Decoding the Customer

This CX Mini Masterclass explains customer "Moments of Truth". Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, shares where the concept came from, and how you can use your understanding of Moments of Truth to improve customer journeys and foster loyalty. These moments can make or break a customer journey, so if you’ve heard this term used as a buzzword, but want to learn how to translate jargon into business results, then this episode is for you. Enjoy the best of the archive The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I've curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners. Want to keep learning about CX? 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 VOC research and customer insight) or get in touch via email.                   

This CX Mini Masterclass explains the role of leading and lagging indicators in measuring customer experience. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, shares examples for how you can build a balanced view of customer experience with the right mix of CX metrics and measures. If you are wondering how to move beyond a one-metric view of CX, this episode is for you. Enjoy the best of the archive The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I've curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners. Want to keep learning about CX? 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. And if you are looking to super-charge your CX skills and continue learning, be sure to check out CX University. They have a great array of CXPA accredited training resources available on a flexible monthly subscription plan. Use the code PODCAST10 to get 10% off your first month’s subscription and support this 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.   

This CX Mini Masterclass covers the concept of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), how to calculate this, and why it’s an important metric for the CX profession. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, will help you understand how to leverage CLV to demonstrate the ROI of customer experience and foster buy-in for customer-centric strategy. Enjoy the best of the archive The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I've curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners. Want to keep learning about CX? 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 strategy, leadership alignment and CX business case assessments) or get in touch via email. 

Customer experience expert and industry pioneer, Jeanne Bliss, shares insights about the origins of the CX industry as well as where it’s going. Jeanne, also known as the godmother of customer experience, provides listeners with a unique window into her career path from becoming one of the first Chief Customer Officers, to founding the CXPA and becoming a transformative force in field of CX. Jeanne and show host, Julia, discuss the enduring challenges facing all CX professionals and what's next on the horizon for customer experience in the years to come. If you’re looking for some insight, inspiration and guidance from one of the most prominent and respected voices in customer experience, then this episode is for you. Meet the godmother of customer experience Jeanne Bliss has always been an important figure in the CX industry. She is truly a pioneer in this field and has spent 35 years transforming companies, where she’s led organizations to earn 98% customer loyalty rates. Jeanne Bliss helps companies and people become the best version of themselves. She guides them to define, build and live the behaviors and actions that will fuse customers to them, and ultimately create deep and memorable relationships. Creating these deeper bonds has been Jeanne’s singular mission for over 35 years. First, as the inaugural Chief Customer Officer at Lands’ End, Coldwell Banker, Allstate and Microsoft Corporations. Then since 2002, guiding over 20,000 leaders around the world to understand that improving lives should be their most important strategic vision. She has shepherded a whole new breed of leader into the marketplace prepared to lead this change through her pioneering years as a practitioner, experience coaching global leaders, her four game-changing books, and as co-founder of the Customer Experience Professional’s association. If the proof is in the pudding, then there is certainly no doubt why Jeanne is one of the most prominent and respected thought leaders in the world of customer experience.   Jeanne Bliss, CCXP, CEO of Customerbliss If you'd like to learn more about Jeanne's work, be sure to follow her on LinkedIn, where she often shares insights about customer experience and more. Her blog is second to none as a resource for aspiring CX professionals. Her books provide foundational knowledge about customer experience, and her podcast, The Human Duct Tape Show, is well worth a listen! From shoes to the C-suite Jeanne's father set the tone for her career in customer experience. As the owner of a local she store, he became not just a part of the community, but a part of people's lives. Putting shoes on children's feet and welcoming families into his store as though they were part of his family. When he retired, there was a line of customers 3 blocks long, waiting to thank him and wish him well. Customer experience was in Jeanne's bones and it encouraged her to ask questions about how brands can create those special experiences that fuse customers to them. What's your three blocks long? How will you be remembered? And that's really so much of what's missing for me as we get into customer experience. - Jeanne Bliss After acquiring degrees in marketing and apparel design, and working in the retail industry for several years, Jeanne's role at Lands' End really catapulted her into her career in customer experience. At Lands' End she worked closely with the CEO Gary Comber, whose enthusiastic support for focusing on the customer enabled Jeanne to learn, experiment and implement concepts that would become the core foundation of her "CX kit bag". Jeanne went on to lead customer experience efforts at organizations across a diverse array of industries. Each one presented unique challenges and opportunities, but she identified her gift for being the "glue" that unites teams around an end state.  Tips for aspiring CX professionals Jeanne recommends that those who aspire to a CX leadership role first foc...

This CX Mini Masterclass explains a simple yet effective CX tool for driving customer-centric change and ensuring that business decisions support an organization's overall CX goals. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, explains the customer impact scorecard, how to build one and then how to use it to ensure that business changes work for - not against - CX. Julia also shares some news about a planned hiatus for the show. If you’re looking for a practical approach to help cross functional teams stay the course towards shared customer experience goals, then this episode is for you. A simple tool for an important job We've all seen it happen. Someone in IT, sales or operations makes a decision about a new product or a process with the best intentions, but the resulting change has a negative impact customer experience. When these things happen, it’s rarely out of malice. After all, no one (or at least we hope no one) goes around intentionally making customer experiences worse. More often than not, the team that implemented the change just wasn’t thinking about the downstream impact on customer experience. This is bound to happen, because honestly, most businesses are geared to solve business problems. The customer may be the guiding light for CX departments and some executives, but historically that hasn’t been true for all teams. Additionally, the more removed a team is from the customer, the more difficult it can be to draw a connection between day to day responsibilities and customer outcomes. In this scenario, a little assistance and structure are in order. And a customer impact scorecard is a great tool to for CX leaders to have in their toolbox. A customer impact scorecard is a rating or evaluation tool that prompts the user to assess how something – be that a change to people, processes or technology – will eventually turn into customer outcomes and if these outcomes are desirable, neutral or adverse. The idea being that a scorecard becomes a quick and easy check and balance to avoid decisions which might inadvertently damage customer experience. It encourages stakeholders to pause and make an honest assessment of the impact on customer experience by moving the thinking from inside out to outside in. Some organizations already have risk assessment scorecards in place for any business change or major investment, so why can’t the same assessment be done for customer experience? Surely customer experience is just as important to the long-term viability of any business. (And if you’d like to know a little bit more about helping your organization balance business risk and CX, then be sure to check out episode 36.) Building and using your customer impact scorecard Identify which attributes to evaluate - These could relate to your customer promise, CX principles or what is known to be important to the customer. It's helpful to identify 5-10 points to evaluate and phrase them as thought-starter questions. E.g. Will this change impact how easy it is for customers to do business with us?  Set your rating scale - The ratings for each attribute should range from positive to negative. A 3 or 5 point scoring scale usually works nicely. Regardless of which size scale is used, a negative impact should yield a negative score, a neutral impact should yield a score of zero, and a positive impact should yield a positive score. When the overall evaluation points for the business change are tallied, a positive rating indicates a change with a net positive impact on CX, while a net negative score should raise red flags about something that would potentially have an adverse effect on CX. Identify the right forum for implementation - Pinpoint the process for vetting or prioritizing new initiatives and see if a customer impact scorecard can be included in that process. Project management, finance and legal are some of the typical gatekeepers for business change.

This CX Mini Masterclass explores best practices for building a CX dashboard, a critically important tool for any CX program. Special guest and customer experience expert, Ben Motteram takes listeners through the benefits and uses of a CX dashboard, he provides insights on how to build one with the end user in mind,  and he also speaks about how best to distribute your dashboard once it’s up and running. If you’re looking for a one stop shop for expert guidance on why and how you should build a CX dashboard, then this episode is for you. Insights from a special guest Ben Motteram is the Founder and Principal of Melbourne-based CX consulting company, CXpert. With 25+ years of experience working with some of Australia’s most recognizable brands, he has helped many organisations to become more human in the way they deal with customers and employees. Ben 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. Ben Motteram This episode was Ben's third guest appearance on the show. If you missed his previous Mini Masterclass episodes on CX Strategy and the Foundations of a Great CX Program, be sure to listen to those. Best practices for building a CX Dashboard Check out Ben's tips for creating a CX Dashboard in this article he wrote for CX Accelerator. It covers many of the same insights shared with listeners in this episode. I'd encourage you to explore the other insights and thought leadership on CX Accelerator, as well as Ben's blog. Both resources are packed with all sorts of other great gems and CX thought leadership.  Want to keep learning about CX? 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. 

This CX Mini Masterclass explains the importance of measuring digital customer experience and some of the most popular metrics for doing this. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, provides an overview of what metrics and measures are typically captured at various digital touchpoints, ideas on how to use these to understand the journey, and tips on where you might be able to find this data within your organization. If you’re looking for some ideas about how to leverage digital experience metrics and measures to better understand the holistic customer journey, then this episode is for you. The importance of measuring digital customer experience So many experiences now happen in the digital realm. Whether that's through a website, an app or via social media, most customer journeys have become at least somewhat digitized. And it’s probably safe to say this is becoming an even bigger trend with each passing year. Within that context, CX professionals need to understand how to integrate an understanding of experiences through digital touchpoints into the larger understanding of the overall customer journey. These metrics for digital experiences aren’t new, most of them have been around for a while, often used by digital operations, marketing or user experience teams, but it’s high time that CX professionals harness them as well. There are a LOT digital experience metrics. It would be impossible to cover all of them in a Mini Masterclass. The following includes a curated selection from different digital touchpoints based on both their prevalence and usefulness in the CX context.  Digital footfall Footfall and conversion can be difficult to track for traditional in-person experiences. That's definitely not the case online. From a web context, the key customer high level engagement measures would be page views, session duration and bounce rate. A bounce is any visitor who lands on a page, but doesn’t take any action. (Note: it’s not always a bad thing). Websites and apps can also track detailed behavior flows, or how customers navigate the different pages or actions. These measures are basically the digital equivalent of footfall and conversion, but the context of digital enables CX professionals to get so much more data about how consumers act and what interests them. Often this data can be tracked back to specific users as a way of measuring digital customer experiences over time. Because many of these measures relate back to the sales funnel, marketing teams are a helpful first port of call if you are looking for website experience data in your organization. Email is still relevant CX professionals should also stay abreast of email marketing metrics, because this touchpoint still plays an important role in customer experience, especially if one is trying to stitch together an entire journey including inbound and outbound communication.  Some of the most popular measures include, open rate, which indicates if people are reading the message, unsubscribe rate, sharing or forwarding rate and the click through rate. This last measure highlights if customers are engaging with any calls-to-action within the message. Some marketing teams put together timelines of customer engagement across email, text, call and other notifications, which can be very helpful for building a comprehensive customer journey. Of these, the digital touchpoints should yield the most readily available data about engagement. Remember that just because someone received a communication doesn’t always mean they engage with it, but it’s helpful for CX professionals to understand these points of interaction so they can be brought into the bigger picture. Social media Email can feel old school these days, but it's undeniable that social media is on the rise as a part of many customer's digital journeys. The great news is that social media has opened up a whole new world opportunities for measuring digital customer experience...

This CX Mini Masterclass explains the importance of establishing empathy for the customer among all employees and 3 practical ways CX professionals can help teams do this. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, covers 3 tried-and-true empathy building activities that you can use with nearly any team from service reps to the c-suite. If you’re looking for ideas and inspiration on how to help team members at all levels foster empathy and get in touch with the needs of the customer, then this episode is for you. Establish a culture of empathy There is a lot of focus on building empathy with customer-facing teams. This makes sense, but we can’t forget that customer-centric culture is about rallying an entire organization around the customer, not just a few select teams. It's great if employees on the front lines can connect with others, remain in touch with the context of customers' lives and demonstrate this through their actions. But to maximize the impact of customer-centric culture, those team members who are defining experiences, building platforms or making strategic decisions also need to be able to relate to the customer. CX professionals need to have a multi-pronged approach to foster empathy. The following 3 activities have been curated with a wide ranging audience in mind. Empathy is a difficult thing to "teach", so these activities are designed to gently guide people to the "ah-ha" moment where they see this for themselves. Once team members connect with what it means to feel empathy towards another, the next step is to help them apply this to the context of customers and then flex and train this muscle so they know how to use it. Activity #1: time traveler This activity involves explaining a modern object, like a TV, car or cell phone to someone who lived 200 years ago (or 500 years ago or who comes from a different planet). The group should be divided into teams of two. One team member role plays the modern day person describing the object, while the other person asks clarifying questions based on the perspective of someone who lived 200 years ago. After a few minutes, ask them to swap roles and repeat the conversation about a different object. To wrap up, facilitate a brief group discussion, asking the participants how it felt to put themselves in the shoes of someone who lived so long ago, as well as what it was like trying to explain a normal everyday object to a person who has a completely different context for the world. The idea is to get participants thinking about context of others and what it means to relate to someone with a different perspective on life. During your debrief discussion, connect the activity back to your customer base by asking participants what disconnects might exist between their frame of reference and that of your typical customer. This activity is quick and easy. It's a fun icebreaker and can sow the seeds that foster empathy or reinforce the right empathetic mindset. Activity #2: persona scenarios This activity requires a little bit of preparation, but it’s totally worth it. It’s another great activity for a broad group of participants, and works well for a team offsite or another setting where facilitators have the luxury of time. To prepare, establish several customer personas (if you’re unsure about what customer personas are, be sure to check out episode 40). Next, identify a typical job to be done or customer journey for each persona and a possible hurdle the customer might face. To facilitate the activity, assemble your group of participants and divide them into teams of 4-5 people. Provide each team with an example persona and scenario. Ask one person within each team to assume the role of the persona. This team member should introduce themselves as the persona and explain their customer journey, as well as the scenario information that you've provided. Their team has the opportunity to ask questions and get to know the fictitious e...

This CX Mini Masterclass covers a roundup of the key insights on CX metrics from previous episodes. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, covers everything from the basic definitions of the most popular metrics to the strategies for putting these to use, plus a step by step guide on where you can go to learn more. Customer experience metrics have always been a hot topic in the industry, so this episode is for new CXers and seasoned experts alike. If you’re interested in an expert-curated guide to customer experience metrics and their role in CX management, then this episode is for you. THE hot topic If you get a group of CX professionals together, at some point the conversation will turn to metrics and measures. It’s inevitable. Largely because metrics and measures are the core of how CX teams validate insights, track their progress, and prove their worth the business. So it should come as no surprise that this is a keen area of interest for continued learning and that conversations on the pros and cons of different metrics have been known to stir up emotions. Given the importance of CX metrics, the topic has been covered quite extensively on the podcast. At least 7 Mini Masterclass episodes to date have featured topics related to CX metric. It was high time for a round up guide to customer experience metrics, and no better way to mark the milestone of the 85th episode.  Kicking off the guide to customer experience metrics In episode 28, guest expert, CX thought leader and former CEO of the CXPA, Diane Magers, outlines the difference between metrics, measure and business value. These are terms that many CX professionals use interchangeably, but it’s important to clarify what these are and how they apply to customer experience management. No guide to customer experience metrics would be complete without baseline definitions of the key terms. Diane broke down her definitions of each: Measures– anything you can count (e.g. number of clients that come into your store, call length, frequency of purchase) Metrics– outcomes of something that’s happened, including a customer’s perception of those outcomes (e.g. customer satisfaction, customer effort score) Value– the financial levers that you can pull in an organization and/or the resulting financial impact (e.g. cost to serve, revenue, expense, profit per customer) For more on this, be sure to check out episode 28. Understanding the "Big 3" metrics Episode 31 explored 3 of the most common CX metrics out there, Customer Satisfaction or CSAT, Net Promoter Score, otherwise known as NPS and a newer kid on the block Customer Effort Score. Each one has a unique methodology and brings as different type of insights to the table. Be sure to listen to episode 31 if you want an overview of the 3 juggernaut metrics of the CX world. Episode 33 was a special deep dive into the pros and cons of Net Promoter Score, as it is undoubtedly the most controversial metric of the bunch. NPS was developed by Fred Reicheld, a notable thought leader and management consultant. The metric was introduced to the world through a Harvard Business Review article, so it caught the attention of executives and helped shine the spotlight on CX, but many CX professionals now feel increasingly shackled to a metric that doesn’t explain the full picture of customer experience, which by the way – no single metric will ever be able to do in isolation. There are many well documented issues with the way that NPS is measured and used. My professional opinion is that NPS has its place as a CX metric, but only in the right context. It is better suited as a dipstick on customer perceptions of a brand across their entire journey and not as performance measure for customer-facing teams. That recommendation only stands if the right methodology is used, which it’s often not. Check out episode 33 for more details. Interpreting metrics One metric used in isolation won’t provide the full pi...

This CX Mini Masterclass comes directly from a listener request about how organizations can ensure that CX is protected, even as customers and companies move to more reliance on technology. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, explains the relationship between customer experience and technology, and 3 ways to maintain the integrity of CX amid a changing landscape. If you’re interested in some practical actions that you can take to ensure great customer experience even as the consumer marketplace becomes more digitized and automated, then this episode is for you. Balancing customer experience and technology The rise of digital technology has brought about an explosion of customer touchpoints. It used to be that if a customer wanted to do their banking, they had to go into a branch, but that’s definitely no longer the case. Now customers have their choice of online banking, app banking, banking through a messenger service, calling a contact center, engaging with their bank on social media or going into the branch. That’s a LOT of different touchpoints, and most of them are powered by tech. At the same time, companies have integrated technology solutions behind the scenes to improve speed, accuracy and efficiency. If you were to go behind the scenes of pretty much any experience, you’re guaranteed to see a mix of people, processes and technology fueling experiences. The role of technology is only set to grow as applications for things like artificial intelligence become more commonplace. This means that CX professionals need to help their organizations keep the heart and soul of experiences, even as touchpoints and the spaghetti wire behind those touchpoints continues to evolve. This is easier said than done, but there are several practical approaches that CX professionals can use.  1. Establish your experience principles A customer promise and experience principles can help foster consistency for experiences throughout the journey, regardless of which touchpoint a customer engages with. Episode 69, explored both the customer promise and experience principles. Essentially, a customer promise is a clear definition of what customers can expect and also how teams should deliver experiences. It’s a high-level statement, or a Northstar of what experiences should ideally look like. The promise can be backed up with more granular or prescriptive experience principles, which outline the “how-to” details behind the promise. An example of an experience principle would be “each customer will walk away from their experience with us knowing we value their business” or “we commit to providing a safe and respectful environment for customers”. These statements are applicable to nearly any touchpoint, and they speak to outcomes or results, so while the approach might be slightly different for a safe and respectful environment in a store vs. online, the way that the customer feels after that interaction should be the same. Experience principles can be a helpful framework for teams to evaluate experiences, reality-check the journey across touchpoints and assess the relationship between customer experience and technology. If an experience isn’t yielding outcomes that are consistent with the promise, that's a red flag. 2. Test the user experience This may sound obvious, but in their haste to launch a new system or platform, it can be tempting for teams to skip the step of testing and refining the user experience. Resist this temptation at all costs. Before any experience is launched into the customer journey, it should be vetted and tested, ideally against experience principles and some sort of customer impact scorecard. An experience should be refined until it receives a passing grade and only then, "released in the wild". Once an experience is live in the customer journey, the monitoring shouldn't stop. It’s important to keep tabs on how customers are responding and to keep refining things.