Decoding the Customer

This CX Mini Masterclass explains customer “Moments of Truth”. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, shares where the concept came from, and how you can use your understanding of Moments of Truth to improve customer journeys and foster loyalty. These moments can make or break a customer journey, so if you’ve heard this term used as a buzzword, but want to learn how to translate jargon into business results, then this episode is for you.












Enjoy the best of the archive

The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I’ve curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners.

Want to keep learning about CX?

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including VOC research and customer insight) or get in touch via email.

This CX Mini Masterclass explains the role of leading and lagging indicators in measuring customer experience. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, shares examples for how you can build a balanced view of customer experience with the right mix of CX metrics and measures. If you are wondering how to move beyond a one-metric view of CX, this episode is for you.












Enjoy the best of the archive

The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I’ve curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners.

Want to keep learning about CX?

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX measurement, insights, leadership alignment and CX change implementation) or get in touch via email.

This CX Mini Masterclass covers the concept of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), how to calculate this, and why it’s an important metric for the CX profession. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, will help you understand how to leverage CLV to demonstrate the ROI of customer experience and foster buy-in for customer-centric strategy.












Enjoy the best of the archive

The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I’ve curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners.

Want to keep learning about CX?

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, leadership alignment and CX business case assessments) or get in touch via email.

Customer experience expert and industry pioneer, Jeanne Bliss, shares insights about the origins of the CX industry as well as where it’s going. Jeanne, also known as the godmother of customer experience, provides listeners with a unique window into her career path from becoming one of the first Chief Customer Officers, to founding the CXPA and becoming a transformative force in field of CX. Jeanne and show host, Julia, discuss the enduring challenges facing all CX professionals and what’s next on the horizon for customer experience in the years to come. If you’re looking for some insight, inspiration and guidance from one of the most prominent and respected voices in customer experience, then this episode is for you.
















Meet the godmother of customer experience

Jeanne Bliss has always been an important figure in the CX industry. She is truly a pioneer in this field and has spent 35 years transforming companies, where she’s led organizations to earn 98% customer loyalty rates. Jeanne Bliss helps companies and people become the best version of themselves. She guides them to define, build and live the behaviors and actions that will fuse customers to them, and ultimately create deep and memorable relationships. Creating these deeper bonds has been Jeanne’s singular mission for over 35 years. First, as the inaugural Chief Customer Officer at Lands’ End, Coldwell Banker, Allstate and Microsoft Corporations. Then since 2002, guiding over 20,000 leaders around the world to understand that improving lives should be their most important strategic vision. She has shepherded a whole new breed of leader into the marketplace prepared to lead this change through her pioneering years as a practitioner, experience coaching global leaders, her four game-changing books, and as co-founder of the Customer Experience Professional’s association. If the proof is in the pudding, then there is certainly no doubt why Jeanne is one of the most prominent and respected thought leaders in the world of customer experience.

 

Jeanne Bliss, CCXP, CEO of Customerbliss

If you’d like to learn more about Jeanne’s work, be sure to follow her on LinkedIn, where she often shares insights about customer experience and more. Her blog is second to none as a resource for aspiring CX professionals. Her books provide foundational knowledge about customer experience, and her podcast, The Human Duct Tape Show, is well worth a listen!

From shoes to the C-suite

Jeanne’s father set the tone for her career in customer experience. As the owner of a local she store, he became not just a part of the community, but a part of people’s lives. Putting shoes on children’s feet and welcoming families into his store as though they were part of his family. When he retired, there was a line of customers 3 blocks long, waiting to thank him and wish him well. Customer experience was in Jeanne’s bones and it encouraged her to ask questions about how brands can create those special experiences that fuse customers to them.

What’s your three blocks long? How will you be remembered? And that’s really so much of what’s missing for me as we get into customer experience. – Jeanne Bliss

After acquiring degrees in marketing and apparel design, and working in the retail industry for several years, Jeanne’s role at Lands’ End really catapulted her into her career in customer experience. At Lands’ End she worked closely with the CEO Gary Comber, whose enthusiastic support for focusing on the customer enabled Jeanne to learn, experiment and implement concepts that would become the core foundation of her “CX kit bag”. Jeanne went on to lead customer experience efforts at organizations across a diverse array of industries. Each one presented unique challenges and opportunities, but she identified her gift for being the “glue” that unites teams around an end state. 

Tips for aspiring CX professionals

Jeanne recommends that those who aspire to a CX leadership role first focus on how and where they can drive change at the ground level. She encourages CXers to get involved with operations, get their fingernails dirty and identify their unique gifts for improving customer’s lives.

She also highlights that it’s important to elevate the work and connect CX efforts to business outcomes. 

If you have a passion, it’s fantastic. But you need to be able to package the passion into simplicity, pragmatism and an understanding for leaders on why it’s important to do this work. – Jeanne Bliss

What underpins this work

Jeanne highlights 3 things have have underpinned the longevity and success of CX or a heightened focus on customer experience. First, Jeanne points to “customer math”, or the acceptance by business leaders of customers as assets. This was accelerated during the economic downturns of the early and late ’00s, and it encouraged senior stakeholders to rethink their prioritization of customer experience given the benefit to the bottom line. 

The rise of social media has also impacted the focus on CX, by shifting the megaphone from companies (or their advertising agencies) to consumers. This has forced organizations to establish clarity around who they are and then fortify the reliability of their operating model to deliver.

When customers talk on social media, they really say three things: Did you do what you said you were going to do? Did you improve my life? And how did you make me feel? – Jeanne Bliss

Finally, the godmother of customer experience says leaders are starting to understand that business silos don’t unite themselves. This realization has given rise to the role of the Chief Customer Officer, but Jeanne warns that CX teams cannot become another silo, or it will defeat the purpose. She fears what could happen if CX professionals become too focused on the mechanics of CX and lose sight of the meaning of their work.

Covid pushes businesses in the right direction 

In her parting words, Jeanne suggests that a missing link has been getting leaders to align their own behavior and messaging to the vision of what they want their company’s brand to be. Covid has force fed the business world with an extra dose of humanity. CEOs are having frank conversations with employees and customers, thinking outside of the box and acting quickly to help improve the lives of their customers. These adaptations have become essential to brand survival, and the godmother of customer experience hopes these attributes will endure beyond the crisis to help elevate and solidify the work. 

Want to keep learning about CX?

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business define customer experience strategy that delivers results, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email. To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here.

This CX Mini Masterclass explains a simple yet effective CX tool for driving customer-centric change and ensuring that business decisions support an organization’s overall CX goals. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, explains the customer impact scorecard, how to build one and then how to use it to ensure that business changes work for – not against – CX. Julia also shares some news about a planned hiatus for the show. If you’re looking for a practical approach to help cross functional teams stay the course towards shared customer experience goals, then this episode is for you.














A simple tool for an important job

We’ve all seen it happen. Someone in IT, sales or operations makes a decision about a new product or a process with the best intentions, but the resulting change has a negative impact customer experience. When these things happen, it’s rarely out of malice. After all, no one (or at least we hope no one) goes around intentionally making customer experiences worse.

More often than not, the team that implemented the change just wasn’t thinking about the downstream impact on customer experience. This is bound to happen, because honestly, most businesses are geared to solve business problems. The customer may be the guiding light for CX departments and some executives, but historically that hasn’t been true for all teams. Additionally, the more removed a team is from the customer, the more difficult it can be to draw a connection between day to day responsibilities and customer outcomes.

In this scenario, a little assistance and structure are in order. And a customer impact scorecard is a great tool to for CX leaders to have in their toolbox.

A customer impact scorecard is a rating or evaluation tool that prompts the user to assess how something – be that a change to people, processes or technology – will eventually turn into customer outcomes and if these outcomes are desirable, neutral or adverse. The idea being that a scorecard becomes a quick and easy check and balance to avoid decisions which might inadvertently damage customer experience. It encourages stakeholders to pause and make an honest assessment of the impact on customer experience by moving the thinking from inside out to outside in.

Some organizations already have risk assessment scorecards in place for any business change or major investment, so why can’t the same assessment be done for customer experience? Surely customer experience is just as important to the long-term viability of any business. (And if you’d like to know a little bit more about helping your organization balance business risk and CX, then be sure to check out episode 36.)

Building and using your customer impact scorecard

Identify which attributes to evaluate – These could relate to your customer promise, CX principles or what is known to be important to the customer. It’s helpful to identify 5-10 points to evaluate and phrase them as thought-starter questions. E.g. Will this change impact how easy it is for customers to do business with us?

Set your rating scale – The ratings for each attribute should range from positive to negative. A 3 or 5 point scoring scale usually works nicely. Regardless of which size scale is used, a negative impact should yield a negative score, a neutral impact should yield a score of zero, and a positive impact should yield a positive score. When the overall evaluation points for the business change are tallied, a positive rating indicates a change with a net positive impact on CX, while a net negative score should raise red flags about something that would potentially have an adverse effect on CX.

Identify the right forum for implementation – Pinpoint the process for vetting or prioritizing new initiatives and see if a customer impact scorecard can be included in that process. Project management, finance and legal are some of the typical gatekeepers for business change.

It’s important to keep the customer impact scorecard simple and straightforward. The goal is to guide cross functional leaders to consider the customer before they make a business decision, but to avoid creating complex red tape that stakeholders end up resenting.

News about the podcast

As shared with listeners at the start of the episode, I’ll be taking a hiatus from publishing new CX Mini Masterclasses for the next few months. The show will be back later in 2020. Keep an eye out for periodic re-broadcasts of favorites from the archive and possible new content from guest contributors.

Transcript

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

Click to expand full transcript
Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

And, an added note to those who are already CCXPs, the Customer Experience Professionals Association is now recognizing CX Podcasts listening towards certification renewal credits. So, be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to so that you can submit this towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 89, the third episode of June 2020. And my last CX Mini Masterclass episode, before I take a little hiatus to go on maternity leave.

Yes, my wonderful listeners, big changes are afoot, but I will be back. I have a very special interview episode with one of my CX heroes next week, so I’m very excited about that. After that episode, I’ll be taking a couple of months off from my weekly schedule of new episodes, but we’ll try to periodically repost a few past favorites from the archive and potentially some fresh content from a few of the show’s guest expert contributors before I’m back in the saddle later this year. I wanted to take us into this hiatus on a high note, so I’ve been saving one of my favorite topics for this episode.

Today, I’m going to share a simple, humble tool that I’ve found to be incredibly effective for driving customer-centric change, and that’s the Customer Impact Scorecard. At the time of recording this episode, the world is grappling with a global health crisis. Business operations are changing in real time, and there has never been a more important moment to keep tabs on how business decisions impact customer experience. So I’m going to share a simple tool that will help any team in your organization evaluate how changes to people, processes, or technology might impact customer experience.

If you are looking for a practical approach to help cross-functional teams stay the course towards shared customer experience goals, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I’ve seen this happen many times over.

Someone in IT, sales or operations makes a decision about a new product or a process with the best intentions, but the result has a negative impact on customer experience. Maybe it was a change to a policy that resulted in extra steps on the part of the customer, or a new platform that made it more difficult for teams to provide service support. Whatever the example, these things happen, and I find it’s rarely out of malice. After all, no one, or at least I hope no one, goes around intentionally making customer experiences worse.

More often than not, the issue is that the team that implemented the change just wasn’t thinking about the downstream impact on customer experience. Because let’s be honest, the customer may be the guiding light for CX teams and some executives, but historically, that hasn’t been true for all teams. Also, the more removed an employee or a department is from the customer, the more difficult it can be to draw the connection between someone’s day-to-day responsibilities and customer outcomes. In this scenario, a little assistance and structure are in order, and this is where the Customer Impact Scorecard can be your best friend.

A Customer Impact Scorecard is a rating or evaluation tool that prompts the user to assess something, be that a change to people, processes, or technology, that will eventually turn into customer outcomes, and if these outcomes are desirable, neutral, or adverse. The idea being that a scorecard becomes a quick and easy check and balance that helps prevent decisions which might inadvertently damage customer experience, or at least it pushes the stakeholders making these decisions to have an honest assessment of the impact on customer experience by moving the thinking from inside out to outside in. I’ve seen many organizations implement risk assessment scorecards for major business changes or investment spending, so why can’t the same assessment steps be done with customer experience in mind? Surely, customer experience is just as important to the long-term viability of any business.

And if you’d like to know a little bit more about how to help your organization balance business risk and customer experience, then be sure to check out episode 36. To get started building a customer impact scorecard, identify which attributes you’d like to score. Think about your customer promise, your principles, and what’s important to your customer. Turn these into thought starter questions that can be rated as positive, negative, or neutral impact.

Let’s say, for example, that respecting customers’ time is one of your customer experience principles. Then you might want to add, as one of your scorecard attributes, will this business change impact our ability to service customers in a timely manner and live up to our promise? Let’s say that ease of use is also something you know that is important to customers. Then you might want to add the question, will this change impact how easy it is for customers to do business with us?

I’d suggest building a scorecard with somewhere between five and 10 customer impact attributes aligned to your organization’s customer experience goals, customer promise, or principles. And then a simple three or five point rating scale from positive to negative, with the positive impact being a positive number, neutral being zero, and a negative impact being negative score. After evaluating a business change, the scorecard should yield a score that sheds light on the impact to customer experience. A high score would mean that an initiative is expected to have an overwhelmingly positive impact on customer experience.

And perhaps this positive result can be baked into the business case or prioritization. A score close to zero would indicate a neutral impact, so customer experience wouldn’t be a primary decision driver. And a negative score would indicate a business change with a potentially adverse impact on customer experience. If the score is negative, it should ring alarm bells and warrant closer evaluation.

Perhaps there’s an opportunity to adjust plans and mitigate this negative impact or at least consider the long-term effect on customer lifetime value versus the proposed benefit of the business change. If your leadership team loves scores, ratings, and structure, then this tool can add some real quantifiable muscle to the case for making decisions with the customer in mind, which is an important step to building customer centricity into your business. In terms of rolling out the scorecard tool, I suggest reaching out to your organization’s project management team or whoever the gatekeepers are for business change. Ask them what their process is for vetting new initiatives and if customer impact can be included in that process.

I think the key is to keep the scorecard stuff very straightforward and easy. You want to help guide cross-functional leaders to consider the customer before making a business decision, but you also want to avoid creating complex red tape that people end up presenting. If you’re looking for help ensuring that your organization makes business decisions that work towards best-in-class customer experience, not against it, then please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help.

You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast.

This helps others find the show. I’ll be back next week with a very special interview episode. I’ll see you then.

Want to keep learning about CX?

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email.