Category Archives: Customer Experience

MrBeast and the Customer Experience Audit

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MrBeast and the Customer Experience Audit

by Braden Kelley

There is a reason why Walmart is flipping the typical retail salary model on its head to pay managers in stores MORE than some managers at its corporate headquarters. The stores pay for the HQ, not the other way around! AND, the stores is where the best information lives for manufacturers selling to Walmart and other retailers.

Enter MrBeast, who sells most of his Feastables chocolate through Walmart. So, what has he been doing since launching the product – over and over and over again?

Conducting a partial customer experience audit by visiting stores all around the country to see how the displays look, sometimes enlisting third parties (even customers and impromptu GoPro cameras) to help him gather information when he isn’t doing it first-hand.

Here is a snippet of a recent video podcast interview of him talking about it:

Some other retailers, like Starbucks, try, but not very hard, to have corporate managers spend time in the stores (a few hours when they first join, never to return) but I think the last CEO might have done away with it completely. It will be interesting to see if the new CEO encourages corporate HQ staff to get out into the stores more – after he finishes laying off 10% of the headquarters staff.

Does your company require headquarters staff to spend time in the field?

Or, do a high percentage of them voluntarily do it regularly?

Doing so does not replace regular independent customer experience audits, but it helps.

Do you need someone to come conduct an independent experience audit of your customer, employee and/or partner experiences?


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The Worst British Customer Experiences of 2024

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The Worst British Customer Experiences of 2024

by Braden Kelley

Every year The Guardian, a newspaper in the United Kingdom (UK) looks not just at companies delivering stellar customer service, but APPALLING customer service as well.

In this article we’ll look at some of the organizations they highlighted in their latest iteration and what we can learn from them.

In looking at the article, the first thing that jumps out – primarily from the tongue in cheek approach of the author – is that many customer service mishaps come from employees following rules instead of sensibilities.

From pensioners being denied their walking sticks, blind athletes being denied their service dogs, to academics writing the occasional book being denied auto insurance – when companies demand that their employees serve their rules more than they serve their customers, bad customer experiences follow.

Without further ado, here are the seven organizations rewarded, ahem honored, ahem shamed by the article:

1. Teachers Pensions, run by Capita (a Business Process Outsourcing firm (BPO)) earned the glorious honor of being the first organization celebrated for their dubious practices of regularly requiring recipients to confirm that they are not dead and to answer whether or not they have taken on a new lover.

2. U.K. Government launched a program to encourage homeowners to insulate their homes, but spray foam insulation (one of the options) when poorly installed can cause roofing materials to rot and for the home if it fails inspection to become illegal to sell until the homeowner pays to have the insulation removed.

3. Eurostar in their brilliance decided it was too dangerous for their employees to push personal wheelchairs any longer and neglected to tell customers booking assistance of this change, leaving them stranded on the station concourse unless they had paid for a companion to travel with them. Eurostar eventually changed this new policy after the Observer reported the issue to U.K. regulators.

4. British Airways landed on the list with two tales of woe, the most egregious being that of a passenger that was prevented from reaching her grandmother’s deathbed by preventing her from boarding, forcing her to buy a new ticket to fly the next day, and canceling her return flight for good measure. They finally provided compensation after the fact once presented with a lawyer’s opinion by the staff of The Guardian on behalf of the customer.

5. Sheffield Council towed a car, didn’t notify the owner, forgot they had it, and then when they discovered it in their impound yard a year later (badly degraded) they demanded the owner collect it in two days and paid storage fees of about $6,000 it would be destroyed. The owner had reported the car stolen, received an insurance settlement and the insurance company, as you might expect, wanted its money back when they learned of the situation.

6. Amazon showed up on their list because their employees (or agents) began engaging in a scam where one-time passwords (OTP) were said by delivery drivers not to be working and so they wouldn’t deliver the item, but then the item showed as delivered in Amazon’s systems and so people were being told there was nothing they could do because it looks like the customer received their product. Amazon finally relented in the case of the one customer in question when Guardian Money intervened.

7. Taylor Swift, administered by AXS, sold VIP ticket packages for more than $650 each that rewarded paying customers with seats behind the stage obstructed by equipment and a celebrity tent and upon complaining resulted in the customers being moved to the cheap seats way in the back that they could have purchased for a fraction of what they paid.

So, as you consistently look to maintain, or create, an excellent customer experience make sure you are minding the details (annual or quarterly independent experience audits can be a great way to do this).

One of the marketing clients I worked with always called the phone numbers, visited the URL’s and emailed any email addresses mentioned in any creative we designed for her at the agency because the one she didn’t when working with a different agency, a typo meant that the marketing materials in market ended up being the number of a phone sex line. The details matter.

It is important that you spend time in the field listening to employees about the real world impact of policies that might land differently than how they were envisioned. Also, managers should make sure they are properly training staff to understand the reasons why the company has certain policies and when they need to be flexible. The lifetime value of a customer is nearly always greater than the value of any individual transaction.

How important is it for your employees to understand that it is better to lose the battle to win the war?


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Experience Audits Are Crucial for 2025 Success

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Experience Audits Are Crucial for 2025 Success

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In an ever-evolving business landscape, companies striving for success in 2025 and beyond must focus on creating exceptional experiences for their employees, customers, and partners. The traditional approaches to delivering value are no longer sufficient; organizations must re-imagine their strategies to remain competitive. One pivotal approach is conducting thorough INDEPENDENT experience audits, which are not merely about evaluation but about discovering new pathways to elevate interaction and engagement by having a third party actually walk and document the performance of the different aspects of your experiences.

Understanding Experience Audits

Experience audits are systematic evaluations designed to assess and understand the quality of interactions across different stakeholder groups—employees, customers, and partners. They provide a structured approach to examining every touchpoint and interaction, allowing organizations to identify areas for improvement and innovation. These audits focus on enhancing intuitive and delightful experiences, which play a significant role in an organization’s success.

Benefits of Conducting Experience Audits

1. Enhanced Employee Experience

Employees are the heart of any organization, and their experience significantly affects productivity and morale. Conducting INDEPENDENT employee experience audits can uncover pain points related to workplace culture, communication, technology, and work-life balance that internal audits miss or rationalize.

  • Increased Engagement: When employees feel heard and valued, engagement levels increase, leading to higher productivity and retention. Experience audits illuminate areas where improvements can lead to a more engaged workforce.
  • Fostering Innovation: By identifying bottlenecks and friction in daily operations, organizations can create environments that foster creativity and innovation.
  • Improved Well-being: Understanding employee needs and stressors helps tailor benefits and wellness initiatives that improve overall well-being, reducing burnout and absenteeism.

2. Enhanced Customer Experience

Customer experience is a critical differentiator in today’s market. Through independent experience audits, companies can gain a comprehensive and unbiased understanding of the customer journey and identify opportunities for enhancement.

  • Personalization: By understanding customer preferences and behaviors, businesses can deliver more personalized and relevant experiences that increase loyalty and satisfaction.
  • Consistency: Experience audits help ensure consistency across all touchpoints, from first contact to after-sales service, building trust and brand reliability.
  • Innovation in Service Delivery: Recognizing gaps in service allows for innovative solutions that elevate the customer experience, potentially leading to new market opportunities.

3. Enhanced Partner Experience

In a globalized economy, organizations often rely heavily on partnerships to deliver their products and services. Experience audits in this area focus on optimizing collaboration and synergy by identifying which parts of the experience works well for partners and which elements are full of friction or lacking in value.

  • Streamlined Processes: Identifying and removing inefficiencies in partnership interactions can lead to smoother operations and reduced time-to-market.
  • Strengthened Relationships: Understanding partner needs and pain points helps cultivate stronger, more beneficial relationships, enhancing cooperation and mutual growth.
  • Co-Innovation Opportunities: Comprehensive audits can reveal possibilities for co-innovation, where partners work together creatively to develop new offerings or enter new markets.

Implementing Experience Audits

For independent experience audits to be successful, they must be implemented thoughtfully with a structured approach that respects and supports their independence:

  1. Define the Scope: Determine which experiences you aim to audit and the specific objectives that each audit should achieve.
  2. Engage Stakeholders: Involve employees, customers, and partners early in the audit process to gather diverse insights and foster buy-in.
  3. Utilize Diverse Metrics: Employ both qualitative and quantitative metrics to gain a comprehensive understanding of experiences across different touchpoints.
  4. Prioritize Actionable Insights: Focus on insights that can drive immediate and impactful improvements, aligning with overall strategic goals.
  5. Iterate and Improve: Audits should be an ongoing process, with regular evaluations and improvements, to adapt to changing needs and expectations.

Conclusion

As 2025 begins, the importance of independent experience audits in securing organizational success cannot be overstated. By fostering a deep understanding of the interactions that define employee, customer, and partner relationships, businesses are better equipped to create meaningful, positive experiences that set them apart from the competition. In embracing these audits as a fundamental component of their strategy, organizations are not just preparing for the future, they are actively shaping it, and getting unbiased perspectives from the outside the organization to do so.

If you would like to engage me to do an independent experience audit for you across your customer, partner or employee experiences (or all three), please let me know.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Beyond the AI Customer Experience Hype

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Beyond the AI Customer Experience Hype

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

I’ve been writing a lot about artificial intelligence (AI) and the digital customer experience (CX). Many of the executives I interview and the articles I refer to are all about how AI is revolutionizing, changing, helping and sometimes hurting CX. So we’ve heard from experts. How about if we heard from the customers?

That’s exactly what we did in our annual customer service and CX research sponsored by RingCentral. We asked more than 1,000 U.S. consumers about their experiences with AI and digital customer support, and here are the basic findings for 2024:

The Good

  1. Sixty-two percent of U.S. consumers expect that AI (and related technologies) will be the primary mode of customer service in the future. But how about today? As you will see in some of the findings below, not everyone feels AI is ready for primetime customer service and CX.
  2. Thirty-eight percent believe AI and related technologies will lead to more personalized customer experiences. Personalization has been a hot topic for marketing and CX leaders. AI is giving companies and brands far greater capabilities to use customer data to create a personalized experience. Customers enjoy doing business with companies that recognize them and use the information they have to create a better experience.
  3. Forty-nine percent think AI technologies have the potential to improve the overall customer experience. This is good news, however, the next group of findings shows that companies still have an uphill battle to get customers to adopt and embrace a CX fueled by AI.

The Bad

  1. Only 32% of customers have successfully resolved a customer service issue using AI or ChatGPT technologies. That number is low. One theory is that customers often don’t realize AI is what’s behind what they are doing. Some think AI is chatbots and automated voice response systems that interact with them like a human would or should.
  2. Fifty-six percent of customers admit to being scared of technologies like AI and ChatGPT. Some of these customers may have watched movies where computers take over the world or robots go rogue, none of which are grounded in reality. However, some customers simply don’t trust the technology because of past bad experiences.
  3. Sixty-three percent of customers are frustrated with self-service options using AI, ChatGPT and similar technologies. Frustration is different than being scared, but it has the same impact: customers would rather avoid technology and talk to a live human for support and service.

As I studied the significance of these findings as a whole, the overarching theme of why AI has not caught on as a viable and reliable customer support option is inconsistency. Included in the annual study is a finding that 70% of customers choose talking to a live customer service agent on the phone as their primary channel for customer service.

Why? It’s easier, and customers know what to expect when they talk and interact with live agents. What they don’t want to experience is a self-service solution powered by AI that takes them through a series of prompts that eventually lead to a dead end, where they end up having to call the company anyway.

There’s good reason for the fear and frustration. As more customers are exposed to AI and start to understand it, their inconsistent experiences from one company to the next are creating a confidence problem. The latest technology, which is very cost-effective for even small businesses, has not been purchased and implemented by a majority of businesses.

As of the beginning of this year, just 27% of customers think self-service or automated customer support using AI-powered technology can deliver as good of a customer experience as a live agent. That number will eventually go up, although not as quickly as it needs to. Once companies recognize that bad service equates to lost business, they will make the investment to do it right. It’s not an option if they want their customers to say, “I’ll be back!”

This article was originally published on Forbes.com

Image Credits: Unsplash

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Time to Stop These Ten Bad Customer Experience Habits

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Time to Stop These Ten Bad Customer Experience Habits

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Recently, Bob Newhart, a famous comedian and actor, passed away. He started his career as a stand-up comedian and eventually hit it big on television, starring in a TV series aptly named The Bob Newhart Show. His awards include three Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe, and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. In 1960, his comedy record The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart reached No. 1 on Billboard’s pop album chart.

But enough about Newhart’s history and accolades, why is he showing up in an article about customer service and experience? The answer can be found in one of his TV specials in a funny sketch titled Stop It.

Seven years ago, I first shared a link to the Stop It video in an article I wrote titled Just Stop It. The focus was to stop doing the things that customers complain about most. To honor and remember the late Bob Newhart, I’d like to bring back the theme of Stop It, and this time, focus on stopping bad habits, systems, or policies that destroy a good customer experience. With that in mind, here are ten (10) things that, if you notice they are happening, will make you want to say, “Stop it!”

  1. Stop putting customers on hold for too long. If you must put customers on hold, tell them how long and provide an option to be called back.
  2. Stop transferring customers multiple times. Get them to the right person the first time!
  3. Stop asking for feedback if you’re not going to take advantage of it. Our CX research (sponsored by RingCentral) found that 71% of U.S. customers assume the company won’t make changes based on their responses to a customer satisfaction survey.
  4. Stop using company or technical jargon your customers might not know or understand. This makes them feel uncomfortable and may make them feel like you’re “talking above them.”
  5. Stop making promises you don’t keep. For example, if you say you’ll call someone back in an hour, don’t be late.
  6. Stop making it hard for customers to talk to a live person. If you have live agents to support customers, don’t make it complicated or hard to get to them.
  7. Stop relying on too much automation. Some companies have gone 100% digital, eliminating customer service agents. Even Amazon, the most digital retailer in the world, has customer service reps to help when problems arise.
  8. Stop blaming others for a mistake or problem, even if it is someone else’s fault. Customers don’t care who is at fault. What they care about is talking to someone who will help them. Even if it’s not your fault, it’s your opportunity to make things right. No blame is needed for that.
  9. Stop being anything less than easy to do business with. This is a big one. Customers want friction-less, no-hassle experiences. Evaluate your processes, systems and policies to ensure they are customer-friendly.
  10. Stop being average! Even an experience that is the tiniest bit better than average, as long as it’s consistent, will get customers to say things like, “They are always so helpful (friendly, knowledgeable, etc.).” The consistent above-average experience will make customers say, “I’ll be back!”

Shep Hyken Bad Habits Cartoon

This list of ten ideas to stop is just a start. Sit down with your team and use this list as an idea starter to discuss the issues, problems and complaints you hear about more often than others. Then, as the late Bob Newhart said, “Stop it!”

Image Credits: Shep Hyken, Pexels

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of January 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of January 2025Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are January’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. A Toolbox for High-Performance Teams — by Stefan Lindegaard
  2. Top 100 Innovation and Transformation Articles of 2024 — Curated by Braden Kelley
  3. The Twelve Killers of Innovation — by Robyn Bolton
  4. Building Trust for High Performing Teams — by David Burkus
  5. Be Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With — by Shep Hyken
  6. Uncertainty Isn’t Always Bad — by Mike Shipulski
  7. The Real Winners of Mega Events — by Shep Hyken
  8. Five Must Reads for 2025 — by Robyn Bolton
  9. Don’t Slow Roll Your Transformation — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  10. Is it Time to ReLearn to Work? — by Geoffrey A. Moore

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in December that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

SPECIAL BONUS: While supplies last, you can get the hardcover version of my first bestselling book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for 44% OFF until Amazon runs out of stock or changes the price. This deal won’t last long, so grab your copy while it lasts!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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99% of Companies Failed to Do This Last Year

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99% of Companies Failed to Do This Last Year

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s rapidly changing business landscape, one essential activity that 99% of companies failed to prioritize last year is conducting regular independent customer and employee experience audits. These audits are critical for understanding the current state and potential improvements needed to enhance engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction among customers and employees.

For most companies, customer and employee experiences are the backbone of their success. A business can’t thrive without satisfied customers buying their products or services, and employees are the driving force behind delivering these experiences. Despite this understanding, many businesses neglect the proactive steps necessary to evaluate and enrich these experiences systematically utilizing unbiased external third parties to walk the experiences and document friction points and opportunities.

Is your company part of the 99% that failed to conduct both an independent customer experience audit and an independent employee experience audit last year?

If you are part of the 1%, please be sure and leave some thoughts about the experience (no pun intended) in the comments!

Why Independent Experience Audits Matter

Independent experience audits are comprehensive reviews of interactions customers and employees have with a company performed by an unbiased external resource. They help identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. These audits should be performed regularly as they can reveal insights into:

  • The alignment between company offerings and customer needs.
  • The effectiveness of internal processes in promoting a positive work environment.
  • The coherence of brand values with actual customer and employee experiences.
  • Emerging trends and preferences that might impact future strategies.

“73% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.” – Temkin Group

Despite the apparent value proposition of these independent audits, why are so many companies still overlooking them? The constraints are often a mix of perceived complexity, lack of in-house expertise, or prioritization of immediate financial metrics over strategic insights. However, history has shown that organizations that adapt ahead of changes in expectations are better positioned to succeed over those that react out of necessity.

Case Study 1: An Overlooked Opportunity – Company X

Company X, a well-established retail brand, faced declining sales figures and employee turnover. Their product line remained strong, and pay scales were competitive. However, deeper insights revealed that customer experiences were inconsistent, and employees often felt disengaged due to a lack of communication and growth opportunities.

Recognizing the signs, Company X engaged in a comprehensive independent experience audit. The audit discovered two key issues:

  • Customer Experience: Customers reported a lack of personalization in their shopping journey, expressing frustration over disconnected in-store and online experiences.
  • Employee Experience: Employees felt unappreciated, with inadequate feedback channels and professional development options.

Armed with these insights, Company X implemented a strategy that enhanced personalized shopping experiences using AI-driven recommendations and integrated both digital and physical stores for seamless customer journeys. Simultaneously, they developed a robust internal communication framework that empowered employees through regular feedback and offered career progression pathways.

Within six months post-intervention, Company X witnessed a 15% increase in customer satisfaction scores and a 20% decrease in employee turnover—solidifying the importance of independent experience audits.

Case Study 2: A Success Story – Company Y

Company Y, on the other hand, already valued independent customer and employee experience audits as a vital component of their corporate strategy. As a result, they experienced steady growth and minimal churn rates despite operating in the highly competitive tech industry.

Company Y conducts bi-annual audits using a company like HCLTech, reviewing user interactions with their software products and collecting feedback through employee surveys intertwined with one-on-one interviews. They discovered that:

  • Customer Experience: The need for improved user interface intuitiveness was prevalent, prompting a user-centered design overhaul that optimized performance and usability.
  • Employee Experience: Although engagement levels were high, team collaboration across departments showed potential for enhancement.

By proactively addressing these issues, Company Y not only improved its software product, which increased customer retention by 25%, but also invested in team-building exercises and diversified project teams, leading to more innovative solutions and a dynamic organizational culture.

How to Implement Experience Audits in Your Organization

To avoid the common pitfalls highlighted, businesses need to incorporate independent experience audits into their regular strategic evaluations. Here’s a simplified approach to getting started:

  1. Define Objectives: Clearly identify what you aim to discover with the audit. Are you focusing on loyalty, satisfaction, efficiency, or a combination?
  2. Select a Partner: Choose an independent resource that is experienced, trustworthy and thorough in their activities to assess and document their findings as they walk the critical components of your customer and employee experiences.
  3. Gather Data: Utilize surveys, interviews, focus groups, and data analytics to collect comprehensive insights.
  4. Analyze Findings: Categorize feedback to identify consistent patterns, pain points, and potential areas for improvement.
  5. Develop an Action Plan: Prioritize issues by impact and feasibility, then devise a strategy that aligns with your company’s goals.
  6. Implement Changes: Address the identified opportunities with targeted interventions, ensuring stakeholders are engaged and informed.
  7. Measure Impact: Continuously track the effectiveness of changes and refine strategies as necessary.

Conclusion

Independent experience audits are not just a ‘nice to have’ but a strategic necessity. Companies can no longer afford to be complacent; they must take actionable insights from these audits to craft memorable and meaningful experiences for their customers and employees. Companies like Y that put independent experience audits at the heart of their strategy invariably found themselves robust against industry challenges, offering lessons that the broader business community should heed.

“Companies that excel at customer experience are 60% more profitable than their peers.” – Gartner

If you would like to engage an unbiased external person like Braden Kelley to conduct a customer experience and/or employee audit for you this year to join the 1% leapfrogging their competition, contact us!

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Pixabay

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The Secrets of Customer Support Triage

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The Secrets of Customer Support Triage

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Recently, I had the privilege of being a keynote speaker on customer experience (CX) at a company’s quarterly event. Following the speech, the CEO shared an insight into their approach to customer service and CX, comparing it to a medical emergency room. “Our response to customer complaints and issues is akin to triage,” he said. “We effectively diagnose the problems, yet find ourselves treating similar cases repeatedly as if sending them to an emergency room that never addresses the underlying causes.”

Triage is an interesting word. It’s a medical term, but I wanted to better understand the definition, so I did what most people do. I Googled the word, and this is the definition from Merriam-Webster:

  1. The sorting and allocating of treatment to patients, especially battle and disaster victims, according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors.
  2. The assigning of priority order to projects on the basis of where funds and other resources can be best used, are most needed, or most likely to achieve success.


The first definition confirmed that the CEO’s comment was accurate. They fix problems, but don’t seem to be preventing the problems. The second definition sounds like common practice for most businesses, not just hospital emergency rooms. They prioritize projects – in this case, customer service issues – and focus on what will provide the best return.

I loved the CEO’s comment because he recognized the end goal wasn’t to deliver great customer service when there was a problem but to create a customer experience that had few, if any, problems. Put another way, it’s one thing to fix problems. It’s another to understand why there’s a problem and create a preventative solution or system that eliminates – or at least mitigates – the problem in the future. Yes, there will be customer service issues, but with this line of thinking, you can eliminate many problems and complaints.

This reminded me of commercials I remember seeing when I was a kid. From 1967-1988, there were commercials for Maytag washers and dryers. Many of you are too young to remember the Maytag repairman known as “Ol’ Lonely,” who was lonely and bored because the Maytag equipment was so dependable. Of course, the machines weren’t perfect, but they were reputed to be more reliable than competitors.

I like the idea of boring – when it comes to problems and complaints. Nothing would make me happier than to see the true depiction of a company’s customer service agents sitting around bored because customers seldom called with complaints.

So, consider this question: Would you rather be the company known for solving problems when they happen or the company that doesn’t have problems?

Image Credits: Unsplash

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2024

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2024Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are December’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Top Six Trends for Innovation Management in 2025 — by Jesse Nieminen
  2. Best Team Building Exercise Around — by David Burkus
  3. You Are Doing Strategic Planning Wrong (According to Seth Godin) — by Robyn Bolton
  4. Why Annual Employee Experience Audits Are Important — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
  5. Don’t ‘Follow the Science’, Follow the Scientific Method — by Pete Foley
  6. Artificial Innovation — by Braden Kelley
  7. Dynamic Thinking — by Mike Shipulski
  8. The State of Customer Experience and the Contact Center — by Shep Hyken
  9. The Duality of High-Performing Teams — by David Burkus
  10. Uber Economy is Killing Innovation, Prosperity and Entrepreneurship — by Greg Satell

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in November that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

SPECIAL BONUS: While supplies last, you can get the hardcover version of my first bestselling book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for 44% OFF until Amazon runs out of stock or changes the price. This deal won’t last long, so grab your copy while it lasts!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Nordstrom Still Acting Like a Startup

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123 Years Later

Nordstrom Still Acting Like a Startup

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

In 1901, John Nordstrom and Carl Wallin opened the original Wallin and Nordstrom shoe store. Twenty-two years later, a second Nordstrom shoe store opened. Today, according to Nordstrom Company Facts, there are 360 stores in the U.S., including 93 Nordstrom stores, 258 Nordstrom Rack stores, two clearance stores, six Nordstrom local service hubs and online e-commerce websites for Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack.

In the past 123 years, much has happened and many retailers have come and gone. There have been stock market crashes, wars, economic issues, pandemics and more. Yet Nordstrom has weathered these storms and has continued to own a reputation for incredible customer service and convenience.

Robert Spector is an author and Nordstrom expert, having written five books on Nordstrom, the most recent titled, The Century-Old Startup: The Nordstrom Way of Embracing Change, Challenges, and a Culture of Customer Service. I had the chance to interview him about the book and how Nordstrom has remained a viable brand for more than a century.

Spector’s first answer was short, and as the title of the book implies, the leadership has a startup mentality. Its leadership is quick to make decisions and keep up with changes in the economy and customer expectations. Here are some of the top takeaways from our interview:

  • The Nordstrom Handbook: This is a legendary story. Nordstrom has one rule: Use good judgment. The company hires good people, trusts their ability to manage customer interactions and empowers them to make good customer-focused decisions.

  • Training: Training includes sharing examples of how other employees have solved problems and taken care of their customers. Legendary customer service stories (such as the story about an employee giving a refund for a used set of tires) showcase how Nordstrom treats its customers, which in turn inspires and motivates employees. These stories emphasize how important it is to find ways to exceed customers’ expectations.

  • Supporting Social Causes: Customers prefer brands that support the same social causes they do. More than just giving back to the community, Nordstrom also understands that embracing social responsibility includes respecting diverse values and perspectives and adapting to different cultures for both employees and customers.

  • Technology: You can’t continue to do business like you’ve always done. Nordstrom has shown that it can adapt to the new ways of retail. Spector writes that Nordstrom has embraced technology. Its philosophy is to try it. If it works, great. If not, move on. At the same time, the company recognizes that its reputation is tied to its legendary customer service. They have found ways to embrace e-commerce and adapt to the ever-changing needs of customers and how they buy. Spector says, “Balancing technology with personal connections and understanding the importance of human interactions is key to creating a differentiated and exceptional customer experience.”

  • Embrace Transformation: Retail continues to evolve, and new iterations of Nordstrom prove that the only constant you can count on is change. Yet one thing that doesn’t change is Nordstrom’s theme of focusing on the customer, regardless of the changes it has made, which includes opening Nordstrom Rack, clearance stores and e-commerce.

The overarching theme to all the ideas that Spector shares about Nordstrom is that, from the company’s very beginning, they have recognized the power of the relationship they have with their customers. Delivering a level of service that sometimes isn’t expected results in a reputation that has kept them relevant for more than a century. Spector sums this up by saying, “Ultimately, it’s about how decisions positively impact the customer, not just the company.”

Image Credits: Pexels

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com.

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