Annette Franz (Gleneicki)

I originally wrote today’s post for StellaConnect. It appeared on their site on July 13, 2021.

You’ve probably all heard – or read about – the Bain statistic from 2005 that goes like this:

80% of executives believe that they are delivering a superior customer experience, while only 8% of customers agree.

I originally published today’s post for StellaConnect. It appeared on their site on May 25, 2021.

I originally wrote today’s post for WixAnswers. It appeared on their blog on June 7, 2021.

A few months ago, I wrote a post on what it looks like when a company is sales-centric. I’ve seen this culture many times over the last year or so (and prior, for sure, but examples overwhelmingly landed on my desk this year). If you haven’t read that post, it’s an important precursor to this one.

I originally published today’s post on Forbes. It appeared on their site on August 23, 2021.

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.