customer experience

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…

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.

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.

There are so many different customer experience roles these days that I wrote a post a few months ago called “Customer [Insert Term Here]: What Do They All Mean?” In the past, I’ve written a few times about the difference between customer experience and customer service.

Back in 2019, I shared an excerpt from my book, Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business, that outlines the various types of maps that you may encounter or use in your work to understand and redesign the customer experience.

I originally wrote today’s post for GetFeedback. It appeared on their site on February 27, 2020.

As a follow on to the post, Four Actions to Take on Customer Effort Feedback, you’re likely going to need to prove the ROI of reducing customer effort. In this post, I’ll talk about five steps to prove the ROI.

I’ve had a lot of conversations in recent weeks about how the employee experience drives the customer experience, but the part that stands out from these conversations is the common thread: that the customer experience only happens via, or is only shaped by, the frontline employees.

That is just not true.

When I’ve addressed this latter point, I’m always asked, “Well, then how do I connect the dots for the backoffice folks?” I love to answer this question.

In last week’s post, I wrote about some findings in Salesforce’s latest State of the Connected Customer report. One of the graphics for the first finding, “customer connections are essential,” stood out to me. The title of the chart is, “Amid Crises, Experience Remains a Key Differentiator.” I agree with that. It’s the sub-title that struck me: “The Experience a Company Provides Is as Important as Its Products or Services.”

I had to pause a moment. Aren’t products and services part of the experience?

Yes!

I originally wrote today’s post for GetFeedback. It appeared on their site on July 19, 2020.

Designing and delivering a cohesive end-to-end customer experience is important for brands to do. To make this happen, your entire organization must be integrated and aligned to work toward that goal. In this article, I’ll address the gap between two important parts of your organization that must be bridged in order to achieve this goal.

I originally wrote today’s post for GetFeedback. It appeared on their site on March 1, 2020.

According to Salesforce, 51% of customers expect that brands will anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions before they make contact – by 2020. Well, here we are!