Annette Franz (Gleneicki)

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?

There’s a difference? Yes, there is.

I’ve been involved in a few conversations lately where it was quite obvious that what these folks were talking about clearly described sales-driven and sales-centric organizations, but not all parties to the conversations agreed with my assessment of the situation.

How do you know when a company is sales-centric? These companies…

Consensus versus alignment: is there a difference? Does it matter? Where does it apply in your customer experience work?

Back in 2015, I asked a similar question about buy-in and commitment – and, importantly, why knowing the difference matters. Ultimately, you’re seeking commitment, not just buy-in. And yet, there’s a greater opportunity to get not just commitment, but alignment and commitment.

The history of the Customer Success profession dates back to 1996, when a CRM vendor, Vantive,  realized that their system had a high failure rate, an issue that certainly didn’t help their quest to have 100% of their customers willing to serve as references. Marie Alexander created and led a department she called Customer Success.

A critical component of a great employee experience is feedback – both from peers and from management. The iterative, continuous improvement that happens as a result of that feedback is important to an employee’s development, productivity, and engagement. But does that improvement really happen? Or is providing/receiving feedback more of a demoralizing exercise?

The topics of customer trust and customer confidence have come up in conversations a few times recently, especially as it relates to pandemic and post-pandemic actions by several companies. More on that in a moment. To start with, I thought I’d take a closer look.

“Hiring for culture fit” is always a hot topic. I love it. I think it’s so important that you get the right people on the bus to ensure you (a) have the culture you desire, (b) deliver the experience customers desire, and (c) see the business results you desire.

I’ve been know to say, “You can’t transform something you don’t understand.” You don’t want to change things that are working well or that create value for your customers. So know the current state and what to fix and what to maintain before designing the future state. Know the current state so that you can make near-term fixes and improvements while you’re re-imagining and redesigning the future state, which can take some time.

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.