Customer Experience Patterns Podcast

The Digital-First Customer Experience

Joe Wheeler

Sam Stern

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Transcript

Employee enablement to deliver great customer experiences. If employees don't have information about the customers they're serving or about your intended experience and about how they, as your employees are supposed to deliver their piece of that intended experience.

They're not going to have much chance of success. And further in enablement if their technology, their tools or their training, let them down, well, then it's also unlikely to be a great customer experience. The best customer experiences contain moments of human connection. Your humans, your employees, they need all the support. You can give them to make those moments of human connection Magic.

Employee enablement is a critical often overlooked component of great customer experience. Simply put, without it, you cannot deliver great customer experiences, not for long. I've seen some companies paper over the cracks with a customer centric culture. There was a term for that approach that is pretty fitting. It's called culture driven heroics.

But you rely on your employees to be heroes every day and what happens? They burn out. And then the reality is that the failure of critical systems or the inadequacy of those systems. It can undermine the efforts of even heroic employees, which still leads to bad experiences.

And if systems failures, technology failures, letting down, otherwise customer centric employees, if that sounds like a problem that might've played, some airlines recently, airlines that usually score near the top of the customer experience rankings. Well, trust your instincts.

Foster ownership through customer community. And co-creation, he used the example of VMware, which has a thriving customer community. That is a shining example of the recommendations he made for design strategy. Number four. What I love about this strategy and why I wish I'd brought it up is that it is rare that brands can get on the same side of the table. Metaphorically speaking as their customers.

But a thriving customer community that helps with product Co-creation is certainly one way to do it. When your customers are invested in your success because it's their success, well, here in a different kind of relationship with them, not provider customer, but partners.

I'm not saying that's possible for every company, or in every industry. But it may not be as unlikely as you think. Lemonade, the insurer that Joe featured in his book is an example of a company that aligned its interests with those of its customers through its business model that donation to charities of unused funds means that customers and lemonade are hoping for the same outcome. And in next week's episode, I'll talk about an experience design strategy that some companies are using to find greater alignment with their customers, especially when they can't be sure that all their customers would want the same solution in the design.

There you have it folks, another podcast cliffhanger. You'll just have to come on back next week to hear the rest of the story. Talk to you soon.

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Small world story, and full-circle story. Rick & I met when he was my client at Forrester, and now we were introduced again as people who should be talking. And we have been talking! You'll hear this episode on the Process Renaissance in CX, and then you'll want to find his podcast, CX Passport (links below), and listen to an episode with Rick and I talking about more CX topics.

Rick's Links:

CX Passport YouTube channel youtube.com/@cxpassport

Audio Pod Apple | Spotify or your fave pod site

Sign up for CX Passport newsletter www.cxpassport.com

Accelerate business growth📈 by improving customer experience www.ex4cx.com/services

Rick on LinkedIn

Find Sam on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Full Transcript

Hi, everyone. Another loose threads, missing threads mini episode from the CX patterns podcast with Sam Stern. This week, I wanted to circle back on two things from last week's episode with Megan Burns. The episode was CX transformation needs employee activation. First a loose thread. I had a suspicion I was misattributing the quote to mark Twain when it was someone else's.

And it turns out it was right to doubt myself. It was actually Jonathan swift famous satirist and author of Gulliver's travels among other books, who said you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. As a reminder of the context, Megan and I were talking about the fallacy of CX teams to try to convince their colleagues

of the value of CX by using data to demonstrate its impact. Look, this is a misstep I'm guilty of myself. So not throwing stones here. Uh, but it is important to bear in mind that your colleagues who are reticent or skeptical of CX don't feel that way because they have carefully considered all the data and decided after much reflection that customer experience just isn't worth it.

No. If they've even thought about it at all, And many haven't, they have not given customer experience an in depth evaluation. Count on that.

Now a missing thread. Megan and I perhaps didn't quite emphasize how much activation is an ongoing project. Not a one-off. Look, we didn't say it was easy far from it, but I also want to be clear that once you start focusing on employee activation,

You should know that it is now a longterm part of your CX transformation efforts. It's worth it to get to a point where all employees across your company can make the right contributions to delivering great customer experience. You have to activate them. And then you have to empower enable and inspire them on a continuous basis.

Uh, activation. Is the start and then don't stop.

That's it for now, I'll be back with a full episode next week, excited to share a conversation with another former Forrester colleague. And Hey, if you're wondering if this podcast is just an excuse to have in-depth conversations with smart people, about my favorite topic, customer experience. Well, trust your instincts, Talk to you soon. And if you're enjoying the podcast would be very appreciative if you shared it with someone, you know, who you think might like it as well.

Thanks. Bye.

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The varied career paths that lead to becoming a CX professional. The ways those expeirences help you be better at your job. The ways that focusing on customers can help you in other jobs.

Jeff Louden on LinkedIn

Connect with Sam on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.