CXPA Member Blog

CXPA Member Blog

This Blog features thought leadership from CXPA members and staff. All contributions are welcome!  Authors and commenters are reminded to adhere to CXPA's community expectations. Solicitation and direct selling are strictly prohibited, and CXPA has the sole discretion to remove any post for any reason.  For assistance with the CXPA blog, contact gabe@cxpa.org.

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CXPA Need to Know for the Week of October 26th

By Joy Wedge posted 2 days ago
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  CXPA Topic Guide: CX Metrics It can be overwhelming to find relevant, unbiased CX resources to help move your work forward. CXPA is here to help. Karl Sharicz, CCXP, dives into the world of CX metrics and offers some advice to CX practitioners on the proper role of metrics in their work. Metrics pervade our world in so many ways and within the CX discipline, especially where performance is concerned, they often take center stage.  See the CXPA Topic Guide: CX Metrics Here Nominate Someone for CXPA's Emerging Leaders Award    As the world’s premier organization dedicated ...

Customer Success is not CX

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 2 days ago
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I’ve written   previously   about different job postings with CX-sounding titles.  One of those jobs is in the family of “Customer Success” positions.  If you’re like me, and work in CX, you may have wondered, What, exactly,   is , Customer Success?  From a CX perspective, it may be useful to understand how these roles and their responsibilities differ from ours.  To that end, it’s a lot  like  CX, but it’s not exactly that.  While I’ve not played much a role in this space, I’ve made quite a few connections in the CS world and here’s what I’ve been able to gather from these conversations: First of all, these folks are also incredibly hard-working ...

Small Things That Have a Dramatic Impact on Your Customer's Experience

By Colin Shaw posted 3 days ago
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Oscar Wilde's famous quip shapes my marketing philosophy, "There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." One of the reasons the brilliant quote rings true is because of the concept of Priming. When you bring attention to things, it influences how people act upon them. Priming activates some part of our mind, and that's enough to produce this response out of us. We talked about Priming on a   recent podcast. From a technical perspective, Priming is a term that describes doing a little bit of something that will activate some idea in your mind and getting a response out of it. The word Priming comes ...

Engendering a risk-taking culture

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 3 days ago
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Business philosophers, book writers, keynote speakers, and basically anybody with an opinion on the subject will say that one key to success for an organization is to foster and encourage creativity and curiosity.  That’s surely a good start, but where the rubber really meets the road and awesome things start happening is when members of an organization truly feel free to experiment and take risks.  Of course as with any other theory, simply talking about it doesn’t get it done.  The real show of success is breakthrough ideas and actions that are the hallmark of a culture that really   does   embrace risk taking. Too many business leaders (and not just ...

Nominate Someone Today for CXPA's Emerging Leader Award

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 8 days ago
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"The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders, and continually develops them." -John Maxwell As the world’s premier organization dedicated to the professional development of career-oriented CX leaders, the Customer Experience Professionals Association has created a new “CXPA Emerging Leader” award to recognize those individuals who are new to CX, wish to grow their careers in the field, and who have positively impacted their organizations and customers early in their professional journey. ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of October 19th

By Joy Wedge posted 9 days ago
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CX Day 2020 Special Offer Extended If you know of anyone who is looking for a community of like-minded CX professionals, please invite them to take advantage of our extended special offer. Now available: Join by October 31st to save 20% off New Individual Membership. Use coupon code: CXDay20 The momentum continues around the globe as virtual events continue to spark new ideas. Want to keep the conversations going? Head over to our community discussion forum or see how you can attend events here . Did you miss the CX Day festivities? Local networks held thought-provoking, insightful conversations and inspired CX professionals all throughout ...

Lead and lag measures

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 9 days ago
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You know I’m all about metrics and measures. One of the things that made entering the CX profession so attractive to me was that this is a field of study that’s not only   based   in numbers, it’s   starving   for people who have an affinity for measuring. CX is a study that’s founded on measuring...from survey results to Customer habits and attitudes to top-level improvements in your CX KPIs, numbers are all around us. One topic of confusion I’ve seen a lot over my time is in regard to lead versus lag measures. Everybody’s got their own opinions and there doesn’t seem to be a textbook answer to what’s what, so take this as simply my theory and how I approach ...

Future-Focused Hali-Ma Khatun on the Role of Augmented Intelligence in CX

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 9 days ago
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What does the modern customer experience mean? What are the modern customer experience deliverables? How can organizations not differentiate, but evolve with the right techniques and resources?  It’s these questions, and more, that drive Hali-Ma Khatun in her customer experience career – which has spanned the telecommunications industry, sales, marketing, and software development. And now that every business has been forced to pivot their brands due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hali-Ma is also pondering how user experiences are being impacted – not only now, but in the future.  Ever since she was a little girl, Hali-Ma has been curious about how brands ...

Getting Inside the Customer's Mind

By Colin Shaw posted 10 days ago
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Getting Inside Your Customers' Minds Customer Experience, like everything else in the world, is changing. What customers want and what they do is changing, too. As we prepare for the next generation and level of putting the customer at the center of everything we do for a Post Pandemic world, we should remember that the critical part to achieving what we want (aka, customer-driven growth) is getting inside the customer's mind.  Lewis Carbone, a Customer Experience Management Expert sees [CX] as a fusion of art and science, a science that has evolved over the years.  Lewis Carbone, a Customer Experience management expert, speaker, and founder of ExpereinceEngineering™, ...

Webinar Review: Inception Fertility Engages Hearts and Minds to Create Better CX

By Ms. Taylor Barbieri posted 10 days ago
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Medallia is a 2020 Silver Sponsor of CXPA. This review was conducted at CXPA's request. The opinions expressed herein are from the author, who was not compensated.   Webinar link: https://www.medallia.com/mastercast/ Webinar title: Transforming Hearts and Minds to Create Wow Experiences   You’re looking over a proposal for a new CX initiative. While it’s perfect from a technical and strategic perspective, it feels a little too metric-focused. In fact, it’s hard to see much of a customer focus at all. Basically, you’re in a pickle – you don’t want to abandon your project’s strategic goals, but you also know that ignoring ...

With Your Customer Experience – Can you see the forest for the trees?

By Bob Azman,CCXP posted 11 days ago
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On more than one occasion, I’ve been asked by a CEO to “fix the customer service department” so the organization can improve its customer experience.  The request sounds like this, “We’re getting too many service-related calls in our contact center and that’s giving us poor ratings on our surveys”.  The problem most likely isn’t within the customer service department.  It’s true that these departments need to be properly staffed with well-trained and professional representatives that have the authority and responsibility to achieve first call resolution.  However, they typically aren’t the cause of the problem, they’re just trying to help the organization recover ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of October 12th

By Joy Wedge posted 16 days ago
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CX Day 2020 Celebrations Continue The CX Day buzz continues from celebrations around the globe on Tuesday, October 6th. CX professionals celebrated the customer experience industry, tuned into gain knowledge from virtual events and witnessed a live reveal of Impact Award Winners. Local networks held thought-provoking, insightful conversations and inspired CX professionals all throughout the day.  CXPA Virtual Community Conversations  2020 Impact Award Winners Live Reveal See the 2020 CX Day Highlights The momentum continues around the globe as virtual events continue to spark new ideas. Want to keep the conversations ...

Transactional and relationship surveys: They're different

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 16 days ago
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“Well, it’s because they’re different.” The not-deliberately snarky, yet somewhat oversimplified tautological response was understandably not satisfying for the support business leader who’d asked me why I thought NPS would be different for the different lines of business his organization supported.  But in the end, it’s no more complicated than that.  Forget that I was, without it occurring to me, loosely quoting   Vanilla Ice , but sometimes it’s hard for us in the context of the business we think we already understand to see the forest for the trees. In my defense, the Customer profiles   were   different, the products in the different lines of business ...

CXDay SPECIAL - Customer What? The honest and practical guide to customer experience

By Chaman Maharaj posted 16 days ago
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"The truth is, truly customer-centric organisations do not put customers first. They put employees first." This is according to global Customer Experience Specialist and Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), @Ian Golding,CCXP  in his first book ‘Customer What? The honest and practical guide to customer experience,’ published in 2018. As a founding member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) - a global, non-profit organization dedicated to the cultivation and advancement of the customer experience profession with more than 4000 members in 70 countries, Ian is also a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black ...

5 Rules for Driving Down Costs in a Customer-Focused Way

By Colin Shaw posted 17 days ago
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5 Rules for Driving Down Costs Without Affecting Customers You might have noticed that the global pandemic isn't doing much for your bottom line. You might also be wondering how you can reduce costs to save your assets—even when the economy is robust and healthy. Today, we offer you the five rules of reducing costs to help you make it through what we will likely call the COVID-19 Recession. We discussed these five rules on a recent podcast. The rules are as follows:  Do not think there is one "silver bullet." Do not over-emphasize the easily-measured costs. Strive for balance. Look at the lifetime value of the customer. Select the areas that ...

Showing ROI for your CX efforts

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 19 days ago
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On several occasions I’ve had the opportunity to share an anecdote about a leader who once, in exasperation during a conversation I was having with him about Customer-centricity sort of threw up his hands a bit and exclaimed, “well, Z, we could just give every Customer a Ferrari, then they’d be happy.”  Without missing a beat, I responded, “well, at least now we’re negotiating.”  We were both kidding each other a bit (I don’t think he was being seriously dismissive), but there was a point to be made. I use that story for jumping-off points very often when I speak with organizations regarding their CX efforts.  Today I bring it up to point out the difficulty ...

How to Get In-Tune for Customer Experience Success

By Lynn Hunsaker,CCXP posted 22 days ago
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An out-of-tune piano or violin may be one of your most vibrant memories of a poor user experience. Every one of the strings and keys must be in-sync, no exceptions. And so it is with every one of the groups in your company that is managing part of the end-to-end customer experience.  CRM, VoC, UX, FCR, NPS, DX, and so on — it’s more than alphabet soup. 1   They’re all parts of a whole. Business results are correlated with coordination of customer experience management methods. 2   Companies that foster communication or central supervision among managers of different types of customer experience (CX) endeavors demonstrate better results than other companies. ...

CXPA Announces 2020 CX Impact Award Winners

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 23 days ago
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CXPA’s annual Impact Awards recognize the critical role that CX professionals play in driving better customer experiences and business outcomes in their organizations. On CX Day--Tuesday, October 6th--CXPA revealed this year's winners during a special live stream event. Read the highlights of their accomplishments, and make sure to check out the award show replay if you missed it! Steve Bieri-Client Experience Advocate, IBM Highlights of Accomplishment: IBM pivoted to completely transform what it was doing with the feedback from client surveys. “We took our core team, and brought in people from other functions within IBM and in the channel, ...

Trying to Control the Uncontrollable

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 23 days ago
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Here at CXPA, we’re proud to offer resources to arm CX professionals with better strategies and tactics to improve their customer experience and drive customer-centricity in their organizations. We offer a lively discussion forum and engaged, passionate local networks around the world comprised of some of the most supportive people you’ll ever meet. We bring together mentors and mentees to help our members grow professionally. In essence, we try to help our audience take control of their professional journey in the customer experience field. But we understand that sometimes this isn’t enough, and that some things are simply uncontrollable. My ...

The value of certification

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 23 days ago
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I once had a mentor whose cubicle walls were covered in certificates and evidence of completion of training and qualification.  People considered him a bit of an egotist and obsessed with certifications.  Credentialism is a thing, after all.  But I asked him once about all his accreditations.  He said, “Some people say, ‘Sure, well you’re just good at taking tests,’ and I say, ‘Yea, I am, I guess.’”  Point being, he was pretty humble and casual about them, but wasn’t kidding himself that lots of folks take them to heart.  In his mind, it didn’t hurt that some people weren’t impressed—he likely wouldn’t lose favor with any of them for being credentialed (he ...