Decoding the Customer

Diane has been part of the CX movement since the get-go. She was one of the founding members of the CXPA, and served for 3 years as the association’s interim CEO. After guiding the association through a critical time in its evolution, she announced that she would be moving on to focus on her CX advisory practice, Experience Catalysts. Leveraging expertise gained through holding senior CX roles at blue chip organizations such at AT&T and Sysco Foods, she helps organizations realize customer-centric transformation. To learn more about Diane’s work as an expert business advisor, speaker and facilitator, connect with her via LinkedIn.

Organizations are ill equipped and unprepared to make the changes needed for customer-centric transformation to be successful. For established businesses, the scale of change is massive. Diane speaks about this as a “level 3” change, which is more akin to transformation than a simple process change (aka “level 1”). CX professionals need to be thinking about the intention and planning of CX initiatives, as well as the bigger picture of sustaining change to core structures within the operating model.

Within this context, CX professional must become adept at change management, but this is a new discipline for many. The good news is that change management is an established field of work and there are many models that CX professionals can call on.

Diane shared a few of these change management models with listeners:

Diane stresses that regardless of which model you chose to use, just be sure to have a plan. Focus on the “why” and accept that change needs to be intentionally managed or it won’t stick. Change plans should be living. As organizations evolve, the change plans should also adapt.

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 44, and today I have a real treat for you. Earlier this year, I debuted mini masterclasses presented by guest experts, and I’m excited to share that this will become a more regular feature here on the program, with insights from some of the world’s top CX thought leaders headed your way in coming episodes. Today, I’m delighted to share a mini masterclass courtesy of Diane Magers. Some of you may know Diane from her role as CEO of the CXPA.

She was at the helm of our industry’s Global Professional Association for three years, guiding the association through an important time in our profession’s evolution. In May, she announced that she would be moving on and focusing on her practice as an expert practitioner and business advisor. Her transition comes at an important inflection point in customer experience management, a time when we need seasoned experts to help organizations transition from talk in the talk to walk in the walk. As more and more organizations embrace the strategic imperative of customer centricity, the next challenge is how to realize CX transformation.

And that’s just what Diane is going to share with us today. The concept of experience-led change and how CX professionals can tap into change management methodologies to drive transformation. If you’re wondering how change management can help you become a more impactful CX professional, then this episode is for you. If you happen to be out for a walk, cooking dinner, or driving to work, and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down.

You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I’ll also include links to find out more about Diane’s work and how you can get in touch with her. So with that, I’ll let Diane take it away. Hello, everyone.

This is Diane Magers, CXP with Experience Catalysts. It’s my pleasure to join you today to talk a little bit about experience-led change. Customer experience and employee experience have been catalysts for changing the way organizations work. We as CX professionals often go into an organization and are asked to make a lot of things happen, whether we’re collecting voice of customer, gathering insights, redesigning experiences, helping to move the culture.

I think organizations are ill-equipped and unprepared for the amount of change that needs to happen in order to make experience-led transformation successful. I often really joke that it’s not really a chief customer officer, but a chief change officer position. And here’s why. The challenge is that everybody in an organization is being asked in today’s world to respond fast to a lot of initiatives.

Everything’s a priority. They have to understand a new direction, learn new processes, learn new ways of communicating, accept different jobs, learn new tools, keep the business operating, and don’t disrupt the flow of revenue and profits, and accelerate the performance of the company. That’s a lot to ask of an association or a brand. So what are the elements that we need to be thinking about when we think about leading customer transformation?

It’s thinking about intention and planning. Do we have the right priorities, incentives, empowerment, skill sets, training, communication, and mindset to quote-unquote do the right thing for our customers and employees? Secondly, do we have the ability to execute? Does the company have the proper governance, systems, process, technology, and access to data to effectively engage with customers and employees?

And the most important part, what we’re talking about today is this comprehensive orchestrated change management. Can we build and sustain complex multi-level changes to core structures, employees get focus and ensure the power is there and ensure that experience leads in our organization? One way to think about this is if you think about the scope of change, we’re really in what we call a level three change. Level one is kind of that single function change, limited process or policy changes, kind of minor changes to the way we work.

They’re pretty consistent with the culture and really change leadership isn’t required. They can be initiated with just communicating what’s happening. This might be a simple policy change or a change to an application or a change to some content. Level two is kind of cross-functional change, change in reporting relationships and org structure.

Processes are significantly changing, maybe even the tools that people are using. Sometimes it includes performance standards. It changes the way people work. It challenges the culture to some extent and can be blocked by culture forces, kind of the way we’ve always done thing around here.

It does require active leader commitment and involvement. And then the more increasingly challenging level three change, which is what most experienced professionals don’t recognize as they come into this profession, is a change across large complex organizations, sometimes multi-country, definitely new organizational structures, how they work, whether that’s cross-team collaboration or more agility. There are multi-dimensional processes, tools, policies, metrics, sometimes new architecture. It’s fundamentally changing performance standards.

New behaviors are required. New capabilities are required. New skill sets are required. Change requires a different radical culture to succeed.

It challenges people’s willingness to change, and it really requires core change leadership as a fundamental requirement for successful transformation. That’s where experienced professionals really have to shine, is understanding that it’s a level three change. And what you need to do around that. Let’s talk briefly before we talk about some examples of models and frameworks.

Change management is really a basic set of tools and structures to keep change efforts under control. It must be driven by change leaders, and it’s usually kind of these small changes that contribute to the larger picture. Change leadership is really what experienced professionals need to develop. It’s a new muscle for us.

The ability to harness the power of people, visions, processes, and really responsible large-scale sustainable transformation in the way the business works, how they think, how they make decisions. Change leadership will direct organizations to new destinations, mobilizing resources which facilitate change. This puts an engine on the whole process, inspiring stakeholders to really embrace the change and make things happen. So how do we think about our being catalysts for our organization, to reorient our culture, to become more experience-centric?

There’s lots of things in our toolbox, education, customer intelligence and sharing that information, teaching experience design, engaging employees in how they can contribute to the new future vision, having them be a part of it, getting technology to take care of a lot of the mundane things so that people can focus on how and where they’re headed, taking those obstacles off their plate so that they can see the future and act toward it, recruiting people to contribute to the organization and the change, reward systems, new capabilities. There’s a lot of things that you can put in your toolbox to help things really change along. Now, along with that toolbox, it’s important also to have a model. You might use Kurt Lewin, L-E-W-I-N, three-phase model of freezing, unfreezing and change and how those three pieces fit together.

Also popular is Kotter’s eight-step model. This is about how you create a climate for change, how you engage and enable the organization and implement and sustain change. So read up on Kotter’s eight-step model. It’s a great way to think about as you tackle each of those to put things in place.

I’ll give you an example, increasing urgency. One of the techniques that I love to use with executives is painting what I call a what-if scenario. So what if we don’t change this experience? What’s the financial impact of that change?

Or if you think about really embedding change and empowering action, what if you took existing processes in your organization, like your project management forms or your business case, and just embedded experience into that, putting things in place that are already there in your organization, you’re just adding a little bit of different flavor to them. So these are just small incremental things that you can do if you think about how that’s a component of change. There is also an ADKAR model. This is Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Action, and Reinforcement, ADKAR.

It’s really a great way to think about, as you take people on a journey of how they become aware, how do you help them understand why it’s important, giving them the knowledge, telling them what the action is, helping them define what it is, and then giving them reinforcement. If you think about the process, it’s really a good way to make sure people understand where you’re headed and why you’re headed there. There’s also Kubler-Ross. Some of you might know Kubler-Ross from her work in Death and Dying, but it’s really about an emotional response to change.

This whole shock and surprise, people are in denial, they get a little frustrated, they get depressed, they start to experiment, they make a decision to move forward, and then there’s this integration and really acceptance. Think about emotionally where your organization is and where they’re headed. I guess if I think about change leadership and being successful, it’s one, really just have a plan. So many experienced professionals are out there doing some great work, but they’re not caring for it, embedding change management in everything that they do.

Because really every activity that you have is a part of how you’re, what I call, turning the light bulbs on for folks. Help people understand why change is necessary, what’s expected of them and how changes are going to impact them. Coach the organization on what change leadership is all about and the why behind the change. That’s often the biggest missing pieces.

They’ll buy in if they understand the why behind where you’re headed. Keep your plan a living, breathing document. Talk about the future and illustrate what the benefits and the desired state are. Use continuous ideation and brainstorming sessions around how to get the organization to change.

It’s not unlike creating ways for the organization to get insights from your data. Bring teams together and talk about where the organization is and what needs to change to get there. So I guess my recommendation to all of you is to one, have a plan. Think about change management as a new muscle and skill set for you.

Consider it your new superpower. I think if we look at change management and getting people to adopt, we all think about the obstacles we run into, but let’s deal with the obstacles. Let’s have a plan to make sure those things happen. Continue to focus on the human experience, making sure you’re caring for that emotion in the change.

Find a model that you can resonate with and use the structure to plan around what changes you’re asking, and then define the what and the why you’re going to change. It’s been great speaking with you today. If you have any additional questions, please contact me. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

So there you have it. Special guest, Diane Magers, taking us through a brilliant overview of change management concepts and why these are so important for CX professionals. Diane mentioned several different models and approaches. A summary of these will be on my website in the show notes for this episode.

If you’re interested in learning more about what change management looks like in practice, keep an eye out for more episodes on this topic next month. I’ll be featuring some mini masterclasses by an expert CX practitioner who is currently elbow deep in change management at his own organization. So be sure to subscribe to the show for updates when new episodes go live. Can’t wait until then?

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

As is the case in many markets around the world, the South African banking sector is amid a significant time of change. Episode 9 featured an interview with Charl Nel and Shaun Ray form Capitec Bank (check out part 1 here and part 2 here). Until recently, Capitec has been the new kid on the block, challenging the status quo of banking with a value proposition focused on ease and simplicity. Capitec has grown steadily since their launch in 2001 but during the course of the last year, an even newer breed of banks have come knocking at the door, ready to nip a the heels of Capitec and the established banking brands.

Leading the change has been TymeBank, South Africa’s first digital bank which officially launched in early 2019. TymeBank has no branches and its core banking system is hosted securely in the Cloud. This reduces its overheads and delivers significant cost-savings that are passed on to its customers. Through a distribution partnership with retailers Pick n Pay and Boxer, TymeBank has kiosks located at stores across the South Africa. Customers can open an account at these kiosks in under five minutes. An important part of Tyme’s value proposition is their combination of low banking fees paired with competitive interest returns, something their lean operations enable them to do.

A digital bank without a traditional branch network certainly represents a paradigm shift in the world of banking, and the leadership team at TymeBank has put the customer at the center of everything since day one. No one is better positioned to share insights about this than Luisa Mazinter. Luisa is the Chief Marketing Officer of TymeBank. She’s been with them since 2017, and her professional background has certainly primed her for this unique job. She has had a vast and diverse career including being the Chief Innovation Officer at Mortimer Harvey, an adjunct faculty member at GIBS Business School, and consultant on strategy and change to some of Africa’s biggest brands.

Luisa shared a lot of insights about how the team at TymeBank has approached things differently. And the great thing is that these can be applied to nearly any industry context.

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.

During the month of May, Julia’s shows have focused on customer insights and understanding. Episode 39 covered the definition of Voice of the Customer and why customer insight and understanding are so important, plus some of the most popular methodologies for gathering VOC data. Episode 40 explained how to use insights to build a persona. And episode 41 looked at leveraging employee insights to augment your VOC program.

To cap off a month of focusing on VOC, it only seems right to explore closed loop feedback. This is one of the most effective ways that organizations can move to immediately act on customer insights, plus it enables you to strengthen your relationships with customers.

So what is closed loop feedback? Simply put, closed loop feedback means getting back to a customer, after they’ve provided feedback about their experience. Usually this entails letting the customer know that they’ve been heard, communicating the actions that have been taken (or will be taken), and if appropriate, finalizing resolution. Closing the loop can happen after either prompted or unprompted feedback. I.e. getting back to customers after you’ve asked them for their feedback (surveys or interviews) or after feedback was organically provided by the customer (social media or customer support).

It’s important to distinguish between an organization’s insights to action feedback loop, which is the internal framework for aggregating findings and operationalizing these as improvements, and closing the feedback loop, which is the external process for engaging with customers after feedback has been provided. You can also think of these in terms of macro and micro frameworks. Closed loop feedback often deals with customer relationships on a micro or individual level, whereas internal insights to action loops tackle macro issues that are causing negative experiences. The two are related and support each other, but are different.

Closing the feedback loop has multiple benefits. Firstly, it lets customers know that they’ve been heard and that organizations care. All too often feedback lands up in a black hole and we never hear about it, but when organizations do follow-up, it lets customers know they are more than just a help desk ticket number.

It also enables organizations to really deliver a top-notch experience. Think about it, when was the last time that a brand responded to let you know that you had been heard, to validate your customer feedback and to let you know that issue resolution was in the works? Sadly, I think this happens too infrequently, but when it does, customers love it. It’s an opportunity to turn an angry detractor into a raving brand advocate.

You’ll know that you are hitting the mark when customers validate that the loops have been closed. This might not always end in resolution, but hopefully it will more often than not. Over time, you should see an improvement in loyalty scores like NPS, and enhancement in business value drivers like lower churn and higher customer referrals. Small steps can add up to a lot, and don’t underestimate the power of closing the loop with your customers.

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 VOC research and customer insight) or get in touch via email. 

Episode 39 covered the definition of Voice of the Customer and why customer insight and understanding are so important, plus some of the most popular methodologies for gathering VOC data. Many of these programs are outward looking, which makes sense. This CX competency is called Voice of Customer after all, but employees can also add richness to an organization’s understanding of its customers.

Before diving into the ways that employee insights about the customer can augment VOC, it’s important to state the obvious: the employee perspective should never be your only window into the Voice of Customer. Organizations often either over-rely on their employees for customer insights, or ignore them altogether. But you can strike the right balance.

Employees do provide a special perspective into the customer experience. This can take several different forms. The most obvious is the perspective of front-line teams. These employees live and breathe the customer experience. They often have an excellent pulse on what delights and irks customers, as well as where experiences are working or not. These teams can offer extra context that helps us understand customers. If survey data leaves your scratching your head, then customer-facing teams might be able to help you understand the back story.

Employees can also provide insight through their organic feedback on what they see as a customer’s preferences, decision drivers or sentiment. This qualitative insight should then be validated with other data, which is an important step, as individual employees normally lack the macro view of broader trends within a customer base.

Employees who work behind the scenes still support experiences, and may have unique insight into patterns of customer behavior that shed light on what’s working and what’s not. These findings should be compared against other qualitative research to determine the impact on things like sentiment.

Additionally, all employees are consumers in their own right. In the age of the customer, brands aren’t just pitted against their direct competitors, but rather the next best customer experience out there. In this sense, employees’ experiences as consumers are also valuable, regardless of whether or not they are customers of their organizations’ products/services. Again, the key is to make sure that these insights augment other research, and that employee driven VOC findings are vetted with another data source.

There are several ways to engage with employees to gather their insights about customers and customer experience

Since employees are so close to the pulse of the experience and are customers themselves, employees can be an excellent source of insight on innovation and improvements to the journey. Game changing innovations such as Amazon Prime came from the humble beginnings of the employee suggestion box. This is where voice of customer begins its inflection point inward towards solution-mode.

The jump from insights to innovation can be a short one, but for the most part you should try to keep these conversations focused on observations and insights. Save solution development for another conversation.

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 VOC research and customer insight) or get in touch via email. 

Episode 39 covered the definition of Voice of the Customer and why customer insight and understanding are so important, plus some of the most popular methodologies for gathering VOC data. But customer insight is only as good as what you use it for. Once you’ve gone through the effort of gathering information, it’s time to put that to work. The challenge with VOC research is that organizations will often employ multiple methodologies, and while each will unearth different insights, you still need a way to bring everything together.

The good news is that customer personas are an excellent tool for bringing the customer insight to life through a format that is relatable.

So what is a persona? A persona is essentially a fictitious personification of a customer segment. Personas often incorporate demographic data, as well as insights on customer wants and needs, as well as perspectives that are pervasive within a segment. Think of the persona almost like a character who represents the typical customer within a segment. Teams often give these personas names so that they are even more relatable. And in some cases, these persona characters can become fixtures within the business and key features of conversations about product innovation or journey evolution. (I.e. What would our persona “Jessica” think about this new product?)

I suggest building the customer persona through a couple of different layers of customer insight:

If you are struggling to bridge the gap between VOC insights and drivers,
click here to download my empathy map template.

Personas have long been used by marketing teams, but CX professionals also quickly adopted this tool to help foster customer-centric change, and there are many applications. One of the most popular is as a key input for customer journeys. If you are creating a customer journey, it’s important to identify whose journey you are mapping, so that you can integrate customer emotions and identify which touchpoints they use. Additionally, when teams share a customer journey, including a persona makes the journey much more tangible for the reader.

The applications for personas extend far beyond just customer journeys.
Once teams can relate to the individuals within a customer segment, it’s easier to anticipate their likes and dislikes, and to see experiences through the customer’s eyes. As such, personas can be used in employee training and onboarding to help team members understand and empathize with customers. Personas can also be used as a tool to frame up customer POV during product innovation or experience design. Personas can be used in employee engagement as subtle reinforcement to keep all teams connected to the customer.

There isn’t a magic number for how many personas you need. Best practice is generally to focus on the largest and most important segments and to keep the total number of personas to manageable quantity. Teams might be able to remember a cast of 4-8 characters, but anything beyond that gets confusing.

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 VOC research and customer insight) or get in touch via email. 

It’s important to clarify the distinction between customer insight and CX metrics. Organizations will sometimes lump CX metrics in with insights and Voice of the Customer, and this is a mistake. These are both important inputs to a CX management framework, and while they are complementary, they are also distinct, serving different purposes.

Voice of Customer, which is also referred to as Voice of the Customer, “VOC” or customer insight and understanding serves to clarify our knowledge of the context of the customer: Who they are, what they care about, what motivates them, as well as what are their needs and how they look to fulfill these through the marketplace. Think of voice of customer or customer insight as inputs into the design or ongoing refinement of the customer journey. While VOC findings might go as far as exploring how customers perceive or experience your organization’s products and services, VOC isn’t a scorecard on the current delivery of the customer experience.

That’s where CX metrics and measures come in. Metrics and measures give the business some insight into performance against customer experience objectives, and what this means in terms of impact on the bottom line. For a comprehensive definition of metrics, measures and business value, be sure to check out episode 28. For the purposes of today’s conversation, we can think of CX metrics and measures as an evaluation of how things are going or as outputs of the existing journey. Metrics and measures might provide some insight into how customers are reacting to experiences, but there are limitations. Quantitative score-based metrics like NPS and CSAT don’t tell us much about who our customers are or what they are thinking. This is why organizations must have programs in place to both understand customers and measure delivery of the journey. For more information on metrics and measures, be sure to check out episodes 31, 32 and 33, which dive into this topic in great detail.

It’s undeniable that businesses need to understand their customers, but there are many ways to do this, each with benefits and drawbacks. I like to think of these methodologies in terms of 3 categories:

Of these 3 categories, the asking methodologies are often the most popular, as they are easier for research teams to manage and control. But we must be aware that asking questions always seeds some bias, and that consumers don’t always do what they say they’ll do. Listening methodologies had a lot of potential, but are sometimes quite difficult, as unprompted customer feedback can be messy. This is why organizations should use a mix of all three methodologies to create a robust and comprehensive understanding of who their customers are and what they want.

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 VOC research and customer insight) or get in touch via email. 

It’s critical for any business to understand its customers. This is something that we – as CX professionals – are constantly saying, but it’s always inspiring to see this mantra in action.

Troy Smith is the Managing Director and owner of True Africa, a company that specializes in tailored African safari itineraries to suit guests in the upper-mid range to luxury segments. Originally from Australia and having previously worked at top safari camps in both Kenya and South Africa, Troy took over the reins at True Africa 7 years ago. With a strong background in marketing and business development, Troy has combined his passion for travel in East and Southern African and built a burgeoning business in the luxury safari sector.

Troy is based in True Africa’s Cape Town office, but has vast experience across the continent – everything from a ‘close encounter’ with a hippo while in a mokoro in the Okavango Delta, to exhilarating walking safaris in Zambia and watching the herds zig-zag across the Serengeti’s plains, he understands safaris incredibly well and leads his team in their efforts of matching clients with the right destination for their safari experiences. Troy and his team work with networks of safari camps, lodges, guides and ground teams to build the perfect trip for each customer.

And it’s paid off. During our conversation Troy remarked that they don’t do as much marketing as some of their competitors. Why? Well, it’s because they enjoy a steady stream of repeat customers and referrals. His business is living proof that if you deliver a great experience, the rest falls into place…pretty much what every CX professional has been telling their executive team since the term “CX” was coined.

During our conversation, Troy and I talked about what it means to deliver bespoke 5-star safari experiences. Here are some of the highlights:

Troy and I discussed how digital technology has moved a lot of the travel industry into a space where the experiences are either online or self-service. This has been slower to come in the safari industry, because information about local travel in Africa is hard to come by (in some places more than others). Those wanting a truly customized experience still need to rely on experts to help them. Even as the digital world has disrupted the traditional travel sector, he sees the safari industry as a corner of this industry that hasn’t been as affected, something that he doesn’t think will change anytime soon.

That said, Troy and his team are looking for ways to appropriately integrate digital enablers into their customer experience. For the time being, connectivity constraints at their partner camps and lodges mean that digital engagement mostly happens before and after travel. But that hasn’t stopped his team for exploring ways that they can leverage innovation to improve customer experience. They identified itinerary-building as a bottleneck in the customer journey and engaged an app-development company to create a customized program to help them automate the process of building itinerary documentation (once the customer trip has been conceptually defined by the team of experts). Removing a time-consuming manual task has enabled the team to focus on engaging with customers, listening to their needs and delivering better overall service. It goes to show that digital innovation can be just as powerful behind the scenes.

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.

For the month of April, my mini masterclasses have been be exploring ideas and best practices for delivering great customer experience, even amid a challenging business environment. When the going gets tough, it’s natural for organizations to look for places they can trim back on their expenses to defend the bottom line. Unfortunately, I often see things like employee engagement on the chopping block. Obviously, as CX professionals, we need to help leaders understand that these types of cuts might jeopardize the success of future CX strategies. If you lose that argument and need to look for ways to bolster your customer-centric culture without incurring additional costs, then I suggest reviewing how your organization’s hiring practices align to its CX objectives.

In reality, this type of culture alignment shouldn’t need to wait for a time when the business climate is challenging and budgets are under pressure, but I’ve chosen to feature it here, because it’s something that – if you haven’t done it already – can be an intervention taken when budgets are tight.

The alignment of HR practices to CX strategy is the foundation of customer experience culture. You can’t foster and authentically customer-centric culture if your HR strategy is at odds with your CX strategy. These two must be aligned, and supported by things like who and how you recruit new team members.

In my opinion, this particular step is even more vital to your customer experience culture than ongoing training. Why? Well, because if you get people with the right attitudes into your business in the first place, you don’t need to spend as much energy on things like soft skills training and mindset change. That’s not to say that training and employee engagement don’t play an important role, especially for fostering culture alignment among employees who were hired before your organization set out on its customer-centric journey. What I’m saying is that fostering your desired customer experience culture is infinitely easier if you start out with people who are already inclined to this.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It’s relatively easy to teach someone a new skill. Teaching someone to empathize or care is a totally different kettle of fish.

Aligning your hiring practices to your customer experience strategy boils down to three main things:

It takes time to align an organization’s hiring practices to its CX goals. As customer experience practitioners, we need to be cross-functional in everything that we do. That means engaging teams like HR to be our collaborative partners as we foster organizational customer-centricity and a customer experience culture.

For inspiration on how to engage with HR and other teams, I’d highly suggest checking out Episode 3, which features my interview with Desirree from Airbnb. I’d also recommend Episode 21, which includes insights from Marnitz Van Heerden of Hollard Insurance. In our interview, Marnitz speaks about how he’s engaged stakeholders across his organization to the extent that they’ve been able to move from a centralized CX approach to managing customer experience through a federated model (where CX is effectively owned by each of the different business teams).

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including employee engagement, leadership alignment and CX culture change) or get in touch via email. 

When the going gets tough, it’s natural for organizations to looks for ways they can mitigate loses and fend off potential disruptions. That makes sense, but it doesn’t mean that an organization needs to let the risk mitigation or legal teams completely take the reins of the business. These teams are often tasked with identifying and fending off any possible risk, and they’re usually not tasked with measuring this against the impact on customer experience or customer lifetime value.

Even if a business isn’t in defensive-mode it’s important to find the balance between protecting customers, employees and the brand while delivering experiences that create value for both the business and customers. 

This starts with including some sort of customer impact assessment in the organization’s business planning and operational change processes. All too often I find that organizations will make changes to systems, processes, platforms, and even products, without fully evaluating what this means for the customer. In practice, this means that businesses sometimes implement changes to their business that result in bad experiences which have an adverse impact on loyalty.

So how do you prevent these things from happening? The answer is to bring a customer impact assessment into the business planning process, so issues get flagged before they happen, and the teams responsible for mitigating risk have some sort of counter balance for customer experience. It isn’t that theses teams don’t care about the customer, it’s just that they aren’t focused on the customer, so you have to find a way to shine the spotlight on the customer experience and show them how to empathize while they analyze.

One way to do this is to implement a customer assessment for any new business risk policy. The details of this will be unique for each business, but this approach incorporates procedural consistency and logic, elements that should resonate strongly with analytically-minded teams.

First off, evaluate if the new risk policy is designed to protect employees, customers or other individuals from harm. If so, your customer impact assessment can be pretty short. If the risk of harm is real and material, the new policy is probably worth implementing, even if it does result in a hiccup to the customer journey in the short term. The brand damaging effects would probably far outweigh a slight inconvenience to the customer.

If the new risk mitigation policy isn’t related to some sort of brand damaging health and safety issue, then it’s likely dealing with a policy that is meant to protect business continuity. This is where organizations can easily get blinded by looking out for their own issues without considering the customer. Customer experience professionals need to figure out how to weigh this against the impact on customer experience and the bottom line.

You can evaluate the impact by evaluating the new risk policy against a couple of criteria:

This last batch of evaluation questions looks at the “slow burn” impact, while the first 2 looks at the immediate financial ramifications. It’s important to look at both.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including employee engagement, leadership alignment and CX culture change) or get in touch via email. 

In episode 15, I provided an overview of the difference between customer experience and customer service. Beyond this, I haven’t really featured customer service on the podcast. To be honest, I engage carefully with the concept of customer service in my work, and that’s an intentional choice. One that I think is common of many CX professionals. For far too long, our craft and profession was boxed within the confines of “customer service”. Yes, service has an important impact on customer experience, but it is just one piece of the puzzle. And of all the “levers to pull” for improving customer experience, the service lever has been pulled the most often. Service will only take you so far in improving customer experience, but it is still important.

In this episode, I explore the role of having a service culture and how to bolster this, even when the going gets tough.

During the month of April, I’m focusing the show on best practices for delivering great customer experience, even amid a challenging business environment.

A tough business environment makes it more difficult for teams to be service oriented and deliver good experiences. Why? This boils down to a couple of factors. Firstly, when there is political or economic uncertainty, it hits people’s morale, both in their personal and professional lives. This means that team members may be slightly distracted by their own individual challenges, whether that’s a bonus in jeopardy or some disparaging things they’re hearing in the news. It is more difficult to look after the needs of others when you are concerned about your own future.

A challenging economic climate or a tough business environment also impacts the morale of customers. Customers maybe facing their own challenges which cause them to be irritable, less patient and possibly prone to lashing out. It’s just that much more difficult to be service oriented when the person you are serving is seemingly disrespectful or treating you poorly. In this context, it’s easy to see how both overall morale and service culture could be under pressure when the going gets tough.

One way to combat this is with a concept that I call “service without subservience”. This is about restoring the dignity in service, by helping customer facing teams, and even supporting teams understand that they are on a level playing field with the customer. Mantras like the customer is always right, can make teams feel powerless and maybe even subservient, but if we re-frame service as a respected and revered duty that rises above the fray in the pursuit of mutually beneficial outcomes, then we can begin to fortify our service culture. Ritz Carlton, a brand globally renowned for its service, puts this beautifully when they talk about service as “ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen”. This puts both the customer and the staff on a level playing field and positions service with the dignity that it deserves.

Instilling a mindset of service without subservience requires 3 main components:

Celebrating the honor in service and the contribution of each role to the customer journey: Organizations can do this by acknowledging the impact of individual or team level contributions and by highlighting good news stories about how these contributions turn into outcomes. Recognition can and should take many different forms, but the key here is to help people make the connection between the purpose of their work and how this both honorable and valued.

Empowering staff to take control of situations: No one likes to feel powerless. When you empower teams and individuals to do good, they will. It’s important that teams follow policies and procedures, but if you rally your team around a common goal and establish clarity on values and behaviors, you can rest assured that people will (for the most part) do the right thing. Perhaps this means allowing team members to make specific recommendations to the customer or to take ownership of how they resolve a question or query. The key here is to be very clear on the expectations, and then to support team members on the decisions they make. If people are worried that their choices will constantly be scrutinized, this won’t succeed.

Enable employees to define their boundaries: In Episode 5, I spoke with Laura Jack about the role of compassion in customer experience. She highlighted that teams, especially those at the coal face of customer experience, need to practice self-care. This is key maintaining employee morale and mitigating burnout. In the context of service boundaries, this might mean encouraging individuals to create self-defined parameters for when they need to take a break and get re-centerd, or enabling team members to collectively define the approach and then support each other when dealing with confrontational customers. When employees take control of their boundaries, is helps prevent scenarios where they might feel belittled or victimized.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including employee engagement, leadership alignment and CX culture change) or get in touch via email.