When it’s okay to ask
At one point a while back in my career I spent most of my days teaching Lean Six Sigma around the company for which I was working at the time. From a (much more seasoned) colleague I learned a witty thing to say at the end of each session: “If you have negative feedback, please share it with me; if you have positive feedback, please share it with my boss.” It was a clever turn of phrase that made people think a little bit and at the end of the day send them off with a smile. But it really was a great encapsulation of what I learned was so important about feedback: I need to know where I’m falling short so I know where I can improve, and it also never hurts for your boss to hear praises of your work.
Fast forward now to my life as a Fractional Chief Customer Officer and CX consultant (and constant pest when it comes to preaching about the value of feedback), and it occurs to me: Maybe it’s okay sometimes to ask for a positive review. […]
How CX is like HR
I’ll often describe CX in terms of an analogy to other operations within your company. If it’s to make an impact, it should have a charter that includes responsibility for and the moving parts needed to drive changes. Otherwise, there’s no point in having a CX department in the first place.
The conversation usually comes as a side note to the dreaded ROI of CX discussion. Let me pull on that thread (picking on HR this time around, but it’s probably applicable for other examples as well).
My argument goes, that HR doesn’t have to defend its own existence. Sure, it has a budget (sorry, we can’t afford to send the whole team to that career fair in the Bahamas!), but it’s never faced with the existential question of, Why should we “do HR?” […]
Two problems with your KPIs
Anybody who’s read much of what I have to say about Customer insights and Voice of the Customer (VoC) knows I’m quite critical of legacy KPIs like CSAT and NPS. Part of that, naturally, is my inherent wiseass contrarian nature, sure. That said, if I didn’t really believe that there’s a better way to do things, I’d not have invented a new top-level CX metric of my own (the Brand Alignment Score).
Sure, it’s easy to beat up on “the way we’ve always done it” and call it a day, congratulating oneself on being so much better than the rest. But it’s also important to understand the limitations not only of our own cleverness, but the principles underpinning our own arguments. For example, it’s important to understand (and admit) that even the metric I made up doesn’t deliver a panacea.
So let’s talk about how bad metrics are bad in two categories:
- Universal—these are properties of every top-level metric, and it doesn’t matter which one you use, there’ll always be problems
- Specific—this is why this particular metric is bad, and ideally this other one is good.
A moment of truth for entrepreneurs
I recently wrote about how some brands don’t really listen to their Customers when they develop new functions, features, and even new products, and how frustrating that can be. That’s often because a brand feels so comfortable and strong that they don’t really need to listen. “We know what our Customers want, we’ve been doing this for years,” they seem to be saying.
A lot of the work I do is with entrepreneurs, getting started with CX, and inculcating their new organizations with a truly Customer-centric culture and organization. I was discussing this dynamic with one of my start-up friends recently and it brought up a trend with early-stage organizations that I shared with her and figured I’d also pass along here. […]
Brand Alignment Score: Reduce the subjectivity
I participated recently in another one of these awesome forums where CXers gather to chat and share ideas about our profession. The main topic centered on VoC approaches, and at one point someone brought up the challenge of interpreting his company’s NPS results. To paraphrase him, sometimes one Customer may rate an experience as a ‘0’ while another Customer may rate the exact same experience as a ‘10’. […]
Collecting data so you can use it
I once worked with a client who was having a somewhat complicated concern about survey data: Every time they interacted with a Customer they’d send out a survey invitation. That was well and good, but they never knew (does anybody?) when they’d get a response. They put a time limit on the survey in that the invitation expired after 30 days, but they knew their Customers were busy, so it may be a couple of weeks before someone got around to filling it out.
That dynamic made reporting a bit trickier because the results were not necessarily reflective of how their performance was at the time they came in. Because they’d trickle in over the course of several weeks to a month, the picture and insights from one day’s experiences would be diluted and confused with those of later days. Now, while in some situations, this may seem a trivial concern (What difference would it make, for example, if the Monday results got mixed in with the Tuesday and Wednesday results?), I’d been working with this group for a while and they’d embraced my admonition to act on the insights they were gathering from their Customers. So in this case, the changes they were making should show up in the results of their VoC program…keeping the survey results aligned with what was going on when the encounter it was to represent occurred was important. […]
