Charging into the new year, it’s easy to want to name what’s ahead of us. I am seeing a few enthusiastic sorts claiming 2020 will be “The Year of Experience,” “When Experience Finally Wins” or “The Year of the Customer.” I ask you to greet these well-meaning mantras with appropriate suspicion. For one, a quick […]

I’m weirdly excited about this year. 2020 – a year of vision! (See what I did there?) This time of year is all about the BIG plans. We’re going to eat healthier, get better sleep and drink more water, right? Of course. We’re also going to execute big strategies based on big plans in our […]

The goal of learning in any workplace is to be, well, better. Better at serving customers. Better at increasing efficiency. Better at employee development. Better at staying ahead of the competition. All of that is achievable with the options in learning today, but how often are we really taking advantage of it? The learning paths for everyone should […]

Customer Experience Leaders Have a Global Customer Focus Even after over a decade of helping small and large businesses alike, I still meet leaders who believe that Customer Experience is just about call-center scripts or proper protocols around customer complaints. As you and I both know, dear reader, it’s so much more than that. The […]

Leaders want to deliver exceptional experiences. We all want to deliver for our customers, starting with a sales experience that builds trust between our organization and our buyers. After all, sales sets the stage for the entire customer journey. Sales is where current challenges are discussed and in turn, promises are made. Those promises may be made with the […]

ALL Leaders Experience Leadership Bias… There is a natural conflict of interest between companies and customers. It’s natural for any organization to have goals that don’t align perfectly with the goals of their customers. And there can certainly be natural conflicts of interest within the organization as well — between leaders and employees, between departments, […]

The employee experience can feel hard to manage. As leaders, we ask our employees to care about a lot of things, even those that are only tangentially related to their job descriptions. As an industry, we’re overwhelming employees with messages about the next big thing they need to learn… Digital Transformation! Personalization! Blockchain Technology! And […]

It’s easy to underestimate the efforts it requires to become a truly customer-centric organization. Brave leaders do their best to lead customer experience initiatives that make an impact. But there are processes, protocols and even people who are obstacles to seeing results.   What is the Customer Experience Gap?   The customer experience gap is […]

It wasn’t THAT long ago when business planning and strategy simply didn’t include the term “customer experience.” There are plenty of organizations that successfully earned customers, kept those customers, and didn’t think much about the actual experience they were providing. The formula for success often didn’t even require gathering customer feedback, let alone responding to […]

As a whole, we don’t really enjoy talking about customer experience basics. Instead, the conversation around CX often centers around the pull-a-rabbit-out-of-a-hat, OHMYGOD moments that amaze customers and offer those oft-discussed but hard-to-achieve moments of surprise and delight. Phew. Even just writing about those is exhilarating. And sort of exhausting. We love talking about those […]