Annette Franz (Gleneicki)

I originally wrote today's post for Story of Business. It appeared on their blog on August 3, 2018.

Stories are a wonderful communication tool and a powerful teaching tool. They allow you to deliver a message in a way that engages the audience, helps them understand the characters in play, and, hopefully, inspires them. People tend to connect to stories and, therefore, remember them and the message they convey.

Do you know all of the building blocks of a customer experience transformation strategy?

I've mentioned the CX Perception Gap before, right? You might know it as Bain's Delivery Gap, which states findings from their 2005 research: 80% of executives believe they deliver a superior experience, while only 8% of customers agree.

I originally wrote today's post for CMSWire. It appeared on their blog on May 8, 2018.

While customer experience strategies and transformations must include a priority focus on the employee experience, they often don’t. Many companies believe they can improve the customer experience without improving the employee experience.

Big mistake. The correlation is real. Happy employees lead to happy customers.

Are you looking to earn your CCXP this year?

I get a lot of questions every week from customer experience professionals who are interested in taking the CCXP exam but aren't sure how to prepare for it. There's a website for the exam with a lot of details and resources; it now also includes a document that lists books, whitepapers, websites, etc. that you can read to help you prepare.

But there's no substitution for experience and having done the work.

I challenge you think about things differently in 2019.

What got us here won't get us there, right?

I recently came across The Tribal Wisdom of the Dakota Indians, a 1999 article in the Guardian, that I felt needed to be resurrected. I had never seen this before.

You can read the article by clicking the link above, but here it is in its entirety. I guarantee that you'll nod your head and chuckle embarrassingly as you read it!

What was on the minds of CX professionals in 2018?

And, most importantly, what does it mean for 2019?  That has yet to be determined, but "execution" and "results" are two words I'd like to see more of this year!

It's fun to see what was interesting for you - my audience - to read in 2018. I shared 58 blog posts (that includes a few posts from guest authors) in 2018; here are the top eight (because 18 would be way too many!) posts, the most-read CX Journey™ posts, that I wrote last year.

I originally wrote today's post for CallidusCloud. It appeared on their blog on March 28, 2018.

Change is hard. But it’s even harder when you don’t have a clear sense of the outcome – and how you’ll achieve that outcome.

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?