Tag Archive from: cx educator

"It can't go on like this!" I was shocked when I heard that my 19-year-old daughter was already earning less per hour than her boy colleagues in the chip shop where she has a part-time job. It's time for ACTION. That was the motivation to say YES to the program 'What do you earn?' of BNNVARA which was broadcast on Monday 29 January.

In it, I share my story. That I found out that my male colleague earned 1,000 euros a month more than me. Do the math, that's 12,000 euros a year. The annual income of a Brazilian or three times the annual income of someone from Egypt. No cat pee, as we say in our family.

I remember that moment very well. Did he say that he gets 1,000 euros a month more than I do? Disbelief. I'm sure I hadn't heard it right. He probably saw it on my face, so he repeated his paycheck and that's when the penny dropped. A hard quarter, BAM. This is unfair, was my first thought. Because I had the same responsibilities. Even a larger span of control. But it was so.

When the initial anger had subsided, I went to HR. How could this be? Well, I just had to learn to live with that. They couldn't do anything with it now. My director at the time also thought it was unfair, but there would be a reason. Of course I got a first step (Yes! Just bringing it up bridged the first difference), but nowhere near the 1,000 euros. Where had I missed the boat?

Negotiate. I hadn't. Also, I hadn't done a good enough job of figuring out what a common salary was for my position. A salary that was appropriate to my responsibilities, span of control and goals. I had missed the exit there. I immediately took the bull by the horns and started training. At Direction I individually followed a 2-day course on female leadership (it no longer exists in that form, but there is a nice other option). In addition, I organized an in-house Masterclass "Stratego for women" at ASR for myself and other colleagues, facilitated by Intouchwrm. Learn, practice and then put into practice. That was the only way I could bridge the pay gap in my heels.

When I made the switch to KPN, my moment was there. I found out what a common salary was, what scales there were and what 'above collective labor agreement' meant. I took my male colleague's salary as a starting point and added that, because that amount was more than usual. I also took a good look at fringe benefits such as car, pension, training budget and parking space (status symbol nummero uno at KPN at the time). In the meantime, I had practiced negotiating, in practice and certainly in front of the mirror. So that my salary wish (or demand, whatever you call it) would come out smoothly in the conversation. Without too many spots on my neck.

A long story about negotiation short. In the interview, I was asked about my previous salary. I mentioned the salary of my male colleague. Did I have a paycheck? No, I hadn't. Know that you don't have to give that and therefore DON'T do it. Gone is your bargaining position. In addition, I told them that I was willing to add an x amount, given the responsibilities and the step I was taking. An offer came, I negotiated a little more (because the first NO is the start of the negotiation) and we came to an agreement. BAM BAM BAM. I danced in the room. I had done it. I was now earning as much as my male colleagues. I was going to earn the salary that came with my position. Toasting with champagne, that's what I did that night.

On average, men earn 16.1% more than women. In the financial sector, the figure is as high as 29%. There are reasons for this, and we can all agree with them. If I go into that, it will be a very long blog. So I don't. I do urge you to take action. You have two options.

Option 1: Do you have influence or do you lead? Do you work in HR? Then you have influence. You can reduce the gender pay gap by rewarding women as much as men. What can you do?

  1. Know the facts.
    How is the remuneration among men and women in your company? What is the gender pay gap? In which departments does who earn what?
  2. Help women negotiate.
    Is a woman coming for a new position and not asking for a step in terms of salary? Help her. Because there's a good chance she won't dare. Then you can say "It's your own fault, big salary bump", but that doesn't change the world. Ask if she still wants to negotiate or what salary she expected in this new position.
  3. Change the system.
    Equalize salaries. Of course, this cannot be done all at once. But if it turns out that there are big differences, make sure that women get more and thus bridge the pay gap. Because you can't explain to yourself that men in your company earn more than women. That's so 1987.

Option 2: Do you want to do something about your own salary? Will you join us in heels about the pay gap? I know. It's a chasm. It is an exciting trek and sometimes the gorge is wide and high. But I promise you that when you get over it, there is Money and a super good Feeling: your profit. You also earn more prestige among your colleagues, because if you are paid according to what you are worth, you will be looked at with different eyes.

We will cross the gender pay gap in 5 steps :

  1. Research
    What do your colleagues earn? What is appropriate for your position at other companies? What scales are your colleagues in? Ask broadly, to men and women. Write everything down in a separate booklet or digitally. Capture everything you find. Step beyond your own assumptions, in terms of scale and step in them. You also do research on the internet, for example through the website of the program "What do you earn?" There are a lot of options here. Do your legwork well. Visit HR. Discuss it at the coffee machine, during lunch. Don't do this too flashy, but neutral. If there are answers that show just as big a pay difference as mine, try to keep a straight face (I could have done that more conveniently...).
  2. Determining your Target Salary
    Take a moment to reflect on all the information you've gathered. Are you earning enough? What are the differences? Salary, scales, emoluments? Are you still missing information? Then go back to step 1. After that, it's time to decide what you want to go for. What is your target salary that is appropriate in your industry, for your position? A real amount. Not over. Not plusminus. No, you go for x euros. That may well be an ambitious number.
  3. Negotiation strategy
    Now you are going to determine how you are going to bridge this pay gap. Why do you earn more than you get now? You write this down. Responsibilities, skills, competencies, results you have achieved, testimonials from others. Go crazy. Brag about yourself, why you should get this salary. Then you think about who you should sit down with if you want to get more salary in your current job. Or if you make a switch, you think carefully about which stakeholders you will have at the table. Are you going to sit down with your manager or director? Or is it HR? You come up with your strategy. Writes down exactly what steps you are going to take.
  4. Exercise
    This is really crucial. Time to practice. With your husband or wife. With your trusted colleague. With girlfriends or even better with friends. Really rehearsing the conversation like a play. Your sentences should come out well, full of conviction why you deserve that salary, or why you should be in that scale. So that takes practice. Practice makes perfect, so this is your moment. In front of the mirror, in the car. You record yourself with your mobile. Yes, you do. Because you want to hear what you sound like. Does it come out convincingly? Beautiful. Then you're ready. If you find it difficult to negotiate for yourself, pretend that you are negotiating for your child or a close friend. It's sometimes easier to negotiate for someone else.
  5. Let's negotiate
    You sit at the table with your conversation partner. Or in an international context, sometimes behind Skype. You are ready and tell them what you want and why. After that, you keep your mouth shut. Until the other party responds. There is a chance that there will be an objection. Why it can't be done. You stay very calm. Repeats your wish and the why. Or you ask what is possible. This is really exciting, but you stay calm. You can get spots on your neck, but that doesn't matter. You're doing it. You take a business-like approach. Calmly stand up for yourself. If necessary, tell them about the pay difference between you and your colleague and ask when this will be compensated. You sink your teeth into it. Of course, there can be several conversations with your manager and/or HR that you get what you want. Every step is one and that's how you reach the end of the pay gap. Doing is the motto and that's how you overcome your hesitation to negotiate. To get what you deserve.

Have you got started? What is your experience and what was the result? Probably more than you thought. Will you share your experience in the comments? If you have any tips on how to negotiate better, let us know! This is a great place to help each other and achieve results together.

This is not a blog about Customer Experience, my area of expertise that I normally write and speak about. But this message had to get out! Thank you for all the support before, during and after the program. Many women and also men have shared their experiences and some of the examples are really painful. Sometimes we are still living in 1987, but we are well on our way in 2018 to bridge the gap. I hope to contribute with my story in 'What do you earn?' and this blog. Action is required: cut in and over that pay gap!

Don't want to miss a blog? Sign up for my newsletter!

 

*****

Nienke Bloem is often called the Customer Experience speaker in the blue dress. 

She's a global CX thought leader, educator and a global keynote speaker who inspires audiences with best practices and proven methodologies. She leads a speaking practice, a CX game company and a training business; she breathes Customer Experiences and is author of two CX books.

Her two-day Customer Experience Masterclass is known as the best program to prepare for your CCXP and she is the go-to person for CX leaders who want to advance their leadership and bring direct results from their Customer Experience transformation programs. Since 2020, she hosts a CX Leadership Masterminds program and helps leaders spice up their leadership and deliver an engaging CX Story including a solid CX Strategy. Besides, she is a modern-day pilgrim and found the parallel with leading customer centric transformations. 

With her over 20 years of corporate experience, she speaks the business language. Her keynotes and education programs in Customer Experience are inspiring and hands-on. She is one of the few Recognized Training Partners of the CXPA and it is her mission to Make Customer Experience Work and help you deliver business results. 

It is that time of year. Especially in the Northern hemisphere, where it is the heart of winter. It is dark when you wake up and also when you return home from your office, the sun has set – if the sun has even shown her face at all during the day... Since most of the days it is raining, snowing or just so cloudy that you want to fly to the sun. Immediately.

This is what your customers are experiencing too. So this is the perfect time to step it up a little bit. Give your customers some extra love and attention. Because you don't have to let your customers feel even bluer than they already do. This blog gives you 15 suggestions, simple but so effective:

  1. Send a birthday card to a customer who celebrates his or her birthday. Congratulate and tell them how happy you are with their relationship with your customer.
  2. Buy a 25 American Dollar Kiva card of (kiva.org) and send it to a customer and share a message that you would like to pay it forward.
  3. Open the door for a customer in your store. Welcome them with a genuine HELLO.
  4. Look into complaints and pick one out that needs extra love and attention. Solve the problem sooner than you have promised and add your TLC to give the customer a good feeling.
  5. Invite a customer for a really good cup of coffee in your favorite coffee bar. Ask them for genuine feedback and listen intently.
  6. Give a customer something extra. If you work in a coffee bar, add a snack. If you work in telecom, some extra mobile data. Try to find something that you can give, which makes your customer happy.
  7. Welcome a new customer with a video you have made especially for them. A genuine welcome with a big smile.
  8. Drive down the country, buy a big bunch of flowers and visit a customer. Thank them for being a customer and have a cup of coffee together.
  9. Dive a little deeper into the lives of your customers. Find a customer with an anniversary, buy a personal gift online and send it to them.
  10. On a rainy day, bring an extra umbrella along and offer this to a customer that comes into your store soaking wet. With compliments of you and the company of course.
  11. Give a compliment to your customer. Easy, but so effective.
  12. Especially in business to business, find out about the interests of the customer and find one or more articles that are in line with these interests. Send the article(s) with some happy greetz.
  13. Go to the logistics department, bring some small gifts along and add them to customers packages that are sent out today.
  14. Find blogs that are written by your customers and leave nice comments.
  15. A more indirect suggestion, but with great effect: Buy a cake for customer service colleagues and tell them how much you appreciate them. If you want to take it up a notch, join them and listen in to customer calls.

So plenty of ideas here. But I would love it if you add to this list, the more ideas the better. Because in these gloomy January days, our customers can use some of your Tender Love and Care.

Do you want to share this message? We have made a printable version that you can download. Print it and hang it where you colleagues can see it. To spread the kindness. Thank you!

 

*****

Nienke Bloem is often called the Customer Experience speaker in the blue dress. 

She's a global CX thought leader, educator and a global keynote speaker who inspires audiences with best practices and proven methodologies. She leads a speaking practice, a CX game company and a training business; she breathes Customer Experiences and is author of two CX books.

Her two-day Customer Experience Masterclass is known as the best program to prepare for your CCXP and she is the go-to person for CX leaders who want to advance their leadership and bring direct results from their Customer Experience transformation programs. Since 2020, she hosts a CX Leadership Masterminds program and helps leaders spice up their leadership and deliver an engaging CX Story including a solid CX Strategy. Besides, she is a modern-day pilgrim and found the parallel with leading customer centric transformations. 

With her over 20 years of corporate experience, she speaks the business language. Her keynotes and education programs in Customer Experience are inspiring and hands-on. She is one of the few Recognized Training Partners of the CXPA and it is her mission to Make Customer Experience Work and help you deliver business results. 

How to align all employees with the customer experience strategy

It is very important to realise that Customer Experience and having a customer centric mindset is often a cultural process within organizations. For that reason, a majority of leaders expressed that the existing culture within the company forms a barrier that has to be taken down before they can start managing daily operations with the customer in mind.

 

There are different approaches for looking at ways in which the customer can be at the centre of the organization, and two vivid examples really spring to mind. Steve Jobs always started with the customer experience and worked back towards the technology. Secondly, Richard Branson who, in contrast to the previous example, only looks from an 'employees-first' point of view. His view is that when you treat your employees well, they will love their jobs and bring that same good feeling to the customers who, in their turn, have a positive feeling about the organization and are willing to do more business with you.

Employee engagement as driving factor for customer happiness

Not every organization needs to have the exact same mindset as Richard Branson to achieve happy customers, but you need to have happy employees to really make a difference. HR has an important role in becoming customer centric in all phases of the HR Cycle.

It starts before your onboarding process. During the recruitment process, recruiters need to focus more on talent or attitude and not so much on skills. Skills can (and should!) be learned and taught when your hire is settling into their job. Also, your recruiters need to recruit with purpose and really look for a good fit with the organization. And keep in mind: with every pair of hands you get a brain for free.

When you hire an employee, inspire them to pursue continuous development, participate in training sessions, courses and study. In that way you give them the power to develop what they really want. You can also make this competitive or place development in a game-setting in order to make it more fun and an enjoyable challenge to keep on developing.

Best practices in improving employee engagement

It is very important to drive cultural change within the organization as a whole. This is a continuous process that might be difficult to implement or keep alive, but it is worth it and employees will adopt some or all of the best practices. After all, they are designed to give employees a happier workplace.

In the masterclass we had fun in an assignment to create a Museum of Cultural Change, where all participants shared Best practices.

Amongst them were:

  • Storytelling: share customer stories in (Board) meetings
  • Awards: give employees whose work resulted in great customer experiences an award and make them feel special
  • King/Queen for a week: hang a huge crown over the workplace of a very customer minded employee. Everyone in the organization will notice this and congratulate them
  • Random acts of kindness: give employees a budget so they can surprise random customers with a gift
  • Compliment shower: print all the compliments of customers who gave a 9 or 10 in the NPS survey, make confetti of the prints and unleash a real compliment shower over your employees at the end of a town hall meeting
  • Invite the customer to the work place: just like bringing a family member to work, invite a customer over and even let them attend a meeting. See what happens in the organization and how people react
  • Give the customer a chair in the meeting. Make a visual representation of your customer and assign him/her to a seat in the Board rooms. In this way, the customer is always visible.

Ways in which to reward employees in their customer centric behaviour


Photo: https://www.slideshare.net/KaiCrow/asknicely-more-valuable-customers-with-nps

The first thing that may come to mind when thinking about rewarding employees for their efforts in customer excellence, may be to give them a bonus when their NPS has reached a certain level. This approach is brilliant, but be aware of possible gaming. You could also reward those who are positively named in customer surveys, give recognition to people behind the scenes and empower peers to celebrate each other's work. Or make it easier for your employees to balance their work/life, offer benefits that reduce stress levels and treat the people who deal with tough customer experiences with the utmost respect.

There are lots of ways to encourage your employees to work on a more customer centric manner, you only have to be creative and persist in the execution! It won't be easy, since we all know Culture eats Strategy for breakfast. But this is where success is made and where the most fun can be had.

Want to grow your Customer Experience competences?

These are only some of the highlights Milou took away from attending the Customer Experience Masterclass. Would you like to know more? Join our next CX Masterclass in February or June 2018, click here for more information or here for reserving your place

Customer Experience Framework and complete list of blog posts in this series

This post is part of a wider series about all the 6 CX disciplines that represent the CXPA Framework around which the CCXP exam is structured and that we cover in the CX Masterclass.

Find here the complete list of the other posts in this series:

  1. CX Strategy
  2. Customer Understanding
  3. Design, Improvement and Innovation
  4. Measurement
  5. Governance
  6. Culture (this one)

About this series

The foundations for these blogposts are written by Milou van Kerkhof following the June 2017 CX Masterclass given by Nienke Bloem and Rosaria Cirillo. Milou attended this as a newcomer in Customer Experience. These blogposts have been slightly edited and reflect only the highlights of the content of each module.

 

*****

Nienke Bloem is often called the Customer Experience speaker in the blue dress. 

She's a global CX thought leader, educator and a global keynote speaker who inspires audiences with best practices and proven methodologies. She leads a speaking practice, a CX game company and a training business; she breathes Customer Experiences and is author of two CX books.

Her two-day Customer Experience Masterclass is known as the best program to prepare for your CCXP and she is the go-to person for CX leaders who want to advance their leadership and bring direct results from their Customer Experience transformation programs. Since 2020, she hosts a CX Leadership Masterminds program and helps leaders spice up their leadership and deliver an engaging CX Story including a solid CX Strategy. Besides, she is a modern-day pilgrim and found the parallel with leading customer centric transformations. 

With her over 20 years of corporate experience, she speaks the business language. Her keynotes and education programs in Customer Experience are inspiring and hands-on. She is one of the few Recognized Training Partners of the CXPA and it is her mission to Make Customer Experience Work and help you deliver business results. 

The foundation of your customer experience success

Moving your organization towards customer centricity, which values the happiness of your customers as a top priority, could be a tough change. This change needs to be supported by a majority in the organization and colleagues need to be held accountable for their responsibilities in making it happen. Sure, such a change might bring a lot of uncertainties and insecurities across all disciplines, but it will pay off in the end.

Driving customer experience change

Of course models are just a simplified representation of the real world, but they do provide a good insight in how complex processes, such as organizational change, could be carried out. So, the road map to make your organization a customer centric one should roughly look like this:

  • Determine where you want to have impact
  • Determine the key stakeholders
  • Find out what their most important KPI's are
  • Know who makes the decisions; what is the governance structure
  • Know what other projects are in place that may impact on your success
  • Make a proposal/project plan/business plan
  • Get agreement on your plans
  • And continue to work on improving the customer experience, tirelessly.

It may sound easy enough, but anyone who tried to make any change within a large organization knows that this process is a very tedious one. Especially when the essential elements of CX organizations are not yet in place.

The essential elements of Customer Experience in organizations

Every organization that has a customer centric focus needs to have 5 essential elements, to let customer experience play a central role in everyone's day-to-day life:

 

  1. CX Core team. These are the men and women who are dedicated Customer Experience professionals. They define a CX strategy and roll it out throughout the rest of the organization.
  2. Reporting executive. This person builds the bridge between the CX core team and the C-level suite. They report the results from team to management and give input to the team based on their comments.
  3. Steering committee. These are the senior leaders from the different silos in your organization. They review metrics and methodologies and give their advice to the core team.
  4. Working groups. Although they may be a level lower in the hierarchy than the steering committee, these people really drive the customer experience change in their respective silos.
  5. CX ambassadors. These are the people that work on project teams to drive customer centricity forwards. They can be from any level, but are mostly mid-level and/or frontline.

However, as said before, the maturity of your organization has a huge impact on how these roles should be set up. If customer experience and a customer centric mind set have just been introduced in your organization, setting up these elements won't do you any good. Being customer centric is not a decision you make overnight and certainly not one that is implemented quickly. By continuous improvement and a strong focus on customer happiness, you can make any organization customer centric.

What works very well when it comes to driving Customer Experience change?

Customer Experience is a business principle. So working with metrics and proving growth and success always works. Finding buy in with important stakeholders and aligning Customer Experience metrics; like NPS, CSAT, CES. Make sure your most important metric is in the top 5 of your company. An easy check could be the balance score card or the year report. How is customer centricity represented? Find your way to the C-suite or the leaders of your company and find alignment on metrics. Create accountability at the top with metrics. But not only metrics are of importance.

Try to find a way to the heart, the believe that customer centricity is a very effective way to go. Because loving your customers, is the start in customer experience success.  To reach the hearts of leaders within companies, evangelizing and storytelling come in.

Customer Experience Managers and their teams are often small and have to influence entire organizations. Find smart alignment strategies, use shared co-ed accountability for metrics, a broader range of groups and steering committees and change will be your result. But know, this 5thstrategy of the CX Framework is your fundament to success. Think and work hard on your governance and organizational alignment. If you want to learn more?

Want to grow your Customer Experience competences?

These are only some of the highlights Milou took away from attending the Customer Experience Masterclass. Would you like to know more? Join our next CX Masterclass in February or June 2018, click here for more information or here for reserving your place

Customer Experience Framework and complete list of blog posts in this series

This post is part of a wider series about all the 6 CX disciplines that represent the CXPA Framework around which the CCXP exam is structured and that we cover in the CX Masterclass.

Find here the complete list of the other posts in this series:

  1. CX Strategy
  2. Customer Understanding
  3. Design, Improvement and Innovation
  4. Measurement
  5. Governance (this one)
  6. Culture

About this series

The foundations for these blogposts are written by Milou van Kerkhof following the June 2017 CX Masterclass given by Nienke Bloem and Rosaria Cirillo. Milou attended this as a newcomer in Customer Experience. These blogposts have been slightly edited and reflect only the highlights of the content of each module.

 

*****

Nienke Bloem is often called the Customer Experience speaker in the blue dress. 

She's a global CX thought leader, educator and a global keynote speaker who inspires audiences with best practices and proven methodologies. She leads a speaking practice, a CX game company and a training business; she breathes Customer Experiences and is author of two CX books.

Her two-day Customer Experience Masterclass is known as the best program to prepare for your CCXP and she is the go-to person for CX leaders who want to advance their leadership and bring direct results from their Customer Experience transformation programs. Since 2020, she hosts a CX Leadership Masterminds program and helps leaders spice up their leadership and deliver an engaging CX Story including a solid CX Strategy. Besides, she is a modern-day pilgrim and found the parallel with leading customer centric transformations. 

With her over 20 years of corporate experience, she speaks the business language. Her keynotes and education programs in Customer Experience are inspiring and hands-on. She is one of the few Recognized Training Partners of the CXPA and it is her mission to Make Customer Experience Work and help you deliver business results. 

Measurement is a mean to an end, not a goal itself

Have you ever heard the following while being asked to fill out a survey: "Please give us a 9 or 10 rating to let us know you are satisfied with us"? Or have you ever heard: "When we formulate the question differently, we can improve our score" inside your company? When these questions arise, you can easily perceive that the people designing these questions are not looking to gain better insights so they can enable the organization to provide a better customer experience, they just want to have a better survey outcome.

What is the best way to translate customer perception of the experience into measurable and actionable metrics, without focusing too much on the metric itself?

Define and use a proven measurement framework

There is a wide variety of metrics which you can use to gauge the customer experience as perceived by your customers and they can be observed or measured at different moments of the experience.

How can you easily set-up a measurement system which informs the entire organization about the experience you are delivering, and at the same time helps you in driving customer excellence?

Start by following these 5 easy steps:

1. Define what you want to measure and when.

  • Relational surveys are about your company and/or brand as a whole. Once every month, quarter or year, you can ask your customers feedback about their perception of your organization or brand in general.
  • Transactional surveys focus on how the latest contact with the company was. Were the customers satisfied about the order process, the delivery times and the end product?

2. Measure what you want to know.

Forrester identifies 3 types of metrics:

  • 'Descriptive' metrics tell you what really happened. How long did a customer have to wait until a call centre employee answered their call?
  • 'Perception' metrics measure how the customer thinks and feels about what happened. It may take you only 20 seconds to answer the phone, but the absence of any message when waiting may make the customer perceive that they waited much longer. In contrast, it may take you 40 seconds to answer but great music whilst waiting may make the customer perceive the waiting time as much shorter. A customer feels more frustrated that a problem has still not been resolved following several promises that it would be.
  • 'Outcome' metrics describe what a customer does as a result of their perception of the experience you delivered. Will they purchase from your company again or will they recommend your service?

The key metrics that are most often used are NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) and CES (Customer Effort Score). There are numerous other metrics to use (ACSI -American Customer Satisfaction Index -, Temkin Group CX Index, Forrester CXI, etc...), so pick one that's suitable for what you want to measure and how you want it presented internally to drive change.

3. Collect your data. Make sure you ask the right customers the right questions at the right time.

4. Analyze your data. It depends on what metric you used, what you are measuring exactly and how you are analysing it. But make sure you interpret the data in the right way!

5. Share your data with the people who need to know and make sure the data is applicable to the various groups.

  • Segment your NPS scores by different silos. Give the contact centre their specific NPS with a focus on coaching and process improvement and present your sales-specific NPS to the sales team. In their report, you focus on up- and cross selling.
  • Use methodologies such as storytelling and gamification to increase engagement and make the sharing fun and memorable, like in Nationale-Nederlanden best practice example. 
 

Keep your measurements alive

After you have taken all the above steps, you have set up your measurement system and identified your baseline. You can now work on this to improve in following the close loop system which was covered during the CX Masterclass during discipline #3 Customer Experience Design & Improvement and you can work towards building all the blocks and competencies areas of an NPS/VOC Program.

Always keep in mind that the numbers are not the key focus. You need to listen to and focus on the stories behind the numbers, which are usually provided in the free text spaces. What are the key insights customers are giving you as feedback in the comments? Which patterns do you see? Which concrete actions can you take to improve either the experience you are delivering or the perception your customers have of the experience? Continue to measure and always take the appropriate action to improve your processes to increase the happiness of the customer, not just the metrics.

Return on Investment (ROI) in Customer Experience

Whenever any change in an organization is proposed, the first question the C-suite will ask is "how much will it cost and what is the return on investment?". This is a very legitimate question, especially in relation to something as abstract as Customer Experience. You need to make a steady business case that will win over any sceptical decision maker, starting by choosing what to focus on.

So how do you prove the ROI of CX?

  • Focus on one CX project/element at the time (i.e. ROI of VOC Program, ROI of Self-Service)
  • Focus on 3-5 elements within two big "returns" areas
  1. >> REVENUE GROWTH
  2. >> COSTS SAVINGS
  • Calculate ROI

Some examples of items you can take into account when calculating ROI of your CX projects are:

  1. Increase revenue
  • Repeat purchases
  • Better cross-sells
  • Reduced churn/ Increased retention

2. Decrease costs

  • Fewer complaints (which cost a lot of money to resolve)
  • Reduced staff turnover and sickness
  • Increased productivity

Once you have your business case, you need to present it to the board! How?

According to Forrester, effective business cases appeal to executives on 3 levels:

1. LOGIC: The rational justification for investing

  • Calculate how collecting, analysing, and acting on customer feedback has demonstrated at least one type of financial benefit.
  • Get help of your CFO's office for financial metrics and models

2. AUTHORITY: Why they should believe you

  • Assemble a portfolio of past successes — even if they've been small.
  • Get stakeholders to help make the case.
  • Plug your results shamelessly.

3. EMOTION: The "gut feel" factor

  • Assemble customer verbatim from unstructured survey questions, customer panels, or social media that demonstrate pain points in the experience today.
  • Analyse the feedback for common themes – and pull out the quotes that are the most colourful.
  • Support verbatim with employee feedback that captures the problem.

Depending on the composition of your board, you need to decide which mix of these levels is best: do you need a logical approach to win over the C-level by presenting the numbers, or an approach based on your authority to convince them why they should trust in your judgment, or an emotional approach to appeal to the gut feeling? When you've done your homework well, there will be no argument about the reason why customer satisfaction should be a key focus in everyone's day-to-day business.

Join the conversation & let's learn from each other

What about you? Do you have a measurement framework in place? Which of the 3 metrics type we present in this post do you use? What are your best tips and challenges when it comes to proving ROI of Customer Experience? Share it with us in the comments.

Want to grow your Customer Experience competences?

These are only some of the highlights Milou took away from attending the Customer Experience Masterclass. Would you like to know more? Click here for more information.

Customer Experience Framework and complete list of blog posts in this series

This post is part of a wider series about all the 6 CX disciplines that represent the CXPA Framework around which the CCXP exam is structured and that we cover in the CX Masterclass.

Find here the complete list of the other posts in this series:

1. CX Strategy

2. Customer Understanding

3. Design, Improvement and Innovation

4. Measurement (this one)

5. Governance

6. Culture

About this series

This post was originally posted on Wow Now and is part of the CX Framework series by Rosaria Cirillo and Nienke Bloem.

The foundations for these blogposts are written by Milou van Kerkhof following the June 2017 CX Masterclass given by Nienke Bloem and Rosaria Cirillo. Milou attended this as a newcomer in Customer Experience. These blogposts have been slightly edited and reflect only the highlights of the content of each module

 

*****

Nienke Bloem is often called the Customer Experience speaker in the blue dress. 

She's a global CX thought leader, educator and a global keynote speaker who inspires audiences with best practices and proven methodologies. She leads a speaking practice, a CX game company and a training business; she breathes Customer Experiences and is author of two CX books.

Her two-day Customer Experience Masterclass is known as the best program to prepare for your CCXP and she is the go-to person for CX leaders who want to advance their leadership and bring direct results from their Customer Experience transformation programs. Since 2020, she hosts a CX Leadership Masterminds program and helps leaders spice up their leadership and deliver an engaging CX Story including a solid CX Strategy. Besides, she is a modern-day pilgrim and found the parallel with leading customer centric transformations. 

With her over 20 years of corporate experience, she speaks the business language. Her keynotes and education programs in Customer Experience are inspiring and hands-on. She is one of the few Recognized Training Partners of the CXPA and it is her mission to Make Customer Experience Work and help you deliver business results. 

How to shape your CX design & change process

Once you have determined what your Customer Experience strategy should look like and you have good Customer Understanding you will need to need to shape your CX design: having clear repeatable processes and frameworks in place to design the customer experience you want to deliver or redesign the one you are currently offering. To do so, you can use at least three frameworks, not necessarily in this order.

1. Customer Journey Mapping and Customer Journey Thinking

To actively influence your customers' decision process when buying a product or ordering a service, you need to know which path they are walking, at which moments they are making decisions and how you are interacting with them at each moment along the way. The most common tool used for this is "Customer Journey Mapping" and the most deep and effective way is to propel also a wider "Customer Journey Thinking". To do so, the Temkin Group recommends that organizations teach employees to consistently think about the following five questions:

  • Who is the customer? For which persona is this map? This is a great place to use personas as a mechanism for describing the customer
  • What is the customer's real goal? What is he/she trying to accomplish by reaching out to you?
  • What did the customer do just before reaching out? What did he/she do independently and which struggles did he/she encounter?
  • What will the customer do right after contacting you? What do you need the customer to do so he/she can accomplish his/her goal?
  • What will make the customer happy? Go above and beyond the initial question and deliver a customer experience that will exceed expectations.

And don't forget to include partners and external suppliers in your map. Although they are not part of the core team in your company, they are in contact with your customers and have an impact on your company's image. They represent your Customer Experience ecosystem (Forrester).

An example from our own life: An undertaker organised a very respectful and beautiful service for a beloved one, but the coffee that was served following the service was just awful. When the people attending the funeral service complained about the quality of the coffee, his response was: "It's not my fault, my catering partner provides the beverages." In terms of customer experience, this response is not acceptable because your customers are not interested in how you organised these things. They want a 'good service' at the funeral and it is the undertaker's responsibility to organise this in cooperation with all his partners.

One simple way to get started with Customer Journey Mapping is to follow the 6 steps methodology by Conexperience involving into the workshop not only your employees, but also other key players of your ecosystem.

2. 'Innovation through Design Thinking' and 'Service design thinking'

Design thinking is created because big corporations lack the ability to be creative and aren't able to create new products and services that meet unfulfilled needs of their customers.

Design thinking is a methodology, but it's also about a mindset and about a changing paradigm in management theory, moving from the traditional top‐down and quantitative approach to a more bottom‐up, qualitative approach in innovation processes.

It builds around 5 principles.

Service design is about making what you do more useful, usable & desirable for your users, and more efficient, effective & valuable for you ‐ everyone loves a great experience

Innovation is part of your organization at any time. So if you see that there are a lot of complaints about a feature, product or service, you can take the lead and innovate the bottleneck point of the process. When doing this, make sure you follow a "Double-Diamond Design" process:

  • Research the exact problem, both from the customer's perspective and from that of your employees.
  • Then analyse these results and create artefacts (like a customer journey map) to make a visual representation of the problem.
  • When you have these insights, start a group session to generate ideas on how to resolve the problem.
  • Make a prototype and perform some testing.
  • Then you continue to receive feedback and continue to improve the prototype, until...
  • You have a final product or service you can fully implement.

3. Continuous Improvement based on customer insight

Temkin Group identifies four customer insight-driven action loops. These can be aggregated in two big areas of action, which have gained different naming in the field:

  • Fire-Fighting (also called small loop, inner loop, customer loop or case management): this is about ad-hoc immediate follow-up on each survey response and includes:
    • Immediate Response towards customers on a 121 basis or Collectively, via dedicated & targeted communication or as open communication on digital channels
    • Corrective/Celebration Action internally: i.e. providing immediate feedback towards employees or making quick adjustments.
  • Fire-Prevention (also called big loop, outer loop, business loop or action planning): this is about driving structural changes and improvements based on the insight gained from NPS responses over-time, and encompasses:
    • Continuous and/or Structural Improvement
      • to address root causes behind drivers of detraction
      • to identify ways to WOW customers based on their needs to move them from passives to promoters
      • to keep and intensify doing the identified drivers of promotion
    • Strategic Change: the new insight gained from customers' voice about what really matters to them can be so substantial to fully influence small or big strategy changes.

You can read more details about these 4 loops and why they are so important to drive change in WHY NPS as Measurement and Methodology: which goals does it serve?

When it comes to change and innovation from the customer experience perspective, it is all about Acting. It is about looking to your processes, products and service through the eyes of your customer and adjust, continuously.

Want to grow your Customer Experience competences?

These are only some of the highlights Milou took away from attending the Customer Experience Masterclass. Would you like to know more? Join our next CX Masterclass.

Customer Experience Framework and complete list of blog posts in this series

This post is part of a wider series about all the 6 CX disciplines that represent the CXPA Framework around which the CCXP exam is structured and that we cover in the CX Masterclass.

Find here the complete list of the other posts in this series:

  1. CX Strategy
  2. Customer Understanding
  3. Design, Improvement and Innovation
  4. Measurement
  5. Governance
  6. Culture

Extra: CXPA exam & Becoming CCXP (will be published on the 11th of December)

About this series

This post is part of the CX Framework series by Rosaria Cirillo and Nienke Bloem.

The foundations for these blogposts are written by Milou van Kerkhof following the June 2017 CX Masterclass given by Nienke Bloem and Rosaria Cirillo. Milou attended this as a newcomer in Customer Experience. These blogposts have been slightly edited and reflect only the highlights of the content of each module

 

*****

Nienke Bloem is often called the Customer Experience speaker in the blue dress. 

She's a global CX thought leader, educator and a global keynote speaker who inspires audiences with best practices and proven methodologies. She leads a speaking practice, a CX game company and a training business; she breathes Customer Experiences and is author of two CX books.

Her two-day Customer Experience Masterclass is known as the best program to prepare for your CCXP and she is the go-to person for CX leaders who want to advance their leadership and bring direct results from their Customer Experience transformation programs. Since 2020, she hosts a CX Leadership Masterminds program and helps leaders spice up their leadership and deliver an engaging CX Story including a solid CX Strategy. Besides, she is a modern-day pilgrim and found the parallel with leading customer centric transformations. 

With her over 20 years of corporate experience, she speaks the business language. Her keynotes and education programs in Customer Experience are inspiring and hands-on. She is one of the few Recognized Training Partners of the CXPA and it is her mission to Make Customer Experience Work and help you deliver business results. 

Understanding your customers Rational and Emotional sides

Customer understanding is essential in determining how you can design and provide products/services and experiences that fulfil customer needs, so you can deliver top-class customer service, improve loyalty and get great recommendations.

It's all about how your customers perceive you and all the interactions with your organisation. Perception being the key element.

Why are they reaching out to your company? How will they feel after being in touch with you? If the customer doesn't have the feeling you want them to have, there's a challenge for you as an organisation.

Foundations of customer understanding: archetypes, emotions & needs

Your customers are not just a number or a bunch of character traits. They are human beings with their own problems, hopes, fears and needs. When making their decisions to buy, customers have both rational and emotional reasons.

Understanding your customers' (buying) behaviour is one of the elements that helps to be successful.

When customers have an emotional attachment to your brand, in addition to being loyal they also become promoters of your brand.

To simplify the understanding of your customers' behaviours you need to consider: Archetypes, Emotions and Needs

A. Archetypes

The Bradford and Bingley Personality Framework identifies four different archetypes:

  • The feeler: they make decisions and take actions based on their emotions
  • The entertainer: they joke around to make their problems heard
  • The thinker: they are rational and process minded
  • The controller: they want everything to go exactly as planned and they get worked up when it doesn't

Just imagine the different reaction each of these archetypes may have when entering a hotel room and they smell smoke. Understanding the attitudes of these personalities for example, is critical for your front-end employees (i.e. contact centres or hotel staff) who need to manage these customers' reactions all the time.

While each of us has a dominant archetype, this can change or become extreme, depending on the situation or the stage in which we are in life, especially in case of life changing events like a divorce or the loss of a loved one.

B. Emotions

Many different models are trying to map emotions & make them understandable within companies.

Most of these models identify 4 main emotions: Happiness, Sadness, Anger and Fear.

Recent Temkin analysis of these 4 emotions at call centers proved the impact of these emotions on call duration!

This model is good and widely recognized, yet has limitations with regards to two essential elements:

  • Tends to perceive emotions as positive versus negative (on a ratio of 1-3)
  • Misses out completely on the fundamental human emotion: love

Rosaria Cirillo has applied her learning from Marshall Rosenberg NVC (Non Violent Communication) and showed us how we can instead distinguish emotions in two broad categories:

  • The ones we feel whenever our needs are met (i.e. happiness and love)
  • The ones we feel when our needs are not met (i.e. sadness and fear). When customers are expressing sadness and/or fear and their emotions are not acknowledged or understood, or when they feel judged, this can turn into anger.

C. Needs

To be able to understand and influence which emotions the customer is feeling, we need to have a clear understanding of their needs.

 

The trainer Rosaria Cirillo shared how the analysis of thousands of survey responses she analysed – run since 2005 for different companies across multiple touch points and industry verticals – shows that an adapted version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs could be applied. There was a clear correlation between CSAT/NPS Score and at which level of needs the customer felt fulfilled during the interaction. In the most recent year she has added the emotions to the model as we can see in this figure.

Another way to look at needs is to consider the value you deliver to your customer like explained in the Elements of Value Pyramid from HBR's The 30 Elements of Value.

Setting up a customer insight framework to systematically understand your customer

To have a proper understanding of who your customers are and how they want to be treated by your organization, you need to have a reliable customer insight program. You can achieve this using the following 4 steps:

  1. Collect data:
    1. Listen to the Voice of the Customers by asking feedback, performing voice analysis of incoming calls and making sure to 'drink your own champagne' i.e. being your own customer.
    2. Listen to the Voice of the Employees. What are they working on that isn't giving them any satisfaction? How can you make their job more fulfilling?
    3. Listen to the Voice of the Process. How are your processes aligned and do they add value to the customer? Do you use Lean Six Sigma or another methodology?
    4. Look at the Value of the Customer. Quantify your customer by revenue, size or any other metric.
  2. Analyse your data. What do they mean and can you find any correlations or associations?
  3. Document the data and make it visible and understandable. Customer journey maps and personas are two key tools that can make your insights visible and easily understandable within your organization.
  4. Share your insights within your organization. Make sure everybody knows how the customer feels and how they can change their service or tone of voice accordingly.

Emotions drive loyalty and higher customer spending

When you're reading this, you might be tricked into thinking that customer experience is only about making the customer happy and it doesn't affect your revenue. Far from the truth! Numerous studies have concluded that a customer is more loyal to an organisation when they have a positive feeling about how they've been treated. For example: when a customer has a very positive feeling about an organisation, they are 7.8 times more likely to try new products and services. Think about the possible impact this could have on your P&L!

Getting in touch and staying in touch with your customer

The easiest way to get insights in the actions of thousands of customers is by analysing your website visit data or by looking at a chart of your contact centre volumes by contact reason (Check Tip: do you have such an overview in your company and, if so, who is looking at it regularly taking which actions?). Downside is that in doing so, you're changing your customers into numbers or segments and you might forget that they are individuals. To compensate for this, numerous big companies make actual contact with customers mandatory for their employees, either by listening to calls, either by calling customers regularly either by acting as customers themselves.

The NS (Dutch Railway) asks their employees to travel by train regularly. That way they can sense the sentiments of passengers and get a stronger focus on ways to improve the journey for the customers. Likewise, the CEO of KPN (Dutch telecom provider) has a mobile phone subscription just like everybody else, so he can feel what it's like to be a customer of his own company. Other organizations facilitate Customer Arenas where few employees listen and observe a group of customers while they discuss among themselves how they are treated and how the organization could improve. All these initiatives give great insights and should be incorporated in every organization that wants to deliver better customer experience.

Understanding your customer is crucial when it comes to customer experience. Listen, observe, get a deeper understanding of their emotions and their feedback, then you'll make a good start!

Want to grow your Customer Experience competences?

These are only some of the highlights Milou took away from attending the Customer Experience Masterclass. Would you like to know more? Join a CX Masterclass.

Customer Experience Framework and complete list of blog posts in this series

This post is part of a wider series about all the 6 CX disciplines that represent the CXPA Framework around which the CCXP exam is structured and that we cover in the CX Masterclass.

Find here the complete list of the other posts in this series:

  1. CX Strategy
  2. Customer Understanding
  3. Design, Improvement and Innovation
  4. Measurement
  5. Governance
  6. Culture

Extra: CXPA exam & Becoming CCXP (will be published on the 11th of December)

About this series

This post was originally posted on Wow Now and is part of the CX Framework series by Rosaria Cirillo and Nienke Bloem.

The foundations for these blogposts are written by Milou van Kerkhof following the June 2017 CX Masterclass given by Nienke Bloem and Rosaria Cirillo. Milou attended this as a newcomer in Customer Experience. These blogposts have been slightly edited and reflect only the highlights of the content of each module

 

*****

Nienke Bloem is often called the Customer Experience speaker in the blue dress. 

She's a global CX thought leader, educator and a global keynote speaker who inspires audiences with best practices and proven methodologies. She leads a speaking practice, a CX game company and a training business; she breathes Customer Experiences and is author of two CX books.

Her two-day Customer Experience Masterclass is known as the best program to prepare for your CCXP and she is the go-to person for CX leaders who want to advance their leadership and bring direct results from their Customer Experience transformation programs. Since 2020, she hosts a CX Leadership Masterminds program and helps leaders spice up their leadership and deliver an engaging CX Story including a solid CX Strategy. Besides, she is a modern-day pilgrim and found the parallel with leading customer centric transformations. 

With her over 20 years of corporate experience, she speaks the business language. Her keynotes and education programs in Customer Experience are inspiring and hands-on. She is one of the few Recognized Training Partners of the CXPA and it is her mission to Make Customer Experience Work and help you deliver business results. 

There are those moments when you can't believe what an employee does and says. That you stand in a store totally bewildered and feel as if you have been put to shame as a customer. That you would prefer to say something very angry out of sheer impotence. Do you know that feeling?

It was a while ago for me, but last week I experienced it again in person. What happened and what can you learn from it? Read and Weep...

My 16-year-old daughter really wanted to go to Appelpop and camp there with her friends on the festival grounds. That would require someone at least 18 years old to come along, and the ladies persuaded me to accompany them. We used to call it Camping=Cramping at home, so you know I wasn't cheering. But you do anything for your kids! I had no camping gear, so I headed to the Outdoor Sports store for a tent and an air mattress.

I was helped perfectly. Was even lucky that the tent was on sale. So I happily went home with my purchases, where the tent was set up by the two adolescent ladies in no time in the living room. The first test was successful.

The festival

Friday, September 11. We arrived at campsite de Betuwe and were assigned a nice spot, also with top neighbors. Tent set up, airbed inflated and we headed for the fantastically fun festival Appelpop (I'm a fan!). After a musical party, we arrived home in the middle of the night and as I crawled into my tent, I immediately noticed that the airbed was a bit soft. "Had I not screwed the cap on properly?" Fortunately, the pump was within reach and I eventually fell asleep. Halfway through the night I woke up and my bottom touched the cold Betuwe ground. Oh dear, an air bed that was slowly deflating. LEK.

Anyway, it's a festival, "you win some, you lose some." It kind of goes with the territory. Saturday was just such a festival day with several musical highlights. Unfortunately, it had turned rainy and when we got back to the campsite at 1am, it was raining cats and dogs. I quickly crawled into my Wildebeast tent and once I was lying down, I heard "Drip, Drip, Drip." After a brief investigation, the zipper of the awning turned out to be as leaky as a basket. Water was running right into my inner tent. Fortunately it dried up after a few hours, but I was bummed. During the night I had to inflate my airbed twice more, because unfortunately no gnomes had come to fix the leak. Sunday morning I came out of my tent pretty broken and decided to go right back to the store that day. With tent and airbed, because this couldn't be the intention.

Returning

There I stood at the counter. A girl stepped up to me. Asked what she could do for me. I explained the situation and she called a colleague. Did I still have the receipt? Of course! They looked hard and asked if I had set up the tent properly. Whether I knew that zippers in awnings always leak when the rain is on them. I told them I couldn't imagine that. That I wanted a new airbed and my money back for the tent. Because the camping season is really over and suppose if I also get tent with a "flaw" now, I won't find out until next year. They couldn't do that, but they were going to figure out what they could do for me. Turned their backs to me and walked away. "You wait here."

Sure. There I was. Between tents, hiking boots, backpacks. There was no empathy for two broken nights on a leaky air mattress. No "annoying that you bought a leaky tent." I couldn't believe my ears, and because of that broken night, my capacity for empathy wasn't optimal either. But I decided to control myself. Waited and yes there came the Sunday helpers again.

"Hello madam, in principle we don't give money back. But for this time we do". So, could I squeeze my hands for a moment.... And then it came. "But next time you buy a tent, and it's important that the awning doesn't leak? Make sure you inform yourself better. And then buy a more expensive one. " My mouth fell open. I got my money back and now a kick in the teeth that I had misinformed myself. In an angry voice I replied " I was here on Thursday and got advice from a colleague of yours and he didn't ask if I wanted a leaky zipper in the awning. I relied on his advice and therefore bought this tent. Then provide better advice yourself and in all honesty; don't sell junk.".

But I still wanted another air mattress. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible. They were sold out in the store, but I could just order a new one at home. In the corner of my eye I saw a tablet, of course they could have done that for me. But no, that thinking and doing was not in the cards. So I got my money back for the airbed and tent. It was a whole hassle with receipts behind the cash register and the money would be refunded to my account. Even though I had my money back, I didn't have a good feeling about it. Lightly sneering, I went home.

How not to deal with a complaint

What lessons can you learn from this? Especially what NOT to do in case of a complaint.

1. Tell customers exactly what they themselves have done wrong

Without any empathy for the two broken nights and the hassle, these ladies told me that I must have set up the tent wrong. That I was so stupid that I didn't know that all awning zippers always leak. My tip: Show empathy. Empathize. Ask through. Nod, hum. But drop all criticism. You'll only make things worse.

2. Tell what is not possible

The moment I indicated, what I wanted in terms of solution, they immediately told me that this was not possible. They didn't give money back in this kind of situation. And they no longer had airbeds. Strange that the solution in the end was that I got my money back. Thinking with me about other scenarios, that was not an option. My tip: Listen carefully to what the customer wants. Ask through to why they want this solution. Then find out what the possibilities are and think along with them. Ask if this satisfies the customer, then you can be sure you are right.

3. Give a kick after

After they explained that I would get my money back, it was also explained to me in great detail that I should do better next time when choosing a tent. In other words, the tent with the leaky zipper in the awning was my own fault. Because I hadn't done my pre-work properly. My tip: when you have come to a solution, ask if this is a good solution. Then take stock of whether you can help the customer with anything else. I would have liked help buying an air mattress.

Is this only about this outdoor sports store? No! Because this happens a lot more often. Unfortunately. The ladies who helped me were weekend workers, earning extra money as students. Sure they could sell well, but were seriously lacking in the service area. Probably had learned nothing about resolving complaints and the importance of empathy. They followed the internal rules and knew how to explain them to me perfectly. Make sure you have qualified staff. Not only in terms of product knowledge, but also in terms of solving problems. Invest in that, because this costs customers and is bad PR.

The nights over the weekend I had gotten through camping pretty ok, despite the discomfort/ But when dealing with my complaint I felt like I had gone CRAMPING. Unfortunate and unnecessary.

What do you most want an organization to do when you have a complaint? What is crucial to you in resolving it? I'd love to hear it in response to this blog!

PS. I took this photo as a selfie while setting up the tent on Friday.

 

*****

Nienke Bloem is often called the Customer Experience speaker in the blue dress. 

She's a global CX thought leader, educator and a global keynote speaker who inspires audiences with best practices and proven methodologies. She leads a speaking practice, a CX game company and a training business; she breathes Customer Experiences and is author of two CX books.

Her two-day Customer Experience Masterclass is known as the best program to prepare for your CCXP and she is the go-to person for CX leaders who want to advance their leadership and bring direct results from their Customer Experience transformation programs. Since 2020, she hosts a CX Leadership Masterminds program and helps leaders spice up their leadership and deliver an engaging CX Story including a solid CX Strategy. Besides, she is a modern-day pilgrim and found the parallel with leading customer centric transformations. 

With her over 20 years of corporate experience, she speaks the business language. Her keynotes and education programs in Customer Experience are inspiring and hands-on. She is one of the few Recognized Training Partners of the CXPA and it is her mission to Make Customer Experience Work and help you deliver business results.