Roy Barnes

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!

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.

The line between customer experience and company branding can be as thin as a supermodel. Even so, there are some important distinctions to consider. A company’s brand is an easy-to-grasp identifier that enables customers to quickly understand what products and services the company offers, as well as who the company is.

Touchpoint. What does it mean? Simply put, touchpoints are all the ways in which your customer interacts with your organization. Each of these interactions takes place at a particular point in time, in a certain context, and with the goal of meeting a specific customer need or want. Customer experience begins to be manifested in one place, and one place only: at each of your touchpoints.

So you know you need a plan for dealing with unhappy customers. But what should that plan entail? To help you remember what you should do when you’re staring into the bulging red eyes of an infuriated customer, try this handy acronym: RUN. Just kidding! Actually, the acronym is RESOLVED. It stands for the following: R: Respond to the person who is upset People need to be heard.