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.

If want to engage and motivate staff members who were born between 1965 and 1980 (known as the Generation X), try these some rewards specifically targeted to Gen X: Time off: Gen X brought the concept of work–life balance to the workplace, and today they're at the age where they're working parents with dual responsibilities.

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?

Focusing only on finances misses the point of customer experience. This view that only finances matter, often referred to as “short-termism,” was the subject of an article in the Washington Post by journalist Neil Irwin, titled “How the Cult of Shareholder Value Wrecked American Business.” Irwin writes: The imperative to boost near-term profits and share prices is a self-reinforcing cycle in which corporate time horizons have become shorter and shorter .

Mapping your customer’s journey can provide you with a clearer understanding of his experience with your organization. Essentially, you produce a visual representation or “story” of the customer’s interactions with your company. Journey mapping yields the following benefits: It enables you to identify whether (and where) you may be confusing customers.