Annette Franz (Gleneicki)

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?

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.