Getting CX right with CTMA (hosted by Paul Linnell)

Everyone agrees that it's nice to give customers a good experience, but there's often a lack of clarity quantifying WHY it's important, and then justifying WHY it should be improved.

This can be a big enough challenge for business - where there's an intuitive link between satisfying customers and getting them to come back to buy more, but it can be an even greater challenge in the public sector where customers seldom have a choice of an alternative supplier.

What you'll learn in this episode:

In our launch episode, I left you with Practice Guide to use as a simple self-diagnostic tool to help you assess where your organisation's customer experience improvement programme may be at-risk. It listed from our experience, "Six Key Reasons why Customer Experience Improvement Programmes Underperform, Get Stuck or Fail to Start".

In this episode I want to focus on the first of those six big "boulders" that may be standing in the way of your success.

It's the boulder I refer to as "The Reality-Clarity Challenge" or alternatively - "Why should we bother with customer experience?"

"The Reality-Clarity Challenge" is possibly one of the most common, least understood, most plagued-by-myths, and the most important challenge to get right.

If an organisation can't clearly define a business justification for improving customer experiences, it's programme is very likely to underperform, get stuck or fail to start!

This challenge may be standing in the way of your success, so let's "dig out this boulder", see what it's all about, and devise a plan to master it.

By the end of this episode, you should be in a really strong position to:

• Define your organisation's purpose in terms of the needs it solves for its customers.
• Define your desired customer outcome behaviours and the benefits they bring to your organisation, and
• Describe the business justification for providing your customers with a great experience

Join me in this episode where I'll be using examples from the airline industry, food manufacturing and local government, to illustrate how this clarity can be achieved in business and the public sector, and I'll be sharing three key steps to help you create some customer experience REALITY and CLARITY in your organisation.

We've prepared a Practice Guide called: "Exploring the Reality-Clarity Challenge". It lists some of the typical symptoms an organisation may be experiencing, the risks it may suffer, and the three key steps I discuss in this episode to help you devise a plan to master it.

Request your copy here

Also mentioned in this episode

• Leadership training and coaching programmes
• Establishing a customer experience baseline
• Customer experience research findings and insights

In this launch episode I want to let you know what this podcast series is all about, and why it's so important to you and your organisation now. We're on a mission: to demystify customer experience and put the power of success in your hands, so you can take control and manage your customers' experiences, before they 'take over the wheel' and manage yours.

Customer experience has become one of the most talked-about, but high-risk and reluctant areas of business investment, where everyone seems to agree it's important, but seldom really agree on why it's important, why it should be improved, how much should be spent on it, and even, what it should be spent on.

In this podcast series, I'm going to tackle some of the big challenges that often block the path to delivering effective customer experiences, and answer some of the big questions standing in the way of progress:

• Why should we bother to improve customer experience?
• Why does it seem that customer excellence is so rare and so hard to achieve?
• What's the right way to measure customer experience so that:
  1. You know the impact it has on your organisation's success, and...
  2. You know what to do to improve it?
• How do you set priorities for improvement, and calculate the ROI?
• How can you break through the organisation's hierarchies and departmental barriers and get everyone involved?
• And then, how do you keep everyone involved?

During the series, I'll be revisiting some of the tough moments I've shared with clients over the past 25 years, in a wide range of industries, from airlines to banks, local government to passenger ferries, pharmaceutical and railway companies, telcos, power companies, government agencies and more…

I'll be sharing some of the strategies and frameworks we've developed to help them unblock their path to customer excellence, and some of the techniques we teach during our leadership training and coaching programmes. I'll also be using some of the findings from our industry-wide customer experience studies and ongoing measurement programmes - to help you put some real numbers into why it's so important to get customer experience right.

We've prepared a short CTMA "Practice Guide" to help you assess where your organisation's customer experience programme may be at risk. It summarises, from our experience, "Six Key Reasons why Customer Experience Improvement Programmes Underperform, Get Stuck or Fail to Start".

Requests a copy here

Also mentioned in this episode

• • CTMA's leadership training, coaching programmes and events
  • CTMA's customer experience research findings and insights