Category Archives: Customer Experience

AI Can Help Attract, Retain and Grow Customer Relationships

Leave a reply

AI Can Help Attract, Retain and Grow Customer Relationships

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

How do you know what your customers want if they don’t tell you? It’s more than sending surveys and interpreting data. Joe Tyrrell is the CEO of Medallia, a company that helps its customers tailor experiences through “intelligent personalization” and automation. I had a chance to interview him on Amazing Business Radio and he shared how smart companies are using AI to build and retain customer relationships. Below are some of his comments followed by my commentary:

  • The generative AI momentum is so widespread that 85% of executives say the technology will be interacting directly with customers in the next two years. AI has been around for longer than most people realize. When a customer is on a website that makes suggestions, when they interact with a chatbot or get the best answers to frequently asked questions, they are interacting with AI-infused technology, whether they know it or not.
  • While most executives want to use AI, they don’t know how they want to use it, the value it will bring and the problems it will solve. In other words, they know they want to use it, but don’t know how (yet). Tyrrell says, “Most organizations don’t know how they are going to use AI responsibly and ethically, and how they will use it in a way that doesn’t introduce unintended consequences, and even worse, unintended bias.” There needs to be quality control and oversight to ensure that AI is meeting the goals and intentions of the company or brand.
  • Generative AI is different than traditional AI. According to Tyrrell, the nature of generative AI is to, “Give me something in real time while I’m interacting with it.” In other words, it’s not just finding answers. It’s communicating with me, almost like human-to-human. When you ask it to clarify a point, it knows exactly how to respond. This is quite different from a traditional search bar on a website—or even a Google search.
  • AI’s capability to personalize the customer experience will be the focus of the next two years. Based on the comment about how AI technology currently interacts with customers, I asked Tyrrell to be more specific about how AI will be used. His answer was focused on personalization. The data we extract from multiple sources will allow for personalization like never before. According to Tyrrell, 82% of consumers say a personalized experience will influence which brand they end up purchasing from in at least half of all shopping situations. The question isn’t whether a company should personalize the customer experience. It is what happens if they don’t.
  • Personalization isn’t about being seen as a consumer, but as a person. That’s the goal of personalization. Medallia’s North Star, which guides all its decisions and investments, is its mission to personalize every customer experience. What makes this a challenge is the word every. If customers experience this one time but the next time the brand acts as if they don’t recognize them, all the work from the previous visit along with the credibility built with the customer is eroded.
  • The next frontier of AI is interpreting social feedback. Tyrrell is excited about Medallia’s future focus. “Surveys may validate information,” says Tyrrell, “but it is often what’s not said that can be just as important, if not even more so.” Tyrrell talked about Medallia’s capability to look everywhere, outside of surveys and social media comments, reviews and ratings, where customers traditionally express themselves. There is behavioral feedback, which Tyrrell refers to as social feedback, not to be confused with social media feedback. Technology can track customer behavior on a website. What pages do they spend the most time on? How do they use the mouse to navigate the page? Tyrell says, “Wherever people are expressing themselves, we capture the information, aggregate it, translate it, interpret it, correlate it and then deliver insights back to our customers.” This isn’t about communicating with customers about customer support issues. It’s mining data to understand customers and make products and experiences better.

Tyrrell’s insights emphasize the opportunities for AI to support the relationship a company or brand has with its customers. The future of customer engagement will be about an experience that creates customer connection. Even though technology is driving the experience, customers appreciate being known and recognized when they return. Tyrrell and I joked about the theme song from the TV sitcom Cheers, which debuted in 1982 and lasted 11 seasons. But it really isn’t a joke at all. It’s what customers want, and it’s so simple. As the song title suggests, customers want to go to a place Where Everybody Knows Your Name.

Image Credits: Unsplash

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

These Forgotten Customers Are Key to Your Success

Leave a reply

These Forgotten Customers Are Key to Your Success

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“There is only one boss. The customer.” – Sam Walton

With all the buzz around human-centered design, customer-centric businesses, and external-facing organizations, corporate America is (finally) waking up to the importance and value of creating things that people actually want and that solve people’s problems.

Teams of innovators, ethnographers, socialists, researchers, and consultants scurry about gathering customer insights, soliciting customer feedback, and generating reports that can be funneled back to R&D, innovation, and product development teams to inform the development of the Next Big Thing.

While this is all important work, amidst all of this activity, one customer is consistently overlooked. And it is this customer that often decides the fate of the Next Big Thing

There is only one first customer. Your boss.

Let’s start with what a customer is:

“The recipient of a good, service, product, or idea obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration.

Yes, you should spend a lot of time getting to know the people outside your company who will eventually be asked to exchange money for the good, product, or service you are creating.

You also need to spend time getting to know the people inside your organization who you are currently asking to exchange money (give you a budget) or some other valuable consideration (time, people, permission) for your idea and its development.

And you need convince them that “a financial transaction” is worth it because, if you don’t they can and will spend their money elsewhere.

Your boss is a tough customer

No matter what type of company you are in — from a company of 10 to a company of 10,000 — you are faced with limited resources. A dollar spent in one place means a dollar not spent in another place. A person allocated to one team means one less person on another team.

Managers have to make resources allocation trade-offs all the time but are often moving pieces between functions and teams where they know the ROI of additional investments. This situation changes dramatically when a manager must decide whether to invest resources into a new and uncertain venture or to invest in the core, and much more certain, business.

Convincing your boss to buy your idea, especially if that idea is a new venture, is tough because you’re asking your boss to buy (or invest in) something with an uncertain ROI rather than buy (or invest in) something with a more certain ROI. But you can be successful if you understand your boss.

Your boss can be understood (and their decisions anticipated)

First, get comfortable with the fact that your boss is a human being. And, just like other human beings, your boss makes lots of decisions, believes that these decisions are based on logic and reason, and actually bases most decisions more on emotion and instinct.

As frustrating as this may be when you are at the receiving end of these decisions, take comfort in the fact that you can actually use the tools you use to understand external customers to understand, and even anticipate, your boss’ decisions.

Here’s how:

  1. What is the current business situation? While this is usually an easy question to answer, it can be hard to anticipate what impact it will have on your boss’ willingness to invest. Just as most people are hesitant to invest in something new when the current business environment is poor, many people are equally hesitant to invest when business is booming. This is usually because investments in the core business are generating more than usual upside and that’s great for your boss and/or there is no urgency to do anything new because people assume the good times will go on forever (news flash: they wont’). So while you can’t anticipate what impact the answer to this question will have on your odds of securing investment, you do need to know the context within which you are asking.
  2. What is your boss being asked to deliver? How is she measured and rewarded? Is your boss expected to deliver revenue increases? She’ll be drawn to new ideas that increase revenue. Cost savings? Then pitch ways to improve efficiency. How much time does she have to deliver results? If she needs to show results quarterly, you have to generate results quickly. If she has a year to show improvement, you have a longer runway to show results.
  3. What is your boss’ reputation? Does she like it? Humans are hard-wired to be social creatures so, whether we admit it or not, we really care how other people see us. What is your boss’ reputation — is she known for being a steady hand that consistently delivers or a renegade willing to rock the boat and take risks? And how does she feel about her reputation? Does she like it or does she see herself differently? If you have a boss that likes being seen as reliable and a defender of the status quo, you’re going to have a much harder time selling your new idea than if you boss is seen (or wants to be seen) as the next Steve Jobs.

With the answers to these questions, you can figure out the likelihood that your boss will buy your idea. If you boss is managing a business that is struggling, is expected to increase revenue after years of decreases, and is happy to be known as someone who always delivers, it’s unlikely she’ll be willing to invest resources in a new and unproven idea. But if your boss is managing a struggling business, is expected to develop new revenue streams that will replace the old ones, and enjoys a reputation as a someone who challenges the status quo, odds are she’ll support a reasonably well-thought out proposal for initial investment in a new venture.

Bottom Line

Before you get the opportunity to sell a new product or service to external customers, you need to sell your idea to internal customers…your boss. Take the time to understand you boss, the things that motivate her and the issues and challenges that she faces. Then, just as you create a product or service to solve your external customers’ problems, you can create a pitch that shows your boss how your idea solves her challenges.

Approach your boss as you would a customer and you’re likely to get the support you need. Forget that your boss is your first customer and you may never get the chance to pitch to the ones you’ve spent so much time studying.

Image credit: Pexels

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

It Takes Hard Work to Make It Look Easy

Leave a reply

A Customer Experience That Will Be Appreciated

It Takes Hard Work to Make It Look Easy

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

My friend Norman Beck recently shared a quote that inspired him: We work hard to make it look easy. Isn’t that what the best people do? Whether it’s sports, entertainment, or business, some people are so good that what they do looks easy.

I Googled the quote to find out who to attribute it to and found numerous variations:

In sports, Ken Griffey Jr., a professional baseball player, said, “Just because I made it look easy doesn’t mean that it was, and you don’t work hard and become a Hall of Famer without working day in and day out.”

In entertainment, Ben Mitchell, a fictional character from the BBC television series EastEnders, said, “It takes a lot of effort to make something look effortless.”

And in business, Steve Jobs of Apple said, “It takes a lot of hard work to make something look simple.”

There is some very practical wisdom in these motivational and inspiring quotes that we can apply to the customer service and customer experience (CX) world.

Think of the best customer experiences you have had.

Perhaps it was a person who was helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly, which, by the way, are the three experiences customers say are most likely to get them to come back, according to our 2024 CX research (sponsored by RingCentral). They made your experience enjoyable and easy. What you probably don’t know is that other than a pleasant demeanor – hopefully a natural part of the employee’s personality – there was a lot of training to get this person educated about the company’s products so they could deliver a knowledgeable and helpful experience.

Or consider the simplicity of ordering a product from Amazon. How complicated is the behind-the-scenes process that takes you from a few clicks on their website to what you ordered showing up on your front porch? It is incredibly complicated, but the Amazon experience is so easy!

When I’m invited to speak to a group of business leaders as the keynote speaker, I often share my Six Simple Steps to Building a Customer-Focused Culture. Yes, the steps are simple, but that doesn’t mean they are easy. There’s a difference!

The point is that simple is usually not easy. There’s lots of work, thinking, planning, practice, experimenting, training, and more that goes into creating an easy experience. And one thing customers really want, whether they express it or not, is an easy experience. So, consider this simple – but not so easy-to-answer – question: What do you do to give your customers an easy experience?

Image Credits: Pixabay

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.






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

Leave a reply

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of June 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 June’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. The Surprising Downside of Collaboration in Problem-Solving — by Robyn Bolton
  2. Designing Organizational Change and Transformation — by Stefan Lindegaard
  3. Four Principles of Successful Digital Transformation — by Greg Satell
  4. Managers Make the Difference – Four Common Mistakes Managers Make — by David Burkus
  5. Learning to Innovate — by Janet Sernack
  6. Think Outside Which Box? — by Howard Tiersky
  7. Innovation the Amazon Way — by Greg Satell
  8. Irrelevant Innovation — by John Bessant
  9. Nike Should Stop Blaming Working from Home for Their Innovation Struggles — by Robyn Bolton
  10. Time is a Flat Circle – Jamie Dimon’s Comments on AI Just Proved It — by Robyn Bolton

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in May 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!

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.






How To Create the IKEA Effect

1 Reply

A Customer Experience That Will Be Appreciated

How To Create The IKEA Effect

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

When reaching out for customer service and support, most customers still prefer to communicate with a company or brand via the traditional phone call. That said, more and more customers are attracted to and embracing a do-it-yourself customer service experience, known as self-service.

I had a chance to sit down with Venk Korla, the president and CEO of HGS Digital, which recently released its HGS Buyers Insight Report. We talked about investments CX (customer experience) leaders are making into AI and digital self-support and the importance of creating a similar experience for employees, which will get to in a moment. But first, I want to share some comments Korla made about comparing customer service to an IKEA experience.

The IKEA Effect

The IKEA effect was identified and named by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School, Daniel Mochon of Yale and Dan Ariely of Duke, who published the results of three studies in 2011. A short description of the IKEA effect is that some customers not only enjoy putting furniture together themselves but also find more value in the experience than if a company delivered pre-assembled furniture.

“It’s the same in the customer service/support world,” Korla said. “Customers who easily resolve their issues or have their questions answered on a brand’s self-service portal, either through traditional FAQ pages on a website or something more advanced, such as AI-powered solutions, will not only be happy with the experience but will also be grateful to the company for providing such an easy, fulfilling experience.”

To support this notion, our customer service research (sponsored by RingCentral) found that even with the phone being the No. 1 way customers like to interact with brands, 26% of customers stopped doing business with a company or brand because self-service options were not provided. (Note: Younger generations prefer self-service solutions more than older generations.) As the self-service experience improves, more will adopt it as their go-to method of getting questions answered and problems resolved.

The Big Bet On AI

In the next 18 months, CX decision-makers are betting big on artificial intelligence. The research behind the HGS Buyers Insight Report found that 37% of the leaders surveyed will deploy customer-facing chatbots, 30% will use generative AI or text-speech solutions to support employees taking care of customers, and 28% will invest in and deploy robotic process automation. All of these investments are meant to improve both the customer and employee experience.

While Spending On CX Is A Top Priority, Spending On Employee Experience (EX) Is Lagging

Korla recognizes the need to support not only customers with AI, but also employees. Companies betting on AI must also consider employees as they invest in technology to support customers. Just as a customer uses an AI-powered chatbot to communicate using natural language, the employee interacting directly with the customer should be able to use similar tools.

Imagine the customer support agent receives a call from a customer with a difficult question. As the customer describes the issue, the agent inputs notes into the computer. Within seconds, the agent has the answer to the question appear on their screen. In addition, the AI tool shares insights about the customer, such as their buying patterns, how long they have been a customer, what they’ve called about in the past and more. At this point, a good agent can interpret the information and communicate it in the style that best suits the customer.

Korla explains that the IKEA effect is just as powerful for employees as it is for customers. When employees are armed with the right tools to do their jobs effectively, allowing them to easily support customers and solve their most difficult problems, they are more fulfilled. In the HGS report, 54% of CX leaders surveyed cited talent attraction and retention as a top investment priority. So, for the company that invests in EX tools—specifically AI and automation—the result translates into lower turnover and more engaged employees.

Korla’s insights highlight the essence of the IKEA effect in creating empowering customer experiences and employee experiences. He reminds us that an amazing CX is supported by an amazing EX. As your company prepares to invest in AI and other self-service tools for your customers, consider an investment in similar tools for your employees.

Download the HGS Buyers Insight Report to find out what CX decision-makers will invest in and focus on for 2024 and beyond.

Image Credits: Pixabay
This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.






How Eavesdropping Can Unlocked Exponential Growth

Leave a reply

How Eavesdropping Can Unlocked Exponential Growth

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

It’s easy to get caught up in the hunt for unique insights that will transform your business, conquer your competition, and put you on an ever-accelerating path to growth.  But sometimes, the most valuable insights can come from listening to customers in their natural environment. That’s precisely what happened when I eavesdropped on a conversation at a local pizza joint. What I learned could be worth millions to your business.

A guy walked into a pizza place.

Last Wednesday, I met a friend for lunch.  As usual, I was unreasonably early to the local wood-fired pizza joint, so I settled into my chair, content to spend time engaged in one of my favorite activities – watching people and eavesdropping on their conversations.

Although the restaurant is on the main street of one of the wealthier Boston suburbs, it draws an eclectic crowd, so I was surprised when a rather burly man in a paint-stained hoodie flung open the front door.  As he stomped to the take-out order window, dust fell from his shoes, and you could hear the clanging of tools in his tool belt.  He placed his order and thumped down at the table next to me.

A Multi-Million Dollar Chat

He pulled out his cell phone and made a call.  “Hey, yeah, I’m at the pizza place, and they need your help.  Yeah, they hate their current system, but they don’t have the time to figure out a new one or how to convert.  Yeah, ok, I’ll get his number.  Ok if I give him yours.  Great.  Thanks.”

A few minutes later, his order was ready, and the manager walked over with his pizza.

Hoodie-guy: “Hey, do you have a card?”

Manager: “No, I don’t.  Something I can help you with?”

H: “I just called a friend of mine.  He runs an IT shop, and I told him you’re using the RST restaurant management system, and you hate it…”

M: “I hate it so much…”

H: “So my buddy’s business can help you change it. He’s helped other restaurants convert away from RST, and he’d love to talk to you or the owner.”

M: “I’m one of the co-owners, and I’d love to stop using RST, but we use it for everything – our website, online ordering, managing our books, everything.  I can’t risk changing.”

H: “That’s the thing, my friend does it all for you.  He’ll help you pick the new system, set it up, migrate you from the other system, and ensure everything runs smoothly. You have nothing to worry about.”

M: “That would be amazing.  Here’s my direct line. Have him give me a call.  And if he’s good, I can guarantee you that every other restaurant on this street will change, too.  We all use RST, and we all hate it.  We even talked about working together to find something better, but no one had time to figure everything out.”

They exchanged numbers, and the hoodie guy walked out with his pizza.  The manager/owner walked back to the open kitchen, told his staff about the conversation, and they cheered.  Cheered!

Are You Listening?

In just a few minutes of eavesdropping, I uncovered a potential goldmine for a B2B business – 15 frustrated customers, all desperate to switch from a system they hate but unable to do so due to time and resource constraints. The implications are staggering – an entire local market worth tens of millions of dollars ripe for the taking simply by being willing to listen and offer a solution.

As a B2B leader, the question is: are you truly tapping into the insights right in front of you? When was the last time you left your desk, observed your customers in their natural habitat, and listened to their unvarnished feedback? If you’re not doing that, you’re missing out on opportunities that could transform your business.

The choice is yours. Will you stay in your office and rely on well-worn tools, or venture into the wild and listen to your customers?  Your answer could be worth millions.

Image credit: Pixabay

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Creating a Seamless and Unique Customer Experience

Leave a reply

Creating a Seamless and Unique Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Most companies recognize that creating a seamless and unique customer experience is key to success in the digital world, but that’s not always easy to do. How can you deliver the optimal digital experience to your users?

If you’ve ever been to the arctic circle, there are icebergs that are not only acres wide, but that rise hundreds of feet above sea level — truly massive objects. Yet what is perhaps even more amazing is that scientists tell us that almost 90% of a typical iceberg’s mass is underwater, and not visible to from the surface. If you are in the “iceberg business” — studying them for science or cutting through them for ships to pass — it’s quite important to understand not just the visible component, but the full scale and depth of the iceberg.

Similarly, most companies now recognize that creating a seamless, elegant and differentiated customer experience is key to success in this increasingly digital world. Defining that optimal experience is not necessarily an easy task. In fact, it can seem like a huge undertaking, and at FROM, it’s something that we spend a large portion of our time working with clients to optimize.

But we also see many companies struggling to execute on delivering their customer experience vision. There are many reasons for this, but a starting point of success is realizing that excellent customer experience is more than meets the eye. While concrete manifestation of the experience is found in the brand’s digital properties, content, and features, this is just the part of the iceberg that sticks up above the water. Beneath the waterline is three additional supporting elements that must also be effectively managed in order to achieve an excellent customer experience and the associated business outcomes.

User Experience FROM Iceberg

1. Technical Architecture

Outstanding customer experiences are supported by modern technology stacks that permit two essential capabilities:

Access From Any Touchpoint

Great customer experiences have the flexibility of touchpoint, and permit you to not only interact via web, phone, mobile, kiosk or other devices but have all actions instantly updated and available in a consistent manner. An example of what not to do: I placed an order on HomeDepot.com and immediately realized I made a mistake. I wanted to cancel it, but due to technical constraints, you can’t cancel orders on the website, only from the call center. So I called the call center, and they told me they wouldn’t be able to “see” my order (and therefore weren’t able to cancel it) for about an hour when the systems synchronize, and I should call back then. Not a great or accessible customer experience.

Flexible Frameworks

Flexible frameworks have the ability to be modified rapidly along with the changes that are being frequently deployed. The number one secret to how great customer experiences got to be great? It’s not by having a genius team that gets it right the first time; it’s through an iterative process of testing and learning. To do that, you have to be able to efficiently code, test, and iterate or kill new ideas quickly. Furthermore, the frameworks for presentation, business logic, and transaction processing need to be flexible. If user testing shows that changing the sequence of information collected from users during a checkout process might improve conversion, you need to be able to make a change like that reasonably simply. We often see companies with aging mainframe-based “back office” systems that are holding them back from being able to re-engineer their customer experience because “that’s not how the legacy system works.” No matter how much pain, companies in this situation need roadmaps to upgrade, redesign or replace these inflexible systems to permit the creative evolution of their customer experience.

2. Business Operations

Serving the digital customer effectively is not just about creating digital touchpoints, but about evolving the total experience with digital at the center. That means you will need to change the way you do business in a variety of spheres. Customers who use online chat to ask questions expect answers far faster than those who email, let alone those who send in snail mail. Digital customers opening an account at your bank don’t want to have to wait to receive a thick packet of forms in the mail that they have to sign in 17 different places. You may want to offer digital customers alternatives in “out of stock” situations (such as a direct ship) or permit them to customize their purchases in ways that weren’t previously possible. Truly optimizing for digital will probably change how you merchandise, your return policies, your customer support, customer communications, and, well, everything. It may require new roles, new processes or a re-organization of the company.

3. Business Model

One of the benefits customers see from digital is a huge improvement in the value equation. Skype has taken our long distance bill from hundreds of dollars to pennies. Spotify has given us access to practically any song ever recorded for a few dollars a month, and Netflix has done the same for movies. In many markets, Uber has halved the cost of a taxi. This is awesome for consumers, but threatening to incumbents whose business models are dependent on the pricing levels of legacy business models. Jeff Zucker, the former CEO of NBC, echoed this concern a decade ago when he bemoaned having to trade “analog dollars for digital pennies.”

Why are some companies able to offer consumers a “better deal?” Because digital can take substantial cost out of the equation, allowing more digitally centric companies to be more cost-competitive or shift to totally different business models (subscription access to huge content libraries instead of one by one DVD rental in the case of Netflix; offering the largest ground transportation fleet in the world without ever buying a single vehicle in the case of Uber; likewise eBay and Alibaba, two of the largest online stores, both of which stock no inventory.) You can have a great website and app, but if the fundamental value equation of your business is no longer competitive, you are going to struggle.

Don’t Bolt On Digital

Digital started out as a means of communication. We then had the era of eCommerce, where we “bolted on” digital alternatives to access the same inventory and offers available in our non-digital channels. But today, the winners are “digitally-transformed” companies that are offering a digital value proposition and have a technology stack that empowers them to create a great customer experience, and the business processes necessary to support and deliver on it.

It may seem like a lot. And it is. The world is changing fast, and the companies that succeed in the future will be those that make the transition. The ones that don’t will wind up on the list with companies like Kodak, Polaroid, BlockBuster, Sports Authority, Borders, Linens and Things and Circuit City. You can use this as a high-level roadmap for what you need to do to keep up with the digital transformation era. If your formula is not working yet, ask yourself which of these three areas you might not be paying enough attention to, or adapting quickly enough.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Pexels

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






A $3.7 Trillion Customer Experience Problem

Leave a reply

A $3.7 Trillion Customer Experience Problem

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Bad customer experiences could cost organizations throughout the world $3.7 trillion annually. That’s according to new research by the experience management company Qualtrics. This figure is up 19% from the company’s projections last year ($3.1 trillion). This is a mind-blowing statistic considering the importance companies and brands are putting on customer service and experience.

During the third quarter of 2023, Qualtrics surveyed about 28,400 consumers in 26 countries about their bad experiences with organizations across 20 different industries. The good news is that the survey found consumers had 2% fewer bad experiences compared to the year before. Still, because of increased spending and other factors, the result is a potential loss that, to put it in perspective, is more than double the U.S. deficit in 2023.

Our just released 2024 customer service and CX research (sponsored by RingCentral) also has some important findings that support the need to provide a better experience. While the Qualtrics survey is international, we focused on the U.S. consumer, matching the census for age, gender, ethnicity and geography. So, what do these findings mean for a company or brand? They have two choices: accept the loss due to a bad experience or create a competitive advantage with a service experience that drives higher sales, higher profits and customer retention. Consider the following:

  • In 2024, 88% of customers think customer service is more important than ever. That’s up from 83% in 2022 and 2023. In 2010, major consulting firms (Walker, Forrester, Bain and others) started predicting that within 10 years, the customer experience would be as important—if not more so—than the product. Of course, the product has to work, but comparable products can usually be purchased from numerous retailers or vendors.

  • In 2024, 64% of customers said no matter how much they enjoy the product, if the company doesn’t provide good customer service, they will find another company to do business with. And that’s the point those major consulting firms were making more than 10 years ago! While product quality will always be important, the majority of today’s customers (more than six out of 10) insist on an experience that meets their expectations.

  • In 2024, 85% of customers are willing to go out of their way to do business with a company that has better service. That’s up from 76% last year. Customers are willing to put forth more effort, spend more time, drive farther and put up with other inconveniences if they know the company or brand will provide a better experience than a CX laggard that may be more convenient. So, the question is: Are you the company that customers go out of their way to do business with?

  • In 2024, 94% of customers feel convenience is important. Convenience is the highest rated experience customers want. But as you saw in the prior finding, convenience with bad customer service still puts you at a high risk of losing customers.

  • In 2024, the top three reasons customers come back to a company are helpful, knowledgeable and friendly employees. Customer service doesn’t have to be complicated. How hard is it for people to be helpful and friendly? And being knowledgeable is a function of training and education. These three together create a powerful experience that gets customers to come back and evangelize a company or brand.

These findings are meant to make you think about the advantages and disadvantages of delivering an excellent experience. I’ve always preached that customer service is common sense—that’s not always so common. Customer experience includes service, but there’s more to it as you look beyond the traditional human-to-human contact, and instead, analyze every interaction the customer has with your organization. To eliminate some of the complications and confusion, start with the end in mind, which is to understand your customers’ “journey” and what you must do to meet their needs and expectations. Build out the experience from there—an experience that doesn’t push them to the competition, but instead gets them to say, “I’ll be back.”

Image Credits: Pixabay
This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.






Innovation the Amazon Way

1 Reply

Innovation the Amazon Way

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 2014, Stephenie Landry was finishing up her one-year stint as Technical Advisor to Jeff Wilke, who oversees Amazon’s worldwide consumer business, which is a mentor program that allows high potential executives to shadow a senior leader and learn first-hand. Her next assignment would define her career.

At most companies, an up-and-comer like Stephenie might be given a division to run or work on a big acquisition deal. Amazon, however, is a different kind of place. Landry wrote a memo outlining plans for a new service she’d been thinking about, Prime Now, which today offers one-hour delivery to customers in over 50 cities across 9 countries.

It’s no secret that Amazon is one of the world’s most innovative companies. Starting out as a niche service selling books online, it’s now not only a dominant retailer, but has pioneered new categories such as cloud computing and smart speakers. The key to its success is not any one process, but how it integrates a customer obsession deep within its culture and practice.

Starting With The Customer And Working Back

At the heart of how Amazon innovates is its six-page memo, which is required at the start of every new initiative. What makes it effective isn’t so much the structure of the document itself, but how it is used to embed a fanatical focus on the customer from the day one. It’s something that Amazon employees have impressed upon them early in their careers.

So the first step in developing Prime Now was to write a press release. Landry’s document was not only a description of the service, but how hypothetical customers would react to it. How did the service affect them? What surprised them about it? What concerns did they want addressed? The exercise forced her to internalize how Amazon customers would think and feel about Prime Now from the very start.

Next she wrote a series of FAQ’s anticipating concerns for both customers and for various stakeholders within the firm, like the CFO, operations people and the leadership of the Prime program. So Landry had to imagine what questions each would have, how any issues would be resolved and then explain things in clear, concise language.

All of this happens before the first meeting is held, a single line of code is written or an early prototype is built, because the company strongly believes that until you internalize the customer’s perspective, nothing else really matters. That’s key to how the company operates.

A Deeply Embedded Writing Culture

It’s no accident that the first step to develop a new product at Amazon is a memo rather than, say, a PowerPoint deck or a kickoff meeting. As Fareed Zakaria once put it, “Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them”.

So the company focuses on building writing skills early in an executive’s career. “Writing is a key part of our culture,” Landry told me. “I started writing press releases for smaller features and projects. One of my first was actually about packaging for diamond rings. Over years of practice and coaching, I got better at it.” Being able to write a good memo is also a key factor in advancement at Amazon. If you want to rise, you need to write and write well.

She also stressed to me the importance of brevity. “Keeping things concise and to the point forces you to think things through in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise. You can’t hide behind complexity, you actually have to work through it,” Landry said. Or, as another Amazon leader put it, “Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to remove.”

Moreover, writing a memo isn’t a solo effort, but a collaborative process. Typically, executives spend a week or more and sharing the document with colleagues, getting feedback, honing and tweaking it until every conceivable facet is deeply thought through.

Reinventing The Office Meeting

Another unique facet of Amazon’s culture is how meetings are run. In recent years, a common complaint throughout the corporate world is how the number of meetings has become so oppressive that it’s hard to get any work done. Research from MIT shows that executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in 1960

At Amazon, however, the six-page memo cuts down on the number of meetings that are called. If you have to spend a week writing a memo, you don’t just start sending out invites whenever the fancy strikes you. Similarly, the company’s practice of limiting attendance to roughly the number of people that can share two pizzas also promotes restraint.

Each meeting starts out with a 30-60 minute reading period in which everybody digests the memo. From there, all attendees are asked to share gut reactions — senior leaders typically speak last — and then delve into what might be missing, ask probing questions and drill down into any potential issues that may arise.

Subsequent meetings follow the same pattern to review the financials, hone the concept and review mockups as the team further refines ideas and assumptions. “It’s usually not one big piece of feedback that you get,” Landry stressed. “It is really all about the smaller questions, they help you get to a level of detail that really brings the idea to life.”

All of this may seem terribly cumbersome to fast moving executives accustomed to zinging in and out of meetings all day, but you often need to go slow to move fast. In the case of Prime Now, the service took just 111 days to go from an idea on a piece of paper to a product launch in one zip code in Manhattan and expanded quickly from there.

Co-evolving Culture And Practice

Every company innovates differently. Apple has a fanatical focus on design. IBM’s commitment to deep scientific research has enabled it to stay on the cutting edge and compete long after most of its competitors have fallen by the wayside. Google integrates a number of innovation strategies into a seamless whole

What works for one company would likely not work for another, a fact that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos highlighted in a recent letter to shareholders. “We never claim that our approach is the right one – just that it’s ours – and over the last two decades, we’ve collected a large group of like-minded people. Folks who find our approach energizing and meaningful,” he wrote.

The truth is that there is no one “true” path to innovation because innovation, at its core, is about solving problems and every enterprise chooses different problems to solve. While IBM might be happy to have its scientists work for decades on some arcane technology and Google gladly allows its employees to pursue pet projects, those things probably wouldn’t fly at Amazon.

However, the one thing that all great innovators have in common is that culture and practice are deeply intertwined. That’s what makes them so hard to copy. Anybody can write a six-page memo or start meetings with a reading period. It’s not those specific practices, but the commitment to the values they reflect, that has driven Amazon’s incredible success.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Unsplash

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.






Happy Employees Make Happy Customers

Leave a reply

Happy Employees Make Happy Customers

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Often, the best companies to do business with are the best companies to work for. When you look at the Google ratings for Round Room Holdings’ TCC and Wireless Zone, two Verizon Wireless retailers with approximately 1,200 retail stores throughout the U.S., you’ll find they are “hitting it out of the park” in both customer reviews and employee satisfaction. I had a chance to interview Chad Jensen, president of TCC and Wireless Zone since 2019, and he shed light on their incredible success, how they do it, and how any company can have similar results.

We can break down the company’s success into three areas: employees, customers, and community.

1. Employees: It all starts with the employees. Jensen’s company has a 90% employee satisfaction rating and 70% employee retention in a retail industry with annual employee turnover rates that are well over 100%. Why? Because Jensen made it abundantly clear that the company puts employees first. The best example of this came not even a year after he took over as president when he and the rest of the world faced the pandemic. His leadership style was immediately put to the test. He was adamant about taking care of the employees. First and foremost was safety, as well as a concern for mental health. And he was determined to keep people employed, saying, “Even if it meant we took a hit on our financials, we were okay with that.” He understood early on that the decisions they made would define how they came out of the pandemic. Employees knew the company had their backs. In exchange, they were confident, fulfilled, and engaged with their customers, ensuring they had an experience that would bring them back. Employee satisfaction is at 90%. As I’ve mentioned many times in my past articles, what’s happening inside an organization is felt by customers on the outside. Jensen’s strategy shows this concept can be tremendously successful.

2. Customers: A focus on the employee experience turns into a positive customer experience. The goal is to provide “the best customer service.” Being the best is a lofty goal. While it’s not a contest, the comment speaks to the commitment the retailer has to its customers. The numbers tell the story. The company’s Google score ranges from 4.7 to 4.9 out of five. Jensen beams with pride over the customer satisfaction numbers, as companies he admires, such as Disney and Chick-fil-A, don’t have numbers quite as high. Jensen said, “We checked, and Disneyland’s Google rating was a 4.5. We’re literally (making customers) happier than the ‘Happiest Place on Earth.’” While a high Google rating is validating, Jensen emphasizes it’s really about the experience that gets customers to come back.

3. Community: Jensen’s efforts to give back to the community create positive results on several levels. He explained, “The more we give back to our communities, the more presence we get, and the better employees we get.” Many companies have a purpose beyond profit. It’s typically a recognizable cause, such as sustainability, poverty, medical research, or other popular causes. Companies like Ace Hardware have raised more than $140 million for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. Patagonia gives 1% of its sales to the preservation and restoration of the environment. TCC and Wireless Zone take a more grassroots approach and give back to the communities their stores serve. They sponsor community events, local pet shelters, food banks, school events, and more. They have given more than 1.3 million backpacks filled with school supplies to kids in their communities. While the corporate HQ is behind this “give back” program, it’s the employees who get the most joy out of being a part of it, once again creating a great employee experience.

By prioritizing the TCC and Wireless Zone employee experience, combined with efforts to create an amazing customer experience as well as support for the communities they serve, the result is a company with some of the lowest turnover in the retail industry, higher Google ratings than “The Happiest Place on Earth” and loyal customers who keep coming back. That’s what happens when you create a company that has what Jensen refers to as “a culture of good.”

Image Credits: Pixabay
This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.