Customer Experience FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

OTHER PLAYBOOKS (FAQs):

Customer experience playbook

What is a CX Leading Indicator?

What is a CX Leading Indicator? Leading indicators are what you control and see before customers experience it.

  • How you’re thinking, doing, and handing off your work outputs.
  • How you’re mistake-proofing outputs that customers will experience.

By improving workflow outcomes, tw telecom achieved 27% reduced customer churn, 65% increased Net Promoter Score®, and 20% better performance than competitors in sales, purchasing, ordering, installation, billing, service inquiry, maintenance and account management processes.

Drill-down:

  1. What are the top prevalent issues? (loyalty correlation)
  2. What are they saying about it?
  3. What are the top 80% themes? (80/20 rule)
  4. What is the root cause? (5 why’s)
  5. How will you eradicate the root cause?
  6. How can you monitor this?

This monitor becomes the leading indicator of what they will soon experience, how they will rate it, and financial results.

Examples:

  • % of field engineers certified to top competency
  • % of knowledge database updates before product launch
  • % of work double-checked before releasing
  • % reduction in internal cycle time

 

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What is Expectations VoC?

What is Expectations VoC? Expectations VoC is qualitative research focused on customers’ ultimate reason for wanting the type of solution they get from you. Next, it’s the reason they want it specifically from your brand.

  1. You can discover expectations by listening or reading. Pay attention to customers’ emotions rising: what makes them pleased, concerned, or frustrated?
     
  2. Start with almost-free VoC, such as Customer Service transcripts. In fact, whatever type of CX work you’re doing, you may be collecting almost-free VoC. Capture it for many uses that I’ll point out in this 101 Ways series.
     
  3. Focus first on your top-growth customers (similar to high-potential employees). These are not necessarily top revenue, but they are who you are relying on for Sales momentum in the coming year. Check with whoever does sales forecasting in your firm. You MUST meet top-growth customers’ expectations, as pivotal to this year’s growth.
     
  4. Explore without bias (without grouping or labels of any kind): put all customer comments in the same pool and see what bubbles up naturally.
     
  5. Expectations VoC discovers 2-4 natural themes. For example, one segment consistently prioritizes risk across their journey, whereas another prioritizes empowerment. You’ll find some common threads across age groups, etc. and this is good news: it simplifies “expectations management”. That’s what automatic CX excellence is, remember? Issue-free experience per their expectations.
     
  6. Discover expectations of every role in your customer’s household or business who has a say in buying from you. You must please them all to get their ongoing purchases.
     
  7. Make note of what they care about at each stage of their end-to-end journey with you. You’ll find that almost-free VoC answers the majority of these questions. For each care-about, what is the consequence to them (functional, social, emotional, and financial) and to you (operational and financial) when your performance is inadequate? What are the consequences when it is consistently right for them?

Clear understanding of expectations is the starting point for automatic CX excellence. Expectations VoC is the start for CX design and for customer-centric management. It’s your best path to lowest costs to serve, highest recommendations, and strongest relationships and revenue growth rate.

 

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

 

How to Get CX Buy-In?

Get CX buy-inHow to get CX buy-in? Getting buy-in to any CX effort or purchase is all about MONEY. It’s executives’ job to ensure money outflows maximize money inflows.

So, show relative size. Relative means you’re comparing it versus normal or versus the big picture. Size means percentage of normal or of the big picture. Show relative size as small vs. medium vs. large circles. Or show it by bars.

A particularly effective format is bars above and below a line. The line represents normal or last period or industry performance, etc. Percent is quantity of comments or ratings or returns or hours or any behaviors of customers or those serving customers. Money is any cost or revenue. Partial is fine. Always include a footnote showing source and scope of your data.

When executives see how big the bars are below and above the line, your point becomes crystal clear. If they do nothing, this is the size of your business that may be affected.

For CX buy-in, your goal is to inspire them to exclaim: “That can’t stand!” When they feel this, it means you’re getting their buy-in: commitment to make change happen.

 

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

https://customerthink.com/how-to-motivate-executive-buy-in-for-cx-ex-and-px/

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

 

What is Outer Loop VoC?

What is outer loop VoC? Outer loop VoC permanently removes pebbles from all customers’ shoes. Outer loop refers to closed-loop communication with customers who have provided feedback to you. In outer loop VoC, you tell customers about their top issues you will solve, promise a date for sharing your progress, and keep customers informed about how you are preventing recurrence of these issues.

outer loop voc

7 ways YOU can influence this:

1. Identify customer issue trends (data mining, dispositioning, etc.)

2. Share insights with groups who originate or perpetuate issues.

3. Show them the issues’ costs to you and customers.

4. Facilitate a 2-hour root cause exercise.

5. Guide their action plan to stop root causes.

6. Influence full deployment of the actions.

7. Celebrate action progress in recognition and compensation.

Not new: Both loops have been in practice since the late 1980s! Inner loop is more popular: it’s quicker, easier, and feeds business models of CX tech firms. However, inner loop can exhaust energy. Inner loop acknowledges a pebble or removes it for 1 customer at a time, usually as a temporary fix, without benefitting all customers. And when CX issues recur, ROI of inner loop is questionable.

Reality check: As an employee, do you want managers to acknowledge your concern and make a quick fix, yet continue to pursue business as usual? Or do you prefer managers to get to the root cause of your concern and prevent recurrence forever? That’s the difference between inner loop and outer loop.

Allocate at least 50% of your energy and resources to outer loop.

7 ways outer loop maximizes value:

1. Shifts value-rescuing to value-creating. Save precious budget!

2. Value-creating builds current and future growth.

3. Frees-up customers to be more productive with you.

4. Makes non-customer-facing groups more customer-centric. (they throw less stuff over the wall to customer touchpoints)

5. Improves employee experience in customer-facing roles.

6. Shapes lifetime value mindset companywide.

7. Makes our society less bogged down and more prosperous.

 

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

 

What is Almost-Free VoC?

almost free vocWhat is almost-free VoC? Almost-free VoC is customer insights volunteered by customers or collected in your processes to conduct business. Almost-free VoC is like “cash in the attic” ready to inspire your firm.

Opportunities for almost-free VoC:

1. Encourage everyone to read customer comments.

  • Make comments the highlight of your VoC reports.
  • Feature a customer comment/story daily on your Intranet.
  • Share comments that can be meeting agenda items.
  • Stream relevant comments to groups originating issues.

2. Create a central repository.

  • Allow all formats of customer feedback to be stored.
  • Motivate customers and employees to share anything anytime.
  • Include customer research done by others: Marketing, R&D, etc.
  • Include digital customer data (CRM, loyalty, apps, etc., etc.)
  • Conduct focus groups or similar quarterly/etc.
    • with customer-facing people
    • with executive counterparts

3. Maximize data mining: text, voice, video.

  • Look for patterns that stimulate fresh thinking
    • for every process,  policy, strategy
    • for every work group

Best ways to use surveys:

1. Ask what you don’t know after learning from almost-free VoC
2. Validate whether customers notice changes you’re making
3. Fine-tune alignment of processes and policies to customers

 

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

 

What is Customer Experience?

What is Customer Experience? Customer experience is what a customer experiences: customers’ perceptions about how well a solution supports their intended outcomes.

Customer experience is measured by customers’ realities vs. their expectations.

Customer experience is not a recent invention. The first customer experience happened when the first people on earth bartered.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

 

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

 

What is CX?

What is CX? CX represents what customers experience as well as the career field of customer experience management, which may also be abbreviated as CEX, CEM, CXM, CustExp particularly for social media hashtags. Customer experience is what a customer experiences: customers’ perceptions about how well a solution supports their intended outcomes.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

 

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

 

What Makes a Great Customer Experience?

What Makes a Great Customer Experience? A great customer experience happens when what’s received matches or exceeds what was promised. This may be in the moment, but more importantly, it’s a series of consistent occurrences, since customer experience is cumulative.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is Customer Experience Management?

What is Customer Experience Management? Customer experience management is what an organization does to react to or be proactive for customer experience: an organization’s (a) remedies for potential customer turnover and (b) efforts to nurture customers as brand allies.

It’s measured by (a) retained customers vs. lost customers and (b) positive word-of-mouth minus negative word-of-mouth.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is Customer Experience Leadership?

What is Customer Experience Leadership? Customer experience leadership is organization-wide alignment to core-growth customers’ expectations. This is automatic CX excellence. The goal is maximum lifetime value by improving prosperity of customers, employees, and partners. Your value increases as theirs does, whenever mutual productivity and trust are at the center of your efforts.

Experience leadership is measured by prevention of issue occurrence, or what was delivered vs. what was promised.

Your highest growth comes from Experience Leadership, because it minimizes costs and maximizes success of every growth initiative.

“Experience Leadership” is a phrase coined by Lynn Hunsaker at ClearAction Continuum.

Consider how the Experience Management discipline parallels the evolution of the HR discipline. It started out as Personnel, then Employee Relations, and eventually, end-to-end Human Resources with Organizational Development and Employee Experience. Similar parallels can be found in IT, Safety, etc. Value evolved by shifting from reactive to proactive modes, from control to empower, and from standalone function to working through ALL managers.

Here’s what this looks like for Customer Experience, Employee Experience, and Partner Experience value evolution:

1) Touchpoint Management

  • Technical Support, Customer Success, Loyalty Programs, CRM, . . .
  • Set of practices to retain and expand revenue.
  • One-by-one guidance and programs.
  • To reverse churn and drive cross-sells and up-sells.

2) Experience Management

  • Journey Mapping, VoX, Human-Centered Design, Net Promoter System, . . .
  • Set of practices to meet (or exceed) expectations.
  • Interaction-based, programmatic.
  • To engage customers, employees, and partners as brand allies for revenue growth.

3) Experience Leadership

  • Brand integrity: company-wide alignment to core stakeholders’ expectations.
  • Set of practices to empower full productivity. (internal and external)
  • Culture-based, strategic, most profitable and scalable.
  • To engage your ecosystem in preventing roadblocks to lifetime value growth.
  • Balance among these 3 tiers, with emphasis on Experience Leadership, is vital for today’s crisis of trust among employees, partners, and customers as the 3 hands that feed organizational success.

Experience Leadership is a Team Sport

  • A team sport means every player is essential to winning.
  • A mis-step by any work group in your enterprise can spoil CX, EX, or PX.
  • Pebbles in customers’ (or employees’ or partners’) shoes hold them back from full productivity with your brand.
  • Preventing and resolving pebbles requires customer-centered proactive mindsets and cross-organizational collaboration.
  • Customers pay for salaries, budgets and profit sharing. Their needs are the context and joys for EX and PX.
  • Making CX a team sport means you’re making customer-centered thinking and doing a way of life for all.

customer experience management

  • Automatic experience excellence is ironically, far more than AI, apps, and automation.
    • For employee experience, it means people who are unified, appreciative, competent, respectful of inter-dependencies, and contributing to your values and goals.
    • Likewise, automatic CX excellence means your whole company is unified in its appreciation of customers’ preferences and values and goals — and everyone is competent and coordinated toward customers’ values and goals.

 

  • Core-growth customers are your near-future high-revenue, high-margin customers. Get crystal clear about their expectations for your brand’s magnetic attraction to these customers. Make their end-to-end customer experience at or above their expectations. What you learn by doing this will benefit all your customers. Expand your excellent performance to next-level/all customers as your bandwidth allows.
  • In contrast to “management” controlling performance toward a goal, “leadership” influences and aligns (de-silo-izes) performance.

 

  • Shift from the 2010s to the 2020s! Trust and value are based on alignment. The goal is lifetime value.
    • From 2009 to 2019, the global economic downturn put revenue as top customer experience focus.
    • For 2020 to the future, the global pandemic affected every individual, family, and organization: everyone is hungry for TRUST and VALUE.
    • Bonus #1: Revenue is included in lifetime value. AND you get MUCH more than revenue!
    • Bonus #2: Trust, value, alignment, and lifetime value apply equally to employee experience, customer experience, and partner experience.

101 ways exist for YOU to shape automatic CX excellence. It’s all in how you collect, communicate, and champion customer insights!

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

Why is Customer Experience Important?

Why is Customer Experience Important? Customers are your primary source of revenue, budgets, salaries, and dividends. Feed the hand that feeds you.

A 1-to-1 ratio between customers’ realities vs. expectations minimizes waste and attracts both new and returning customers.

“Over a 10-year horizon, FoEs (firms of endearment) outperformed the Good to Great companies by a 3.1-to-1 ratio,” reports the book, Firms of Endearment, by Rajendra Sisodia et al. “The public FoEs returned 1,026% for investors . . . compared to 122% for the S&P 500; that’s more than an 8-to-1 ratio!”

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

 

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

 

What is B2B Customer Experience vs. B2C Customer Experience?

What is B2B Customer Experience vs. B2C Customer Experience? B2B customer experience is business-to-business CX, where both the buyer and the seller are businesses. B2C customer experience is business-to-consumer CX, where the seller is a business and the buyer is a consumer such as a household or individual who is buying something for personal use.

B2B CX typically involves numerous people in the customer’s company having a role in buying decisions.

B2B CX often has longer buying cycles, higher purchase amounts, longer period of interactions between buyer and seller, and higher risks to the customer in both personal and business aspects.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

How to Measure Customer Experience?

How to Measure Customer Experience? Measure it by how well you are delivering what you promised to deliver, as seen by your customers. To do this, most companies survey customers. It’s also possible to monitor internally if you clearly understand customers’ expectations as your performance standards.

Most companies measure customer experience through customers’ ratings of likelihood to recommend them or level of satisfaction or amount of effort required by the customer.

  1. Consider whether your measurements are company-centric or customer-centric: are you really measuring how good the customer experience is, or are you measuring the value received by your company? If not, switch to customer-centric phrasing in surveys and translate responses to business goals in your reporting.
  2. Another pitfall is assuming that customer service experience or survey participation is the right basis for evaluating the customer experience your company is providing.
    • Keep in mind that customer experience spans the spectrum of selecting, getting, and using a solution.
      • Therefore, customer service is typically a small part of that spectrum.
      • Also, is ideal experience for customers inclusive (or preventive) of the need for customer service?
      • Make sure your primary survey report to executives covers the end-to-end customer experience.
  3. Remember that survey participants are only a fraction of your customer base.
    • If you are assuming that survey findings reflect how well your company is performing, make sure you are conducting a stratified random sample with strong validity.
    • Then evaluate whether the highest ratings are from your core-growth or non-core-growth customers.
  4. Ultimately, customer experience measurement should inform you about:
    • Gaps between what’s delivered versus promised
    • Customer expectations as your performance standards
    • Your potential risks versus rewards for acting or not acting on customer experience insights.
  5. To choose what’s best, discover how your customers naturally assess the goodness of their experience, especially as it relates to their intended outcomes.
  6. Then setup your customized method according to what makes the most sense to (a) customers’ viewpoint and (b) managers’ actionability.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

 

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateAdvanced.
  5. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department through the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

 

How to Start Customer Experience Management

How to Start Customer Experience Management: Start customer experience management with your business objective and a plan for who should do what, when and why.

Avoid the temptation to buy a technology or start a survey until you have created your plan.

1) Example business objective: retention, differentiation, industry leadership, customer value, profitability, or risk minimization.
2 ) Who are your core-growth customers? What do you already know about your them regarding this business objective?
3 ) Who in your company (and its ecosystem) is a contributor to these customers’ behaviors regarding this business objective?
4 ) How has a previous initiative with these contributors succeeded or failed? What lessons learned can you borrow?
5 ) How can you engage these contributors in aligning their behaviors with your answer to question 2 above? What will you need to do to minimize their resistance and workarounds, and to maintain their ongoing energy for these behaviors?
6) Referring to your answer to question 2 above, what will make the most sense to your customers as ways to engage them toward your business objective?
7) How can you tie-in your answers to questions 5-6 to the routines of contributors and customers? Routines include planning cycles, reviews, meetings, and so on.
8) Communicate your answers to questions 5-7 above to the contributors and engage them in making a difference.
9) Engage customers, buy technologies, and so on in accordance with your answer to question 8.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

How to Increase Customer Experience Scores?

How to Increase Customer Experience Scores? The prerequisite for sustainable improvement of survey scores is to act systemically on what customers have told you. Systemic action is resolution of root causes, to prevent recurrence of an issue. By taking systemic action, you’ll save time and resources for your own company and for customers, earning ongoing rewards from both existing and new customers.

  1. Conduct a correlation analysis between an independent variable (e.g. loyalty, NPS, likely to rebuy, overall satisfaction) and each dependent variable (e.g. survey ratings of user-friendliness, knowledgeability, responsiveness, etc.). The highest correlation coefficients are key drivers.
  2. Conduct a Pareto analysis of each key driver. Rank-order the frequency of themes related to the key driver (e.g. from customer comments, returned materials, inquiries, complaints, or other operational data). The top themes that total 80% of all themes are your vital few improvement priorities, whereas the rest of the themes are the useful many areas for quick wins. All of the themes are symptoms of a root cause.
  3. Quantify the monetary impact of the vital few themes: how much are these themes costing customers? how much are they costing your company? how much revenue is represented by the affected customers? Any data you have will be useful — just explain that this is the tip of the iceberg. Share this monetary report with executives to stimulate their passion for driving improvement.
  4. Conduct a root cause analysis of each vital few theme. Ask “why are we allowing this to happen?” Typically, the answer to the 5th round of this question is the true root cause. This is what team members should focus on improving!
  5. Identify a metric you can track for this root cause. It must be an internal metric that predicts the symptom. Accordingly, this internal metric will be predictive of customer experience scores and financial performance.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

Why Improve Customer Experience?

Why Improve Customer Experience? The costs of poor customer experience are staggering: negative word-of-mouth erodes marketing, high costs of customer support and customer success to smooth over the rest of the company’s incongruencies and mis-steps, escalation involving executives’ time and opportunity costs, customer turnover curtailing lifetime value, customer acquisition costs to replace discontinuing customers, distrust lengthens buying cycle time, and so on.

The revenue gains are impressive: a study by the London School of Economics discovered 3X increase in revenue by reducing negative word-of-mouth compared to increasing positive word-of-mouth.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

(study report PDF)

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

How Can You Improve Customer Experience?

How Can You Improve Customer Experience? There are 3 levels of customer experience improvement: resolve the instance, prevent recurrence, and prevent occurrence.

1) Listen to customers. What’s costing them the most worry, time, and money? These are your top improvement priorities.

2) For greater clarity, ask customers to rate various aspects of their realities with your solution, plus an overall loyalty question.

a) Then conduct a correlation analysis to identify which CX aspect is strongly correlated with overall loyalty.
b) Next, conduct a Pareto analysis to identify which subthemes of that CX aspect are the vital few contributors to customers’ grief.
c) Then conduct a 5-why’s analysis to identify the root cause of the vital few subthemes. Make a plan to prevent the root cause!
d) Maintain high visibility of each action plan: review in staff meetings, ops reviews, senior execs’ preparation for analyst calls, etc.

You may find this recipe sufficient for driving significant changes and CX ROI. Journey mapping is optional, not required.

Customer experience improvement is the heart of customer experience ROI. Directional correctness is typically sufficient. Emphasize prevention of root causes, rather than quick fixes or analysis paralysis.


 
See also: Customer Experience Playbook

 

SIPOC?

SIPOC is an acronym used in process management: Suppliers provide Inputs to Processes which produce Outputs to Customers. The customer-centric version is backwards: COPIS. Customers’ realities vs. expectations gaps determine the Outcomes needed from our Processes and Inputs from Suppliers. This is the key to identifying and focusing on true leading indicators of customer experience ROI. Since customers experience the outcomes of your company’s processes, dissatisfaction points to under-performing processes. See this FAQ: “How You Can Improve Customer Experience?

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

VoC Acronym?

VoC is voice of the customer, or feedback and inputs from customers. VoC can be customer-initiated or company-initiated. VoC is data, whereas Customer Intelligence applies managerial meaning to VoC by connecting various sources and discovering patterns that compel managers to act wisely on the insights.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

How to Collect Voice of Customer?

How to Collect Voice of Customer? Ask for feedback only as often as changes occur in customers’ expectations or in solving a prevalent customer issue.

Use customer insights (a) to educate all groups in your company of their performance standards based on customer expectations, (b) to prevent recurrence of prevalent customer issues, and (c) to check customer acknowledgement of issue resolution trends you’re tracking internally.

1) Allow customers to give feedback anytime, anywhere, any way they prefer.
a) Make a QR code or URL available everywhere possible to encourage customers to initiate feedback.
b) Enable customers to give feedback in any format: photo, video, verbal, written, or ratings.

2) Act on almost-free VoC before requesting customer feedback. Almost-free VoC is customer-initiated feedback from their interactions with your service, success, sales, and marketing organizations, alliance partners, and channel partners.

3) Invest in text-mining and similar software capabilities to make the greatest use of almost-free VoC.

4) Use wisdom you’ve gained from almost-free VoC to expand depth or breadth of insights from other unstructured feedback sources such as customer advisory boards, user groups, front-line listening and executive listening sessions, and so on.

5) Use wisdom you’ve gained from all the above to expand depth or breadth of insights from transaction surveys and relationship surveys.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is a Customer Experience Journey?

What is a Customer Experience Journey? A customer experience journey is what a group of similar customers see, hear, taste, think, feel, and do from the time they are aware they need a solution until they deem the solution as no longer needed.

A journey map summarizes a customer experience journey in columns for the steps customers take and with icons or pictures to represent what customers care about, their expectations, consequences when things go well or not, and the solution provider’s performance gaps.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

Centric Definition?

Centric Definition? Centric means what’s at the center of one’s focus. Product-centric means products are the central focus. Customer-centric means customers are the central focus.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

Experience Definition?

Experience Definition? Experience is the totality of what a person sees, hears, touches, smells, tastes, feels, and thinks about a solution.

This applies to customer experience, patient experience, member experience, employee experience, partner experience, and so on.

Experience occurs in a moment, yet it is also additive: the sum of all experiences a person has with a solution shapes their expectations and overall assessment of good or bad experience with the solution.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is Customer Centricity?

What is Customer Centricity? Customer-centricity is the degree to which customers are the central focus. Since culture is a group’s ways of thinking and doing, customer-centric culture is the degree to which customers are respected in a group’s decision-making and actions.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is a Customer Experience North Star?

What is a Customer Experience North Star? Customer experience north star is your senior leadership team’s commitment to running the business in accordance with your core-growth customers’ expectations as the primary basis for all decisions.

The foundation of your north star is intentional customer experience: a description of how you want your customers to feel across their end-to-end journey with your brand.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

How to Lead Customer Experience?

How to Lead Customer Experience? To lead customer experience in your company and industry, close negative gaps between what’s delivered and what’s promised.

  1. Get crystal clear about what your customers perceive as what’s promised, within the context of their intended outcomes.
  2. Educate every group in your company about these findings as each group’s performance standards.
  3. Engage every group in closing the gap and preventing gaps in customer-centric ways. Focus on TRUST and PREVENTION.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is Customer Experience Strategy?

What is Customer Experience Strategy? Customer experience strategy is executives’ shared vision on how customer-centered business will maximize value.

  1. Start with your core-growth customers’ expectations as your company’s North Star.
  2. Reality-check your corporate objectives, values, structure, cap-ex criteria, and so on relative to the North Star.
  3. Reality-check your reviews, agendas, development objectives, recognition criteria, and so on relative to the North Star.
  4. Plan how you will bring to life and make these a way of life throughout your company: VoC, customer intelligence, customer lifetime value, customer experience improvement, design, and innovation, employee engagement in CX, customer engagement, and CX performance metrics.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is a Customer Experience Roadmap?

What is a Customer Experience Roadmap? A customer experience roadmap is a timeline that sets milestones for increased levels of customer experience maturity.

  1. Mobilize CX management: engage contributors of customer experience issues in resolving these issues.
  2. Operationalize CX management: routinize CX efforts with your company’s annual calendar.
  3. Align CX management: align customer insights to each issue contributor, in turn, they align their work to customer insights.
  4. Embed CX management: weave-in CX criteria to reviews, approvals, agendas, development, advancement, rewards, and so on.

For best results, put the basics all CXM building blocks in place within this next year and move to higher sophistication yearly.

CXM building blocks: VoC → customer intelligence → customer lifetime value → customer-centered corporate strategy → customer-centered culture → CX improvement → CX design and innovation → customer engagement → CX metrics.

Ideally, you will be embedding, aligning, and operationalizing from the start of your customer experience management efforts, with the basics first, graduating to more sophistication year by year.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is a Chief Customer Officer?

What is a Chief Customer Officer? A chief customer officer facilitates company-wide ownership of customer experience performance and value.

Chief Customer Officers are often mis-directed to drive revenue or customer touchpoints. Typically, there are already people in place to do this. The best use of a Chief Customer Officer is to facilitate every work group’s performance across your enterprise in (a) preventing issues and (b) increasing trust.

When your Chief Customer Officer reports to the CEO and is positioned as a facilitator of prevention and trust, every work group does their part toward almost-automatic experience excellence. This is vital, because any work group’s mis-step can make a mess of customer experience, reputation, and investor value.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What Does a Customer Experience Team Do?

What Does a Customer Experience Team Do? A customer experience team facilitates prevention of customer issues, to ensure what’s delivered matches what’s promised.

There are different types of customer experience teams. Your company probably has many existing work groups who are shaping and delivering what customers experience. All of these efforts should report dotted-line to the Chief Customer Officer. A relatively small core team reporting directly to the Chief Customer Officer should be facilitators of every work group’s issue-prevention and trust-building. This is the path to almost-automatic experience excellence.

When every customer touchpoint reports directly to the Chief Customer Officer, then the non-customer-facing work groups tend to abdicate their responsibility to be aligned with customers. They assume all of that is being handled by customer-facing people. In reality, a large percentage of customer issues is inadvertently caused by non-customer-facing groups. This is why your whole company’s ecosystem must be in-tune with customer expectations, to ensure excellent performance for customers. Being in-tune minimizes waste and maximizes success of every growth initiative, which means maximum value for investors.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is Customer Service vs. Customer Experience?

What is Customer Service vs. Customer Experience? Customer service is typically post-sale reactive assistance to customers who have a question or complaint.

Customer experience includes customer service as well as pre-sale assistance by marketing and sales and others, customer success, and many aspects of the customer journey that are not direct interactions with the seller.

Ideally, customers would need customer service only when there is a change in the customer’s life situation, such as location, name, weather effects, etc. To achieve this, the seller must be fully aligned to customers’ expectations.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is Customer Success vs. Customer Experience?

What is Customer Success vs. Customer Experience? Customer success is typically post-sale proactive assistance to ensure customers’ objectives are met.

Customer experience includes customer success as well as pre-sale assistance by marketing and sales and others, customer service, and many aspects of the customer journey that are not direct interactions with the seller.

Customer success is most common in B2B firms with software as a service, to increase the likelihood that customers will renew their subscriptions.

Ideally, expectations VoC educates every group in the seller’s business about customers’ objectives and expectations to minimize gaps between what’s delivered and what’s promised. This would make customers’ success almost automatic.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What is Customer Effort vs. Customer Satisfaction?

What is Customer Effort vs. Customer Satisfaction? Customer effort is an evaluation of how easy it is for a customer to get an answer or remedy via customer service.

Customer satisfaction includes customer effort as well as how well the answer or remedy met the customer’s expectations.

Customer effort is typically evaluated by customers through a post-service survey question. For example, on a scale from very difficult to very easy, how easy was it to get what you needed? This is used by customer service managers to fine-tune technology, processes, policies, staffing, and agents’ interactions with customers.


 
See also: Customer Experience Playbook

 

What is Customer Loyalty vs. Customer Value?

What is Customer Loyalty vs. Customer Value? Customer loyalty is a customer’s insistence on a certain brand. Customer value is two-fold: (1) benefits of a brand to a customer and (2) benefits of a customer to a brand.

Value is evaluated by each party and it is relative to alternatives available to each party.

The denominator of value quantifies what is spent, such as money, time, stress, resources, and opportunity costs.

The numerator of value quantifies what is gained, such as solution, interaction, relationship, and opportunities.
Both customer loyalty and customer value should be mutual and nurture seller-buyer relationship strength.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is Product Centric vs. Customer Centric?

What is Product Centric vs. Customer Centric? Product-centric means products are the central focus. Customer-centric means customers are the central focus.

When you are focused on customers, you are more likely to create and deliver high-value products, for which customers will continually reward you.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is Brand Experience vs. Customer Experience?

What is Brand Experience vs. Customer Experience? Brand experience is what drives target customers’ perceptions, emotions, and preferences, which influence their purchase and usage behaviorCustomer experience management is what an organization does to react to or be proactive for customer experience. Therefore, brand experience is a component of customer experience management.

The phrase, Brand Experience (BX), was coined by Qualtrics to guide marketing professionals in improving customer experience. Customer experience is what a customer experiences: their perceptions about how well a solution supports their intended outcomes.

 

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is Customer Centric vs. Customer Focused?

What is Customer Centric vs. Customer Focused? Customer-centric means customers are the central focus. Likewise, customer-focused means customers are the central focus.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

What is CX vs. UX?

What is CX vs. UX? UX is user experience and CX is customer experience. UX is an approach to product development that incorporates direct user feedback throughout the development cycle (human-centered design) in order to reduce costs and create products and tools that meet user needs and have a high level of usability (are easy to use). https://uxpa.org/about-ux

CX is what a customer experiences: their perceptions about how well a solution supports their intended outcomes. Customer experience management is what an organization does to react to or be proactive for customer experience. Therefore, UX is a component of customer experience management.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

  1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
  2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
  3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
  4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
  5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: FoundationalIntermediateOngoing.
  6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletters:

  1. ‘Ease of Work & Business’ Growth for your C-Suite and Board.
  2. CX Skill-Building for Marketing, PX, CX, CS, and EX professionals’ self-managed career growth.
    YOU are a vital cog in your enterprise’s success in the ways you collect, share, and advocate experience insights!
  3. Clear Ways to Influence Action for CMOs and CCOs’ indispensable value.
  4. ClearAction Continuum newsletter: weekly CX ROI lesson and roundup of what’s new and upcoming.

Experience Leadership Mastery for everyone

customer, partner & employee experience excellence

Get your whole department on the same page! Cross-pollinate!
Live or self-paced sessions mix participants from all 3 levels, with online resources tailored to each level.

customer experience skills for all managers

Foundations
For all experience managers

Intermediate customer experience training

Intermediate
For seasoned XM managers
100% prep for certification

Experts' Experience Leadership

Advanced
For VPs, authors, CCXPs, etc.

customer experience faq playbook

Customer experience is a team sport.
Everyone has a ripple effect on customers.

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