Annette Franz (Gleneicki)

I originally wrote today’s post for CallidusCloud. It appeared on their blog on October 15, 2018.

Critical to improving the customer experience is listening to customers and incorporating their data and their feedback into your transformation strategy. Data-driven decisions are key to customer experience transformation success.

There are many different customer listening posts and equally as many sources of customer data. Let’s start with some examples of listening posts, which provide not only performance data but also demographic, psychographic, diagnostic, and competitive benchmarks data:

If you want to improve the customer experience, you first need to understand your customers and their experiences; to do this, I typically recommend three approaches, all of which go hand in hand:

According to TechTarget, “Customer experience management is the collection of processes a company uses to track, oversee, and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifecycle.”

Gartner defines it as “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.”

Today’s post was originally published on Forbes on February 1, 2019. I’ve made some modifications to that original post.

It’s starting to happen. I hear it. I see it. Finally.

It’s not perfect, but we’re making progress. I’ll take progress at this point. It’s better than nothing.

What am I talking about?

Understanding the difference between customer experience and customer service will save you money in your contact center!

There’s a quote (which I may have evolved over the years) from Chris Zane, founder of Zane’s Cycles, that goes like this: “Customer service is what happens when the experience breaks down.”

It’s a great quote for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it nicely differentiates “customer experience” and “customer service,” which people often confuse to be one and the same. Not so.

The following is an excerpt from my book, Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business

Is hiring for culture fit a good idea?

In the last several weeks, I’ve seen a couple articles – in reputable publications like Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal – about the “dangers of hiring for culture fit.” They cited that hiring for culture fit destroys things like diversity, creativity, and innovation. And then I saw the responses on LinkedIn because it became a “today’s news and views” topic, and I was baffled.

Oh boy. I think we need to start with some definitions.

As a customer experience professional, you focus a lot on the customer. You put the customer on a pedestal. You put the customer front and center. And rightly so; without customers, you have no business. But you have to remember this: in order to deliberately design a customer-centric culture, you must put employees more first. Only when employees have a great experience can customers have a great experience, too.

I originally wrote today’s post for Forbes. It appeared on Forbes on March 5, 2019.

“Customers are connected.” “Customers are more-informed than ever.” “Customers trust each other more than brands.” “Customers have the power.” “Customers are in control.”