The CX Cast

AI is rapidly evolving from sci-fi fodder to a paradigm-shifting technology that will impact every aspect of our daily lives — and advances in voice and natural language understanding are at the forefront. With millions of voice-activated digital assistants already in homes today, along with those built into billions of smartphones, how can brands use these exciting new technologies to bring their CX to the next level? SoundHound VP and GM Katie McMahon and Forrester’s Mike Facemire discuss the current state of the digital assistant revolution and what’s coming next.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Relevant Forrester research:

The Rise Of Intelligent Agents

How Voice-Controlled Intelligent Agents Can Redefine Computing

Managing CX well, let alone even establishing a formal CX program, requires coordination across the organization. In this episode, Laure Park, VP of Customer Experience at Quest Diagnostics, joins us for a candid discussion of lessons learned from building a CX program in a complex ecosystem within the healthcare industry. From the outset, Laure fostered key partnerships with IT and Marketing to collaboratively design their intended future-state experience. This is part one of a two-part series with Laure Park.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Relevant Forrester research:

Develop Your Digital Customer Experience Strategy

Customer Experience Strategy Best Practices

The Top 10 Voice Of The Customer (VoC) Program Questions Answered

On this 100th episode, a special thanks goes out to the following individuals who have made this podcast possible:

You, the listeners.

Deanna Laufer, our fantastic, former co-host.

Will Willsea, for editing and producing.

Gabriella Zoia, for coordinating new episodes.

Nick Welles, for managing the studio and showing us the ropes.

Phil Stern, for strumming the music.

And all of our guests.

In this week's episode of CX Cast, Sam Stern is joined by Forrester research director Harley Manning and by Todd Walthall, SVP of Customer Experience with Blue Shield of California. Todd walks us through his experience in the customer service and customer experience space, working for iconic CX companies like USAA and American Express before coming to Blue Shield. Then he talks about the health insurer's focus on inspiring trust among its members, as well as how it aims to provide service worthy of family and friends. He also highlights some of the ways Blue Shield has changed employee goals and metrics to make it easier for them to focus on building trust.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Relevant Forrester research:

Forrester's Customer Experience Forum

The US Customer Experience Index, 2016

In this week's episode of CX Cast we are joined by John Lincoln, the customer experience leader at Duke Energy, and Adele Sage, Principal Advisor from Forrester's Customer Experience Council. John shares his experience as a customer experience professional, first at Wachovia and then at Duke. He talks about how the utility has transformed its customer communications, has applied journey mapping, and how his expertise in facilitating StrengthsFinder workshops has helped him open more doors in the organization. 

Thanks to John for sharing his wisdom.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Relevant links:

StrengthsFinder

"Gauge Your CX Management Maturity"

"The State Of CX Management Maturity, 2017"

It takes engaged employees and a customer-centric culture to achieve your customer experience goals. Companies can leverage employee onboarding as a key opportunity to set the stage for sustained employee engagement and build the right culture. In this episode, we discuss ways that CX pros can help evolve the onboarding experience — and make a connection with their new hires that leads to better experiences for their customers. For more on this topic, see the "Make (Or Break) Your CX Through Employee Onboarding" Forrester report.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

In this week's episode of CX Cast, Sam Stern is on his own talking about how CX professionals can adapt their research and design skills to improve the employee experience. He highlights several examples of how companies have taken this approach to transform their employee experiences, and how companies have started to look for emergent behaviors among employees that will provide the next improvement in either their employee or customer experiences.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Related Forrester research:

Harness The Power Of Emergent Behavior To Design Great Employee Experiences

Books mentioned:

The Progress Principle

Team of Teams

Deep Work

Drive

Work Rules!

Personalization is all the hype, and for good reason: Consumers expect brands to leverage the data they exchange to deliver better experiences. But many personalized experiences today miss the mark. In this episode, we explain how to approach personalization programs with person-centric objectives. For more detailed guidance on how to develop person-first personalization programs, see the "Pivot To Person-First Personalization" Forrester report.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

This week, we talk to analyst Andrew Hogan about Facebook's recent F8 conference. Andrew shares the big announcements that CX pros should pay attention to, including the huge number of chat bots, the increasing moves into augmented and virtual reality, and Facebook's push to get developers interested in customer research techniques and best practices.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Relevant Forrester research:

 

Augmented Reality: Emerging Tools To Explore

Chatbot Commerce Benchmark

Forrester interviewed customer experience (CX) professionals at brands that showed the biggest year-over-year improvement in Forrester's Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) from 2015 to 2016. In this episode, we discuss key takeaways of how those brands achieved significant CX improvements. For more insight, see the "How Companies Improved Their CX Index Scores, 2016" Forrester report.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Conducting research for a customer journey mapping effort involves more than learning what customers do, interact with, think, and feel. To yield meaningful benefits, CX pros must gather research that not only exposes the customer journey but also lays the groundwork for the broader CX improvement initiative. In this episode, we uncover the real objectives for journey mapping research efforts and identify the research methods and techniques that experienced CX pros use to fulfill them. For detailed guidance on how to do the research, see the "How To Do Research For Customer Journey Mapping" Forrester report.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.