Top 10 Take-Aways From CXPA Members Insight Exchange Event

I am home from San Diego, and the withdrawal is complete. I am determined to make the awesome CXPA event I attended last week go further than getting me pumped up about CX only for a few days before I settle back into the daily grind.  As I review my notes for sharing with my partners at the office, I thought it might be fun to assemble a top 10 list to summarize the event.

Please don't expect anything close to David Letterman's humor from me, but what better way to pull so many disparate ideas together into one post?

10. I am not alone! There are lots of super cool people from all different backgrounds forging the path for the CX professional.And many people have been at this for years.
9. People with a CX focus are outgoing, friendly, and welcoming. No offense IT conferences - but this was a whole new experience for me attending an event where most people were socializing, and enjoying it.
8. Building an ROI case for CX is no different than building an ROI case for any other business initiative. There is no magic bullet, but the same basic templates apply. And the ROI should be a supporting backdrop to the obvious return conveyed by the business problem description. Everybody has to rely on plenty of assumptions, so the key is ensuring the assumptions are documented and reasonable.
7. The CXPA vibe feel entrepreneurial to me. I love working with entrepreneurs. This is a new, and growing organization with goals to help establish a budding profession.
6. The best CX companies get that their culture, driven from the executive level, sets the stage for delivering a superior CX AND employee experience.
5. The excitement around a company who really gets CX is contagious regardless of the company's product. Fabulous CX fills a gap in what can otherwise be a disconnected business world. With the reliance on social media, texting, mobile devices, websites, and IVR instead of face to face relationships between the customer and the organization, companies that get how to establish and maintain that connection are exciting, sometimes in spite of the product they deliver. Great examples from the conference include 1-800-Got-Junk, Umbqua Bank, Signature Healthcare, and USAA. Hire leadership based on their commitment to the culture, and remove leadership immediately who do not live and breath your culture.
4. VOE - the Voice of the Employee is an invaluable tool. Don't forget to talk to your employees (front-line, not just leadership) to gain their insights on what your customers need and want. Empower and expect them to deliver it.
3. Like 1-800-Got-Junk does, motivate your company be rewarding all employees based on NPS (Net Promoter Score) rather than revenue.
2. NPS - I feel there is a huge opportunity to make this measurement more meaningful. When you only hear back from 10% of your customer base as a benchmark, how can you make the best decisions about the whole of your customer base. I understand why the benchmark is what it is, but I think it is time to make it better.
1. The role of IT - as I spent time in the sessions and in networking, it was more and more clear to me what a unique animal I was at the conference.I come from IT. Few others at the conference did - they mostly came from marketing. IT has an opportunity to help organizations use technology to make CX innovative and a differentiator. IT leaders need to ensure their focus is on the CX rather than holding up the old adage of IT as a cost center.

As soon as I finished the above list, a bunch more items popped into my head.  I really enjoyed the conference, and highly recommend it for the next time around for those who are passionate about CX.

CXPA Members Insight Exchange Event

I am en route to the CXPA Members Insight Exchange Event.  I have been looking forward to this for a while.  Side note - in flight wifi is a great example of anticipating my needs as a business flyer.  However, charging for checked bags then not having space for the allotted carry-on luggage is an example of a customer interaction I would give a red to in overall health.

I may end up being a track-jumper at the conference.  I am particulary interesting in getting more insights to how to caluclate the ROI.  While I feel it makes perfect sense that delighted customers will remain loyal, result in a lower cost of sales, and spend more money with your organization than dissatisfied, or merely satisfied customer will, I am very interested in how people are calculating and measuring this.  Just as with streamlining processes, there are so many soft returns and measures you cannot unequivocally tie back to the customer experience initiatives.



How do you estimate ROI, and how do you prove after the fact that your estimates were valid?


I am also interested in learning how others are leveraging the power of social media to make marked improvement in learning from, reacting to, and proactively improving the customer experience through word-of-mouth.


I will keep you posted.

Engage Your Customer...

I liked this post title - and wholeheartedly agree.

Are You Obsessive About Customer Experience

I was reading a great post by Megan Burns about obsessing over the customer experience.  In reading the blog posting, I questioned how much my organization obsesses about the customer experience.  We strive for customer satisfaction, but do we obsess?

As I shared the blog post with others on my team, I quickly realized that if I focused too much on whether my company is obsessing, I lose the opportunity to be obsessive myself.  I changed the thought process in my mind from is my organization obsessing about our customer experience to am *I* obsessing about our customer experience.  The change in thinking helped me move outside of thinking of customer experience as a large universe over which I have no control to a realm I can impact.

So for today, I WILL obsess about customer experience.  If everybody else in my company did the same thing, then the answer we be YES my company does obsess about customer experience.

Now I have to put it into action...