Good CX Principle #3: Take on the stress
Today I’m posting the third article in a five-part series on the Principles of Good CX. There’s an intro to the series here, and parts one and two are here and here, respectively.
I’ve previously mentioned the tongue-in-cheek observation that our jobs would all be a lot easier without the Customers, right? (Forget that our jobs would not exist without Customers, of course, but that’s part of the joke.) One reason some of our front-line team members feel that way is because they’re usually trying to help Customers navigate our own internal processes when they need help. Forget that, well, it’s our job to do that, and let’s concentrate on what it means from our Customers’ perspective. The reason it may seem like drudgery at times to hand-hold a Customer as they try to wend their way through our online interface or manage a return event is that we’re so used to it. We know how things work, and from that perspective, it makes the work of explaining it over and over again all day long a bit of a grind. I’m sympathetic, believe me.
But if we walk in our Customers’ shoes we’ll find that our processes aren’t as straightforward or simple as we think they are. After all, that’s why they had to contact us for help in the first place. And frankly, they don’t have the time or inclination to concern themselves with our internal processes. This is the heart of the third of the Five Principles of CX: Take on the Stress. […]
Good CX Principle #2: Communicate
In this, the second installment of a five-part series on the Principles of Good CX (Intro here, and Part One here), I’ll present the principle of Communication. It’s pretty obvious that this is important, but that makes it even more surprising that so many organizations get it so wrong.
I recently spent literally two weeks waiting to hear back from my insurance company on a property claim. It was a complicated issue (for me, at least, as the Customer) that entailed my insurance company, my neighbor’s insurance company, and the insurance company that covers my HOA. There were all sorts of complicated (again, for me, I’m not in insurance) dealings between the three carriers having to do with liability and competing deductibles, and meanwhile, I had tradespeople working on repairs to our place who were wondering when and via whom they’d be paid. […]
Good CX Principle #1: Get it Right
In my time as a CX professional, I’ve developed what I call the Five Principles of CX. I’ll go through them over the course of five articles starting here with the first one: Get It Right (GIR). (I posted an introduction to the series here.) Although not universally the case, and it’s not a good idea to limit it just this way, a lot of folks consider CX in terms mostly of Customer support. That is to say, that most of the time when we consider improving CX, we look to how we handle Customer requests when something’s gone wrong.
This is a narrow view, and we should avoid considering CS as the totality of CX. A Customer’s experience begins before he or she even comes into direct contact with our brand—through word of mouth, online reviews, or just the sound the name of our business makes when spoken out loud—let alone has problems with our goods or services. That said, though, Customer support can help us greatly when it comes to improving our CX. […]
An introduction to the Principles of Good CX
I wouldn’t be a self-serving, self-promoting consultant if I didn’t have a few frameworks to show you, so at the risk of shaming myself and losing my membership card, here’s another one. Over the course of five articles, I’ll get into each of them, but here I’ll lay out what I term the Principles of Good CX. […]
I’m on another podcast
Here’s the direct link:
Hello Friends! My buddy Ben Goodey had me on his podcast recently. Check it out and share:https://t.co/9dYEOrSjlr#cx #cxleaders https://t.co/0O7rL9QyEI
— ✵Nicholas Zeisler (@NicholasZeisler) November 6, 2020
Two roles of a Chief Customer Officer
The concept of a Chief Customer Officer (CCO or, sometimes, CXO) is still pretty fresh for a lot of organizations. I’ve even posted a video to go over some of the simple questions like, Why should you have a CCO and what are the benefits? But just what a CCO is sometimes feels foreign, even though the responsibilities are pretty simple to analogize to other leadership roles in any organization. As with these other positions, the job can be broadly broken down into two main hats the CCO wears: one as a leader and representative of an important part of the organization on the leadership team, and the other focused functionally and inwardly.
If that sounds familiar, it should. In much the same way as the Chief Finance Officer is responsible not only for the day-to-day keeping of the books but also for bringing insights from that bookkeeping into the leadership team in order to offer guidance and expert opinion on what those finances are saying and what we should do about it, the Chief Customer Officer likewise has a team of CX experts deriving Customer-centric insights and acting on them (day-to-day functions), while also representing that part of the business in a collaborative effort to make the best strategic decisions as a leadership team on behalf of the organization.
When it comes to the CCO functional responsibilities, they fall into three categories: the Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, Process Engineering (PE), and Customer-centric culture. These all work together to create an ecosystem from which the CCO draws insights to inform the rest of the leadership team (the other part of the CCO’s job) about how decisions they make will impact the Customer and the impact that will have on the organization as a whole. […]
