Today’s #CXQOTD: Is neutral feedback good?
Maybe, maybe not (how's THAT for 'neutral'?)
It's *only* valuable if you can do something with it. When you see it that way, that actual rating is meaningless in fact! pic.twitter.com/JZxP3var4n— ✵Nicholas Zeisler (@NicholasZeisler) February 11, 2021
The struggle for feedback
I came across the following article I wrote in an earlier part of my consulting career (I was much thinner then). Without knowing it at the time, I foreshadowed a lot of reflection that I use now as an executive CX consultant and Fractional CCO. At the time my practice was mainly focused on training clients and facilitating workshops in Lean Six Sigma and Agile Project Management among other topics…mostly more transactional than the larger and more strategic work I do with clients these days. Nonetheless, I think it is a microcosm of the concept of seeking and acting on feedback wherever you can. I use it still as a consultant and encourage my clients to do the same in their own VoC programs. I’ve lightly edited and updated some parts. Enjoy. […]
Don’t ask questions if you already know the answers
A good lawyer never asks a question for which he doesn’t already know the answer. That’s not necessarily just about being smart and being prepared. Frankly, it’s a manipulation technique used to sway juries and judges: When they get a witness on the stand, the most important thing for an attorney is to control the situation and allow just the right narrative to come through to the audience. People can object to the ethics, but the technique is age-old.
When we in the CX field speak of a similar rule, not asking questions to which we should know the answer. Likewise, it’s not about just being prepared; it’s more in speaking to respect for our Customers. Normally we are referencing surveys, and I’ll start with that, but there’s also another application of this rule I’ll mention in a minute. […]
Metrics: Output vs. Outcomes
Y’all know I’m a big fan of metrics. Long before I was in CX, I was in Process Engineering (Lean Six Sigma and Operations Research), and long before that I was an analyst. My BS is in Mathematics, and I teach Statistics at the Air Force Academy. So yea, I dig numbers. I write about them a lot.
I was chatting with a colleague the other day and he had an awesome turn-of-phrase regarding metrics that I’d never heard of before. He’s the leader of an international organization and we were talking about strategies and how important it is to ensure that leadership’s highfalutin strategies and visions are made real to team members in their own day-to-day work. This is a standard theme in leadership and management: Sure, we can design strategies and missions and visions for our organizations, but of course it’s the folks working on executable actions every day that are the champions who carry the deliverables across the goal lines.
Naturally, that turns to metrics. But simply having metrics isn’t enough. If you leave it to the visionaries and the leaders (CEOs, Presidents, Boards of Directors) to name the top-level KPIs but don’t boil down what that means that I, as a part of the team, am supposed to do, we’ll never get anywhere. Turning numbers into results requires communicating, and sometimes translation. My friend offered a great way of framing the challenge of driving higher-level metrics into operational, measurable goals.
He said, it’s the difference between Output and Outcomes, and it helps frame out how we all work together to deliver for our Customers. […]
Channel Surfing
I have covered my experience using Twitter to solve a support problem in a previous article. For many CX (and definitely Customer support) professionals, the channel is ‘the thing’. We often talk about switching channels, being multi-channel, being omni-channel. It sometimes seems like an obsession.
A colleague recently posted in one of the online discussion forums to which I belong in all caps (which I’ll spare you here) that “nobody” likes being moved from one channel to another. I suppose among a lot of CXers, it’s an article of faith that you should never, unless absolutely necessary (and, they’ll say, it should never be absolutely necessary) switch a Customer to another channel. Furthermore, some will say that you should be available and excellent in every channel.
I’m not so sure. […]
