Blake Morgan is a best-selling author, speaker and futurist who focuses on customer experience. Her new book, The Customer of the Future: Ten Guiding Principles for Winning Tomorrow’s Business, was just released on October 29.

Creating great customer experience is critical for organizations looking to get and stay ahead. With all of the technologies we have and use on a daily basis (Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, etc…) as consumers we have come to expect personalized, easy, quick experiences. The problem is so many organizations are not keeping up with technology. Most, if not all, of us have stories about horrible experiences when interacting with insurance companies or cable companies or airlines.

Creating great customer experience is intertwined with creating great employee experience, because it is employees who are fulfilled, happy, and engaged who are going to be willing to go above and beyond for the customers. Employees who do not have the resources, tools, and training to do their job correctly are not going to provide great customer experience.

Blake shares a story that she heard from an HR executive at Workday, that proves this point completely. There was a salesperson who worked at the company, but he had a very hard time selling the software. The software itself was very hard to sell because it is only replaced every 10 years, but on top of that the salesperson was going through some difficult times personally, which made selling even harder. He had found out his daughter was suffering from an illness and the insurance he had through the company would not cover the medical attention his daughter would need.

He approached HR to ask for an exception and surprisingly they were able to change his policy to cover what his daughter needed. He was so grateful and relieved that he had a complete turn around professionally. He became the highest grossing sales person at the company and he started bringing in million dollar deals.

Blake says, “What I love about this story is that the head of HR didn't even remember approving this policy change for this young man because it was just so normal to be a human being and do the right thing for the human beings that work for you. And I think most companies, they've become so procedure obsessed, so operations obsessed, so money obsessed that they completely miss the human element, they treat their employees like robots, which is ironic because we're all afraid of being replaced by robots. Well, most companies already treat their employees like robots and their employees treat customers like robots.”

Think of how much our customer experience would change if we could start by treating our employees with empathy, compassion, and kindness.

“Being a successful business today takes hard work, but if you're just the one who has common sense, if you have integrity, if you have fair business practices, I believe that you can make it based on these old principles of integrity, of a commitment to being better. Jeff Bezos recently said, "I believe that one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt." And that's this humility, this awareness of... His company's own mortality. Like even Amazon could disappear overnight. That keeps him humble. And earning our keep every single day, no matter if it's in our relationships with our family, with our employees, with our customers, it's that humility. All of this could just go away. So every single day we need to try our best and commit to our originally established own vision and not let it lose its luster over time.”

 

What you will learn:

• How Blake got involved in the customer experience space
• What is the difference between customer service and customer experience
• A look at the biggest trend causing organizations to spend more time on customer experience
• How does employee experience fit in with customer experience
• Examples of companies who are getting customer experience right
• A look at the 10 guiding principles in Blake’s new book