Annette Franz (Gleneicki)

I originally wrote today's post for Clicktools. It appeared on their blog on March 26, 2018.

There are a lot of different ways to listen to customers and employees.

What's in your library?

I still love to hold and read physical books (as opposed to audible, Kindle, etc.). I don't know how many books I added to my library this year, but it was a lot. I thought I'd share some good ones that I'd recommend you add to your reading list for 2019.

These books are not customer experience books per se - but the outcomes of implementing what you learn in them will certainly lead to better experiences for employees and for customers. Let's dive in.

Let's put the "customer" into customer experience.

What does that mean?

If you’re a customer of any business on this planet, no surprise here, you know this: most companies are not really focusing on the customer and the customer experience. They might be giving it lip service, but that’s not the same as actually doing the work, understanding the customer, and designing a great customer experience as a result.

What is customer understanding? And how can you achieve it?

Are you adding data to your journey maps?

Back in 2015, I wrote a post titled Hey! You Got Your Metrics in My Journey Map!In it, I advocated for mappers to add data to their journey maps. I wrote that... 
 

There should be no doubt: companies must recognize that employees come first.

I had a great time talking about this and many other topics when I joined Mary Drumond and James Conrad with Worthix for their Voices of Customer Experience podcast.

The customer experience profession has a lot of buzzwords.