Annette Franz (Gleneicki)

As customer experience professionals, the work you do to identify improvement opportunities and other initiatives to design and deliver a better experience requires you to build the business case and help your executives prioritize those initiatives – because there are typically many improvements that need to be made.

I’ve previously written about prioritization methods and criteria:

Culture is so important to your business. The right culture is even more important. If you ask me, the right culture is always one that is customer-centric. Putting the customer at the heart of the business is what makes the world, er, the business, go round.

You know you need to make changes in the business, but there are competing forces, those that help to drive the change and those that impede the change. How do you identify and then solve for each of those and, ultimately, bring everyone together?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Seth Godin’s concept of finding your Who, which is all about identifying who your products are for. The Who isn’t defined by demographics but by psychographics: their (customer) beliefs, their dreams, their desires. It’s a reminder that developing personas is so important to customer experience design. And it’s a reminder that we should be finding products for our customers, not customers for our products.

WHY PERSONAS

Personas…

The following is a modified excerpt from my book, Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business), available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats.

I’ve written about change and change management several times over the years, especially last year. After all, customer experience management really is (all about) change management. Change is hard. Well, it can be. But it’s especially hard when not everyone sees or agrees with your change vision.

A couple months ago, I wrote about the difference between consensus and alignment and why that’s important to know.

Back then I wrote:

“How do you keep the customer top of mind when everybody is working remotely right now?” This was the question that Ben Motteram and I tackled on one of our recent calls. The following is a transcript of the call.

One of the most-commonly requested needs – often as a result of CEO/executive asks – is to build the business case for the business to focus on the customer experience. (It’s painful just to write that without thinking about this open letter to CEOs, excerpted from my book, Customer Understanding.)

What is a brand? And what does it mean to ride for the brand?