Decoding the Customer

As it turns out, quite a lot. The term “customer experience” is the basis for an important area of business strategy and an emerging field of work. As such, creating clarity around the definition is quite important.

So what is that definition? Customer experience is all the ways that a consumer interfaces with a brand. This includes things like price, product, user interface, communication, service and much, much more.

While this example isn’t even exhaustive, it’s easy to see that customer experience is incredibly multifaceted. It also adds context to why many in the field of CX have been pushing for customer experience to be recognized as the responsibility of everyone in the business.

Still in doubt? Think about your last experience buying groceries, going to a movie or dining out. Reflect on the different components of the experience and where responsibility for these might sit in an organization.

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

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 the host of this program. Thank you so much for tuning in. This episode is the first in my customer experience mini masterclass series.

These episodes are designed to be punchy, bite-sized overviews of key CX concepts. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional just looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge and skills as a customer experience professional. A summary write-up of the show is available in the show notes for this episode, posted to my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. So, if you happen to be driving, chopping onions for dinner right now, or getting your workout on the treadmill, and there’s something that you want to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down.

I’ve already done that for you. So, I’ve been really excited to launch this series. I get lots of feedback from others working in the field about the lack of a clear curriculum for people who are interested in learning more about CX. As customer experience becomes a more prominent business focus, those of us who are established in the field need to amp up how we contribute to the evolution of the profession and prepare the next generation of customer-centric change champions.

The CX mini masterclass series is part of my contribution to the professional development of global CX practitioners. If you’re interested in following this series, be sure to subscribe to the show so that you can get notified when new episodes are published. For the next few months, I’ll be posting my longer-format interview episodes during the first week of the month, followed by mini masterclass episodes each week after that. To kick things off, I’m starting with a classic concept that goes straight to the heart of CX: defining what is customer experience.

The term customer experience is probably the most used term in my vocabulary. If the autocorrect function on my phone is any indication, I probably use these two words together far too often. And as a friend and colleague recently pointed out, not everyone thinks about customer experience in the same way as I do or is as familiar with this terminology that’s so important for my profession. So I’ve started adding a quick definition of customer experience whenever I do a workshop, have a speaking engagement, or give a guest lecture.

I think it really helps contextualize the field of work and just make it more tangible for those who aren’t as familiar. I hope that this definition provides you with the same. So, what is customer experience? Customer experience is all the ways in which a consumer interfaces with a brand.

This includes things like products, communication, in-store environment, an app interface, advertisements that somebody might see or hear, assistance provided by a representative of the brand through a contact center or in a store. And that list isn’t even exhaustive; it’s just the tip of the iceberg. But I wanted to give you a sense of how broad and inclusive customer experience can be. So, a person’s specific customer experience would then be the cumulative effect of their actions and interactions as they go about fulfilling some need in their consumer life.

So, for example, my customer experience shopping for groceries would involve my interactions with the physical store environment, the products on the shelf, the pricing information that I absorb around me as I work my way through the store, any dealings I might have with staff members along the way. Again, that list definitely isn’t comprehensive, but you get the point. Each of these elements is like a piece of a puzzle that has a unique contribution to my overall grocery store shopping experience. These experiences leave an impression on the consumer, and over time, the aggregate effect of these experiences shapes the consumer’s impressions of the brand.

Shopping at a grocery store is quite an obvious and direct experience, but sometimes they can be subtler. Say, for example, I’m driving to work and I hear an advertisement on the radio for some items on special at my local grocery store, and this sparks an idea about what I might cook for dinner tonight. And then this is immediately followed by a news bulletin about how the same store was caught selling expired milk that makes me second guess my shopping plans. So while I wasn’t actively engaging with the brand and I wasn’t even grocery shopping, I still had a customer experience that impacted both something that I was going to do as a consumer and my relationship with the grocery store brand in question.

When we think about experiences in this way, it’s easy to understand how multifaceted they are and how there’s almost never a case when a single team or department is responsible for delivering customer experience. Customer experience isn’t the responsibility of the support team alone; it’s the responsibility of the entire business. When we start weaving these experiences together to create a customer journey, that’s when we start to see how experiences are interlinked and how they impact loyalty. But that’s another topic for another mini masterclass, one that’s going to be headed your way soon.

So there you have it, that’s my first CX mini masterclass episode. My commitment to you as my listener is to keep these episodes short and digestible so that you can easily pick and choose between the topics that you’d like to learn about without having to feel like you need to commit to some lengthy lesson.

Please join me for next week’s mini masterclass as we explore the difference between customer experience and customer service. We’ll tackle this age-old question and hopefully give you some ammo for the next time someone asks you if you work in customer service. In the meantime, you can check out my website julia-ahlfeldt.com to explore previous episodes of Decoding the Customer, subscribe to my newsletter, or find my contact details to get in touch.

Thanks again for listening, and I’ll be back next week.

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 or get in touch via email. 

Customer experience is the next competitive battlefield. By now, most organizations have realized that customer experience is no longer a nice-to-have, but rather a critical component of any brand’s long term viability. This realization has been slightly slower to arrive in the B2B realm, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less important. Increasingly, consumers expect easy, seamless experiences, and these expectations are carried over into their professional lives as well.

As a CX practitioner, I am often asked my my clients about the difference between customer experience management in a B2B setting vs. a B2C setting. The short answer is that the basic fundamentals are quite similar, with the key distinction that in a B2B context the “consumer” is actually a village of stakeholders rather than an individual. This creates an added layer of complexity for organizations that provide enterprise-level products and services, but it is by no means insurmountable. B2B brands the world over are addressing this, and I had the opportunity to explore one such example with Andrew Swan.

Andrew Swan

Andrew leads the business intelligence team for the leading global law firm White & Case. His responsibilities include helping the business strengthen and improve its client relationships through data and insights. When we think of legal services, we often think of a personalized relationship with a trusted advisor, one that is built on face to face interaction. At first glance it might seem like the legal industry (or really any professional services firm) would be a data-poor environment, but that is definitely not the case. Over time, White & Case has built a framework for gathering insights about client experience and turning these into ongoing improvements to their client journey.

As is the best practice in B2C CX, Andrew and his team consolidate insights from multiple sources to create a comprehensive view of experiences withing various client segments. This includes things like findings from client satisfaction interviews, CRM touch point tracking and external economic sector performance. The marketing and BI teams share these findings with the firm’s legal practitioners on a regular basis to explore ways that they can improve the client journey. Insights from this process have led to enhancement to their client pitch presentations and many other aspects of client experience. This dedication to B2B customer experience embodies their one firm partnership approach, which has served to strengthen relationships and trust between the firm’s legal practitioners and their clients.

Data is a key enabler of customer experience, but customer experience insights are just data points in a report unless you do something with the findings. Given that White & Case is a legal services firm with expert practitioners in offices around the globe, the organization has a focused on embedding its client service principles in all aspects of the business. As I covered during my interview with the head of Customer Experience at Airbnb, when a brand focuses on creating an authentic culture that is founded in a central set of values, it unlocks the potential for CX agility.

When an organizational leadership team has peace of mind that individuals within the business are acting in the interest of the brand’s mission, it frees them from the burden of micromanaging customer journey evolution. This doesn’t happen overnight, and White & Case has had 117 years to get things right. But their ongoing focus on client service principles means that kernels of data originating from Andrew’s team have a much better chance of turning into client journey improvements.

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 leverage insights and improve B2B customer engagement, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email. To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here.

Jason Bradshaw, Chief Customer Officer of Volkswagen Australia

This episode was a bit different. A few months ago, the Chief Customer Officer of Volkswagen Australia reached out to me about appearing as a guest on Volkswagen’s in house podcast for employees. Since their program isn’t published publicly, I asked if we could use the interview for my customer experience podcast.

I was impressed with the robustness of VW’s employee engagement strategy. Anyone else who’s created a podcast knows that it’s a labor of love. One that can be quite time consuming and patience-testing. So, and in-house podcast about customer experience definitely isn’t the norm.

The fact that Jason and his team go through the effort to curate CX insights, related these to the VW business and then package this for consumption via a podcast, speaks to how the team prioritizes fostering a cohesive customer-centric culture within VW. Though this makes sense given the fact that – beyond the consumer’s experience with the vehicle itself – the rest of the automobile ownership experience is highly influenced by those who assist during the purchase and maintenance of the vehicle. That’s not to say that digital touch points in this journey aren’t important, but the key moments of truth are still largely experienced in-person.

Adding complexity to this is the fact that most car brands operate on a franchise dealership model, meaning that the team delivering those moments of truth may not even be direct employees of the car brand. Dealerships are essentially 3rd party “partners”, and so its easy to understand why a solid employee engagement plan would be so critical.

During our conversation Jason shared many insights from his years of experience rallying teams around the customer. There were several that really stuck out in my mind:

If you’d like to learn more about Jason’s insights on customer experience and employee engagement, you’re in luck! He’s recently published a book, It’s all about CEX. I haven’t read it yet personally, but given Jason’s vast experience, I’m sure it’s chock full of great tips for those looking to drive customer-centric change in their organization. With a title like that, who knows what’s in store. The book is available on Amazon, starting October 23rd, 2018.

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 engage employees and realize customer-centric growth, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email. To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here.

Speaking with Yuppiechef CEO, Andrew Smith, at their HQ in Cape TownI recently had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Smith, CEO and co-founder of Yuppiechef. Now 12 years old, the Yuppiechef brand is a true South African customer experience leader as well as one of the country’s ecommerce pioneers. The brand sells high quality kitchenware to local consumers via its website and, more recently, its stores.

One of Yuppiechef’s signature handwritten thank you notes ready to accompany an outgoing order

What struck me about Andrew and the Yuppiechef team was just how innate customer experience is to them. He seemed surprised that CX was even a “thing”. From their first trading day, the founders asked themselves “How would the customer enjoy this?” This question was applied to its website, and UX was continually refined to ensure the best experience for their customers. Later, this same question was applied to its distribution, support, and nearly every other aspect of the business.

Andrew demonstrates how their POS system enables a seamless omnichannel experience

Yuppiechef has put the customer at the center of their evolution. Customer wants and needs propelled them to change from being yuppiechef.com, to Yuppiechef. A decade on from their start as an online retailer, the brand recognized that consumers don’t want to choose between online an in-store shopping. They want both. Ecommerce is growing, but some purchases are just better suited for an in-person experience. Shopping can also be a form of entertainment. In South Africa, where online shopping only accounts for a tiny 2% slice of the retail pie, there is an entrenched mall culture; families go to the mall on the weekend to enjoy a meal and browse the shops.

Leveraging customer experience as their cornerstone, they renamed themselves as Yuppiechef and launched their first physical store in 2017. But the transition wasn’t easy. The team relied on customer empathy to guide them, and the result is a truly seamless omnichannel experience. Customers can order online and collect in store or view a product in store to be delivered to later. Both sides of the business are fully integrated and systems are connected to their warehouse.

The close-knit Yuppiechef team

Given the retailer’s success, it would not be a surprise if Yuppiechef’s founders considered themselves as having “made it”. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Andrew and his team are not resting on their laurels. He is acutely aware that selling high quality kitchen tools is easy to replicate, but Yuppiechef has built an experience that feels different. From the handwritten thank you notes, to the top notch customer support, it’s clear that the employees care.

The Yuppiechef team has big aspirations, but remains connected to their roots

The founders built a brand around a clear set of values which everyone in the business embodies and they still set the tone Yuppiechef’s unique team culture. Andrew personally responds to each an every customer survey. He also helps out in the contact center when needed. These may seem like small gestures, but they demonstrate that Yuppiechef’s leaders remain committed the brand, their customers and the employees who make the Yuppiechef experience something special.  And it’s this secret ingredient that cannot be copied.

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. Originally from the US, she is now one of Southern Africa’s foremost experts in Customer Experience Management. For more information about Julia’s services including her customer experience advisory consulting, click here. To hear other episodes of the CX podcast, Decoding the Customer, click here.

Customer experience is a relatively new profession. Some larger businesses have established a CX team, but others have just one or two dedicated resources – and that’s in mature markets like the US and Europe. In developing markets, CX is still gaining traction. This means that the number of CX practitioners is continually growing, but that many in the field are still working in relative isolation, Diane Magers, CXPA president is on a mission to remedy this.

Thanks to the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), the growing global number of CX practitioners have an international network that they can tap into. Founded in 2011 by CX thought leaders Jeanne Bliss, Bruce Temkin and others, the CXPA strives to support CX professionals through knowledge sharing, networking, and career development. The CXPA also established a CX philosophy around 6 core competencies, which became the basis for the CCXP certification. These conceptual foundations and community network helped provide structure to the evolution of a burgeoning field of work.

As the field of CX continues to gain steam in South Africa, I have personally been involved with efforts to grow the local CXPA network. Through this, I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with the CXPA leadership team based in the US, including the CXPA’s CEO, Diane Magers.

Diane Magers

Diane has over 25 years experience transforming customer experiences – everything from front line to infrastructure – working in and with brands such as Sysco, AT&T, Dale Carnegie, Invisalign, Ciena, Freeman, Sodexho, Sandy Spring Bank and MoneyGram. She is a passionate customer experience executive and change agent. In addition to being the CEO for the Customer Experience Professionals Association, Diane speaks and conducts workshops all over the world to help transform CX strategy into action.

Diane has been actively involved with the CXPA since day one and is a driving force behind the association’s ongoing evolution, including strategies for supporting international CX communities as the profession grows and takes root in new regions. Diane will be visiting South Africa to speak at the 2018 CEM Summit, South Africa’s longest-standing CX conference. In the lead-up to her visit, we had the opportunity to have a conversation about the CXPA, her insights on the genesis of the Age of the customer, and her vision for the future of the association.

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 one of Southern Africa’s foremost experts in Customer Experience Management. For more information about Julia’s services including her customer experience analysis methodologies, click here. To hear other episodes of  this CX podcast, click here.