Bob Kelleher

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!

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!

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!

When you’re trying to engage your workforce, it helps to know how engaged they already are, and you can do this by conducting an employee engagement survey and acting on the results. A key way to build momentum following your survey is to draw on your engagement ambassadors — employees who are already fully engaged and committed to your company.

An EDP (employee development plan) is one good way to encourage engagement in your workforce. So, how do you use an EDP? Here's a breakdown: The manager completes the EDP forms.This step includes providing an assessment of the employee’s past performance, as well as a road map for the future. (The manager can partner with his HR manager as needed for guidance writing effective goals, providing reinforcing and constructive feedback, and so on.

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.

Although recognizing your employees is easy to do, it's also one of the easiest things to forget. Don't let this happen! Recognition provides reinforcement and spurs motivation — both key components of engagement. The suggestions in this article are designed to get your creative juices flowing so you can provide timely, specific, and meaningful recognition.

A great way to share best practices among employees is to create a "corporate university" — in other words, create learning materials and make them accessible to employees. Creating a corporate university doesn't have to be a huge investment. In fact, you can launch yours simply by collecting and branding all the training, development, conferences, seminars, and other materials and opportunities you already have in place.

If your organization has declared that employee engagement is a top business objective, then it should also assemble an employee engagement committee. This committee, which will consist of 10 to 20 people (depending on the size of your company), should have a clear charter to evaluate and prioritize employee engagement survey results, with an ultimate goal of increasing employee engagement, boosting innovation, improving the firm's culture, and even changing company policies.