Roy Barnes

Article / Updated 07-18-2022

Customer experience is a dynamic discipline. It's always evolving, so you have to make an effort to stay on top of things! Here, you find several suggestions for additional customer experience resources. You'll notice that a great many of them are blogs. Fortunately, the community of bloggers who focus on customer experience is extremely open and sharing! Reading these blogs on a regular basis enables you to stay abreast of the latest thinking in the customer experience field. Even better, why not participate? By providing comments and questions, you can become a part of the evolution of customer experience. You're likely to receive unbiased and helpful feedback that can help you move the needle on your customer experience efforts! LinkedIn LinkedIn hosts scads of groups devoted to customer experience. If you're looking to find out more about customer experience or network with other experts in the field, this is a great place to start! Here are just a few groups to choose from: Advanced Customer Experience Strategy (ACES): This group is designed for seasoned customer experience experts who want to engage in a stimulating, rigorous study of customer experience strategy. Building the Customer-Centric Organization: This group focuses on the migration to customer centricity by focusing on customer experience management, customer-centric process design, and organizational design. Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management: A wide-ranging forum that looks at customer experience from a B2B perspective. This forum discusses everything from buying decisions to cross-process coordination and alignment. Chief Customer Officer Group: This group focuses on advocacy for the chief customer officer function while including broad discussion on customer experience topics. Customer Experience Leaders: Look here for advice and counsel from practitioners in the field. There's nothing like hearing from the people who are executing customer experience on a daily basis. Customer Experience Professionals: This group offers lots of case studies and varying points of view from a large group of customer experience experts. CXPA: This is a group run by the Customer Experience Professionals Association, which is a global nonprofit focused on the advancement of customer experience management practices. In addition to its LinkedIn group, the organization runs CX certification classes. Customer Experience Summits and Conferences A number of excellent customer experience summits and conferences are held worldwide. These conferences typically come in a couple variations. One variation features presentations from field experts, vendors, suppliers, consultants, and other interested parties. Often, at these conferences, there's a heavy emphasis on selling you different products and services. The other variation is also likely to have vendors and sponsors, but the agenda typically involves dozens of presentations from people (like you) who are in the process of trying to improve customer experience in their organizations. At these conferences, you see lots of "this is how we're doing it" discussions. Although the quality of the presentations can vary, if you're in the process of implementing a customer experience program, talking to people who are making it happen can be extremely helpful. One of the best things about these conferences is the networking opportunities. You can use these conferences to find and develop your own network of customer experience experts, peers, and friends who may just lend a supportive ear or idea sometime down the line. Although the names of specific conferences can and do change, the following conferences and sponsors provide valuable learning sessions and productive networking opportunities: The Conference Board: The Customer Experience Conference Forrester's Forum for Customer Experience Professionals Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit Gartner Customer 360 Summit InMoment (formerly Mindshare) InMoment is a favorite customer research, customer survey, and customer experience analytics organization. The InMoment blog talks about the data analytics side of worldwide customer experience. Customer Experience Matters Bruce Temkin and his team are "market makers." Their research, perspective, and insights are discussed by customer experience experts worldwide. Their Customer Experience Matters blog contains everything from recent research to deep insight on customer experience execution. CX Journey Annette Franz's CX Journey blog is a broad sweep of the customer experience landscape. Look to Annette's blog for insight and resources on execution of both customer experience and employee experience. Beyond Philosophy Colin Shaw, who has written extensively on customer experience, is one of the thought leaders on that topic. His thinking and his words have not only made him a LinkedIn Influencer, but a source of inspiration for elevating the discipline of customer experience. His blog, found at www.beyondphilosophy.com/blog, is required reading. Roy's Blue Blog Roy's Blue Blog and the next one are maintained by the authors of Customer Experience for Dummies (published by Wiley) — Roy Barnes and Bob Kelleher, respectively. Barnes' blog, Roy's Blue Blog, goes into detail about executing customer experience and includes observations from the day-to-day world of customer experience. Want to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of customer experience? This is the place. The Employee Engagement Group Blog The Employee Engagement Group blog is the online home of Bob Kelleher. The blog's focus is on employee engagement, but you'll quickly discover the degree to which an engaged workforce can improve customer experience! The two go hand in hand.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-12-2022

To compete in a world where more and more products and services are commoditized more quickly than ever before, you have to up your game and deliver great customer experiences at every point of interaction in your business. A consistently great customer experience is very difficult to copy and may represent a sustainable competitive differentiator for your company!

Step by Step / Updated 01-26-2017

Following are tools you can use to gauge your progress on each step of improving customer experience, enabling you to see what you’ve done so far and get a handle on what still needs to be accomplished. Feel free to copy these tools and use them in your efforts to improve customer experience in your own organization! These tools are, in effect, questionnaires. Each one includes a list of tasks; your job is to indicate your status on each one. Rate your status as follows: Thinking about doing: 1 point; Plan to do: 2 points; Initiated: 3 points; 50 percent complete: 4 points; 100 percent complete: 5 points. Then, add the total number of points and divide that sum by two to determine your score.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Of course, the best way to deal with angry customers is to do whatever you can do to prevent them from getting that way in the first place. Barring that, you need a plan to deal with these unhappy souls. To help you remember what you should do when you’re faced with an infuriated customer, here's a handy acronym: RESOLVED. It stands for the following: Respond to the person who is upset. If you’re dealing with an upset customer, it’s imperative that you respond to him in such a way that he feels heard, attended to, and respected. Take care of the person first and the problem second. Empathize and apologize. When faced with an upset customer, job #1 is to empathize — that is, to focus on your customer’s emotional state — and to apologize. Dignity and genuine concern are the watchwords here. Seek to solve the problem. If a customer is upset, you must work to solve her problem. First and foremost, that means cleansing your speech of the phrase “It’s our policy.” If a customer is unhappy, she doesn’t care what your policy is. Second, be aware that the customer doesn’t care what caused her problem. Was it a cumbersome internal process? Are you short-staffed? Frankly, it doesn’t matter. All the customer wants to know is what you’re going to do about it. Be open to the customer’s proposed solution. Often, the best solutions come from the customers themselves. Customers will frequently devise solutions and alternatives that you would have never considered. Don’t be afraid to ask what would make the customer happy. Listen intently. To listen intently, you must practice active listening. That is, you must concentrate deeply on what is being said, giving your undivided attention. It isn’t enough to simply hear the message; active listening requires you to pay attention with all of your senses. When you listen in this way, upset customers will begin to calm down. Verify the solution. After you propose a solution, verify that it’s what the customer wants. Say, “If we do X, Y, and Z, will that satisfy you?” This shows the customer that you will not move forward unless you are both in agreement that the situation is resolved to his satisfaction. Eliminate the problem. When you and the customer agree on the solution, you must act immediately. Don’t let anything get in the way of implementing the resolution you’ve reached. Document the problem. After you solve your customer’s problem, you must document it to prevent it from happening again. This can be as simple as jotting down notes about your conversation, or more formal, like entering your notes into a database. In this way, you can track the complaint, maintain a history of it, learn from it, and identify and eliminate preventable problems in the future.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Are you still trying to get a handle on what great customer experience looks like? Perhaps an example would help. Years ago, a young woman named Stephanie was hired to work the front desk at a Marriott hotel in Denver. Bubbly, energetic, and born with a desire to serve, Stephanie lived and breathed the customer experience intent. One night, very late, the lobby's front doors slid open and a woman trudged in. Her shoulders were slumped, and all the energy was drained from her body. Tears were flowing from her eyes. In an instant, Stephanie was out from behind the desk. She strode across the lobby and intercepted the woman. She steered her to a sofa and sat her down. "What's wrong?" she asked gently. The woman's story spilled out. For weeks, the woman — whose name was Amy — had been sitting vigil at her mother's bedside. Her mother had been terminally ill with an aggressive, inoperable brain tumor. But there was a business meeting in Denver that Amy, who lived in Chicago, needed to attend. She spoke to her mother's doctors, who assured her that all would be well in her absence. So Amy decided to take the last flight out of Chicago that night to Denver, attend a brief meeting the next morning, and fly right back home. Unfortunately, the doctors were wrong. Amy's mother passed away while Amy was enroute. "Wait here," Stephanie told Amy. She went back to the front desk, checked Amy in, and grabbed her room key. Then she personally walked Amy up to her room. She turned on the lights, set the radio to a soft, classical station, and got Amy settled. She offered to bring Amy some fresh coffee and a bite to eat. She also offered to make arrangements for Amy to fly back to Chicago on the first plane out. But that wasn't all. After leaving Amy's room, Stephanie called hotel security and asked them to unlock the gift shop so she could purchase some flowers and a sympathy card for Amy. She then passed the card around to all the staff who were still working that night so they could sign it. Half an hour after leaving Amy's room, Stephanie was back. She brought with her a pot of fresh coffee, a slice of warm apple pie, flowers, and a card signed by 18 staff members. She informed Amy that she was booked on an early-morning flight to Chicago, and that she, Stephanie, would meet Amy in the lobby at 5:45 a.m. (which was not her scheduled shift) to escort her to the airport. No doubt, Stephanie was a naturally gifted service employee. But she was also armed with an explicit understanding of that hotel's customer experience intent. As a result, she made a real difference in Amy's life.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

While it’s recommended that you limit touchpoint redesign efforts to 20 days, some processes that affect customer experience are too broad to be tackled in that timeframe. So, what should you do about those big broken processes? Before getting the answer to that, consider the mistakes organizations have been known to make by tackling projects that were too big for a reasonably quick resolution — projects like fixing the entire order-to-cash process or reengineering the product-innovation-to-commercialization process. Here’s what often goes wrong with these types of projects: These types of large-scale process-redesign efforts are typically inward-focused, not customer-focused. Often, their intent is just to try to save money and “get lean.” Nothing is necessarily wrong with that; it’s just a different goal from improving customer experience. The sheer size and scope of these larger types of projects typically require a multi-month — and sometimes multi-year — effort. Very few organizations have the internal discipline to stay focused on anything for that long. These efforts are ripe targets for mega-consulting firms, which typically come in and do it to you rather than with you. As a result, employees often don’t buy into the change, and the whole effort can often stall. The chances of finding significant real-cost savings are average at best. And the chances of significantly improving the customer experience with these mega projects are often negligible. The prescription is this: You should consider tackling larger, cross-touchpoint problems after — and only after — you’ve redesigned at least half a dozen customer touchpoints using the 20-day method. Get addicted to the rapid pace of redesign. You’ll love it. And once you do, you should use the exact same approach, dividing the project into smaller pieces and extending the time period to a maximum of 30 days. Here are a few tips: Don’t be afraid to break the bigger problem into several component successive scopes, to be handled and redesigned by the same touchpoint team. Ask the redesign team stakeholders to hold the reins a little tighter to avoid scope creep. Ensure that stakeholders quickly get recalcitrant peers to the decision table to hammer out what will be some difficult and thorny issues. In a larger project, the stakes are higher, and the challenge of redesigning the customer experience is more complex, but it’s definitely doable. Organizations big and small have successfully executed large projects using this approach.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

The majority of customer experience problems arise in one of the four following areas: personnel, processes and technology, customers, and financials. For this reason, the following questions that pertain to your customers' experiences can be categorized accordingly. 5 questions about personnel Have you clearly articulated the experience you want your customers to receive, in a way that all employees can understand? Are you hiring for the best basic customer service traits, such as warmth, empathy, optimism, detail-orientation, and teamwork? Are you recruiting new customer-facing employees with the skills and abilities to deliver the customer experience you want? Have you profiled your existing successful customer-facing employees to identify traits that work in your organization? If given the choice to steal something from your organization, would your competitors choose your people? 5 questions about processes and technology Do your processes give employees enough time to listen to, diagnose, and solve individual customer problems? Can a customer press 0 at any time within your interactive voice response (IVR) system to talk to a customer service representative? Do your customer-facing systems pass the necessary customer information and data from touchpoint to touchpoint so that an ongoing customer dialogue can be maintained throughout the customer journey? Do you have a good selection of leading and lagging customer-performance metrics regarding the use of your process and technology? Are all your key customer-facing processes mobile enabled? 5 questions about your customers Do you know what your customers’ expectations are of your service, product, and brand? Do you proactively solicit customer feedback at your key customer touchpoints? Do you immediately respond to customer complaints and concerns, no matter what channel is used to communicate with you? Have you mapped all your customer touchpoints? Do you know who “owns” each customer touchpoint within your organization — who is accountable and responsible for improving it? 5 questions about financials Have you created a list of “perfect” customer behaviors? Have you worked with your CFO or financial team to identify elements of your return on customer experience (ROCE) model? Do you know all the costs associated with poor service in your organization — for example, customer defection, churn, buy-backs, cancellations, and non-renewals? Have you calculated the cost to acquire a new customer versus the cost to retain an existing one? Have you determined what percentage of customer defection is for price-related issues versus service-related issues?

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Want to improve your own customer experience delivery in a hurry? Here are ten things you can change today that will make an instantaneous impact on your customer interactions. Be patient. Patience, as they say, is a virtue — and it’s one that people who deal with customers must have in buckets. Here are some tips for dipping into your inner well of patience when dealing with a difficult customer (or other work frustrations): Take a deep breath and let it out slowly. If you’re dealing with a customer on the phone, ask her to hold for just one moment. Then consciously focus on relaxing your body. If you’re dealing with a customer face-to-face, remove yourself from his presence for a moment. Step into a back-office area and slap a coworker if need be. (Kidding!) Slow down your speech. Sometimes by acting patient, you can feel patient. Try to remember that it’s not personal. The customer isn’t mad at you — at least, she shouldn’t be. Really listen. It simply isn’t possible to truly help a customer if you don’t listen to her needs. Moreover, customers know when you’re not listening to them, and their frustration level rises accordingly. Listening requires more than just hearing. To listen, you must really focus on what another person is saying. That means staying quiet and working hard to understand the message behind the other person’s words. Know your stuff. You may have a winning smile, a personality without peer, and an uncanny ability to connect with customers. But if you’re not an expert on your company’s product or service, you are of absolutely no help to a customer who is in need of expertise. Make it your mission to know your product and service line inside and out, so you’ll be able to answer just about any question a customer throws at you. Knowing your stuff enables you to move quickly, make the right decisions, and find workable solutions for your customers. Show a yearn to learn. Yes, you should strive to become an expert in your area. But you’ll quickly find that the more you know about your area of expertise, the more there is to learn. You must own your personal learning and development. Don’t wait for someone else to identify what you need to know. Seek feedback from lots of different sources on how to improve and develop. When training is offered, participate fully. Finally, integrate and apply what you learn into your everyday existing work style and flow. Be proactive. If you’re looking to provide a great experience, you cannot be passive. You must take charge and control the experience the customer is going to receive. You must be proactive. As soon as you understand a customer’s problem, work to offer a solution. If others need to be involved in the solution-making, reach out to them quickly. Gather all relevant information from whatever sources are available. Ideally, you’ll be able to solve the customer’s problem right away. If you can’t, tell the customer exactly how long it will be before you can, and then deliver on that timeline. As you’re working to solve the problem, be decisive. Your ability to be decisive stems from your understanding of the nuances of your business. Don’t wait longer than is absolutely necessary to develop a plan of resolution and execute on it. Follow through. If you tell a customer you’re going to do something, do it. Keep your word. Your promise is a commitment. And if you don’t have an answer just yet, let them know. Bad news is better than no news! Persevere. Look, dealing with customers can be tough. No matter how patient, proactive, or engaging you are, every so often, somebody is just going to let you have it. Fairly or not, he’s going to direct all his pent-up anger and frustration at you. That’s where perseverance comes in. Letting all those negative emotions roll off your back like water off a duck isn’t easy, but let them you must. You simply cannot permit yourself to wallow in the negativity. You must pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and let it go. Be fast on your feet. Those who interact with customers on a regular basis must be fast on their feet. That is, they must be able to triage a situation without really thinking. To help yourself prepare for this, establish a set of triage guidelines. Do this before you’re confronted with an unhappy customer. In these guidelines, include the name of your go-to person (or people) —that is, the person you’ll contact when you don’t know what to do. Be sure to have his or her (or their) contact info handy. Also, decide what information you’ll send up the chain of command if you’re confronted with a customer challenge that is above your pay grade. Will you need to pass on verbatim recordings of an interaction? Will you need to share the customer’s purchase history with the company? Whatever it is, try to be ready to communicate the whole story. Smile. Like yawning, smiling is contagious. Unless you’re super creepy, when you smile at somebody, that person will probably smile back. A sincere smile works wonders! If you can keep smiling even when everything around you is going to heck in a hand basket, you’ll find that others will smile, too. Manage your body language. When it comes to how people perceive you, nonverbal communication — that is, body language — is extremely influential. Here are a few points to keep in mind: Don’t shield your body. Keep your hands away from your face. Don’t fake-smile. Watch where you stand; give the customer personal space. Keep your hands out of your pockets. Don’t fidget. Stand up straight. Face the person you’re talking to. Stand still.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Your relationship with a customer is a little like a marriage. Keeping it on track requires hard work and focus. Sometimes, these relationships run like well-oiled machines. Other times, dirt, grit, and plain old neglect begin to gum up the works. And on occasion, the machine breaks down altogether. The relationship ends, and you’re left wondering, “What the heck just happened?” Customer relationships end for the following three reasons: Inflicting one too many minor wounds: More often than not, a customer ends his relationship with a company not because of one big failure on the company’s part, but rather because of the slow, cumulative effect of several tiny mishaps. Take flying. When you fly, you expect the airline to run on time, the staff to be friendly, and the in-flight Internet to be operational. If any one of these expectations occasionally isn’t met, you probably aren’t too upset. But when failures in these areas begin to stack up, it puts your relationship with the airline at risk. Failing to acknowledge and take responsibility for mistakes: Everyone screws up. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. But the real failure is acting as though nothing has happened. When you make a mistake, no matter how small, ’fess up and take immediate steps to rectify it. Your customers will appreciate it! Failing to communicate when things go bad: Everybody knows that things sometimes go wrong. But when they do, it’s up to you to immediately communicate that with your customers. Unlike fruit, problems don’t improve with ripening. They get worse — a lot worse. Just ask executives at Target Corp., who, after suffering a data breach in late 2013, waited close to three weeks to alert some 40 million consumers to the problem. Needless to say, customers weren’t happy about the lag time — and still aren’t.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

For customer experience to be great, every interaction at every customer touchpoint must be exceptional. In other words, the whole organization must work together to deliver a great customer experience. There are eight essential components to building a great customer experience program: Developing and deploying your customer experience intent statement Building touchpoint maps Redesigning touchpoints Creating a dialogue with your customers Building customer experience knowledge in the workforce Recognizing and rewarding a job well done Executing an integrated internal communications plan Building a customer experience dashboard Step 1: Developing and deploying your customer experience intent statement The process of building your customer experience program starts here, with a formal declaration of your desired customer experience through an intent statement. The intent statement directs all subsequent work. Although the intent statement is related to and supportive of brand positioning, it’s not a marketing slogan. The intent statement is more akin to a set of engineering schematics. It’s a formal, defined set of criteria against which the organization can manage and monitor the delivery of customer experience. Step 2: Building touchpoint maps If you want to provide excellent customer experience, you need a deep understanding of how your customers interact with your business at each of your individual touchpoints as well as across your entire organization. To gain this understanding, you must map your customer’s journey and the touchpoints they interact with along the way. This analysis provides you with a clearer understanding of your customers’ experience with your organization. Step 3: Redesigning touchpoints You’ll likely need to redesign one, some, or even all of your customer touchpoints to improve the experience your customers are receiving. Fortunately, the redesign process for each touchpoint requires just four weeks, or 20 workdays. No more, no less. (Due to an alarmingly prevalent bureaucratic condition — CADD, or corporate attention deficit disorder — redesign efforts must be very tightly scoped and time-limited.) During this period, the touchpoint redesign team brainstorms, proposes change, and executes on its proposal. In addition to creating change fast, this process also results in a widely dispersed set of enthusiastic customer experience change leaders. Step 4: Creating a dialogue with your customers When it comes to getting feedback from customers, annual surveys are out, and constant listening and providing real-time dialogue is in. That means you need to inventory where you are listening effectively today, prioritizing your highest-value listening and dialogue touchpoints, and creating a governance model for managing and responding to customer feedback. The end game here is to be able to converse with your customers in near real-time and to respond to customer concerns, problems, and suggestions as they happen. Step 5: Building customer experience knowledge in the workforce Employees who regularly interact with customers need to understand not only what customer experience your organization intends to deliver (your intent statement), but also how to deliver that experience. Most employees are trained only on the specific functions needed to execute their individual part of their siloed business process. Very few are given real-world, hands-on, practical experience in exactly how to deliver great customer experience. That has to change! Step 6: Recognizing and rewarding customer experience done well Your organization’s compensation system telegraphs to all employees what’s really important and what isn’t. If rewards (compensation and so forth) and recognition programs don’t reflect your focus on customer experience, then even your very best efforts to turn your company’s culture customer-centric will ultimately fail. The program will also fail if you reward individuals who “make their numbers” but act in a way that ignores or injures the customer experience. Step 7: Executing an integrated internal communications plan If your organization’s leaders rarely mention customer concerns, issues, or opportunities, then all the best internal marketing will fall short of fostering significant cultural change. The fact is, making your organization customer-centric is an uphill battle. It is winnable, but significant resources — both financial and philosophical — need to be brought to bear, including a robust internal communications effort. Step 8: Building a customer experience dashboard Feel-good customer initiatives are a no-go. These must be replaced with laser-guided projects supported by clear and formal performance metrics with assigned and owned commitments. Real metrics and aggressive goals drive accountability for improvement and help kill misaligned initiatives. To help you keep track of your metrics and data, you’ll want to build a highly visible customer experience dashboard and to regularly monitor, review, and discuss each measure it contains.