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.

The key to building an engaged workforce is putting in place the necessary measurement and reward systems to capture employees’ extrinsic motivation, while also understanding the unique intrinsic drivers that motivate each of your employees. Often, these intrinsic motivational drivers will differ from person to person, so you need to get to know your employees well enough to understand their intrinsic motivational drivers.

Employees want and need to know the score in your business. Yet, very few companies establish an organizational scorecard, often called a balanced scorecard, to aid in this. In layman's terms, a balanced scorecard is a set of quantitative metrics that a company can track and report on, hopefully to all employees.

As part of the process of increasing employee engagement in your company, an EDP (employee development plan) should include a summary of the employee's 360-degree assessment. So, what's that? In answering that question, here’s a cue from Socrates's playbook (asking another): What is one key drawback of the traditional one-on-one review?

This killer quietly appears when an organization can’t step into its customers’ lives and understand their real needs — to walk a mile in their shoes, so to speak. The truth is, many companies suffer from the inability to get out of their own heads and put themselves in the customers’ mindset. Too often, like ships passing in the night, what companies think is important to their customers isn’t.