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!

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.

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.

Instead of limiting rewards to money, adopt a total rewards strategy that will increase achievement and engagement among your employees. That means expanding your definition of rewards beyond cash. A total rewards strategy may include the following: Base salary: Yes, this refers to money. Obviously, your employees need to earn a living.

What is meant by customer experience advocates? Simple — those employees who lead, direct, and foster change in the area of building and sustaining a customer-centric culture. Following are ten key qualities of awesome customer advocates. They know their corporate culture may be the enemy As you confront the realities of an intransigent corporate culture, an understanding of Newton’s Laws of Motion (albeit slightly modified) will serve you well: A body in motion (your company) tends to stay in motion unless an external force (your efforts) is applied to it.

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.

As you’re designing your organization’s customer experience, your task is to forge an emotional connection with your customers. All customers move through a predictable series of stages in their interactions with your company. They become aware of your organization through its media, marketing, and branding. They find out more about you through your offline and online reputation.