Category Archives: Customer Experience

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

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

  1. Innovation is Dead. Now What? — by Robyn Bolton
  2. When Best Practices Become Old Practices — by Mike Shipulski
  3. 3 Keys to Improving Leadership Skills — by David Burkus
  4. Audacious – How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World — Exclusive Interview with Mark Schaefer
  5. Which Go to Market Playbook Should You Choose? — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  6. Turns Out the Tin Foil Hat People Were Right — by Braden Kelley
  7. Are You a Leader? — by Mike Shipulski
  8. Time to Stop These Ten Bad Customer Experience Habits — by Shep Hyken
  9. Beyond the AI Customer Experience Hype — by Shep Hyken
  10. A Tumultuous Decade of Generational Strife — by Greg Satell

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in January 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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FORO: The Fear of Reaching Out

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FORO: The Fear of Reaching Out

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

We’ve all experienced long hold times, repeating our “story” because we get transferred from one customer service rep to another, etc. It’s an ugly customer service experience that gives many customers FORO, or the Fear of Reaching Out.

FORO is the result of an experience marred with time-wasting friction that makes customers dislike having to reach out to customer support. Our annual customer service and Customer Experience (CX) research (sponsored by RingCentral) finds that 43% of customers would rather clean a toilet than call customer support. The support experience can be so bad that 60% of customers admit to hanging up on a support agent, 34% admit to yelling at an agent, and 21% admit to cussing at an agent. So, it does make sense that customers would have FORO due to poor experiences they have had with some companies and brands (not all) in the past.

Because some companies get it right and others don’t, the inconsistency makes the customer wonder what the next time will be like. Their past frustration, anxiety or memory of a bad experience creates the unwillingness to call.

I had a chance to interview Gaurav Passi on Amazing Business Radio, and he introduced me to the concept of FORO. Passi is the co-founder and CEO of Zingly.AI, a platform that empowers customers to collaborate with a company, either through AI or with direct human-to-human interactions, to have their questions answered and problems resolved. Below are some of Passi’s most intriguing points, followed by my commentary:

  1. The next 15-20 years will be about the end customer experience. Many consulting companies and business experts recognize that customer experience is more important than a company’s product. Most customers can buy the same product—or at least similar products—from many different sources. What differentiates the companies and brands that sell these products is the experience. Passi agrees and adds that the way companies deliver support is changing. The future of CX is a blend of AI, digital and human/live support. That prompted me to ask Passi a question that concerns many people, especially customer support agents, “Do you see AI replacing live agents in that time frame?” He answered, “I don’t see a world where humans are completely taken out.”
  2. Customers don’t want to talk to a human being — until they do. Passi says that customers often don’t want to talk to a human. They just want an answer as quickly and efficiently as possible. If they can’t get it, then they want to talk to a human … as quickly and efficiently as possible. Even with many customers desiring this self-service approach, Passi cautions that companies should not make the mistake of 100% deflection to digital self-service. He asks, “Even if you achieve 100% deflection, what will happen to your customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores?” Passi shared an example of a client who had chosen to deflect 100% of customer support to digital self-service and had an outage. Because of the outage, the employees ended up talking to customers, human-to-human. Amazingly — or not — CSAT went up. Why? Passi says, “Because there was a human touch when needed.”
  3. Customer patience is at an all-time low. This is a primary symptom of FORO. Customers don’t have the time or patience to go online to a company’s website, find the customer support number, wait on hold, get authenticated, etc. They want, as Passi calls it, a “One shot, one kill experience.” Using the company’s self-service options, often fueled by AI, you ask a question, and an answer comes back. It’s as simple as that. The customer appreciates not having to get on the phone, wait on hold, etc., etc.
  4. AI is not the final answer! While AI is revolutionizing customer service and support by enabling businesses to scale their operations efficiently, maintaining the human touch with customers to foster genuine relationships is still important. But the human touch doesn’t have to kick in until it’s needed. And in the perfect world, the platform will recognize customers’ reactions when they aren’t getting the answers they need. Passi is proud of what he refers to as “the most magical component we’ve created in the past three years,” which is a technology that understands when the customer is not getting the right answer and seamlessly passes them to a human agent to take over.

If you’ve been following my work, you know I’m focused on helping my clients create amazing customer experiences. As Passi and I wrapped up our interview, he mentioned that amazing is what Zingly is about. He shared that his mission, like mine, is to help his customers create amaZINGLY great experiences for their customers. With an increasing demand for customers to have more control over how, when and on which devices they communicate with businesses, the combination of AI and human expertise, paired with transparency and collaboration with customers, can create a more personalized, effective and amaZINGLY great customer experience.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Digital Customer Experience Drives Bottom Line Results

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Digital Customer Experience Drives Bottom Line Results

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Several years ago, Jake Sorofman, from Gartner, Inc. wrote that “Customer Experience is the new battleground.”

This has been requoted numerous times by companies including Forbes, Altimeter and, McKinsey, etc. And now it looks like FROM.

Not to beat a dead horse, but are CEO’s convinced? In our experience, clients whose leadership is on board with investing in a great experience report greater financial advantages vs. those companies who are not focused on Customer Experience (CX) or are dabbling in it.

In fact, the Aberdeen Group conducted a detailed study on Aligning the Business Around a Customer. In the report, the Best in Class (BIC: defined as the top 20% of participants by reported performance) reported significant financial advantages. For example, the Year over Year (YoY) change in Company revenue is 35.4% for the BIC and 7.7% for all rest.

Other interesting findings include Customer Retention Rate: BIC 85% the rest 40%. YoY change in Customer profitability: BIC 18.2% the rest 2.9%.

Aberdeen Group Aligning Around the Customer

How do companies get results like these? Our clients don’t just fix touchpoints but use Journey Management to Innovate Exceptional Experiences that Customers Love. A simple 6 step process works:

  1. Know your customers and their behaviors
  2. Map their journey and identify friction points, gaps and enabling systems
  3. Establish metrics and analytics based on your business strategy
  4. Ideate and innovate based on new technologies, analytics, and trends
  5. Blueprint the new experiences using a service design based method
  6. Deploy new capabilities and implement the new journeys

6 Step Customer Journey Map Process

Of course, measurement against the metrics set up in step 3 allows us to optimize over time and keep the journey fresh. It also allows us to see potential new friction points that should be resolved. Many companies are looking at personalizing the experience, really understanding their customer behavior and building an environment for co-creation. Powered by ethnographic research, user-centered design can help to focus on what the customer wants to accomplish and how best to get the desired outcome.

So, this works for the rest of the companies, but what about the Best in Class group? Yep, the true innovation to deliver exceptional experiences is never really done. There will always be new tech, and of course, competitors and other companies are investing in their experiences and creating the next big thing.

Need more detail on the benefits of implementing a CX Operating Model and using journey management to deliver Exceptional Experiences? Here is another study that is about 15 months old, also by the Aberdeen group, that details some of the most common areas of value companies are reporting.

The Employee Engagement comparison is staggering. Companies that use Journey Management get almost 15% more employees engaged than companies who work on their journeys, but do not have a cross-silo mature management program. As you may know, engaged employees have a profound impact on the Customer experience. ROMI, Referrals and Sales Cycle Times are also areas that carry large financial rewards.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Pexels

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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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