CX, EX and ROX Blog

There are so many different customer experience roles these days that I wrote a post a few months ago called “Customer [Insert Term Here]: What Do They All Mean?” In the past, I’ve written a few times about the difference between customer experience and customer service.

In a major customer centricity programme I ran a number of years ago, we interviewed over 100 people at all levels of the organisation. We wanted to understand how customer-centric they considered themselves to be and compare these findings to the behaviour of the whole business.

I’ve had a lot of conversations in recent weeks about how the employee experience drives the customer experience, but the part that stands out from these conversations is the common thread: that the customer experience only happens via, or is only shaped by, the frontline employees.

That is just not true.

When I’ve addressed this latter point, I’m always asked, “Well, then how do I connect the dots for the backoffice folks?” I love to answer this question.

Imagine the following situation.

A man sees an attractive woman at a party. They talk and decide to have a few dates. After giving all the right signals for being a loyal, caring, trustworthy and relationship-oriented guy, he convinces her to spend the night. The next day he is gone and when she calls, it is clear he doesn't want to speak to her....