customer experience

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.”

It all starts with CEO commitment.

Customer experience professionals got an early Christmas present last week in the form of a revised statement on the “purpose of a corporation.” Well, it was a revision for the CEOs at the Business Roundtable, but many of us already know what the purpose of a business is.

More and more companies are pursuing customer-centered approaches in the context of digital change projects. But where is the customer located in the company? How do I measure his or her behavior? Which feedback sources do we have? How can I analyze and visualize a cross-system journey? And: what do I conclude from this? A new position is created: The Customer Experience Manager ("CX Manager"). People with this job description are faced with a multitude of questions.

Are you using journey mapping to design a better future-state experience and to deliver new value for your customers – with your customers?

With whom and how do you socialize customer insights?

You’re listening to customers. You’re combining their feedback with those bread crumbs of data that they leave with every transaction and interaction with your brand. You’ve developed customer personas to better understand who they are, what problems they are trying to solve, and what jobs they need to get done. You’ve mapped their journeys to understand their experience today and their expectations for a better experience tomorrow.

Are you making this mistake when journey mapping?
We already know that people are making mistakes when they’re journey mapping. I’ve outlined several of them in past posts:

5 Myths of Journey Mapping, in which I wrote about:

I originally wrote this post for Forbes.com. It appeared on the Forbes site on November 14, 2018.

Creating the perfect customer experience is not an easy task - especially in the beginning, when you don’t have even a clue from which point of the Customer Life Cycle to begin. Additional difficulty in the first days is the lack of support from your colleagues and managers. Learn how to overcome their natural resistance and win their support and arm yourself with a concrete business case for the NPS (Net Promoter Score) along the customer journey.

I originally wrote today's post for Forbes. It appeared on the Forbes site on October 18, 2018. I've made some slight modifications since then, as it turned into a two-part series.