Decoding the Customer

When teams map the customer journey, they often end up with a long list of customer journey improvement opportunities. Being confronted with a massive list of issues is a tough place to be. For teams that are just starting their customer-centric evolution, picking the right place to start can make or break the momentum of your CX change movement. The good news is that there is a straightforward answer.

The first task at hand is to prioritize the journey improvements, based on the customer impact, then evaluate the cost/benefit as a secondary step. Organizations normally jump straight into advocating for the business’s needs, but as with all things CX, we should anchor our decisions in the customer’s needs.

I suggest an initial assessment of customer journey improvement opportunities based on two criteria:

Once you’ve quantified these parameters for each of your identified customer experience issues, multiply the number of affected customers, by the experience rating to get your customer journey improvement prioritization score. The higher the score, the more urgent the journey improvement.

This methodology highlights issues that might seem minor, but could impact a huge number of customers or potential customers, as well as those that might impact a small number of customers, but with potentially brand damaging results.

Once your team has evaluated potential journey fixes from a customer impact perspective, they can further refine the list based on cost, level of complexity, etc. Journeys are constantly evolving, and there will be multiple factors to consider, but the point here is that CX teams should take the outside-in view first.

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 54. Last week’s Mini Masterclass was about KPIs, and this week, I’m sticking with a theme of organizational alignment and accountability. A big piece of organizational accountability is defining responsibility for customer experience improvements.

But before we go around assigning customer journey fixes to different leaders within the business, we need to make sure that we’ve chosen the right things to fix. When I help teams map and evaluate their customer journey, it often results in a massive laundry list of things to fix. To say that reviewing this can be overwhelming would be a massive understatement. It can seem like a huge undertaking.

And since it’s just not feasible to fix everything all at once, teams need to assess the journey, understand what’s wrong, and pick their battles. In this episode, I’m going to take you through my formula for prioritization and give you some tips on where to start. If you’re looking for a simple, straightforward answer on how to cut through the noise and help your organization pick the most impactful journey improvements, then stay tuned. And as always, if you’re out and about while listening to this episode 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. I often say that in life, people want simple answers. And sometimes, the more complex and frustrating the problem, the more we seek a silver bullet. 99% of the time, complex problems just don’t have simple answers.

But this is not one of those times. This is one of the exceptions to the rule. When you’re being confronted with a massive list of issues with a customer journey, it’s a tough place to be. For teams that are just starting their customer-centric evolution, picking the right place to start can make or break the momentum of your customer experience change movement.

So, what’s a customer experience professional to do? The good news is that there’s a really straightforward answer. Customer experience leaders need to start by prioritizing journey fixes, figuring out what needs to get fixed first. Like, how do we eat the elephant?

Bite by bite. When we do this, oftentimes, the inclination is to go immediately into cost benefit analysis mode, or to start looking at the cost and expense of potential fixes. But I think there’s a step that should happen before teams get into that. I recommend that teams do an initial prioritization of journey improvements based on their impact on the customer.

Surprise, surprise, as customer experience professionals, we are once again helping the organization look at things from the outside in rather than the inside out. To do this, I suggest evaluating all of your journey fixes based on two parameters. The first is the number of customers or prospective customers that are impacted. The second is the degree to which the current broken experience goes against the organization’s customer promise, the experience principles or just the general definition of what good looks like.

By evaluating the fixes against these two different parameters, teams can begin to see which experiences are the most broken, and then the factor by which this impacts your customer base or prospective customer base. To take stock of how broken experiences are, the degree to which they’re broken, try defining them on a scale from one to 10, with one being the rating for experiences that are just sort of mildly off the desired mark, and 10 being assigned to experiences that are beyond cringe-worthy, those that could even present a reputational risk. Multiply the rating by the number of customers or prospective customers that are impacted to get your experience improvement prioritization score. To demonstrate how this works, let’s take a couple of examples and compare them.

Let’s say that your company’s a retailer, and your online shopping portal has a bug that creates a one-time error for new customer online registrations. The error results in making customers go through an extra step that takes about 30 seconds. It’s an annoyance, it’s not an ideal first impression, it’s not in keeping with the experience the business would like to provide, but it’s also not earth-shattering. So in this case, let’s give that one a two.

Let’s also say that each month, there are about 100,000 customers who register. So the total impact score in this case would be 200,000, or a level two multiplied by 100,000 customers. For our next example, let’s take another experience that’s been identified as an issue. Let’s say this one is with the e-commerce site.

And the problem is that a small proportion of customers are getting charged an extra shipping fee on their orders. Now that’s a much more serious issue because customers are being charged something they shouldn’t. And it’s one that would definitely erode the brand’s reputation in the marketplace. So in this case, we’ll give that one a nine.

Let’s also say that there are 40,000 customers that are impacted each month. So the total impact score here would be 360,000 or 40,000 customers multiplied by the level nine. Even though the e-commerce issue impacts a smaller number of customers, the severity of the issue puts a new perspective on the prioritization. This approach also sheds light on the importance of prioritizing issues that might seem minor, but could impact a huge number of customers or potential customers.

So let’s say, for example, it was a level one issue, but it was something that was impacting a million customers a month. That would be something quite big. So this approach is just the first lens to which teams should evaluate customer journey improvements. Teams should also look at the cost and level of complexity of journey improvements.

If you want to get technical, you could even build your own scorecard with multipliers for those factors as well. As any CX professional will tell you, it’s important to balance quick wins with long term change. As you refine your prioritization, keep this in mind. Doing this assessment upfront also paves the way for you to track progress.

Once you know how many customers are affected by particular pain points along the journey, you can then track what happens when those issues are fixed. And if you can tie that back to retention or repeat purchases or something like that, you’re well on your way to crafting your ROI story as well. All of these are critical components as customer experience leaders look to plan journey improvement, foster leadership alignment, and drive accountability for owning a living, evolving customer journey. 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 CX Mini Masterclass. Be sure to tune in or subscribe to the show for updates when new episodes go live.

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. 

People shape their behavior around what they get measured on. It’s a basic tenet of management theory, and it’s why sales teams chase revenue targets so aggressively.

The same logic applies to customer experience. If nobody on your team is measured on CX, don’t be surprised when CX takes a back seat to revenue and cost targets.

This is where customer experience KPIs come in. When you build CX into scorecards across the business, you give teams a reason to prioritize the customer, not just their own department’s goals.

Not all KPIs are created equal. The most important rule: pick KPIs that the team can actually influence.

Start with your overarching CX objectives, then cascade them down to team and individual level. Each team’s KPIs should look different, because each team contributes to the customer experience differently.

Take a cell phone company that wants seamless service access as a customer objective. For the contact center, that might mean fast, accurate issue resolution. For the network team, it might mean fewer outages and consistent speed. For risk and legal, it might mean balancing compliance with customer ease.

The further a team sits from the customer, the harder this gets. Don’t let that stop you. It’s often a great opportunity to teach these teams about the customer journey and co-create their KPIs with them.

Watch out for these three mistakes:

Want to go deeper on customer experience metrics? Check out episode 31 on the most common CX metrics, episode 32 on leading and lagging indicators, and episode 33 on Net Promoter Score.

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 53. Today, I’m diving into an important topic related to organizational alignment and accountability, KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. When business leaders think about how to rally teams around the customer and incentivize the right actions or behaviors, they often look to KPIs as a way to do this.

In their own right, KPIs are important. If performance management guides teams towards common customer-centric goals, it absolutely can encourage the right stuff. But I’d also caution that KPIs are not a magic wand, nor are they the only component of an organizational alignment strategy. That said, they are definitely important and a critical way for any organization to foster alignment around customer experience.

So, I’ve dedicated this episode to giving you some answers. We’re going to explore why it can be useful to align KPIs to customer experience objectives, look at which types of KPIs are the most effective and why, and we’ll explore some of the common pitfalls so that you can avoid these. If you’ve been looking for a quick and snappy overview of the role of KPIs in customer experience management, then stay tuned. And 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. Let’s start with a little bit about why KPIs are important for customer experience management, and fostering alignment to customer experience strategy. As mentioned in the show intro, it’s a generally accepted management theory that people will mold their behaviors to align with the criteria that they’re evaluated on. This is why sales teams so often have revenue or customer acquisition targets built into their performance management, and also why they chase these so aggressively.

And businesses have these kinds of KPIs for sales teams, because they want them to contribute to revenue and profitability objectives. It’s just that simple. From the early 1990s, the concept of the balanced scorecard gained popularity. And with it, the understanding that teams and individuals should have measurable performance goals that roll up to broader business objectives.

This is why operations teams, for example, will oftentimes have KPIs related to efficiency, accuracy, and productivity. These KPIs are probably connected to the organization’s cost and profit margin objectives. So as you see, it all rolls up into a bigger goal. It should come as no surprise then, that as customer experience became a business focus, leaders also started considering how to bring customer centric KPIs to encourage teams to work towards the common customer experience goals.

If everyone is chasing revenue and cost, and no one is being measured on customer experience, then one can easily see how this could create problems for an organization that wanted to foster customer centricity. This thinking gave rise to the inclusion of customer experience KPIs in team members’ scorecards, something that’s gradually become a globally accepted best practice. In order for these KPIs to do their job, they must be designed correctly. For starters, some measures are more effective than others.

And those listeners who tuned in to the mini masterclasses from March of this year, 2019, will know that there’s a lot of debate right now around customer experience metrics and measures. When thinking about appropriate customer experience KPIs for team members or individuals, it’s important to select KPIs that teams or individuals can directly influence. That’s typically a lot easier to do for customer facing teams than for those who are working behind the scenes. Yet those working behind the scenes play a critical role equally as important when it comes to delivering customer experience.

And so they need to be equally accountable for customer experience. To do this, businesses should first decide on their overarching customer experience objectives and how these will be measured, and then figure out how that cascades down and across the organization in terms of roles, responsibilities, and KPIs. Each individual’s contributions will be unique, and the KPIs should reflect this, at least at a team level. So for example, let’s say that a cell phone company defines seamless access to their service as a key customer objective.

For the contact center team, this might translate into a KPI around accurate and quick issue resolution to minimize any friction between the customer and the service. For the network team, it might mean minimizing network outages and maintaining a certain level of network speed. For the organization’s risk and legal team, it might mean maintaining policies that balance risk mitigation with customer ease on some sort of customer effort score rating system or something like that. Ideally, each team or individual should have a couple of KPIs that connect their day-to-day responsibilities back to the bigger customer experience picture.

It’s not uncommon for these to become a little more obscure or difficult to define as a team member’s role becomes more removed from the customer interface. Don’t let that discourage your efforts. It may present an opportunity to engage with these teams, teach them about the customer journey or customer experience, and maybe even co-create their KPIs. If you’re planning to do this, I’d encourage you to go back and listen to those episodes from March, episodes 31, 32, and 33, which covered metrics and measures in a lot of detail.

In episode 32 in particular, I looked at leading and lagging indicators, which might be useful to help teams understand the inputs of customer experience, which are things that could eventually become KPIs. Now that we’ve covered the basics of customer experience KPIs, it’s time to look at some of the potential challenges and pitfalls for teams that are wanting to implement these. The first and most common pitfall that I see is assigning KPIs that people can’t influence. For example, net promoter scores often used the KPI for customer facing teams to help manage their performance.

But when feedback from NPS surveys is reviewed, sometimes it shows that customers provide their ratings based on impressions from other experiences with other teams or the product or something that happened a year ago. When this happens, teams can become despondent about their CX KPIs and feel like they can’t affect change. Ultimately, this can lead to resentment, and you don’t want teams resenting the customer. That attitude couldn’t be further from the desired result.

Another common mistake is that only some teams are given customer experience related KPIs, usually the customer facing or operational teams. If you want to foster organizational alignment across and through the organization, you need to cascade customer experience KPIs across as much of the business as possible. In saying that, I’ll fully acknowledge that it will be difficult to find suitable KPIs for some teams, difficult, but not impossible. Finally, the last pitfall that I wanted to highlight is relying on KPIs as some sort of silver bullet for alignment and accountability.

If you want to get the right attitudes and behaviors going on in an organization, it’s going to require a combination of performance management and employee engagement. KPIs are just one piece of the puzzle. Don’t let your executive team fall into the trap of thinking that KPIs are a fix-all, because they’re not. 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 other people find the show. I’ll be back next Thursday with another CX Mini Masterclass. Be sure to tune in then or subscribe to the show for updates when new episodes go live.

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 check out 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. 

Electricity is the silent enabler of business, governments and most aspects of our lives. If you’ve ever experienced a power outage, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. We often take electricity for granted, and don’t think about it, until it isn’t there. Historically, electricity has been supplied by large power producers and utilities. These entities were often monopolies, and if they weren’t owned and operated by the government, they were, at a minimum, highly regulated. But in recent years, things have changed significantly. Technology has empowered individual consumers to more effectively control how much power they consume, and they have more options for getting their electricity, including generating this themselves and selling it back to the utility – something that morphs their role from consumer to supplier. Consumer activism is also on the rise, and with it, pressures that power producers shift to sustainable, lower emission options. As has happened within many other sectors, these changes and other market-disrupting forces have created the perfect storm to bring about a rise in customer-centricity.

Unlike other industries where marketing or customer-facing operations teams could champion change, those teams aren’t as prominent in this sector. As a result, change falls on the shoulders of the engineers, innovators and policy-makers. The energy industry faces other uphill challenges as the hierarchical structures of the incumbent organizations are so ill-matched for customer-centric evolution. Yet, we can see green shoots of change.

We might not think of engineers or technical folks as natural CXers, but Chris Ahlfeldt is a great example of how those outside of the field of CX work can also help advocate for customer-centricity. Chris is my husband, and while he’s not a CX expert, he hears me talk about my work regularly. Over the years, he’s learned enough to understand how CX applies to his area of work. And as it turns out, that’s enough for him to be able to understand the implications of his work on customer experience and why that’s something all businesses (including utilities) should care about.

Chris has learned about customer experience in the same way that others in an unrelated department would, by hearing consistent reinforcing messages and participating in discussions about it. The fact that he’s embraced these concepts and applies them to his own work is a testament to the fact that as CX professionals, we need to communicate, communicate, communicate with our stakeholders! You might be surprised at who becomes a champion for the cause!

It was a real treat to have Chris join me on the show, and not just because he’s been such a key behind-the-scenes supporter of the program. Chris was also able to share some fascinating insights about how customer experience is being applied to the energy sector, tapping into his wealth of knowledge to do this.

Chris Ahlfeldt has over a decade of experience working globally in the sustainability and clean energy industries. Since founding Blue Horizon ECS he’s helped clients identify opportunities and overcome pressing challenges within the rapidly changing energy and socially responsible investment industries. He’s also shaped early-stage policy and market decisions on clean energy through work on renewable energy policy, climate change finance, off-grid electrification, and social impact projects in various countries.

For more information about Chris’ work, check out his blog, connect with him on LinkedIn, or follow him on Twitter.

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.

A growing focus on B2B CX

Episode 49 covered how the field of CX is growing and evolving, specifically with regards to the evolution of customer success teams and the role that these teams play in customer experience. The rise of the Customer Success function is rooted in the unique needs of CX within the B2B world, which is an important topic in and of itself.

It’s generally accepted that CX gained traction in the B2C world first, but as B2B companies start focusing on customer experience, we need to understand how customer experience management might differ within this context.

The core fundamentals of CX management are 90-95% the same
whether you are talking about B2C or B2B, save for a couple of differences.
These differences are also the basis of key considerations for how to manage
B2B CX:

What learnings can CX practitioners leverage from the world of B2C CX? The short answer is pretty much everything, as long as the approach is tweaked for the context of the 3 key differences mentioned above. Beyond that, it’s generally good practice to treat individual B2B customer stakeholders in the same way that a brand would treat any end consumer. B2B stakeholders are consumers in their own right. We know that consumer expectations are on the rise, and individual stakeholders within a business are unlikely to check these expectations at the parking lot when they go into work. If you want to deliver a great B2B customer experience, this starts with the individual experience for each of your stakeholders.

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 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 51. During the months of July and August, the show has been focusing on topics related to change, both managing customer-centered change within organizations, as well as some of the macro changes that are happening in the field of customer experience. I’ve had the opportunity to bring in some great guest speakers during the last couple of episodes, but I’m closing out the month of August with an episode from me.

In episode 49, I explained how the field of customer experience is growing and evolving, specifically with regards to the evolution of customer success teams and the role that these teams play in overall customer experience. The rise of customer success as a function is rooted in the unique needs of customer experience management within the context of B2B business. But after publishing that episode, I realized that I hadn’t yet done a deep dive into the world of B2B customer experience, which is a pretty important topic in and of itself. It’s widely accepted that customer experience gained traction in the B2C world first.

But as B2B companies start focusing on customer experience, we need to understand how customer experience management might differ within this context. So in this episode, I’m going to explain what makes customer experience unique in the B2B world. Some key considerations for organizations that are delivering experiences to other businesses, and I’m going to cover how we can leverage what we already know about B2C CX. If you’re keen for a quick and snappy overview of the basics of customer experience in the business to business realm, then stay tuned.

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. So let’s dive right into the heart of this topic. What makes customer experience management unique for organizations that offer products and services to companies rather than to consumers?

I think that the fundamentals of customer experience management are 90 to 95 percent the same, whether you’re talking about B2C or B2B, save for a couple of differences that I’m going to share with you right now. The biggest difference is that in the B2B space, you aren’t dealing with an individual as your customer. You’re dealing with a community of stakeholders within your customer’s organization. This is almost like dealing with a customer who has multiple personalities.

To effectively manage the relationship in a B2B context, you need to understand the wants, needs, and drivers of all of your customer stakeholders, recognizing that these are probably going to differ from person to person. Often, product and service providers will focus too much on the needs of the customer’s decision maker, someone like the CEO, since this person is key for sign off at the time of customer acquisition, but they might be removed from the relationship for the rest of the customer journey. Multiple stakeholders will be part of the journey, and some of these people will become influential voices in things like repurchase decisions. For these reasons, it’s worth the time and effort to do a little bit of stakeholder mapping on B2B customers before you map the journey or define your strategy for relationship management.

That might sound like a complicated undertaking, but there are likely to be similarities with stakeholder dynamics among a given B2B customer base. These insights might form part of a customer profile and can be used to customize experiences for particular segments. And while B2B customer relationships might be more high maintenance, given the number of stakeholders, the good news is that most B2B business models have a smaller customer base. Which takes me to my second key difference between B2B and B2C, the depth and breadth of customer relationships.

Companies offering products and services to other companies are likely to have a smaller number of customers, but these relationships are also likely to be deeper and more complex, hence the rise of customer success teams to help manage these relationships. If your customer base runs in the hundreds or thousands, not millions, it will definitely change the way that you define experiences, communicate with your customers, and solicit feedback. This is an important consideration for customer experience professionals. By way of one small example, a CX team might opt for face-to-face interviews or focus groups rather than surveys.

In episode 45, Stephanie Thum talked about bringing B2B customers into the business to help craft and refine experiences. The depth of B2B relationships means that enterprise level customers might be willing to get more involved. And this opens up a whole new world of possibilities for experience management, things that you couldn’t dream of doing in the B2C world. The third major difference between B2B and B2C customer experience is that in the business to business world, customer organizations are ultimately serving another customer.

So their enterprise suppliers need to think about how those expectations and pressures move backwards through the value chain. This obviously isn’t an issue in the business to consumer customer experience world. Because the buck stops with the consumer. But in B2B, by contrast, understanding your customer’s customer is really important, as it enables you to provide better support and experiences to your customer.

For example, if speed and turnaround time are important to the end consumer, a B2B product and service provider can expect that their enterprise customer will want to do everything they can to facilitate quick and easy processing. And they’ll be looking to their suppliers to help them do this. Essentially, we can kind of think of this as two layers of customer in the B2B world, which just adds a little bit of an extra level of complexity. So what learnings can we leverage from the world of B2C customer experience?

The world of customer experience management that’s been around for just a little longer. The short answer is pretty much everything, as long as we tweak it for the context of the three differences that I’ve just described. In addition to this, I always suggest that product and service providers carefully consider the experiences of each of their business customer stakeholders. These stakeholders are consumers in their own right.

We know that consumer expectations are on the rise across the board. And individual business stakeholders within your customer’s organization are unlikely to check these experiences at the parking lot before they go into work. If you want to deliver a great B2B customer experience, this starts with the individual experience of each of your stakeholders. 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 an interview episode, and there will be more mini masterclasses to follow each Thursday in September. Be sure to tune in or subscribe to the show for updates when new episodes go live.

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.

When we think about customer experience, the default is often to consider the implications for the private sector, but consumers don’t check their expectations at the door when they go to the DMV, grab a book at the library or go for a hike in a national park. And they certainly don’t forget these experiences when they go to the ballot box. Consumer expectations are on the rise across the board, and the public sector is also responding.

Stephanie shares 3 trends for how CX is taking hold within governmental organizations:

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 in 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 50. It’s an exciting milestone for the show. And today, I have another mini masterclass presented by a leading customer experience expert.

In this episode, Stephanie Thum joins us again. If you heard Stephanie’s great insights in episode 45, it will come as no surprise that Stephanie is a seasoned CX professional. She’s a CCXP and is one of the founding members of the CXPA. She’s remained closely involved with the association, even spending some time as part of the association staff team.

In her career as a customer experience practitioner, she’s amassed deep expertise through her diverse professional background. She’s had the opportunity to drive customer-centric change within government. And while she’s known for her background as one of the US federal government’s first agency customer experience leads, she’s also been a practitioner and a consultant in the B2B customer experience world, working with small and midsize companies. Today, we have a real treat because Stephanie has invited us into her wheelhouse to learn about customer experience in government.

When we think about customer experience, the default is often to consider implications for the private sector. But consumers don’t check their expectations at the door when they go into the DMV, check out a book from the library, or go for a hike in a national park. And they certainly don’t forget these expectations when they go to the ballot box. Consumer expectations are on the rise across the board, and the public sector is also responding.

In this episode, Stephanie explains three trends that are on the rise with how governments are incorporating customer experience best practices. She speaks about how this trend is gaining global momentum, the importance of adapting citizen experiences for the modern world, and the growing influence of oversight bodies to ensure that governments are doing right by consumers. If you’re wondering how customer experience is being applied beyond the private sector, then stay tuned. And as always, if you happen to be out for a walk or chopping veggies 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, julia-ahlfeldt.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. Hi, this is Stephanie Thum.

When Julia asked me to do this mini master class on government customer experience, I was a little stumped. And if you know me, you may be puzzled by that. Because while I got my start in customer experience in the B2B world, most people know me as one of the US federal government’s first agency level customer experience leaders during the Obama administration. And since leaving government service, I’ve written, spoken, and advocated all around the world for embracing the concepts and principles of CX as a business discipline in government.

Now, a lot of people ask me why government should even care about customer experience. And the argument is typically that government is a monopoly, so they don’t have to care about citizen experiences. Well, I have two responses for that. Number one, government touches everyone every day.

It belongs to everyone. So trust, efficiency, transparency, and commitment should be at the heart of that relationship between a government and its citizens. But there’s a big experience gap there. And you probably don’t need a lot of fancy data to tell you that.

Just think about some of your own experiences with, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or applying for student aid, or maybe a small business loan. There seem to be more sad stories than happy stories. Citizens have expectations that so often are not being met, and that erodes their trust in government, which is not a good thing. CX practices can help to close that experience gap.

The second thing is, and a lot of people might not realize this, but having been on the senior team of a government agency, I’ve been up close and personal with this. There’s a business side to running a government organization. So just like the practices and principles of CX as a discipline can help a business to be more effective and efficient, the same thing is true for government. Now, the nuances can make it much more complicated to get the work done sometimes, but you can’t deny the business benefits of great CX practices.

So I thought long and hard about this mini masterclass. What should I share? Because governments around the world are different when it comes to embracing experience management practices that would improve the lives of the citizens and the business owners that make up their communities. There are differences in commitments, priorities, funding, and cultures, and that all plays into what gets done with CX and government.

But that’s not all that different from organizations that aren’t government agencies. So I thought I’d share with you three things that are really rising to the surface right now for me that might interest you about how governments around the world are embracing CX. First, there is CX momentum around the world. I take a look at the incredible work of what Service New South Wales in Australia is doing.

And I visited their offices in Australia earlier this year. More than 850 transactions across 40 agencies have now been brought under the Service New South Wales umbrella. That streamlines experiences for citizens. And that means there’s less confusion about where to go for what.

And if you’re a citizen, less running around for you when you have to get something done. They also created a role for a minister for customer service, so things are only going to continue to improve. And they just got 50 million in funding. And when you see funding, then you know they’re serious about improving the experiences for their citizens.

Number two, finding ways to digitize and modernize with the resources they have. Let’s talk about the city of Dublin, Ireland. It used to be that as a citizen, to have your opinion heard about a policy or a new law or maybe a new retail developments going up by your house or road closures are coming, you had to show up to a city council meeting, stand up and maybe speak your opinions into a microphone. Now, that might not be your style.

And in today’s world, you might be too busy to get to those city council meetings. That doesn’t mean you don’t care about your city. So I recently talked with the leaders of the Dublin City Council. They’re using opt-in online panels to increase the number of voices they can cultivate when they’re making decisions.

So citizens and residents opt in, they get a quarterly survey on the topics that matter, and then the city council uses the feedback they collect to help make decisions. That’s a win for modernization, and it’s a win for digitizing services for citizens. The third thing is there’s a growing influence of oversight bodies. This is something I’m seeing in the US on the federal level.

Now, in addition to the new White House guidance on CX and legislation that actually moves CX practices from nice to have into the realms of requirement, you’ve got oversight bodies, like the Government Accountability Office and Inspectors General, and they’re calling for agencies to collect more customer feedback, pay more attention to how they communicate with citizens because there can be a lot of confusing communication out there for citizens, and they’re calling on them to fix problems with wait times at the post office, for example. So you have to understand the influence of the Government Accountability Office and Inspectors General. They’re separate groups, but they have similar missions to make government better and to mitigate fraud, waste, and abuse. And they put it in the public eye when they find agencies need to improve.

They publish written reports, and agencies then have to respond in writing and publicly as to what they’re going to do about the recommendations that the Government Accountability Office and Inspectors General have made. Now, all this being said, it’s important to understand that there are big roadblocks sometimes for even the most well-intentioned government agencies. For example, did you know that in the US there is decades-old legislation that requires paper processes in some instances? That stands in the way of digital solutions that would make it easier for citizens and even for agencies.

But it’s important to understand, Congress is in charge of changing the laws. Agencies aren’t. So sometimes the regulations and rules that were created long ago, usually without citizen input, they’re at odds with what would make things better for citizens. But the pressure is on now from citizens, and governments know it.

And there’s also the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, also known as the OECD. Now the OECD is a global organization that uses their influence and connections with governments around the world to advocate for lots of things, including more innovation and more policies that are modern that make things better for citizens. So there you have it. Some of my observations about customer experience practices in government right now.

And I love this topic, because it’s great to share what’s happening around the world with government and CX because it touches all of us. And it’s great to share some of the reasons why it’s not always easy, as you think that it should be, for governments to just change. Now the good news is, we haven’t seen the last of the progress. In fact, I think this is just the beginning.

Thanks so much for listening. So there you have it. Special guest, Stephanie Thum, sharing insights on how customer centricity and experience management are becoming part of the way that governments work. I had no idea about the growing role of consumer oversight bodies, but I’m glad to hear that there is someone tasked with advocating for customer needs among government agencies.

Maybe this is something that the private sector can learn from government. A summary of Stephanie’s insights will be available in the show notes for this episode, along with a link to her ebook and information on how to get in touch with her. 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, julia-ahlfeldt.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 customer insights, CX measurement, leadership alignment and CX change implementation) or get in touch via email. 

Customer success teams are mostly a feature in the B2B world, often where there is an ongoing client need or subscription based service offering. These teams are responsible for protecting and cultivating the client relationship, as well as delivering client outcomes.

Once a sales team has acquired the customer, the relationship is often transitioned to the customer success team, which is responsible for keeping customers happy and engaged. These teams are also usually tasked with onboarding new clients as well as retaining, renewing and growing their business. Customer success teams are the beating heart of the client’s customer journey once the sales process is complete.

Unlike traditional B2C customer service, which is a reactive function, responding to specific customer issues or queries, customer success teams usually have some proactive ongoing engagement with their clients in addition to solving issues when they arise.

B2C customer service teams are rarely tasked with growing a customer’s business. Retention, yes, growth, rarely. Customer success teams on the other hand are also responsible for understanding a client’s needs and then deepening their relationship with the brand through other products and services if appropriate.

If you are struggling with the distinction, a safe way to think about it is that the CX function is often strategic in nature, while the customer success team is usually more tactical. CX management encompasses the entire journey, whereas customer success is responsible for delivering value once a potential customer becomes an actual customer. Both CS and CX will work towards the same end goal, but through slightly different means.

The customer success team is one of the most if not the most important touchpoint for a customer in the B2B setting. Besides a client’s interactions with the product or service itself, customer success teams are probably the most important point of contact with the brand. That’s a huge responsibility.

In terms of CX management, customer success teams will be an important source of customer insights and they can be a powerful voice for customer advocacy within the organization, but just as CX teams are typically separate from customer service teams, it’s important to create a distinction between the two in the B2B setting. If not, you run the risk of the rest of the business viewing CX as “that team’s responsibility”, which is a slippery slope.

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 49. During the month of august, the show has been focusing on a lot of topics related to change. In the last episode, I had the opportunity to bring in a great guest expert and I’m going to do so for the next episode as well.

But for this one, I’m exploring how the field of customer experience is growing and evolving. Specifically, with regards to the evolution of customer success teams and the role that these teams play in customer experience. I think it’s pretty widely accepted that customer experience first gained traction in the B2C world. But as B2B companies are starting to focus on customer experience, they’ll also need to define how the teams within their organization contribute to customer experience.

Central to all of this is the customer success team. In this episode, I’m going to explain the typical customer success team function, clarify how this differs from the service team in the B2C world, and then we’ll explore the role of customer success within the context of customer experience management. If you’re keen to learn about the heart and soul of the customer journey in B2B customer experience, 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. Earlier this year, I gave a webinar for software as a service customer success teams, specifically on customer centricity. As any CX professional worth her salt, I did some research in advance to understand my customers and their needs. As I gained a deeper appreciation for what these teams do, I began to realize that just as marketing and customer operations teams were the source of many CX functions within the B2C space, that customer success teams were likely to become the genesis for CX functions in the B2B world.

For those who are unfamiliar with what a customer success team does, I’ll try to break it down for you. As mentioned earlier, customer success is mostly a feature in the B2B world. Often where there’s an ongoing client need or a subscription-based service offering. These teams are usually responsible for protecting and cultivating the client relationship, as well as delivering client outcomes.

Once a sales team has acquired the customer, the relationship is then transitioned to a customer success team, if there is one. This team is then responsible for keeping customers happy and engaged. These teams can sometimes be tasked with onboarding new clients, and they’re definitely tasked with retaining and renewing and growing the business with those clients. customer success teams are the beating heart of a client’s customer journey once the sales process is over.

Personally, I see a blurring of the lines between what you might think of as an account manager and what a customer success manager might do, especially after that initial customer acquisition is over. Unlike traditional B2C customer service, which is usually reactive, responding to a specific customer issue or query as it arises, customer success teams usually have some more proactive, ongoing engagement with their clients, in addition to the issue problem-solving. Besides the once-off, cheeky, cross-sell during a service call, B2C customer service teams are rarely tasked with growing a customer’s business. Retention, yes, customer growth, rarely.

customer success teams, on the other hand, are often also responsible for understanding a client’s needs and then deepening this client’s relationship with the brand through other products and services, if that’s appropriate. Now, if you’re a customer experience professional listening to this, you may have already connected the dots between the role of customer success and overall customer experience management. Essentially, the customer success team is one of the most, if not the most important touch points for the customer in the B2B setting. Besides the client’s interaction with the product or service itself, customer success is probably the most important point of contact with the brand.

That’s a huge responsibility. In terms of CX management, customer success teams will be an important source of customer insights, and they can be a powerful voice for customer advocacy within the organization. But just as CX teams are typically separate from customer service teams, it’s important to create a distinction between the two in a B2B setting. If not, you run the risk of the rest of the business viewing customer experience as that team over there’s responsibility, which we all know is a slippery, slippery slope.

If you’re still struggling with a distinction between customer experience and customer success, I think that a safe way to think about it is that the customer experience function is often strategic in nature, while the customer success team is typically more tactical. Both will work towards the same end goal, but through slightly different means and with different responsibilities. Do you work for a customer success team? If so, how do you see your role as part of your organization’s customer experience ecosystem?

Let me know. I’d love to hear your feedback. 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 CX Mini Masterclass. Be sure to tune in or subscribe to the show for updates when new episodes go live.

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. 

I can’t think of a better guide for this immersive tour of change management. Nate is the co-founder of CX Accelerator, a virtual community for experience professionals. And while Customer Service is his primary expertise, Nate is able to leverage experience in professional services, marketing, and sales to connect the dots and solve the big problems.  From authoring and leading a Customer Experience program, to journey mapping, to building and managing a complex contact center, Nate is always learning new things and sharing with the community.

Beyond Nate’s expertise bringing together the CX community, he’s also in an in-house CX practitioner role, on the front lines of driving CX change, so he’s here to bring a great balance of theory and practice.

You can follow Nate on Twitter using handle @CustomerIsFirst or LinkedIn. His CX Primer is an excellent resource for those looking to learn more about CX. Nate’s CX Accelerator is the kindest, most helpful digital community of CX professionals in the world.  Join them to be encouraged, learn new things, and meet fantastic people who share a common bond of creating exceptional experiences!

Nate shared his perspective on the practical application of change management with John Kotter’s 8-step model. This is one of the most popular change management models out there, and a model highlighted by Diane Magers in episode 44 (a great overview of change management theory for anyone looking to learn more about this topic).

Nate took listeners through each step of change, highlighting practical ideas and actions:

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 48, and I’m kicking off this month’s CX Mini Masterclasses with another guest expert. This time, Nate Brown from CX Accelerator is joining us on the program.

Building on what we heard from Diane Magers in episode 44, Nate makes the case for why customer experience professionals must become proficient in change management methodologies. He then takes us through one of the most popular change management models, John Kotter’s eight-step approach, outlining practical ideas and recommendations for CX professionals at each step of the way. I can’t think of a better guide for this immersive tour of change management.

Nate is the co-founder of CX Accelerator, a virtual community for customer experience professionals. While customer service is his primary expertise, Nate is able to leverage experience in professional services, marketing, and sales to connect the dots and solve big problems. From authoring and leading a customer experience program, to journey mapping, to building and managing a complex contact center, Nate is always learning new things and sharing with the community.

Beyond Nate’s expertise bringing together the CX community, he’s also an in-house CX practitioner himself. On the front lines of driving change, so he’s here to bring a great balance of theory and practice. If you’ve been wondering how to bring change management theory off the textbook page and into real action in the workplace, then this episode is for you.

And as always, if you happen to be out for a walk or cooking dinner, 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. I’ll also include links to find out more about CX Accelerator and how you can get in touch with Nate. So with that, I’ll let him take it away.

Greetings, everybody. Nate Brown here, signing in from Nashville, Tennessee. Very excited to be on the podcast today. I first met Julia on CXChat about a year ago and was immediately drawn to her energy and enthusiasm and wisdom. Love the show, love the episodes that I’ve seen and thrilled to be on one myself.

I feel like CX work is just the best work in the world. I mean, we’re getting to make people’s lives better and easier. There’s so few things that are that intrinsic and that wonderful and that powerful, but that are just so clearly also the right thing to do for the business in terms of impacting the bottom line and being that competitive differentiator.

Customer experience is some of the best work in the world, but it’s absolutely some of the hardest. Just the criticality around us being intentional with change management, change methodologies, and being aware of those, and the CX professional becoming more and more of a change manager, which I just think is so good and wonderful and important.

So, I’m going to continue on that topic today and just talk about some of my personal experience in this area, and then also from some of the insights collected via CX Accelerator and the many wonderful folks in there.

We have these sobering statistics that are out there, and I’m sure you’ve seen them from Bob Thompson, from Forrester, from Gartner, from others, that are being very realistic in terms of the fact that many customer experience initiatives are failing, failing to show real results and meaningful returns to the business.

I don’t think we need to be embarrassed of that, but I think it should motivate us to want to do more and to be even smarter in our approach to change the playbook up a little bit perhaps to ensure that that statistic is not the same in a couple of years.

But if we look at things like digital transformation and the recent article that came out on Harvard Business Review, very similar statistics — 80% of those digital transformation initiatives are failing to generate the results as expected. So I think the bottom line there is that change is hard, especially in these large enterprise organizations, really in any organization.

I mean, we’re changing the thoughts and behaviors of human beings, which crosses the employee experience over into that customer experience, and it’s difficult and it takes time. But there are models and there are things that we can do to enhance and increase our opportunities for success.

So I’m going to talk about my approach, the way I like to think about customer experience transformation in these four pillars of leadership and strategy, voice of customer, experience engineering, and employee experience. Taking that holistic approach, but then also wrapping that around in the John Kotter model.

You might remember from many years ago, the leading change methodology from John Kotter, the eight-stage model, which is still so good and so true, and has been so heavily validated over these years. I think his model is about as old as NPS. I think both of them have the ability at this point to have a driver’s license. But that doesn’t make them any less valuable. It just means they’re that much more validated, I guess.

That first area of leadership and strategy. The very first John Kotter principle is to establish a sense of urgency. I think that’s so critical as we approach this movement of customer experience inside of the organization.

It’s really easy to just try and plug ahead forward before we’ve really earned the right to do the work and the sense of getting others to care and making them want it, making them want to do customer experience and them naturally being the executives and those that are going to be investing in the program.

But even beyond that, just the sense of urgency inside of the organization — we need to focus on this and customer experience is not just something that we give lip service to, it’s something we need to do and do very well. So there’s many ways to establish that sense of urgency.

It could be around your competition and the fact that those that are excelling in customer experience are gobbling up the market. The Forrester Index makes that very clear. Other ROI statistics out there show that CX laggards are losing, whereas those that are focusing on customer experience and doing well are winning and the return is there.

So that is certainly a way to motivate and to collect that sense of urgency, or it could be a little bit more localized. Just having true insight into your customers and who it is that you are serving and how you can serve them even better. And that can absolutely be used to create a sense of urgency.

So then springboarding off of that, once people have an appetite for the work, the next step in that Kotter model, which I believe is just so powerful, is setting up a change coalition. And having a true CX change coalition that represents the different functions inside of the organization is essential. I really don’t think this work can be done if you take the customer experience function and put it over here peripherally to the core of the organization.

How are those individuals, how is that function, that team, if it doesn’t exist in the very core, if it’s not infiltrating and embedding itself in everything, how are they going to influence change? And that CX change coalition is your ability to do that and to influence change in every area.

And I love how Jeanne Bliss talks about the power core and identifying where in the organization change is coming from today. Who holds the purse in terms of the money? Who are the decision makers inside of the organization that have that strategic backing? In many cases, especially recently, it’s IT — information technology — because they’ve got the digital transformation projects.

So therefore they’ve got the money, they’ve got the strategic backing, and now they become this driver inside of the organization. Instead of trying to come in as a customer experience team or function or person, and just drop the customer right in the middle of the organization, which is just not really realistic, the idea of taking the power core and turning them into an ally and making them a central part of the CX change coalition is better, it’s more reasonable, and the changes last when you can get others to buy into those changes in a meaningful way and to help you to drive them.

Instead of you trying to point fingers at everybody and get them to do things, they are taking the strategy, they are taking the importance of customer experience and being an evangelist for that inside of their team and beyond. So think about that power core and think about your CX change coalition inside of that leadership and strategy.

So then thinking about voice of customer. Historically, CX professionals — at least from what I can kind of see and tell — there’s almost like this false finish line at this voice of customer concept, where what CX was is we would generate the insights around voice of customer. We would understand what’s going on with the customers via a survey program, or hopefully even a little more than just a survey program, and then have a report that was generated.

But that’s almost like a false finish line — as long as we established that NPS score and generated a report of, well, here’s what we could and should do to make our customers happier, the customer experience work was over. That certainly is not the case anymore.

Organizations expect us to not only be able to identify those changes and those priorities, but to make them, and to lead the charge and lead the strategy around making them. So it requires a highly skilled group of individuals to make this effort happen. We’ve got that analytical piece, but then also this motivating, this strategic element of taking those changes and making them happen inside of the organization.

So the next area of the Kotter model is removing the barriers, which if you read into that, it’s really about effort reduction and taking those things that are going to eliminate energy from your program and removing them, making them into an ally, or displacing them, or reducing their impact.

And I really think that we should be focusing more and more on effort reduction — not just for our customers, but also for our internal employees. I think it’s so valuable and powerful to be measuring effort inside of the organization. How easy is it for you to facilitate a quick and easy resolution for your customers? What a powerful question to be asking. And the insights that come out of that will allow us to identify what are those barriers to the customer experience and to actively work to remove those.

And I love Annette Franz on this topic and many others. It’s kind of funny how the phrase “CX program” has become kind of a bad word. And I think it’s actually a good thing that it is. I was actually teaching a class recently and I started having to put a dollar in a jar every time I called it a CX program, because it’s really so much more than a program. And if we try to make it a project or a program, it’s not going to have the long-term impact that we need to be able to have to drive real lasting results.

And customer experience, it’s the type of thing that requires a very long-term view. It’s absolutely a marathon, not a sprint. So the more that we look at it as a movement, the better off we will be. I just think that’s critical.

And the part in the John Kotter model that’s next is to enlist a volunteer army. And a volunteer army is not going to enlist in a project. But when you start to talk about the movement and the power around making people’s lives better and easier and injecting life into the business through doing the right thing for your customers, that is something that people can intrinsically get behind. And you can enlist your army of volunteers to take these voice of customer insights and generate real change, which leads us into this experience engineering category.

So next in the John Kotter model is generate short-term wins. So when we can take voice of customer insights and have people and resources that can actually make us successful in taking those insights and generating real change, we can knock some stuff out. We can show real value. And when we’re smart about the way we do that and identify where are some areas that we can collect some real momentum, we can have some quick wins and we can demonstrate to people the value of customer experience and our ability to be successful in it.

I think a lot of movements around customer experience fail because we don’t identify the ability for us to collect momentum in the short-term, in the beginning of the program. We think about that two to three year strategy, which is so essential. But in order for people to continue the appetite to get there, we have to have milestones that lead us through to that stage of success.

And then the next in the Kotter model is sustain acceleration. It’s exactly that. It’s how can you put the milestones out there to get people excited and keep them excited about the work. And I think it’s so funny and so brilliant how John Kotter talks about not celebrating victory too early.

I feel like so many change initiatives fail because we celebrate them in such a way that it takes all the energy and all the momentum out of the program. I could think back to so many times where I’ve seen this happen inside of organizations and I didn’t know what it was. It seemed good at the time. It seemed like the right thing — even the natural thing to do when something good would happen — that you would celebrate that thing.

But if you’re not careful in the way that that’s celebrated, instead of saying, look at this milestone that we’ve achieved, here’s the next thing we get to do together, and here’s what that’s going to culminate into and keeping people into that program and the energy up — if you put a bow on it, then where’s the opportunity to contribute? Where’s the glory in that to continue that effort moving forward? And people will absolutely start to tap out because they’ll feel like, well, we can check that box and move on with something else.

And then, of course, last but not least, this all has to be embedded in the employee experience. And I love seeing job titles now that represent a true scope, not only into customer experience, but also into employee experience, with people realizing that it is impossible to try and create a customer experience and focus on the customer when we are not super intentional about building a real experience, an authentic experience on the employee side that can then be mirrored to the customers.

So the next John Kotter step is institute real change. And it’s this idea of embedding these ideas, these principles into the organization in a strong enough, in a palpable enough way to overcome old habits. And I think we could all agree, having had to work through many things on our own in our own lives, it’s hard to change our thoughts and behaviors. We’re stuck in a pattern.

And inertia — if you look at Primed to Perform, which is just the best employee experience resource that I’ve read in a long time — they make it very clear and compelling that inertia is the most damaging thing inside of the organization. We’re gonna keep doing things because that’s the way that we do them. And that’s the rut that we’re in. We have to be able to break out of that. We have to overcome that.

And in order to do it, it takes a significant amount of intentionality in this long-term view and building up this model and working through these stages of customer experience and these stages that John Kotter talks about.

So use that as an encouragement that, if we take the good, patient approach to embed these changes and focus on our people first, earn the right with them, show them the value of it, have them slowly begin to change their thoughts and behaviors, that’s how we create a true, authentic customer experience that will last.

It can be done, and once it is done, it is not something that can be replicated quickly by your competition or anyone else, because it’s difficult, and most people give up somewhere along the way. Those organizations that can follow these stages and take that marathon view and embed the changes inside of their employees, not only are they just a better place to work and are attracting the top talent, but they’re gobbling up the market share. Those are the organizations that are excelling, and those are the ones that are winning.

Think about those stages — leadership and strategy, voice of customer, experience engineering, employee experience — and then think about how those can be followed using the John Kotter model, or one of the models that Diane had talked about. However you approach the change, just know that it’s going to take time, but it is absolutely possible, and it’s the greatest thing that you could do for your organization and for your employees. So thank you for listening today, and everybody have a wonderful rest of your week.

Well, podcast listeners, there you have it. Special guest Nate Brown sharing insights on how to realize customer-centric transformation. A summary of Nate’s insights from this episode are available in the show notes, along with links to Nate’s CX Accelerator, which is a fantastic online community for CX professionals around the world. It’s a great place to learn, find encouragement, and connect with others who share the common bond of creating exceptional experiences.

I’ll also include links to Nate’s CX Primer, which is essentially a customer experience wiki with all kinds of great information about customer experience topics. And if you’re on Twitter, you can follow Nate. His handle is @CustomerIsFirst.

I’ll be back next Thursday with another CX mini masterclass. If you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet or LinkedIn message. My handle is @JuliaAhlfeldt 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 customer insights, CX measurement, leadership alignment and CX change implementation) or get in touch via email. 

I met Matt at a conference last year. We were both speakers, and listening to him recount his work, I was struck by both his innovative approaches, as well as his energy and dedication to the customer experience profession. It can be easy for customer experience teams to get mired in the negativity of what’s not working with the customer journey. But it’s just as important to focus on the positive…and that’s exactly what Matt has done.

Matt may be known as the happiest man in insurance, but do not be mistaken, Matt is all about substance. He is a seasoned customer experience professional, with a degree in marketing and a diverse, cross-functional professional background that he can pull from. Matt is a Customer Experience evangelist charged with bringing the voices of customers and colleagues into organisations through stories. In his current role he is helping Australia’s largest general insurer IAG to be customer-led and data-driven through the creation of customer-centred routines, rhythms and resources. He has managed Customer Connection programs at organisations like FOXTEL, Rolling Stone Magazine, Sydney Morning Herald and most recently IAG.

Throughout his career, he’s been a champion for the customer, and more recently he’s become an advocate for positivity as a means to foster customer-centric change. Connect with Matt here:  www.linkedin.com/in/mattprowse

After working at FOXTEL, one of Australia’s major media brands and being bombarded on a daily basis with negative news, Matt decided to turn a 180 and focus on the positivity, both in his personal and professional life. As Matt has written about, our brains are hard-wired to seek out negative messaging. But this negative messaging also suppresses our creativity, problem solving and ability to connect with others. To unlock the power of positivity, we have to change the way we communicate, and this extends to how we talk about customer experience.

Most Voice of Customer (VOC) programs are geared around opportunities for experience improvement. It’s important for teams to understand which aspects of the customer journey need to be improved, but that doesn’t mean those are the only messages that teams should focus on. To balance the positive with the negative, Matt started a program called “IAG with thanks”, inviting senior leaders to call customers who had reported a positive experience and then engage with them about their recent interactions with the brand. Senior leaders can then send a personalized thank you to the front line team members.

As Matt’s “IAG with thanks” program gained momentum, it also opened up other opportunities for back office teams to connect with customers and teams directly supporting the customer. Rather than sending PowerPoint slides with survey results, Matt invites cross functional teams to see customer feedback firsthand and engage with the employees who are at the coalface of customer experience.

This approach has helped rally all teams around the customer and get everyone thinking about their contribution to the customer experience, regardless of how many degrees they may be removed from the actual experience. If you want to enable teams to design and deliver exceptional customer experience, you have to create this team cohesion, and Matt has achieved this through the power of positivity.

Matt has had incredible success engaging employees and bringing all teams closer to the customer, but he was very clear that there was some groundwork needed to get there. Here are some of his tips for CX leaders:

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.

Just like the term “touchpoint”, “Moment of Truth” (MOT) is another one of the super popular CX buzzwords. I hear it used to describe all sort of things, often incorrectly. (Check out Episode 16 for an overview of what touchpoints really are!) The good news is that the concept of the Moment of Truth is one that has been around for a while and has a pretty clearly documented meaning. This concept was coined by Jan Carlzon, the former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines. He spoke of these as “any time a customer comes into contact with a business, however remote, they have an opportunity to form an impression.”

Within this broad definition there are especially crucial moments of truth along the journey. These crucial moments happen when a customer has invested a lot of time, energy, money or emotion in a particular outcome, and that outcome is about to come to fruition. MOTs have a significant impact on customer sentiment or satisfaction. We can even think of them as a sort of “tipping point” for the journey.

Within the airline example, the check-in counter experience is a quintessential crucial moment of truth. There are so many steps that lead up to the day of travel. From booking tickets to packing bags, customers typically invest a lot of time, energy and money in their trip before they even get to the airport. All this time, expectations and emotions are mounting. If the customer is greeted at check in with a friendly smile and a complimentary upgrade because they are a frequent flier, they’ll be floating on cloud 9 all the way to their final destination. If, on the other hand, the check in agent scowls at the customer and informs them they’ve been bounced because the flight was oversold, it would set a horrible tone for their trip. The interactions at the check in counter take just an instant, but it’s so much more than that to the customer.

Journeys can have multiple moments of truth. To identify the most important MOTs, start by mapping the customer journey and evaluating the accumulation of customer effort along the way, searching for those points when the effort crescendos into an outcome. Another way to look at this is in terms of “jobs to be done”. Most customer journeys involve little achievements along the way to fulfilling some greater need. Look for these smaller achievements, and you’ll also probably find the moments of truth.

In the airline travel journey there are a good handful of key MOTs. Arriving in your seat on the plane and retrieving your bags upon arrival are two other examples of key moments of truth. Each of these moments presents an important emotional fork in the road. The outcomes could reaffirm the customer’s brand loyalty and make their effort seem worth it, or it could leave them upset and erode their relationship with the brand.

Once CX professionals identify those crucial moments of truth, it’s time to define what good looks like. Organizations should assess the moments through the lens of what they know customers like or dislike, as well as through the lens of their brand’s aspirations.

The Virgin branded airlines have really nailed this balance. Their check in experience is seamless, modern and highly digitized with friendly service staff on hand to assist. These are the building blocks of a good check-in experience, but they’ve also added great branded touches like sleek kiosks, red carpets and mood lighting to all of their check-in areas to set the tone and mark the beginning of the customer’s travel journey with them. Memorable MOTs will look different for each brand and journey, but CX professionals can take inspiration from these best in class examples.

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 46. During the month of July, the show has been focusing on a lot of topics related to change. I’ve had the opportunity to bring in some great guest experts.

But this episode, I’m back on the mic and bringing you a deep dive into a topic that is one of the most important catalysts for change. Not change within companies or organizations, but change with customers. And this, my friends, is the moment of truth. A moment of truth is a make or break point in the customer journey.

Moments of truth can flavor the tone of an entire journey, or even a customer’s relationship with a brand. So if we understand these moments, we’re better equipped to manage and deliver great journeys. In this episode, I’m going to explain the definition of a moment of truth, share with you where the concept came from, and explain how you can use your understanding of moments of truth to improve customer journeys and foster loyalty. If you’ve heard this term used as a buzzword and want to learn how to translate jargon into business results, then stay tuned.

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, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. The moment of truth is another one of these super popular customer experience buzzwords. I hear it used to describe all sorts of things, but just like the term touch point, I find that it’s mostly used incorrectly.

The good news is that the concept of the moment of truth is one that’s been around for a while, and it’s one that has a pretty clearly documented definition. This concept was coined by Jan Carlzon, the former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines. He spoke of these moments of truth as, any time a customer comes into contact with a business, however remote, they have an opportunity to form an impression. And within this, there are some especially critical moments along the journey that have a particularly significant impact on customer sentiment or satisfaction.

We can think of these moments as a sort of tipping point for the journey. It’s a time when things can go great, or they can go horribly wrong. Now, you might be scratching your head thinking, but how do I identify these critical moments of truth among all the other moments? I define these critical moments of truth as a point along the journey when the customer has invested a lot of time, energy, money, or emotion in a particular outcome, and that outcome is about to come to fruition.

If we stick with the airline example, where this concept originated, we can think about all the steps that lead up to the day of travel. You plan a trip, research flights, buy the flights, book your seats, pack your bags, drive to the airport, park, and make it to the check-in counter. Up until that point, you’ve invested a lot of time, energy, and money in your trip. Expectations and emotions have also been mounting.

If you’re greeted with a friendly smile and, oh wait, a complimentary upgrade because you’re a frequent flyer, you’ll be floating on Cloud 9 all the way to your final destination. If, on the other hand, the check-in agent scowls at you and informs you that you’ve been bounced because the flight was oversold, it would set a horrible tone for the rest of your trip. The airline check-in experience is a quintessential example of a critical moment of truth. It’s just an instant, but it’s so much more than that to the customer.

As CX professionals, we need to help organizations identify and understand their customers’ moments of truth. Because if we’re going to focus on improving the customer journey, that’s exactly where we should start looking at things. So how do you identify these critical moments of truth among all the others? I’d start by mapping the customer journey and evaluating the accumulation of customer effort along the way.

Looking for those points when the effort crescendos into an outcome. Journeys can have multiple moments of truth. Another way of looking at this is in terms of jobs to be done. Most customer journeys involve little achievements along the way to fulfilling some greater need.

Look for these smaller achievements and you’ll also probably find the moments of truth. In the airline travel journey alone, there are a good handful. Personally, I think that arriving in your seat on the plane and retrieving your bags upon arrival are two other moments of truth, and there are probably more. Each of these critical moments of truth presents an important emotional fork in the road.

The outcomes could reaffirm their choices, make the effort seem worth it, and fortify their brand loyalty, or it could leave them upset and erode their relationship with the brand. Once we identify these moments of truth, it’s time to define what good looks like. Organizations should assess the moments through the lens of what they know customers like or dislike, as well as through the lens of the brand’s aspirations. I think that the Virgin Brand and Airlines have done a fantastic job of this, and anyone who’s flown with them will know exactly what I’m talking about.

Their check-in experience, for example, is seamless, modern, and highly digitized, with friendly service staff on hand to assist. These alone are the building blocks of a good check-in experience. But they’ve also added great branded touches like sleek kiosks, red carpets, and mood lighting to all of their check-in areas. And this sets the tone and marks the beginning of the customer’s travel journey with Virgin.

I’ll admit, I was a little sad when Alaska Airlines bought Virgin America, but the point is that we can take inspiration from these best-in-class examples. So there you have it, Moment of Truth in a nutshell. Thanks for listening today. 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 an interview episode, and there will be more mini master classes to follow each Thursday in August. Be sure to tune in or subscribe to the show for updates when new episodes go live.

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, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

If you’d like to check out 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 VOC research and customer insight) 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.

Historically, businesses and government agencies have viewed customers as a source of business risk. These themes can easily take center stage in leadership and management discussions, positioning customers as adversaries. Stephanie shares that while it’s important to recognize and manage risk, organizations must also view customers for what they are: real people. Through humanizing customers, organizations can position customers as partners and remind themselves of who and what they are working for.

Making that change, however, is easier said than done. Fortunately, Stephanie has shared some practical and engaging ways to initiate the shift:

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 45, and today I have another mini masterclass presented by a leading customer experience expert. In this episode, Stephanie Thum joins us. Like many others in the field of customer experience, Stephanie has found her calling through CX work. She’s 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, CX leads, she’s also been a practitioner and consultant in the B2B world, working with small and mid-sized companies.

The core themes of customer centricity transcend industries and even the public-private sector divide. At the end of the day, the nuances of each unique organization will dictate its path to CX evolution. The more paths we walk, the more we learn. So I’m excited to include Stephanie’s perspectives and expertise here on the show.

In this episode, she makes the case for why customer experience practitioners need to help their organizations flip the script on how they think of customers. And then she takes us through three practical approaches for just how to do this. If you’re wondering how to change the way your organization regards its customers, then stay tuned. And as always, if you happen to be out for a run, cooking dinner or driving to work while you listen 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. 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. Hi everyone, this is Stephanie Thum.

One of my favorite topics lately has been about how organizations can use customer feedback to get ahead of operational and business risk. The subject is ripe for breakthrough moments because for a long time in business and government, customers have been viewed as a source of business and operational risk. And sometimes with good reason. You have shoplifting, credit risk, and fraud.

And sometimes these things take center stage for senior teams. But times are changing. The modern business world demands that change, and that means CX professionals need to integrate their work into new corners of what’s best for the business of their companies. In today’s business world, if you ask customers the right questions, listen in a different way, and let customers share feedback on their terms, then you’re making the right moves toward finding new sources that can alert you to certain business and operational risks.

Some examples include website vulnerabilities, policy dangers and shortcomings, top hiring losses, confidentiality breaches, safety, expensive marketing missteps, and maybe even potential social media firestorms. A colleague recently asked me a great question about this subject. Here’s what he said, Love the perspective shift of viewing customers as partners rather than the subjects of our investigatory experiments. What first steps would you recommend to try to initiate that shift?

That is a great question. It is a practical question definitely worth exploring because changing your colleagues’ mindsets surrounding how customers are viewed sometimes takes a culture shift. It takes patience and it takes time. And it’s important to know how to influence that change or maybe just validate that what you’re doing already is the right thing.

From where I sit, influencing a shift in perception is about humanizing customers. And here are some inexpensive ways that you can do that. I have three ideas to share with you. First idea, democratize the customer experience and operational data or what we sometimes refer to as X and O data.

Now democratize the data simply means you share customer experience data in a widespread manner throughout your organization in a way that creates a reaction from people. It doesn’t really matter if it’s the reaction you hoped for initially, because the purpose is to put customers in the company’s conversations the same way profits, expenses, staffing and technology get airtime internally. So here are some ideas. Play a contact center recording at a team meeting.

Put up a chart of your company’s progress toward reducing customer wait times at the next town hall meeting. Set up a page on your company’s intranet site, where you can post customer survey results or maybe even their testimonials. Maybe even share survey findings with your organization’s board of directors or advisory committee. My second idea, simply start a conversation.

So much of the customer experience work at any organization is about socializing concepts, especially if you’re just getting started. So share a customer anecdote with your colleagues over lunch or maybe happy hour drinks. It may sound so simple, but anecdotes humanize quantitative data. And almost everyone has a story of how a customer’s life has been impacted by the work of their agency or company.

The good news is the person you share a customer story with probably has a story of their own that they can share with you as well. And here’s some more good news. Having a conversation is completely free. So this is one of those things that’s okay to make a habit.

Third idea, include customers in the business. I’m talking about inviting the actual live human beings who are your customers to be part of your company’s activities. Ask customers to participate on advisory boards, in a customer appreciation day, or as a speaker at a conference or a special event. In my past life in B2B CX, my firm brought the CEO of a priority account into planning meetings where we talked about how we wanted to expand our opportunities with his company and it worked.

A colleague also created a client advisory board for a law firm where he worked to bring more client-oriented context to the firm’s regular business and personnel things. During my time in government, we held roundtables in conjunction with the agency’s annual conference, where more than 1,000 customers and intermediaries gathered each year. We made the most of that event by further involving customers. Customers aren’t outsiders to your business, they’re part of your business, and without their stories and experiences being part of the day-to-day business conversation, you really don’t have the full picture of your company’s risks and opportunities.

But changing the mindsets of your fellow executives can require time and attention and patience. But the work is most certainly worth doing. Thanks for listening. So there you have it.

Special guest Stephanie Thum making the case for why we need to shift perceptions and humanize the way we think of customers. It sounds simple, but this shift can profoundly change the way leaders and employees approach strategy and planning. A summary of Stephanie’s practical tips for how to do this will be available in the show notes for this episode, along with a link to Stephanie’s ebook and information on how to get in touch with her. 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 decodingthecustomer.com.

If you’d like to check out 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.