’s really not much of a story to build on there. To understand the full story of customer’s experiences, look at things like customer wait times, application processing times, your response times, transaction completion rates, acceptance rates, contact center volumes, and types of customer complements and complaints, for example. I always recommend monitoring customer wait times as a great experiential metric. It’s operational.

But one thing we know from multiple research studies is few things annoy customers more than waiting. So scan your internal resources for a wider scope of data points that can help you see what customers see and actually experience when they are with your company and trying to conduct business. That’s number three. Here comes metrics mistake number four.

A once per year customer experience data review is all we need. Well, customer needs and expectations aren’t static. Service standards like wait times, processing times, they should keep pace with customer expectations. And you may need to flex how, when, and where you collect customer feedback, set standards, and take measurements based on a changing product, a changing business, a regulatory landscape.

Doing things more than once a year can keep you ahead of customer complaints, social media backlash and firestorms, and employee tensions and attrition. It’s hard work, but it sure beats managing a public crisis. So keep a pulse on what’s happening. So what do you do?

For starters, don’t fear the data. That can be easier said than done, especially when customer experience data inside your organization may only be used for incentives and performance measurement and not as a tool to develop the organization and coach your people. But it can be done. As customer experience professionals, that’s part of the expertise that we bring to the table, that internal influence to make the change for customers.

Then seek the right metrics that will shed light on the truth about how you need to flex change and communicate as an organization in order to avoid slowdowns, mistakes and complaints. In conclusion, when you have a good mix of customer experience metrics and the right conversational collaborative mindset surrounding data inside your organization, then you can avoid these mistakes and missed opportunities. And you can use metrics to help you and your team better understand what you need to do to be successful with your customers. I’m Stephanie Thum.

Thanks so much for listening. So there you have it. Special guest, Stephanie Thum, taking us through the mistakes and missed opportunities when it comes to CX metrics. One of the exciting things about being a CX professional is working in a field that is constantly evolving.

Organizations need to continually adapt to changing consumer preferences. CX metrics as a result aren’t a stagnant thing. So even if you work in an organization that has a measurement framework in place, I hope that Stephanie’s insights have provided some food for thought as things evolve. To hear more of Stephanie’s pearls of wisdom, be sure to check out the show notes for this episode.

I’ll include links to her previous episodes, along with information about how to get in touch with her. If you’re on Twitter, Stephanie’s handle is at Stephanie Thum. She’s active on the platform and always sharing awesome insights.

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 so much and I’ll see you 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. 

This CX Mini Masterclass explores the importance of human experience and why brands need to ensure that their promise is delivered to all stakeholders, not just customers. Special guest and CX thought leader, Pierre Daems, shares insights about why an ecosystem of human experiences is key to a brand’s success. If you’re looking for inspiration on how the essence of brand promise extends beyond the customer experience, and why this is something CX professionals should care about, then this episode is for you.

Pierre Daems is a seasoned expert in the field of customer experience. He is the CEO of the French and Canadian strategy and management consultancy Aube Conseil, which specializes in customer experience management. Pierre is a CCXP, longstanding member of the CXPA and co-founder of the local CXPA communities in Paris and Montreal. He is a recognized expert and keynote speaker on customer experience management, with a focus on cities, airports, hospitals and a deep knowledge of Bank/insurance sector. If you are keen to get in touch with Pierre or follow his work, you can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

With such broad expertise working on citizen experience, patient experience and passenger experience, Pierre has been fortunate to help shape CX in a number of different sectors, for many years. For that reason, he’s the ideal person to help CX professionals push their thinking beyond just customer experience.

We’ve all heard about the importance of employee experience. Happy, engaged employees are more likely to deliver good customer experience. Pierre suggests that we shouldn’t stop there, but rather as CX practitioners, we should also understand the importance of other stakeholders and their experiences.

Suppliers, partners, governments and even shareholders are not traditionally on the CX professional’s radar, but they should be. These stakeholder groups still play an important role within the brand’s ecosystem. In the case of suppliers and partners in particular, it’s easy to see how their experience (much like that of an employee) would influence the customer experience.

Pierre suggests that a brand’s purpose is at the heart of the human experience it delivers to all stakeholders. He uses the example of Michelin brand, and their purpose:

“The Michelin brand is the best expression of our Purpose: giving everyone a better way to move forward. It embodies the Group’s strengths with our customers and partners around the world. It’s a promise that defines us and commits us.”

The Michelin Group

A better way to move forward, isn’t just about tires or helping passengers move from point A to point B, it’s also applicable to shareholders, employees and others.

The brand has decided to charge customers per kilometer rather than per tire, an innovative approach that delivers value to the company, its shareholders and customers. A great example of delivering the purpose to everyone, not just customers.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, 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 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 CXP 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 62, and today I have another mini masterclass presented by a leading customer experience expert. I’m excited to introduce a new contributor to the show, Pierre Daems. Pierre is the CEO of French and Canadian Strategy and Management Consultancy, Aube Conseil, specializing in customer experience management.

Pierre is a CCXP and the co-founder of the local CXPA communities in both Paris and Montreal. He’s a recognized expert and keynote speaker on customer experience management, with a focus on cities, or citizen experience, airports, which includes passenger experience, hospitals, which means patient experience, and he also has a deep knowledge of the banking and insurance sector. You may have noticed that Pierre isn’t my first international guest expert. Living in South Africa these last few years has opened my eyes to some of the cutting edge thinking that’s happening in the field of customer experience beyond the borders of the United States.

Yes, customer experience first gained notoriety in the United States, but as a wave of empowered consumers has spread across the world, it’s given rise to some really amazing customer experience global thought leadership. Here in Decoding the Customer, I’m proud to feature guest experts not only from my home country, but also from elsewhere around the globe. In this episode, Pierre invites us as CX practitioners to take a broader look at experience, not just customer experience, but human experience, and how this is manifested through a brand’s vision and aspirations. Experiences are often delivered from an ecosystem that includes employees, shareholders, suppliers, and many other stakeholders.

We as CX practitioners would be remiss if we didn’t think about the experiences of all these stakeholders. So if you’re looking for inspiration on how the essence of brand promise extends beyond the customer experience, and why this is something that we as CX professionals should care about, then stay tuned. As always, if you happen to be out for a run, cooking dinner, or driving to work, 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 Pierre’s work and how you can get in touch with him. So with that, I’ll let Pierre take it away. Thank you so much, Julia. I’m Pierre, Pierre Daems, and hi, I’m CCXP and working both in France and Canada to help companies develop a specific spirit that you all know, this spirit of customer experience.

Today, you gave me, Julia, an opportunity to speak about belief that I do have about the evolution of customer experience. We all know that when working on customer experience, it’s not enough to go deep in understanding the customers. We also need to understand employees and really connect to their lives. I think that’s very important.

For me, it’s really not enough. We should go a lot further. What do I mean? Again, when speaking about experience, the practices that we do have in terms of customer understanding about creating experience, about measuring experience, about putting some governance or change the culture, can be totally applied to people overall, meaning that in order to be stronger and sustainable as a company in the long term, I believe that we should not limit to only customers and employees, but we should care about all the different stakeholders of the company.

Meaning, we should connect not only to the life of employees, of customers, but also of suppliers, of shareholders, of all partners in the city, and all kinds of partners that we can have. That’s only by this profound empathy for all the stakeholders of the company. That we’ll be able to deliver long-term value, not only for the company, but for humanity, I would say. So, how can you do that?

We all know that it’s not enough also to have a good experience. That’s why, when speaking about customer experience and employee experience, we try to focus on the brand, and that is the promise that we want to deliver to customers. And our job, daily job, as customer experience specialists, is to deliver the brand on a day-to-day basis, and deliver the promise. So, that’s what we do, and I think that’s very important and not done everywhere.

But when speaking about all the different stakeholders, what would it be? It cannot be the brand itself. It needs to be something higher than the brand. And then we come to the purpose.

I believe that the backbone for all different stakeholders is and has to be really the purpose of the company. That needs to be delivered in a way for all different stakeholders. So let’s take an example, just to be really clear on what I mean. Maybe you know Michelin or Michelin, I don’t know how you call that, but the entire company.

Their purpose is, I quote, we care about giving people a better way forward. That’s very interesting, because delivering this better way forward can really be applied to all different stakeholders. So it means that first, when working about the delivery of this purpose, that is again so important as it is for the brand in relation with customer experience, you need to understand what are the expectations and feelings today. Let’s start with the customer.

What does it mean? What do they expect when they move? What do they today? How do they feel?

Do they feel there’s somebody caring about them when using a tire? And then you try to say, OK, so now how can we do our best to make them feel that we care about them and that it’s a better way with Michelin and it’s a different shader? Because they care about giving you other ways to move that is not only classical ways. You know that, for example, on that matter, Michelin decided to make you pay per kilometer, not per tire.

So that’s a big change in the experience of customers. That’s the same thing for employees. When Michelin cares about giving employees a better way forward, it’s also in the policy of what they do with the employees in the career they can have at Michelin. Then let’s think about what it can mean also for suppliers.

It means also that giving suppliers a better way forward in their relation with Michelin would say to help them grow, to help their suppliers grow and develop themselves and find their way in the relation and through the relation with Michelin. Let’s apply that also to shareholders. I mean, a shareholder generally wants to have a good return on investment, but maybe there would be another way, also a better way forward in terms of investing in Michelin. It could be also to be part of the adventure of Michelin, that is, a company that has more than 100 years history and that wants to stay there for long.

So be part of the history of Michelin for a shareholder can be also something that contributes to a better way forward for them. So that’s something I believe that is so important today to try to have a larger vision of what we do as customer experience specialists. Maybe we should use our tools and practices that we do have in companies to make sure that purpose and there are more and more companies in the world. And I know in France we have things changing and now purpose can be really like in the status of the companies.

But if it’s only a sentence, it’s nothing. So to make your purpose alive, I think that we should use our tools of customer experience experts to this time deliver the promise. But you know, this incredible and fantastic promise of the purpose that goes a lot further than creating value for shareholders, but really create values for all stakeholders. I hope that approach and vision open new doors in your heads and maybe new companies.

Thank you again so much, Julia, for this opportunity. See you soon. Bye. So there you have it.

Special guest, Pierre Daems, sharing his insights on the importance and the power of the broader human experience that brands deliver to all stakeholders, not just their customers. As a challenge to you, my fellow CXer, I invite you to think about how your organization delivers its brand promise to one of the stakeholder groups that Pierre highlighted. Pick a group and then ask yourself or maybe ask your colleagues too, if you think that your brand is truly delivering on its promise to that group. If not, how has that impacted customer experience?

And if you feel like you are delivering on that promise, then how has it augmented customer experience? Now, should this line of thinking catalyze a major revelation for you and your team, I’d love to hear about it.

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. See you next Thursday.

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.

As more and more of the customer journey moves into the digital realm, it’s important for CX teams to understand what consumers are looking for in digital experiences. Fortunately, there is an entire field of UX specialists out there focusing on how to make great experiences in the digital space (and beyond – though a lot of emphasis is being placed on digital). This begs the question of how UX differs from CX, and how these two functions should most effectively collaborate.

Episode 56 explored the similarities and differences between UX and CX, and it was reassuring to hear a UX expert like Jacques corroborate the same key points. Essentially, we can think of both as functional areas that advocate for the needs of customers, but that UX tends to do this through the lens of a user’s experience on a specific system, platform or touchpoint. We can think of CX as a more holistic look at a customer’s overall experience, while UX zooms in on a specific subset of this.

One of the challenges with managing experiences in the non-digital world is that we have gaps in our understanding of the customer’s experience. In a traditional retail context, for example, a retailer might only gather data about the customer at the point of sale. Information about their journey through the shop before purchase is largely unknown. Granted that might change with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), but for now we have limited insight.

That’s definitely not the case in digital space, where every click produces a data point. In our conversation, Jacques highlighted the role of data as a game changer for digital UX. Website tracking has empowered organizations and their UX experts to quickly gather insights about what customers do and don’t like. It’s also forced UX specialists – many who hearken from a creative background – to learn the language of quantitative analysis and to figure out how to integrate this into their understanding of customer needs. These insights can help teams develop great websites, but they also bring the voice of the customer into the conversation early and often, something that can be simultaneously helpful and frustrating.

Jacques and I discussed a number of UX trends that should be important considerations for CX professionals who want to help their organizations craft and deliver great digital experiences:

Jacques is the founder and UX director of Now Boarding
Digital, one of South Africa’s leading usability and design agencies. He is
also the Head of Design at SwissBorg, a cryptocurrency investment startup in
Switzerland.

Now Boarding has been servicing the South African digital landscape for 10 years, creating user experiences for the likes of innovative brands like Property 24, AutoTrader, and SnapScan, as well as a range of exciting startups in South Africa and around the globe.

For more information about Jacques’ work, check out the Now Boarding website or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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 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.

Ben Motteram is a customer experience specialist based in Melbourne with over 20 years experience developing and implementing customer acquisition and retention strategies within some of Australia’s largest organisations. Through his consulting company, CXpert, Ben now assists clients in areas such as CX strategy, Voice of the Customer, and employee engagement. In December 2018, Ben was the only Australian named on a list of global thought leaders to follow on Twitter and his blog has been independently recognized for its insight on all things CX.

This episode was Ben’s second guest appearance on the show. If you missed his first Mini Masterclass episode on CX Strategy, be sure to check it out here.

Normally I provide a synopsis of the episode in these show notes, but Ben has already created a stellar write up on his blog. And I’d encourage you to explore the rest of Ben’s blog while you’re there. It’s packed with all sorts of other great gems and CX thought leadership. A truly fantastic resource for any CX professional.

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 60, the fifth episode for the month of October, a month I’ve dedicated to exploring topics that are a buzz in the CX professional community. I couldn’t think of a better way to cap off the month than with an episode from a returning guest contributor, global thought leader, and Australian customer experience expert, Ben Motteram. Ben has over 20 years experience developing and implementing customer acquisition and retention strategies within some of Australia’s largest organizations.

Through his consulting company, CXpert, Ben now assists clients in areas such as CX Strategy, Voice of the Customer, and employee engagement. Last time Ben shared his expertise in the show was episode 29, where he covered CX Strategy. In this episode, Ben takes us through the foundations of a great CX program, defining seven key principles that are important for effective and sustainable customer experience management. Ben approaches this topic from a green fields perspective.

So it’s an ideal roadmap for anyone who’s busy setting up a new CX function within an organization. That said, Ben’s insights are just as applicable for a CX practitioner working within a CX program that’s already up and running. We all know that CX programs are always a work in progress, and Ben provides some excellent food for thought. If you’re looking for an expert’s take on the structure, strategy and approach for an ideal CX program, then stay tuned.

Today is Halloween, so if you happen to be out stocking up on candy or carving a pumpkin, 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 get in touch with Ben and his blog, which has been recognized for its insights on all things customer experience. Enjoy the show.

Thanks, Julia. It’s a pleasure to be back on the show again. Thank you for having me. So before I get into what I consider to be the foundations of a great CX program, I just want to talk a little bit about what originally inspired me to think about this topic.

Now, I grew up in a town called adelaide in South Australia. Now, it’s a reasonably small city. There’s only about 1.3 million people who live there. And the place is best known for being the birthplace of Sia, the recording artist, some of its beautiful wine regions, places like the Barossa, Cunawara, and Clare Valley.

And it’s also the home of Australia’s major cycling race, which is called the Tour Down Under. And for over 30 years, my mum has hosted walking tours around the city, where she takes groups of people around and tells them about the history of adelaide. And being a bit of a history buff myself, and having been on a few of these walks with her, I’m pretty familiar with adelaide’s history. And one of the more interesting facts about the place is that the act that created the city was actually based on a number of principles that were contained in a series of letters, written to the local paper by a guy named Edward Gibbon Wakefield in the 1820s.

Now Wakefield’s blueprint for structuring a colony from a blank canvas, literally a Greenfield site, got me to thinking if I was structuring a CX program from scratch, what would be the major principles I’d use? And I came up with seven. Now the first one is to know your purpose. Now organizations need to understand why they’re in business and what higher purpose that they serve.

So go back to why the founders of the company created the firm in the first place. What customer needs did they satisfy back then? Is that still the case today? Then I’d look at defining your company’s mission and vision.

Now these are the broader statements that define the aims and values of the company and how it sees the future based on the work it does. And once they’re defined, communicate them far and wide to connect to your customer base and to motivate and inspire your employees. I think that a company’s purpose, mission and values are really its soul. These three statements are the bedrock upon which everything else is built.

The second principle is know your customers. So the most successful companies in the world know their customers inside and out. They have built an intimate understanding of their customers, needs, motivations, behaviors, preferences, challenges, jobs to be done, you name it. Now, not every company is going to have the resources to ascertain all those things about their customers.

So start with the basics. Spend time talking with your customers to understand at a very minimum, why they come to your company, why they stay with you and importantly, talk to ex-customers to understand why they leave. If you’ve got the time and money available, some of the other things you might want to do is run surveys or hold focus groups or even conduct some ethnographic research. You could even create a customer advisory board where the executives of your company meet regularly with senior stakeholders within a cross-section of your customer base.

At the very least, I’ve been sure that all levels of management spend time talking with your customers on a regular basis, either in store or out in the field or on the phone. Number three is engage employees. Now, if you’ve been in CX long enough, you’ve no doubt heard the saying that the internal experience determines the external experience. And what that refers to is the fact that companies with disengaged workforces simply don’t cut it in the world of CX.

And this is backed up by a ton of research. There’s a great video on featuring Sir Richard Branson, who was asked who he prioritized in terms of customers, shareholders and staff. And he put staff number one. It’s a really good interview.

If you’re interested to see it, you’ll find it online. Just Google, why customers come second at Virgin. So you need to inspire your employees. Give them the training they need and the delegation they need to satisfy customer expectations.

And of course, give them the tools that they need to do a good job. And also when it comes to engaging employees, don’t forget to look at your hiring practices to ensure that you’re bringing people into the company that are consistent with your values. Another thing I do is build a CX component into all employee job descriptions, so people understand how the work that they’re doing impacts customers. And when it comes to reward and recognition, make sure that behavior you’re rewarding is aligned to your values, and that you’re recognizing the achievement of CX goals.

Things like an improvement in first call resolution, for example, or maybe a reduction in the number of customer complaints. The fourth principle was a little controversial when I started bouncing these principles off a few CX buddies of mine. I put it in as define your aspirational customer experience. And the reason I put it in the list is because of the old saying that goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up someplace else.

But other people I spoke to were of the opinion that there’s no point defining a whiz bang experience for customers when maybe the organization doesn’t have the resources to support it. But the way that I see it is that the experience you give customers is way too important to lead to chance. So it makes sense to define your aspirational customer experience as part of your CX strategy. And of course, sense check it with your customers before setting it in stone.

If you’ve got an opinion on that one, I’d love to hear it. Number five is understand your current customer experience across all channels and touch points. Now in my last guest appearance on this podcast, I used the analogy of a map to describe a CX strategy. And I’m gonna borrow the same analogy again for this principle.

Once you’ve defined your aspirational customer experience, which is akin to your destination, you need to know where you are now. So you know how far you’ve got to go and what the best route to take is. So you need to understand the experience you’re delivering to customers today. Now the best way to do this, of course, is through the process of customer journey mapping.

I’m not gonna go into detail about journey mapping today, but if you’re interested to know more about it, Julia covered it brilliantly in episodes 18, 19 and 20 of this CX Mini Masterclass. So go back and listen to those. What you may wanna do though is augment your journey maps with process maps which show the internal processes that support the external experience and I thoroughly recommend them. The sixth principle is embrace agility to execute change.

Now if there’s one thing that we know about customer needs, it’s that they’re evolving at an incredibly fast pace. So businesses need to be agile. And by that I mean that they’re prepared to ensure they understand the changing needs of their customers and can respond in a timely manner. And when it comes to executing new customer experiences, don’t spend too much time trying to create the perfect experience.

Be comfortable making small changes as you move towards your aspirational experience and perfect it as you go. The last of my seven principles is measure and communicate success. Putting customers at the heart of a business requires stamina and support. So stamina to continually drive change and the support of everyone in the business.

No business is going to transform over night. It’s going to happen in incremental steps. So as you move towards your aspirational experience, ensure you have the metrics in place that will enable all internal stakeholders to understand the impact of your efforts and communicate with customers, employees and other stakeholders regularly. And finally, don’t forget to celebrate your wins along the way.

That’s really important. So those seven principles again were know your purpose, know your customers, engage employees, define your aspirational customer experience, understand your current customer experience across all channels and touch points, embrace agility to execute change, and measure and communicate success. Before I go, I just want to acknowledge Alicia Clark for her contribution to these principles. She was a great sounding board and an invaluable source of inspiration while I was putting them together.

Okay, with that, I’ll hand back to you, Julia. Thanks again for getting me back on. It was a pleasure speaking with you again. That was special guest Ben Motteram taking us through the foundations of a great CX program.

Be sure to check out the show notes for this episode, for links to get in touch with Ben, and to find out more about his work. Late last year, Ben was the only Australian named on a list of global thought leaders to follow on Twitter. So if you’re on Twitter, he’s definitely one to follow. I’m a huge fan of social media as a means to connect the global CX community.

If you and I aren’t already connected, let’s change that. I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt. Thanks for listening.

If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and read the podcast. This helps others find the show. I’ll be back next Thursday. So, be sure to tune in then, or subscribe for updates when new episodes go live.

All right, I’ll see you 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 employee engagement, leadership alignment and CX strategy) or get in touch via email. 

Episode 58 looked at service design, which is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. And with most brands out there today delivering a hybrid of both goods and services, it’s important for teams to carefully orchestrate how they deliver experiences. If not, they’ll risk things completely falling apart.

Service blueprinting is an important step for any team looking to implement service design. The actions needed for an organization to deliver a service are often complex and need to be documented before plans can be made. That’s what service blueprinting is all about.

Service blueprinting is essentially a visual documentation of service design. To build a service blueprint you need to start with the customer journey. And in this case, it should be a very simplified version of the journey, highlighting the aspects of the journey where the organization in question plays a major role. Remember that when we map entire journeys, we need to consider experiences outside of the realm of just one brand’s interactions with the customer – but in this case we’re looking inward, so it’s OK.

A service blueprint often also includes a space for physical evidence, though this isn’t required.

The next step is to capture the layers of service functions, starting with what the customer sees. In the world of service blueprinting, these are sometimes called front stage interactions. The next layer down captures the backstage interactions or the operational support that the customer doesn’t see, and finally every service blueprint should include a final layer of strategic support functions.

Like journey maps, service blueprints are highly dynamic CX tools that bridge the conceptual divide between the journey and a business’s operating model.

Service design is about helping organizations coordinate their activities to deliver experiences. Anyone who has worked in a large corporation will know that the silo mentality is real! Service blueprints can help CX leaders unite teams around the customer journey in a number of ways:

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 59, the fourth episode in the month of October, a month I’ve dedicated to exploring topics that are a buzz in the CX professional community. I’m doing this so that we can unpack how these topics relate back to the work that many of us are doing in the field of customer experience. Today, I’m covering service blueprinting.

Last week’s episode, number 58, explained the concept of service design. And this week, I’m covering a practical tool for documenting service design. I’ll explain what a service blueprint is, how to build one, and most importantly, how to use it. I’ve seen a lot of journey maps die sad and lonely deaths on CX managers’ laptops, and we don’t want that to happen to your service blueprint.

So it’s important to have a plan. If you’re looking for a practical explanation of how to build and use a service blueprint, 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.

As mentioned, last week’s episode looked at service design. Which is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication, and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. And with most brands out there today delivering a hybrid of both goods and services, it’s important for teams to carefully orchestrate how they deliver experiences. Otherwise, they’ll risk things completely falling apart.

When I help teams map customer journeys, I find that a lot of people will gravitate quickly towards an inward looking view on things. As a journey mapping facilitator, I often have to fight the tide on this one and help teams do what they aren’t always comfortable doing, looking at the world through the customer’s eyes. I do, however, tell teams not to worry because there is a time and a place for looking inward and understanding how the business’ operating model supports the journey. And service blueprinting does just that.

It’s where we get to turn our perspectives inward to the people, processes, and technology that make experiences happen. Service blueprinting is essentially a visual documentation of service design. I’ll include a downloadable template in the show notes for this episode. And you can find a lot of great examples through a simple Google Image search.

But a service blueprint looks a bit like a simplified journey map with little strings of support functions trailing down from each phase of the journey. To me, it almost resembles a series of lily pads with the journeys at the top as the visible part of the lily pad, and then the organization support processes as a submerged network of routes. Again, if I lost you on that metaphor and you’re more confused now than you were before, just hop online and find a quick example to anchor the concept. To build a service blueprint, you need to start with the customer journey.

And in this case, it should be a very simplified version of the journey, highlighting the aspects of the customer experience, where your organization plays a major role in the customer experience. Remember that when we map an entire journey, we need to always consider experiences that happen outside of the realm of just one brand’s interactions with the customer. But in this case, we’re looking inward, so it’s okay to focus on where the brand plays the biggest role. For each phase of the journey, we need to capture the details about how the organization supports delivery of the experience.

Often, this starts with something called physical evidence, which could be a product or a tangible output from a touch point, like a text message or an email or a flyer. Once we’ve documented the physical evidence, we need to capture the service functions that the customer sees. In the world of service blueprinting, these are sometimes called front-stage interactions. The next layer down captures the backstage interactions, or the operational support functions that the customer doesn’t see.

And then finally, we document the last layer, or the roots of the lily pad, or the strategic support functions are. Now, I know that all of this is probably sounding pretty abstract. So let’s take a tangible example. Let’s say that we work for a sit-down pizza restaurant, and we’re doing service blueprinting for the in-restaurant dining experience.

For the sake of this example, let’s hone in on the food ordering phase of the journey, which remember would be one of several phases running along the top of our service blueprint. In this case, the physical evidence would be the menu. That would go right next to the phase of the journey. Next, we look at the front stage functions or what the customer would see, which in this case would be the waiter providing the menu, explaining the specials, answering questions, and then maybe returning to take your order.

Behind the scenes, you’ve got the daily special planning, kitchen preparation, menu printing, and the process of communication between the waitstaff and the kitchen to place the orders. That’s your backstage interactions. But below that, there’s even another layer of support functions. The strategy for the menu has to be defined so that it appeals to the clientele in the neighborhood.

Maybe there’s an electronic system that waitstaff use for capturing orders and billing. And then of course, someone has to hire and train the waitstaff to be able to do their job. There are undoubtedly many more support functions that we could document, but you get the point. We start with the journey and then work our way through the functions that are needed to deliver the experience.

Documenting those that are visible to the customer first, followed by the operational support functions that are not visible to the customer, and then finally, those strategic support functions that happen way, way behind the scenes. This example included three layers of service functions, but there’s really no reason that you couldn’t add more if needed. I’ve seen service blueprints that have a support layer dedicated completely to technology platforms. Build a blueprint that works for you and your team, but remember that it has to start with the journey, and at a minimum, it should include three layers.

In terms of building the service blueprint, I suggest creating a bare bones template, ideally on a conference room wall, and then documenting your simplified journey at the top with the physical evidence. Then, once you’ve got that in place, engage with various teams within your organization to add the appropriate information. Start by inviting the customer-facing teams to help you establish the key points for your front stage layer. Then, invite the operational support teams to help with the next layer.

And finally, for the support functions, reach out to teams like IT, HR, and marketing, maybe even finance and some others. Teams that are the furthest removed from the customer are likely to contribute to the journey at the strategic support capacity. Remember, those are the roots of the lily pad, furthest removed from the journey. Engaging with these teams may help them understand their role in the customer journey, even if there are many steps removed from the actual customer.

Once you’ve included the process of engaging with these teams, you’ll probably have the makings of a service blueprint. Like journey maps, service blueprints will change as experiences and businesses evolve. Think of your service blueprint as a living document. But what are service blueprints good for anyway?

As mentioned at the start of this episode, service design is about helping organizations coordinate their activities to deliver experiences. Anyone who’s worked in a large corporation will know that the silo mentality is real. Service blueprints can be used to demonstrate how teams from different parts of the organization need to collaborate to deliver the journey. Service blueprints can be used to determine team-level KPIs that relate back to the journey so you can effectively rally people around a common goal and drive accountability.

They can also be used for root cause analysis on where specific experiences are breaking down so that teams can work on solutions. Finally, once you’ve made a service blueprint for an existing journey, you can also use it as a roadmap for defining how teams will deliver new experiences, either by building the future state service blueprint or by demonstrating how current actions would need to change in order to deliver a reimagined experience. Service blueprints are incredibly dynamic tools that bridge the conceptual divide between the journey and the business’ operating model. If you’re looking for help with service blueprinting in your organization, please get in touch.

I’d be happy to explore how I could 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. So that’s it for this week.

Thanks for listening. If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program 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 Thursday with another Mini Masterclass.

Be sure to tune in then or subscribe for updates when new episodes go live.

See you next Thursday.

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 B2B CX strategy) or get in touch via email. Julia’s work on service design and CX strategy has been featured in CMSWire, BusinessLive, Mail & Guardian, and other publications. See Julia in the Media for a full record.. 

To understand service design, we need to clarify the difference between goods and services in the marketplace. Goods are tangible items of value, like cars, sweaters or cartons of milk. Services are intangible items of value like expert advice or training. If we were to look at the consumer marketplace 100 years ago, most brands would have provided either a good or a service, with a few providing a hybrid of the two. In the modern marketplace, the reverse is true. Most organizations provide both goods and services.

A medical clinic is a classic example of the goods/services hybrid; they provide a combination of tangible products in the form of medicine with medical consultation that is a service. SaaS providers are an excellent example of the hybrid of goods and services that is so pervasive in the modern marketplace. Brands like Google, Hubspot and others provide a good through their software, but they also provide a suite of services around that software to enhance its usage. Yes, there are definitely still organizations out there that provide just a product or just a service, but these are now the outliers. And with consumers doing so much more through digital channel in particular, it’s given rise to a whole ecosystem of services to support customers.

Episode 57 looked into design thinking, which was essentially born out of product design. While modern design thinking can also be used to creatively problem solve for service-based solutions, actually providing experiences that are based on a blend of goods and services is a complex undertaking. That is where service design comes in.

Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers.

Wikipedia

Service design is where teams lift up the hood and look at all the parts that are needed to make an experience happen. CX teams can dream up the most amazing customer experience in the world, but if the rest of the organization isn’t equipped to deliver that experience, it’s all for not. So, service design is where we get to turn our perspective inwards to the people, processes and technology that make experiences happen.

Service design clarifies the roles, responsibilities and inter-dependencies that are needed to deliver an experience. Service design unpacks this in terms of interactions that the customer sees and the layers of behind the scenes actions functions that are necessary.

Wondering how to actually do service design? Stay tuned for episode 59…

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 58, the third episode in the month of October, a month I’ve dedicated to exploring topics that are a buzz in the CX professional community. I’m doing this so we can unpack them and understand how these concepts relate to the work that many of us are out there doing in the field of customer experience. Today, I’m covering service design.

A lot of people talk about service design, but I think it’s widely misunderstood, probably because it has the word service in it. Common sense might tell us that service design is about designing customer service, but that’s actually not the definition. Service design is much more than that, and it’s a critically important competency for nearly any organization that wants to attract and retain customers. So, if you’re interested in learning what service design is and is not, then stay tuned.

If you’re busy carving a pumpkin or putting the finishing touches on that one-of-a-kind Halloween costume, 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. To understand service design, we need to first clarify the difference between goods and services. Goods are tangible items of value, things like cars and cartons of milk.

Services are intangible items of value, like medical consultation, expert advice, or training. If we were to look at most economies, say, 100 years ago, the majority of brands would have either provided goods or services with just a handful providing a hybrid of the two. In the modern marketplace, however, that idea has been turned completely on its head. Most organizations provide both goods and services.

Software as a service is a great example of this. Companies like Google and Hubspot provide products through their software, but they also provide a suite of services around that software to enhance its usage. The doctor’s office is another great example of a combination between goods and services. They provide tangible products in the form of medicine, along with consultation as a service.

Yes, there are definitely still organizations out there that provide just a product or just a service. But they’re the outliers. And with consumers doing more and more themselves and interfacing with their phones and software every day, it’s given a rise to a whole ecosystem of services to support customers. Last week’s episode, number 57, looked into design thinking.

Design thinking was essentially born out of product design. And while modern design thinking can also be used to creatively problem solve for service-based solutions, actually providing experiences that are based on a blend of goods and services is an entirely different kettle of fish. We can dream up an amazing ideal outcome for our customer journey, but delivering that is no small task. That, my friends, is where service design comes in.

In preparation for this episode, I looked into some of the definitions of service design and settled on the one from Wikipedia, of all places, as my favorite. This definition states that service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication, and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. Service design is where we lift up the hood of the car and look at all the parts that are needed to make the car run. Well, not literally because a car is a product, but in a metaphorical sense, service design is where we understand what an organization needs to do in order to make experiences happen.

So service design is where we get to turn our perspective inwards to the people, processes, and technology that make experiences happen. Service design clarifies the roles, responsibilities, interdependencies that are needed to deliver an experience. Service design impacts this in terms of the interactions that a customer sees and also the layers behind the scenes, the actions and supporting functions that are also necessary. As I’m talking about this, I imagine that many of you are now thinking about the spaghetti wire of processes that happen in your own organizations to bring experiences to life.

It’s probably not just a simple linear process. So don’t worry if the idea of service design sounds a bit scary and quite a bit overwhelming. Next week, I’m going to share a simple tool that you can use to help visualize service design. If you’re looking for help with service design in your organization, feel free to get in touch.

I’d be happy to explore how I could help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. So that’s it for this week.

Short and sweet. Thanks so much for listening. If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program with others or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show.

I’ll be back next Thursday with another Mini Masterclass. Be sure to tune in then or subscribe for updates when new episodes go live. All right, thanks so much and I’ll see you next Thursday.

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 B2B CX strategy) or get in touch via email. 

You’ve probably heard the term “design thinking” before. Unlike “customer experience” or “user experience” (UX was the subject of episode 56), the concept of design thinking has been around for a bit longer. It also has a much less nebulous definition.

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.

Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO

The origins of design thinking start in the late 1950s and early 1960s as creativity techniques for designers and engineers. Through the 1960s and 1970s design thinking methods and theories began to take hold in the fields of industrial design, architecture and product design. By the 1980s and 1990s people began talking about this in terms of human-centered design. During this time, design thinking firms such as IDEO came into being and the most innovative and forward-thinking organizations started to embed design-centered business management. From 2000 onward, we’ve seen the steady rise of design thinking as a proper business discipline that can be applied by organizations to many different contexts.

Design thinking aims to solve problems at the intersection of three things: desirability, viability and feasibility. Design thinking methodologies push teams to balance these competing forces. Unlike CX, which doesn’t have a set approach or methodology, classic design thinking has an adaptable 5-step approach. This is often represented as a double diamond.

If a team comes out of testing and goes back to square one, that’s still a win because at least they didn’t launch something that was going to be a total flop with their audience. Design thinking encourages teams to go through this process quickly with several iterations so that the investment of time doesn’t tempt teams to become attached to an idea that might not strike the magic balance of desirability, feasibility and viability.

Design thinking has some obvious and not so obvious applications in the world of customer experience. It’s easy to see how this could be a powerful approach for innovating journey improvements or defining new products and services.

Beyond the obvious applications within customer experience innovation, design thinking can help teams bolster the organizational ecosystems that help journeys happen. How many of us have had an employee onboarding experience or a vendor management experience that was user unfriendly to the extreme? Not only are these experiences super annoying for the end user, but they also throw noise into the system that slows things down. Design thinking can be used in the context of employee experience, organizational alignment or stakeholder management.

Because of it’s emphasis on empathy and framing the user’s point of view, design thinking is an inherently outside-in way of looking at things, so it’s a great approach for CX professionals to use. If the 5-step methodology seems overwhelming, don’t worry. It’s also OK to leverage components of the approach as and when appropriate.

Regardless of whether or not you use the 5-steps in a structured approach or integrate bits and pieces into your daily work, it will make a difference and complement your efforts to instill customer-centricity.

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 57, the second episode for the month of October, a month I’ve dedicated to exploring topics that are a buzz in the CX professional community. I’d like to unpack these and explore how they relate to the work that many of us are doing in the field of customer experience. Today, I’m covering design thinking.

It’s another term that gets bandied about in the business world. Design thinking courses have been all the rage in the world’s top business schools. I should know, I’ve been teaching an executive education course at the University of Cape Town on design thinking and customer experience. The emphasis on design thinking comes with good reason.

Design thinking is central to the success of many of today’s leading brands, such as Apple, Airbnb, Tesla, just to name a few. As CX professionals, design thinking can be a powerful methodology for crafting new experiences, refining journeys, or building solutions around the needs of other stakeholders, such as employees. It’s an important approach we should all understand and be able to incorporate into our repertoire as CX professionals. So, if you’ve been keen to learn a little bit more about design thinking and see how this can be used to enhance customer experience, then stay tuned.

As always, if you’re out for a crisp fall walk in the northern hemisphere or busy doing a bit of spring cleaning in the southern hemisphere, 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. Let’s start with the definition and quick overview of design thinking. Like the topic of user experience, which I covered last week in episode 56, design thinking does not have a singular definition.

But I think that one of the clearest explanations comes from Tim Brown, the executive chair of IDEO. He defines design thinking as a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. Within this definition, we can regard design thinking as a process for creative problem-solving, one that can be applied to nearly any problem, customer journey, or otherwise. Even though design thinking is still somewhat new for the business community, it’s been around for some time.

The origins of design thinking start in the late 1950s and early 60s as a creative technique for designers and engineers. Through the 1960s and 70s, design thinking methods and theories began to take hold in the fields of industrial design, architecture, and product design. By the 1980s and 90s, people began talking about this in terms of human-centered design, and the most innovative and forward thinking organizations out there started to integrate design-centered business management into their way of doing business. From 2000 onward, we’ve seen the steady rise of design thinking as a proper business discipline, one that can be applied by organizations to many different contexts.

So why is design thinking so special? What’s the secret sauce? Design thinking aims to solve problems at the intersection of three things, desirability, viability, and feasibility. Design thinking methodologies push teams to balance these competing forces.

The classic approach for design thinking incorporates five stages, which are often represented as a double diamond. If you’re having trouble visualizing this, don’t worry. I’ll include a few images and some helpful links in the show notes. The five stages of design thinking are empathize, define, ideation, prototype, and test.

Let’s go through them one by one. First we have empathize. This is arguably the most important phase of the process. This is all about understanding the user, their needs, their feelings, and their perspective.

When we talk about putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we’re essentially talking about establishing empathy. And we do this by researching, understanding, and observing the user. After all, how can we build something for someone if we don’t understand who they are? Next we have define.

This is arguably the step that most organizations neglect. Once we understand the user through empathizing, we need to leverage that information to establish their point of view and to express the problem that we want to solve. The more specific we can make that problem, the better. In design thinking, the problem is often posed as a how might we statement.

It’s a statement that gives clues about the user and their needs and the task at hand. An example problem statement might sound something like, how might we provide quick and healthy meal options to the busy working mom on the go? This problem statement could go through several variations of what we call reframing to make it more and more specific. The more we learn about the user.

Einstein once said that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution. I think Einstein was on to something. Next, we have ideation. This is what people often think about when they envision design thinking.

They imagine word clouds and post-it notes and all kinds of creative ideas flying around. The stages up until now have been all about honing in on the challenge and the user. But ideation is where teams want to go wide again. Imagine the possibilities and generate lots of possible ideas.

Ideation is wonderful. It’s creative, exploratory, and it can be a lot of fun. After ideation, it’s time to prototype. Of the volumes of ideas generated during ideation, teams now need to pick one to carry over from idea into something tangible.

Prototyping can take a lot of different forms. Perhaps, it’s storytelling or storyboarding. Sometimes, it’s building a prototype with legos or crafting a small 3D model. But the important thing is to make the idea real so that the user can begin to interact with it, which takes us to step five of design thinking, testing.

This is where teams share their prototype with the user and get feedback. This is the opportunity to gain more perspective about the end user. Feedback may help teams realize that they need to go back and learn more about their user, reframe the question, pick another idea to prototype, or maybe they just need to make refinements to their existing prototype. All of these outcomes are okay.

If a team comes out of testing and goes back to square one, then that’s still a win. Because at least they didn’t launch something that was going to be a total flop with their audience. Design thinking encourages teams to go through this process quickly with several iterations, so that the investment of time doesn’t tempt teams to become attached to an idea that might not strike the magic balance of desirability, feasibility, and viability. Design thinking has some obvious and not so obvious applications in the world of customer experience.

It’s easy to see how this could be a powerful approach for innovating journey improvements, or defining new products and services. Because of its emphasis on empathy and framing the user’s point of view, design thinking is an inherently outside in way of looking at things. So it’s a great approach for customer experience professionals to use. Beyond the obvious applications of customer experience innovation, design thinking can also be used in the context of employee experience, organizational alignment, or stakeholder management.

How many of us have had an employee onboarding experience or a vendor management experience that was user unfriendly to the extreme? Not only are these things super annoying for the end user, but they also throw noise into the system that slows things down. Design thinking can help teams bolster the organizational ecosystem that helps journeys happen. If design thinking sounds like common sense, then good.

It should. When I first learned the five-step approach, it seemed so logical to me, yet also very different from the way that I had seen most teams go about solving problems. How many of us have been in a brainstorming session where teams jump straight into solution mode without even clarifying the task at hand? How many of us have seen a product or experience get hurled into the customer journey without any testing?

How many of us have been a part of teams that just didn’t want to let go of an idea even though all the signs were telling them to turn back and go another way? I think the honest answer here is that we’ve all been in these situations. In design thinking methodology, regardless of whether or not you use the five steps in a structured approach, or just integrate bits and pieces into your daily work, will help make a difference and complement your efforts to instill customer centricity. If you’re looking for help applying design thinking in your organization, I’m just an e-mail away.

I’d be happy to explore how I could help. Thanks so much for listening today. If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program 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 Thursday with another Mini Masterclass. Be sure to tune in then or subscribe for updates when new episodes go live. See you next Thursday. 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 listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

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 B2B CX strategy) or get in touch via email. 

User experience (UX) is a buzzword in the business world. It’s sometimes confused with customer experience. As the field of customer experience continues to gain momentum, it’s important to understand how other disciplines like user experience fit into the picture, so that CX professionals can effectively collaborate with these teams and help business leaders understand what’s what.

Customer experience and user experience are related. We could think of them as cousins and good friends. Related, but still different. If we want to make a comparison between customer experience and user experience, the most logical place to start is with a definition of each.

On CX Day, the CXPA released a great video with a definition of customer experience. The definition that I use is similar to the CXPA. I cover this in detail in episode 14, but as a quick refresher, we can think of a brand’s customer experience as all the ways that a consumer interfaces with that particular brand. Customer experience is the combined effect of things like touchpoints, products, service support, communication, plus a whole bunch of other things.

While the definition of a brand’s customer experience is all encompassing, we must remember that as customers move through their lives, their individual journeys will include experiences beyond the confines of just one brand. Customer journeys don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen in the real world where people talk with their friends, read online reviews and interact with any number of other entities before or after they interface with your brand.

I’m pleased that the CXPA has provided some clarity around the definition of CX. The professional community needed this clarity, and it’s probably safe to say that the UX community could benefit from the same. There are a wide range of definitions out there. One of the most commonly referenced definitions is from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). They’ve defined UX as a person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use and or anticipated use of a product, system or service. We could also interpret this as how a customer feels about every interaction they have with what’s in front of them while they’re using it.

While UX and CX both pertain to a person’s interactions and their responses, user experience tends to look at this through the lens of an interaction with a particular system or touchpoint. And in practice, user experience assessment or user interface design normally hone in on an individual’s interactions with a specific thing. This makes UX essentially a subset of CX, and it explains why user experience maps often feel like a zoomed in look at a particular facet of the customer journey.

In the business world, UX has gained notoriety as a practice for improving user experiences in the digital space. The definition of user experience isn’t necessarily restricted to the digital realm, but this is why people so often associate user experience design with developing tech solutions.

It’s obvious that UX plays an important role in CX. With more and more of our experiences happening in the digital world, it’s crucial that UX and CX teams to work together. We don’t always need to think of things in terms of CX vs. UX. In fact there are many opportunities for the two fields of work to collaborate and complement each other. For example, CX teams can help UX teams understand the bigger picture by incorporating customer experience principles or the vision for the overall customer journey into UX design. UX teams can help organizations understand, create and refine experiences. The UX team might be the CX team’s best ally for establishing a robust insights-to-action feedback loop or instilling design thinking into a company’s way of working.

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.

Regular listeners will know that the first Thursday of the month is normally a longer format interview episode, but for the month of October, I’m mixing things up a little bit and doing a series of just mini masterclasses. If you’re a fan of the interview episodes, fear not, I will be doing more, but this month, I’ve been inspired by all of the learning buzz that’s happening around Customer Experience Day, which happened Tuesday, October 1st. And as a result, I wanted to share perspectives on some of the topics that have caught my attention.

This is episode 56, and today, I’m covering the topic of user experience, or UX. UX is a buzzword in the business world, and it’s sometimes confused with customer experience. Customer experience and user experience are related. We could kind of think of them as cousins that are also good friends, so they’re related, and they’re close, but they’re still very different.

As the field of customer experience continues to gain momentum, it’s important to understand how other disciplines, like UX, fit into the picture, so that customer experience professionals can effectively collaborate with these teams and help business leaders understand what’s what. If you’ve been curious to understand a bit more about user experience or have been wanting clarity on how to distinguish between UX and CX, then stay tuned. And as always, if you’re out and about while listening to this episode 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.

If we want to make a comparison between customer experience and user experience, the most logical place to start is with a definition of each. On CX Day, the Customer Experience Professionals Association released a great video with their definition of customer experience. I’ll include a link to this in the episode show notes, but it’s pretty similar to the definition and explanation that I provided listeners way back in episode 14. But as a quick refresher, we can think of a brand’s customer experience as all the ways that a consumer interfaces with that particular brand.

That includes things like touch points, which are the channels of interaction. It includes products, pricing, service support, communication, plus a whole bunch of other things. The definition of CX is all encompassing. We also have to remember that as customers move through their lives, their individual journeys will definitely include experiences beyond the confines of just one brand.

Customer journeys don’t happen in a branded vacuum. They happen in the real world, where people talk to their friends, read reviews online, and interact with any number of other entities before or after they interface with your brand. So that’s customer experience. But what about user experience?

In preparation for this episode, I did a bit of research on the definitions that are out there. And if you think that CX professionals were a bit confused about the definition of customer experience, then buckle up, because I think that user experience is just as bad, if not worse. There was a really wide range of definitions out there. One user research company defined UX as encompassing all the aspects of an end user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.

Not only is that quite broad, but it also sounds eerily similar to the definition of customer experience. Fortunately, most of the definitions out there were quite different. The Oxford Dictionary, for example, defines UX as the overall experience of a person using a product, such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use. Now, that’s much narrower, and the reference to technology is an important one, something that we’ll get into in just a minute.

The definition that seemed to be the most commonly referenced was one outlined by the International Organization for Standardization, otherwise known as ISO. They define UX as a person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use and or anticipated use of a product, system, or service. We could also interpret this as how a customer feels about every interaction they have with what’s in front of them while they’re using it. So, as you can see, while UX and CX both pertain to a person’s interactions and their responses, user experience tends to look at things through the lens of an interaction with a particular system or a touch point, which would make it essentially a subset of customer experience, which is how I and many others have always thought of user experience.

And in practice, user experience assessment or user interface design normally hones in on an individual’s interactions with something very specific, a specific platform or touch point or thing. This is why user experience maps often feel like a really zoomed-in look at a particular facet of the customer journey, because that’s exactly what they are. In the business world, UX has gained traction as a practice for improving user experience in the digital space. The definition of user experience isn’t necessarily restricted to the digital realm, but this is where it’s gained notoriety.

And while people so often associate UX with developing tech solutions, hence the reference in the Oxford Dictionary definition. Now that we’ve clarified the definitions and relationships between UX and CX, I’d like to quickly explore the implications for CX professionals. It’s obvious that user experience plays an important role in customer experience. And with more and more experiences happening in the digital world, it’s crucial that UX and CX teams work together.

In terms of what collaboration looks like, I think that customer experience teams can help UX teams understand bigger picture by incorporating things like a brand’s customer experience principles or the vision for the desired overall customer journey into user experience design. UX teams can help organizations understand, create, and refine great experiences. The UX team might just be your best ally for establishing a robust insights to action feedback loop or instilling design thinking into your company’s way of working. Speaking of design thinking, I’ll be opening that can of worms next week.

So be sure to tune in or subscribe to the show for updates when new episodes go live. Thanks so much for listening today. If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program 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 Thursday. 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.

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 B2B CX strategy) 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.

Data and metrics are a logical place to start. Many organizations live and breathe “the numbers”, so leaders are already primed to pay attention. Plus, most organizations are sitting on mountains of data. The next step is to identify how this data can be used to understand the customer and foster organizational accountability (e.g. as KPIs – see episode 53 for a deep dive on KPIs).

Next, leaders should foster awareness and rally department leaders around these figures. Easier said than done, but Stephanie shares the story of a manufacturing CEO who started a weekly stand-up meetings with his plant manager, HR leader, and lead customer service rep to go over the data. The company’s customer experience management efforts evolved from there.

Once leaders begin supporting CX, they can take the message to their teams, sharing results and helping individuals understand how their day to day responsibilities impact the bigger picture of CX.

Great customer experiences may start at the top, but rallying the rest of the organization, won’t be without a few challenges along the way. Stephanie provided her insights on what to look out for, and how to respond:

If you’d like additional insights from Stephanie, be sure to read her full article on this topic.

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 55, and today I have another Mini Masterclass presented by a leading customer experience expert and friend of the show, Stephanie Thum. If you missed Stephanie’s insights on reframing how organizations should think of customers in episode 45, or her take on customer experience in government in episode 50, then be sure to check those out. It’s a pleasure to feature Stephanie’s pearls of wisdom once again on the show.

She’s a seasoned customer experience professional, a CCXP, and is one of the founding members of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. She’s remained closely involved with the association, even spending some time as part of the association staff team. In her career as a customer experience practitioner, she’s amassed deep expertise for 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-sized companies. My last two episodes have focused on organizational alignment and accountability. Episode 53 explored customer experience KPIs. Episode 54 provided a methodology for prioritizing experience improvements before delegating them to teams.

And in this episode, Stephanie stays with the theme of accountability, but with a different lens. Today, Stephanie explains where and how CEOs can begin advocating for the customer. She speaks about the role of data and then six things that CEOs and their teams should be prepared for as they champion the customer mandate and keep shareholders happy. The CEO is and should be the starting point for customer experience leadership and organizational alignment.

This can be the birthplace of great customer experience. But Stephanie’s practical guidance is applicable to any customer experience leader, regardless of their level of seniority or their organization stage in its customer experience evolution. If you’ve been looking for some fresh ideas on fostering alignment or some food for thought that you can send to your organization’s leadership team, then stay tuned. And as always, if you happen to be out for a jog or driving to work, 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. Thanks so much, Julia.

Well, by now, almost every CEO has heard the phrase customer experience. Some CEOs may have even considered adding a chief experience officer to their leadership ranks. And it makes sense for CEOs to have customer experience management on their minds. After all, it is the CEO’s responsibility to advocate for modern business practices that attract customers and profits.

But customer experience management is a newer management discipline. Some CEOs and their leadership teams might not be familiar with the competencies and skills associated with the discipline, or they may not know exactly where to start. But you don’t necessarily need to be an expert to get going. So where do you start?

Well, it’s fairly simple and practical. Start where it makes sense for your business. One place where many organizations get going is with data, metrics, and measurable customer experience goals. Data and metrics can be a good place to start because chances are, you and your team probably already have access to plenty of customer-oriented operational data.

Maybe it’s your latest application processing data, new customer numbers, website usage statistics, smartphone app downloads, fees and revenues, hiring numbers, order turnaround times, or contact center KPIs. You may even have some customer experience data, survey results, Yelp ratings, notes from customer roundtables, complaint letters, or feedback from your advisory board. One manufacturing company CEO I know started his company’s experience management efforts with sales figures, numbers of new hires, and content from online reviews. He started weekly standup meetings with his plant manager, HR leader, and lead customer service rep to go over that data.

The company’s customer experience management efforts grew from there. So choose five or six data points. Set some performance targets around those data points. Then pull the data, the targets, and your company’s performance to those targets into a single spreadsheet or dashboard so that you can easily view and understand the basics around your customer’s experiences.

Update the dashboard regularly. Show it to others. Consider creating a customer experience advisory board that will review and triage that data regularly. Then what?

Pull together your management team. Put the data you have in front of them. Ask your chief operating officer, your strategic planning chief, or another senior leader who doesn’t have a department specific agenda of their own to begin monitoring, sharing, and socializing the customer data, what it means, and how it connects to your company’s strategic goals. Decide when, where, and how you’ll take action as a team on what the data tells you about your customer’s experiences.

Meanwhile, here are six things to be prepared for as the work you’re overseeing unfolds. First, get comfortable being uncomfortable. I once worked with a CEO who said, if you’re comfortable, then your performance targets are not high enough. Customer data will undoubtedly cause you to bristle, worry, and even cringe from time to time.

And if that’s the case, then the data is doing exactly what it should do, trigger a desire to improve the business. Number two, if the numbers aren’t great, get comfortable explaining the reasons why. It’s never a good idea to gloss over data that tells a not so great story about customers’ experiences with your company. No matter if it’s stakeholders, shareholders, employees, or a board of directors, you want to tell the truth behind the customer experience data and the company’s performance to its targets.

Say what you’re doing to improve, and then support the change by helping to clear a path for progress for your teams and anyone that you may assign to address the systemic issues that will surface as you review data. Number three, align your management teams. Think of your management team as an extension of your commitment to creating a customer-focused culture. Communication and example are everything.

Write and speak about your company’s commitment to customers at every opportunity. Give your team space to team up and address change. Ask for customer updates at leadership offsite meetings. Your senior team’s direct reports as well should be given a chance to pitch in.

So much of customer experience improvement is about socializing concepts and giving people a chance to contribute. Words and actions put you on the right path. Number four, present customer experience as a triage tool, not a policing mechanism. I recently encountered a CEO who was very excited about hiring the company’s first Chief Experience Officer.

It was very obvious that he got it when it came to CX. That is until he said, yes, they’re going to be like the police for us when it comes to customers. Big red flag here. As a CEO, you will want to choose better words.

Customer experience victories happen collaboratively, usually with a cross-disciplinary team from a variety of departments. You don’t want to present the Chief Experience Officer or the discipline of experience management as though they’re policing mechanisms. Instead, encourage collaboration and talk about making changes that are good for the business, employees, and customers. Number five, keep going no matter what.

In a past life, a company leader I know made it mandatory for cross-disciplinary teams to meet each week to triage customer experience data. He asked me to furnish my colleagues with written reports, and we discussed the ups and downs at senior team meetings each week. That regular cadence of data sharing helped to build an understanding of customers’ experiences with our business, and it led us to making changes that helped us to become more efficient. But it took time to see results, so cadence is very important.

Finally, number six, when the numbers are great, celebrate. When the numbers are not so great, don’t point fingers. Celebrating customer wins is just as important as correcting the direction when things are off course. One CEO I know holds a monthly coffee for employees celebrating a birthday that month, and he incorporates verbal thank you messages into those gatherings.

Another company leader I know used to spend one hour each Friday writing emails to everyone he’d seen make a difference with clients over the past week. Pick up the phone and personally thank someone who saved a client from walking away, or send an email to someone who went the extra mile to meet a customer deadline. These suggestions are just a place to start. There’s much, much more to the field practice and discipline of experience management, and I highly recommend reaching out for expert credentialed help.

The Customer Experience Professionals Association maintains a database of credentialed customer experience practitioners and consultants where you could start your search. That website is www.ccxp.org. As CEO, your overarching commitments mean you may not necessarily be in the trenches doing all of the customer experience work yourself, but you can certainly lead the charge. You can support a start, provide funding, and hold your team accountable.

In the end, it’s about more than just saying you want a customer-focused culture for your organization. You want to show it to your staff, your shareholders and stakeholders, and to customers themselves. It’s an everyday commitment. Seeing the return on your effort requires, among other things, organizational patience, but the work is worth doing.

Thanks so much for listening. So there you have it. Special guest, Stephanie Thum, taking us through the CEO’s Guide to Advocating for the Customer. All but many of you are thinking about how to subliminally send this message to your CEOs.

Well, you’re in luck. Stephanie has written a wonderful article covering these same points. It’s going to be published on CX Day, which is October 1st, 2019. Once her article does go live, I’ll include a link in the episode show notes.

Along with information on how to get in touch with Stephanie. If you’re on Twitter, Stephanie’s handle is at Stephanie Thum. She’s active on this platform and is always sharing great gems and insights. I’ll be back next Thursday with another episode of Decoding the Customer. 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 Decoding the customer.com.

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.