Decoding the Customer

CX professional need to keep a pulse on what’s changing in the consumer world. It can be easy to get stuck in customer-centric transformation work, but we can’t forget to keep our eye on the horizon. Doing this enables us to help our businesses (or clients) evolve for the future needs of customers. I spoke with Ilenia Vidili to hear hear thoughts about what trends are impacting the consumer landscape.

Ilenia is a consultant and trainer with extensive experience working in various multinationals and start-ups across different industries. Fascinated about strategies, brands and consumer behavior of the digital era, she believes that companies should start disrupting the way they interact with their customers. She also believes this will be the key that unlocks their future. She is the proud founder of The Smarter Crew, an innovative company that helps organizations make customer experience their competitive advantage

During our conversation, Ilenia and I covered many different topics related to consumer experience trends. Here are some of the highlights:

My conversation with Ilenia started an ended on the topic of mobile experience. This wasn’t intentional, but the topic of mobile interactions is central to ANY conversation about customer experience these days. Mobile devices catalyzed the Age of the Customer, and have continued become more deeply entrenched in our consumer journeys. Getting the mobile experience “right” is not an option, it is a requirement for the future success of any brand.

Ilenia shared some insights on how organizations can get mobile “right”, citing research from a study conducted by Google. This study showed that key moments for mobile engagement include those when consumers are looking to know, go, buy, and do. Google calls these micro moments, and they are loaded with intent, context and immediacy. Know moments reflect when consumers are in research mode. Go moments reflect when consumers are quickly looking for something relevant. Buy moments are when a consumer is in purchase-mode. Finally, do moments are when consumers are looking to solve or do something (e.g. search “how to fix my washing machine”).

These micro moments are the new battlefield for businesses. During these moments, brands need to be present, useful and quick. The organizations behind these brands will have to anticipate these moments and be ready to respond with helpful engagement or content. Doing so will help them earn the trust of the next generation of consumers.

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.

I covered an overview of Net Promoter Score (NPS) along with 2 other popular CX Metrics in episode 31, but it warrants repeating here, before we dive into the pros and cons. NPS was developed by Fred Reichheld, and introduced to the world in a 2003 Harvard Business review article titled “One Number You Need to Grow”.  Net promoter score is intended to be applied as a loyalty metric, and is measured by asking survey respondents to rate on a scale from 0 to 10 “How likely is it that you would recommend our [company/product/service] to a friend or colleague?” Ratings of 9 or 10 are considered promoters, ratings of 0 to 6 are considered detractors, and ratings of 7 or 8 are regarded as neutral. NPS is calculated as: % of promoters – % of detractors. The resulting score can range from -100 to 100. Check out the Temkin Group’s annual NPS research for some context around typical score rages among various industries.

NPS has captured the attention of, and resonated with, business leaders. Perhaps it was because NPS was introduced through the Harvard Business Review, or because it was created by someone from a reputable top consulting firm, or because of the alluring simplicity of understanding the customer through just one number. I’m not 100% sure of the reason, but either way, this score seems to have won over the hearts and minds of executives. For all of its faults and flaws, NPS has helped put customer experience in the spotlight and on executives’ radar.

Personally, I don’t think that NPS deserves this pedestal with business decision-makers, but that’s the current reality. If I had a time machine and could go back to 2003, I’d ask Fred Reichheld not to position NPS as a holy grail of customer loyalty or experience assessment tools. This positioning has been the source of its misuse and the cause of great frustrations within the customer experience professional community.

When I engage with members of the CX professional community about NPS, I see CX leaders who feel almost shackled to a metric that they cannot fully control. They are often forced to be measured by a number that is influenced by a multitude of different factors. I understand their frustration as they endeavor to drive change within businesses that are obsessed with a score…a score that had been hailed as a predictor of things like retention and spend, but in reality is not. Again, some days I really wish that I had that time machine, but until I do, I think the best alternative is to provide some clarity around the pitfalls of NPS so that teams can avoid these.

Touchpoint-specific application: Net promoter score is often incorrectly applied as a metric for specific touchpoints. For example, after a service call out, a company might send a customer a text message survey asking them how likely they would be to recommend the company. A customer’s view is shaped by many interactions, not just one. Sure, the most recent service interaction might feature prominently, because it’s fresh in the customer’s mind, but they will also be referencing previous experiences and what they’ve heard from others. For this reason, NPS is not effective as a satisfaction measure for specific channels or touchpoints. This measuring approach also excludes those customers who haven’t had a service call out. They are still customers and their opinion matters too!

Incorrect methodology: When, where and how you ask this NPS question can influence the results. In its purest form, as a broad-based market loyalty metric, NPS should be applied to a survey of the general consumer population (regardless of whether or not they are you customer). It should use the exact question language as established by the methodology’s creators. It needs to be the leading question in the survey, not tucked at the end after other impression-prompting questions. It also shouldn’t include color coding or other visual indications that may bias responses.

The wrong metric for the job: Many organizations leverage NPS as a performance assessment of overall customer experience or as a KPI for customer-facing teams. A consumer’s impression of a brand is influenced by a multitude of factors and a history of experiences. Knowing this, it’s easy to understand why NPS wouldn’t be the the best KPI for service or CX teams. When it is used in this way, teams can become resentful and frustrated that their efforts aren’t moving the dial.

If measured correctly, NPS will give you a temperature check on overall consumer loyalty towards your brand. The power of this is that it provides a window into loyalty based both on firsthand experience as well as word of mouth, including prospective, current and past customers…all of the stakeholders that make up the consumer marketplace.

If you are thinking to yourself, this is sounding less like a CX metric, then you might be onto something. A friend and colleague recently said that NPS belongs in the marketing department, not the customer experience team. I believe there’s a lot of wisdom to that. Even is you are measuring NPS correctly, the key is in how it’s used. This requires a change in mindset at the senior level, but it is worth the effort to help leadership teams see NPS for what it is.

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

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

When organizations begin monitoring and evaluating customer experience, there is a natural tendency to latch onto one number. Often this number is one of the 3 most popular mainstream CX metrics: CSAT, NPS or CES. These metrics are useful, but they have their limitations, and it’s unrealistic to assume that you can understand the full picture of CX through just these number s alone.

Organizations should track and evaluate their CX performance through a number of metrics and measures that can be brought together to create a more comprehensive view. I recommend creating this holistic view through a combination of leading and lagging indicators.

So what are leading and lagging indicators?

If you want your CX leading and lagging indicators to really resonate with business leaders, consider linking these to business impact. Believe it or not, your existing indicators can be used to calculate CX ROI. For more on this, including examples and guidance on how to measure the business impact of CX, be sure to check out my Ultimate Guide to the ROI of Customer Experience.

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. Today’s episode is a rebroadcast of one of my favorite episodes from the archive. I’m currently on a little hiatus from posting new episodes, but I’ll be back soon.

In the meantime, I’ve promised to periodically share some of the best of the 90 episodes I’ve published since starting the podcast back in 2017. I hope that you enjoy the highlight reel. 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 32. For the month of March, my Mini Masterclasses have been exploring CX metrics and measurement. It’s a very important topic for those of us working in the field of customer experience.

Metrics and measures help customer experience professionals demonstrate progress and are a way to tie results back to value within the business. In episode 31, I explained three of the most common CX metrics, CSAT, NPS, and customer effort score. These metrics alone only give us a tiny window into the success or failure of a customer experience. In this episode, we’re going to look into how you can use leading and lagging indicators to create a more balanced and robust view of customer experience.

If you’ve been wondering how to help your leadership team move beyond a one-dimensional obsession with CSAT or NPS, stay tuned. If you happen to be out enjoying the start of spring in the Northern Hemisphere or soaking up the last rays of summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. As always, 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. Right, let’s dive into leading and lagging indicators.

Measuring and evaluating customer experience is like understanding someone’s health or the overall success of a business. It’s unrealistic to assume that we can understand the full picture with just one number. We wouldn’t dream to presume that we could understand someone’s health by just taking their temperature. And we definitely wouldn’t assess a company’s success by just looking at their revenue.

Likewise, with customer experience, we need to understand a variety of performance indicators to assess if an organization is providing experiences that meet customers’ needs and expectations and to keep tabs on what’s working versus what’s not with the way those experiences are managed. I think it’s quite helpful to look at these in terms of leading and lagging indicators, acknowledging that you have to balance both. Leading indicators are the factors that contribute to a good or bad customer experience. These are things that precede or feed into the experience.

So for example, if you’re a grocery store chain and you know that customers don’t like long wait times, you could infer that minimal time spent queuing for checkout would be a leading indicator for the success of an experience. Similarly, the operational factors that dictate wait time, like the number of cash registers that are open or the overall speed of checkout would also be leading indicators, as these precede and contribute to the experience. Leading indicators are important because they help you clarify your recipe for success. Once you know what customers do and don’t like about experiences, which by the way is something you should ask them and not just assume you know, you can use this information to identify the factors that drive experience outcomes.

Leading indicators can then be used to proactively mitigate the impact of negative experiences. For example, an alert to preemptively notify customers of an extended waiting period, or a way for a business to monitor and manage operational workflows before long wait times even become an issue. Leading indicators are often easy to connect back to business operations, so they’re a great way to get the broader organization to think about their contribution to the customer experience, to set department level KPIs that are related back to experiences, and to get people rallied around common goals. Then we have lagging indicators.

These are the outcomes or results of the customer experience, which are usually measured after the fact. Think of it this way. At this point, the cake is baked, but lagging indicators will tell you whether or not the cake was delicious. Some of the most common customer experience metrics, CSAT, NPS, and customer effort score, are all lagging indicators.

If you’re interested in the definitions of these, be sure to check out episode 31. But in a nutshell, these three very popular CX metrics will tell you after the fact, how a consumer perceived the experience or their overall relationship with the brand. If we say with our grocery store example, a customer who experiences an extraordinarily long wait time at checkout might respond to a CSAT survey with a low level of satisfaction. In this case, the lagging indicator would reflect their disappointment with the experience.

And a quick side note on one of those three most popular customer experience metrics, Net Promoter Score. I’m planning an episode fully dedicated to this topic, but it bears mentioning here that Net Promoter Score can be particularly tricky as a lagging indicator to use in correlation with a specific experience. Because a consumer’s response to the NPS survey question, which asks about likelihood to recommend a brand, will normally draw on multiple experiences or interactions. These popular customer experience metrics evaluate customer perception, but there are many other lagging indicators that don’t rely on surveying customers.

In our grocery store example, we could capture the number of customers who abandoned their cart or leave the store without making a purchase. We could also evaluate the frequency of repurchase and other behavior-based measures that tells the result of the experience. The key point here is that these lagging indicators are used to tell you how you did, and we don’t always need to pester the customer with a survey to find this out. Ultimately, we want to see gradual improvement with our lagging indicators, as customer experience initiatives turn into better experiences for customers and make customers happier.

But to get there, we need to understand the recipe for good experiences so that we can help organizations deliver this. If leading indicators are tracked in real-time, organizations can use this information to flag and intervene when it looks like an experience might be going sideways. If you’re a CX professional working in an organization that currently measures customer experience, I’d encourage you to sit down with your team and identify your top five leading and top five lagging indicators. Reflect on what these numbers tell you and if you think they’re providing the complete story.

If not, then grab your journey map, identify your drivers of success or failure, and figure out how to measure both the inputs and outputs of this. To help you through this process, I’ve included a simple visual in the show notes for this episode. This visual clarifies the distinction between leading and lagging indicators and can be used as a reference for a team discussion about your top five. So there you have it, my overview of leading and lagging indicators.

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. We’re sticking with the topic of CX metrics and measures, so tune in then or subscribe to the show for updates when new episodes go live.

I’ll catch you next Thursday, but 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 consulting services  (including journey mapping, CX strategy development, experience innovation, leadership workshops and CX ROI measurement) or get in touch via email. Julia’s work on customer experience strategy and CX leadership has been featured in CMSWire, BusinessLive, Mail & Guardian, and other publications. See Julia in the Media for a full record. 

Nothing gets the CX community more riled up than a conversation about CX metrics. If you want to spark a lively debate at a conference or on social media, just ask a group of CX professionals for their opinions about CX metrics. Why is this?

CX metrics have been the way that customer experience teams defend and demonstrate their contribution to the business. These tangible results have also provided the platform for CX leaders to bridge the gap between the nebulous aspects of customer engagement that often drive customer happiness, but have historically been regarded as the fluffy stuff by business leaders, and tangible business value. CX metrics and measures are critical to the success of of customer centric work, and it shouldn’t be surprising that they ignite such passion within the professional community.

Metrics will undoubtedly evolve with the profession, but for the moment there are several metrics that are widely in use. Regardless of the ongoing debate, it’s important for any CX professional to understand what these metrics are an how they are currently used.

Love them ore hate them, there are 3 customer experience metrics that currently dominate the scene.

Many businesses leverage these scores to understand and evaluate the success of their CX management efforts. It’s crucial to note that these customer experience metrics only provide a small window into overall customer experience delivery. An over-reliance on one score is a dangerous path for CX teams. Keep in mind that these metrics should be utilized and reviewed in conjunction with CX measures and business value drivers to create a more comprehensive view. If you are confused about the difference between CX Metrics, measures and business value drivers, check out episode 28, which features CXPA CEO Diane Magers providing clarity on the distinction between these.

There’s more to come on CX metrics and measures! Stay tuned for more CX Mini Masterclasses in March on this topic.

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

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

Baby boomers represent a major population group in most economies. It’s a generation that is fast approaching retirement, and in the US alone the population of people 65+ will grow 90% between 2010 and 2040. As baby boomers age up and the “silver tsunami” approaches, there is a heightened focus on the types of experiences these consumers will be looking for in their retirement.

Many retirees opt, or need, to change their living situation to align with changes in their life while aging. It’s a huge decision, and one that can impact the most important facets of a retiree’s life. I had the opportunity to speak with Bill McDonald, CEO of the Arvida Group about how his organization is preparing for the coming wave of older consumers, and the role of customer experience in this.

Bill is an experienced leader in the retirement community (aka retirement village) industry. He has held a number of senior executive roles in the New Zealand and Australian retirement sector including General Manager of ING’s retirement assets division in New Zealand and Regional Operations Manager for Stockland Limited in Victoria, Australia.

Bill entered the industry as acting CEO for a community owned organisation in county Victoria, Australia where he successfully guided the organisation through the accreditation process. Bill subsequently joined the Buxton Group to assist in the development and operation of the acclaimed Rylands facilities in Melbourne. The development projects won multiple awards from the Urban Development Institute of Australia and Australian Institute of Building. They are recognized as benchmark retirement operations in Australia and internationally.

Bill is focused on building a retirement and aged care business that aligns with the demands of today as well as those of the future, through the principles of resident well-being and positive community interaction. It’s this focus on the customer that sets Bill and his team apart.

To realize the principles of resident well-being, the team at Arvida needs to keep their finger on the pulse of changes in the industry and consumer preferences. Here are some highlights of insights about Baby Boomers from my conversation with Bill:

The Arvida Group owns and operates a network of retirement villages across New Zealand. The business has been around for 4 years and grew through the acquisition of existing retirement villages. As a relatively new organization, the Arvida team had the opportunity and challenge of defining their purpose and building customer experience around this.

Arvida’s purpose is to “transform the aging experience”, and Bill explained that the rest of the business is molded around this objective. They’ve made a point to move away from the traditional hierarchical structures that are pervasive in the healthcare sector, and have rather focused on instilling the “attitude of living well” and empowered teams to contribute to customer happiness and well-being. Small changes such as enabling staff to wear their own clothes rather than uniforms and removing buzzers, have all contributed to a better experience.

The Arvida team seeks to understand and continually evolve customer needs through the lens of their employees. Bill explained that their values underpin their success and that employee engagement is a hugely important aspect of their customer experience strategy. While the brand doesn’t have a major presence on social media (yet), their internal social platform, Yammer, has taken off and been an amazing tool for keeping the team connected, engaged and learning from each other.

Bill is the the CEO, so ultimately he’s accountable for delivering financial results to keep Arvida’s board and shareholders happy. So how does CX translate into bottom line results for this business?

By focusing on their attitude of living well, rather than the typical clinical KPIs and measures of the retirement community industry, it has freed the team to define and deliver better experiences. This in turn translated into better occupancy rates, transformed their ability to gain certifications, and enabled them to implement premium pricing. These results link directly to business and shareholder value.

Sometimes CX teams can get wrapped up in customer experience metrics, but Bill’s team seems to have bypassed the typical CX dashboard. By giving teams strategic direction and fostering the right culture, Arvida has delivered value to both customers and shareholders. These support each other as contribution to the bottom line fuels business advocacy for customer experience.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business define customer experience strategy that delivers results, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email. To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here.

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

The words “strategy” and “strategic” are used a lot in the business world, but what do these really mean? In it’s simplest terms, Ben defines strategy as the statement of a goal and a high level plan about how that goal will be achieved. (That’s not so scary, now is it!) Ben frames this up as a map showing where you want to go and how you want to get there. Normally in CX, we start with the customer, but as Ben points out, with a CX strategy, you actually want to start with the organization, and then link this back to customer insights.

Ben defines the key steps to building your CX strategy as follows:

To create a visual representation of this CX strategy, Ben uses the analogy of a house to capture and reflect the different components. Within this context, the company purpose, goals and CX vision will be positioned at the top, with the principles and then strategic priorities flowing down from these. CX enablers are positioned as the foundation of the strategy.

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

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

Diane has been part of the CX movement since the get-go. She was one of the founding members of the CXPA, and is currently serving as the association’s interim CEO, along with her role as an independent business advisor, speaker and facilitator within the CX professional community. Before this, she held senior CX roles at blue chip organizations such at AT&T and Sysco Foods. To learn more about Diane’s work with the CXPA, her CX advisory practice Experience Catalysts, or to get in touch about she can help your organization realize customer-centric goals, connect with her via LinkedIn.

Many CX professionals confuse the terms “metrics”, “measures” and “value”, but it’s important to clarify what these are and how they apply to customer experience management. Diane broke down her definitions of each:

Diane emphasizes that as CX professionals, we must translate CX speak into C-suite speak. This means creating the connection between our CX metrics and related measures, and the financial measures that executives are about. Without this connection, our efforts are doomed to be sidelined and not get the attention they need to succeed.

Diane suggests looking at the causation between CX metrics tied to CX projects and financial outcomes. Finding ways to articulate the connection between CX efforts and business value goes a long way to earn the attention, respect, and hopefully support of executive stakeholders.

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. 

Employee Experience is getting increasing amounts of attention from the CX professional community, and with good reason: it’s a key enabler of CX. Employees are a key pillar of an organization’s operating model – the engine that delivers customer experiences. If the components of the operating model aren’t functioning, can’t work in harmony or aren’t aligned to common goals, then the outcomes suffer.

This connection might seem abstract, but there are plenty of ways that we can see the tangible link between customer experience and employee experience. The following examples are just 3 of many ways that we see employee experience “shine through”.

These 3 examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Employee experience manifests itself in so many aspects of CX, but hopefully these have sparked some thinking about the important link between the two.

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 change implementation) or get in touch via email. 

Adrian Swinscoe

In a world where we are spending increasing amounts of time on our phones, and the digital world has infiltrated nearly all aspects of our lives, it can be easy to fall prey to the mantra that tech is best. But that isn’t always the case. Yes, technology can be an incredible enabler of great customer experience. Seamless app experiences, VOC solutions that help businesses decipher customer feedback, customization algorithms, and the social media platforms have all helped turbo-charge many aspects of customer experience. But this doesn’t mean that the human element has lost its place. Behind every experience there is a human, and sometimes human intervention is the most effective and efficient way to deliver customer experiences and (hopefully) customer delight.

I sat down with Adrian Swinscoe to unpack this topic and explore how organizations can find the balance between humans and tech.

Adrian shared research on the Pratfall Effect, which is our human tendency to prefer some level of imperfection.  We gravitate towards people, leaders and brands that display their imperfections and are open about vulnerability. In the quest to deliver great experiences and test out tech innovations, brands can (and will) stumble. The takeaway here is that these mistakes – when managed appropriately – can enhance brand affinity.

Within businesses, CX leaders can also learn from this phenomenon. Leaders who are open about their mistakes and share their vulnerability with team members and employees, may earn more of their respect in the long run.

I really enjoyed speaking with Adrian and could have picked his brain for hours. He is truly a wealth of knowledge, and the good news is that there are plenty of ways that you can keep learning from Adrian’s work and expertise. He published a bestselling book in 2016, How to Wow: 68 Effortless Ways to Make Every Customer Experience Amazing (Pearson). He is also a fellow podcaster, and his show, The RARE Business Podcast, is well worth checking out. You can also follow Adrian on Twitter, LinkedIn, or get in touch through the contact details on his website.

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.

Customer experience leaders can have brilliant ideas, but they must also be able to foster buy-in and support to effectively influence change. As a professional community, we spend a lot of time discussing and debating the functional side of our profession, and this is great, but we must also support each other in the “softer” competencies of leadership that can be just as important. I view business diplomacy and influence as part of these softer leadership competencies. As I know that many are preparing for the year ahead, I thought it was an apt time to curate and share my top 3 recommendations for actionable interventions to foster support and influence real change.

It’s important to understand how decision-makers in your organization frame their world and address priorities so that you can help make CX one of these priorities. In many cases, decision-makers speak the language of financial metrics, so think about how you can frame CX outcomes in these terms. Your ideas will be more likely to resonate with your audience and garner their support. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is one of many metrics that you can use to align to the case for CX to financial metrics. If you’d like to learn more about CLV, episode 22 covers this topic in detail.

This may sound simple or obvious, but a proactive stakeholder management plan can go a long way to helping you effectively engage with others in your organization. Plus, once you document this as a formalized plan, you can share it with your team. If you are looking for ideas on templates for stakeholder management plans, here is a nice template and another example. Curious about what a stakeholder plan looks like in action? In episode 21, I spoke with Marnitz van Heerden from Hollard Insurance about his journey influencing customer centric change. He explained how he leveraged the SCARF model and several other approaches to win over his colleagues and foster support for CX.

We all know that communication is key, but for my final recommendation, I’m suggesting that you reflect on how you communicate your plan, and to introduce empathy into your communication. Take the time to acknowledge your audience’s hopes and fears, and how these might evolve during the change process. Also, be open with your organization about the possible impact of CX changes so that people can properly prepare. This 3rd point was inspired by a Harvard Business Review article that I recently read. You can read the article here.

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. This is episode 25.

If you’re new to the show, welcome. If you’re a returning listener, 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.

If you’re looking to learn more about how CX best practices can be put into action or to be inspired by global customer experience thought leadership… …be sure to check out my longer format interview episodes, which are published on the first Thursday of each month. This is episode 25. It’s a special episode, as the 25th one feels like kind of a milestone for me.

And I’m recording it while on the road. I’m in London at the moment for some client meetings, so if you hear a little extra background noise, that’s because I’m not doing this from my normal recording space. So please bear with me and just think of it as a little extra ambiance for the customer experience professional on the go. During the month of January, my mini masterclasses have been building on the concepts related to strategic planning for customer-centric change.

It’s the start of a new year and I know that many of you are busy creating your plans for the rest of 2019. So for the last episode of January, I wanted to dive into a topic that’s hugely important for making your CX strategy a reality, and that’s influencing change. Because we can develop the best customer experience strategy ever, but if it doesn’t take hold, then all of our efforts are for naught. So today I’m going to share with you my top three actionable tips for winning the hearts and minds of your colleagues and getting real buy-in and support for your CX efforts.

Hopefully, you’ll be able to put these recommendations to use immediately and get the most impact out of that 2019 plan you’ve been sweating over the last couple weeks or months. If you happen to be dashing around between meetings or commuting on the London Underground as I’ve been doing all this week 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 in today’s show in the show notes for this episode…

…which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Okay. So let’s jump right in with tip number one for influencing customer-centric change, which is to speak the language of the audience that you want to influence. I mean this in more of a figurative than a literal sense.

Understand what’s most important to the top decision makers or influencers in your business… …and frame your efforts in terms of outcomes that are relatable. For many business leaders, this language is the language of financial results. The rest of the business world doesn’t always talk about things in terms of net promoter score, customer satisfaction or customer advocacy…

…though if you work in an organization that does, count yourself very lucky. Most executives have KPIs that tie back to financial metrics… …which are reported at a board level. If you want to sing to their heart and have them support your initiatives, position these in terms of their metrics.

For example, if leaders are measured on revenue, position your outcomes in terms of customer acquisition and revenue growth that comes with this. If leaders are measured on cost reduction or profitability, show how customer retention saves money on the cost of acquisition or align experience improvements to efficiency gains. And if you think your executives are open to it, introduce them to the concept of customer lifetime value and see how this might be woven into established financial reporting. If the term customer lifetime value puzzles you, I’d encourage you to check out episode 22, which covers this concept in detail.

Tip number two is to make a stakeholder engagement plan. Don’t leave stakeholder engagement as something that you deal with on an ad hoc basis. Make it deliberate and intentional. Look at who the key players are in your organization, evaluate their level of influence and their level of interest or resistance to your plans.

If you’ve never made a stakeholder engagement plan before and aren’t sure what this looks like, don’t worry. I’ll include some links to examples in the show notes for this episode. You can also check out episode 21 where I interviewed Marnitz van Heerden from Hollard Insurance about his journey influencing change. He shared the SCARF model, which is an approach that he used to understand and leverage common drivers for stakeholder behavior.

These plans are often quite simple and straightforward. So don’t be put off just because you haven’t done a stakeholder engagement plan before. Putting thought into this approach and documenting it will help you engage with people in a way that is deliberate and not haphazard. Plus, if you turn this into a tangible plan, it means that you can share it with your team members and bake it into your overall project management and communication efforts.

Which brings me to my third and final point, communication. I saved the best and possibly the most important one for last. In order to properly engage with stakeholders, you have to have a communication plan. How your efforts are positioned within your broader organization’s ecosystem can make or break success.

For most of you out there listening to this, I’m sure that this goes without saying and you’re thinking, why is Julia telling me to make a communication plan? Of course I’m doing that. So what I’m going to do is delve a little deeper into the topic of communication and urge you to think about empathizing with others as you communicate your customer experience strategies. Understand that your plans or suggestions might make some team members a little uncomfortable, put their performance under the microscope or challenge their existing beliefs.

Also, understand how stakeholders’ needs may evolve through the process and how your communication might need to be adjusted along the way. People could be skeptical at first and then need a little extra encouragement when the change process hits a hurdle. Another consideration is to be honest with people about the change that’s coming and what to expect. This will give them time to acclimate and perhaps make provisions if your plans or initiatives will impact their day-to-day responsibilities.

As customer experience professionals, our work to improve customer experience often has real downstream effects for customer-facing and operational support teams. We might be inherent agents of change, but we shouldn’t underestimate how others could be resistant to change. I often speak about the importance of communication when trying to realize customer-centric strategy, though diving into the empathy behind communication was inspired by a Harvard Business Review article that I recently read. I’ll post a link to this article in the show notes for this episode.

So, if you have big CX strategy plans for 2019 and would like to see these come to fruition, remember… …first, speak the language of your audience, recognizing that financial metrics will resonate with most key decision makers. Second, take the time to establish a stakeholder engagement plan. You won’t regret this effort.

And finally, communicate your plans with empathy and understanding for the needs of your audience to get them on your side from day one. Thanks so much for listening and I wish you all the best of luck for the coming year. If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program with others who might be interested… …or head on over to iTunes and rate this podcast.

It helps others find the show too.

I’ll be back next Thursday with one of my longer format interview episodes featuring thought leader and aspirant customer experience punk, Adrian Swinscoe. Adrian and I caught up in Johannesburg recently and explored the role of technology in customer experience and how being powered by humans is actually a thing these days. 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, 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 CX strategy, leadership alignment and CX change implementation) or get in touch via email.