CXPA Member Blog

Introducing “On the Move,” a Celebration of Your Career Success

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 2 days ago

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You may have heard that CXPA has a new mission and vision , and that we aim to be a professional association that supports and celebrates the professional growth of its members throughout their entire career. In support of this mission, we’re introducing “On the Move,” a new initiative to shine the spotlight on CXPA members who are starting in new CX positions. This can include promotions, roles in new organizations, or other new career ventures as CX practitioners, providers, or consultants. "Celebrating and supporting CX professionals at every career stage are two of our favorite things at CXPA,” says Greg Melia, CAE and CEO of the association. “A ...

Stay Connected in 2021

By Barbie Fink,CCXP posted 2 days ago

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Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to 2021! In line with the mission statement CXPA developed towards the end of 2020--“We support CX professionals to share, learn, inspire, and grow throughout their entire career,”--I am excited about the year ahead and our future together. I hope you are, too! I have never been big on New Year’s resolutions because I assess every day how I can be my very best self, but a former colleague posted something on LinkedIn that resonated with me: “Instead of New Year's resolutions this year, I have decided to set a one-word theme for the year. I have thought about what I want most from the next 12 months – how I want ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of January 18th

By Joy Wedge posted 2 days ago

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2021 New Board Members and Officers CXPA is excited to welcome new board members and officers for 2021. We are proud to be led by a Board of Directors drawn from leading organizations across the globe, including 2021 Officers and newly elected Board members: New 2021 Board Members Jayalakshmi Sudarshan, CCXP , Customer Experience Leader, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, India Mark Ratekin, CCXP , Global CX Principal Director, Confirmit Mark Slatin, CCXP , SVP Director of Client Experience, Sandy Spring Bank Roxie Strohmenger, CCXP , Vice President, Customer Experience Strategy, UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group) Stacey Nevel, ...

Do you love your Customers as much as your employees do?

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 2 days ago

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We hear all the time that hiring is destiny: You have to be very careful when looking for new team members—especially those who are on the front-line and Customer facing—that they’re empathetic, Customer-focused, and just plain nice. In fact, there’s an entire cottage industry growing around hiring for your support/services/sales teams to ensure you’ve got the right fit. Once they’re in the door, we spend tons of time (and money!) explaining our processes and procedures to our new hires so they can make an impact right away. We may enable them with some of the greatest technology, give them awesome benefits packages, and even stock the fridge in the break ...

Reflections on the Causes of Lousy Customer Experiences

By Howard Lax posted 3 days ago

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These days, it’s hard to find a company that doesn’t say it competes on customer experience. At the same time, we know as both CX pros and consumers that many – some might say most – deliver mediocre experiences on a good day and flat-out crummy experiences most of the time. What is the source of this gap between what companies say and what companies do? Reflecting on this issue, what follows are 10 explanations, which probably are by no means exhaustive. In no particular order, here are 10 causes of lousy customer experiences and tips to help address each challenge. Lack of commitment from the top . Lip service doesn’t cut it. Senior leadership has ...

Why the 'just keep it' return policy may not help your CX in the long run

By Mr. Shane Schick posted 3 days ago

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When companies say things like, “Satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back!” we all know there’s still one extra cost: whatever it takes to return the product for an exchange, refund or store credit. In some cases, especially recently, that cost has involved shipping the product back to whatever brand you bought it from online. A few merchants have made this a little easier by including return shipping labels, or sending some after the fact. Even when returning the product doesn’t cost money, however, there is time and effort, both of which are in short supply for almost everyone right now. That makes a recent trend reported by the Wall Street ...

When you can't answer, "Why?"

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 5 days ago

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I wrote recently about an incident at a local grocery store that sparked some thought about how sometimes we provide excuses instead of offering solutions . Likewise, sometimes at my gym, I come across a piece of equipment that’s out of order for some reason or another. Usually, there’s a note pinned to it alerting us that it’s not to be used. To some degree, I’m sure the team member whose job it is to put that sign on the equipment considered his job ‘done.’ The person whose job it is to fix it? That’s another story. Anyway, the punchline of these and other similar experiences is that Customers aren’t as interested in hearing about why their ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of January 11th

By Joy Wedge posted 9 days ago

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Are you passionate about CX in Higher Ed? The Customer Experience Professionals Association has launched a community initiative to develop a list of all institutions of higher learning that offer Customer Experience programs, courses, certificates or degrees. The first phase in this project relies on the knowledge of the community, so please take a few minutes to complete a survey entry for each college, university or higher education institution that has a "Customer Experience" offering of which you are aware. Complete Survey Here 2021 Innovation Award Volunteers Needed ...

Whose problem are you solving?

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 9 days ago

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I’ve written about Customer Effort Score (CES) before and kind of chided the intractability of defining it specifically. Of course, it’s not fair to pick on CES, as I’ve written in other instances , even common definitions like First Contact Resolution runs into definitional problems when they encounter actual Customer opinions (we all have our own definitions). But specifically, when it comes to Effort (or, as I sometimes will call it, “hassle”), I remember a wise Process Engineer who used to work for me once noted: “we’re defining ‘hassle’ from our own perspective.” And he was correct to point it out in that instance. I wonder: Are you doing the ...

From Customer Experience to Enterprise Experience: Aligning CX and Corporate Strategy for Results

By Amy Shioji,CCXP posted 10 days ago

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I’ve always been a customer experience (CX) professional and advocate. So when my CEO approached me to take on the role of corporate strategy and Chief of Staff, I was immediately intrigued. How would my CX skills and background translate to corporate strategy? What would that mean for my role and passion in driving the customer agenda forward? Corporate Strategy and CX At its core, corporate strategy requires taking an enterprise approach to strategic decision-making by looking across the business at ways to create and maximize consumer and shareholder value. The more I thought about it, the more synergies I saw between strategy and CX. When ...

The accidental lesson 'Bean Dad' taught us about moving customers to self-service

By Mr. Shane Schick posted 10 days ago

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Just think of John Roderick as a business and his daughter as a customer and it’s pretty easy to understand why ‘Bean Dad’ went viral on social media. Over the weekend, Roderick — a podcaster and musician — posted a thread on Twitter about how he had asked his nine-year-old daughter to make a can of beans. He didn’t offer any support, other than to direct her to a can opener. She struggled to get the can opener to work. For six hours . Besides making her go hungry, Roderick documented her difficulties (“Eventually she collapsed into a frustrated heap,” “By now we were working on anger management, and perseverance too”). The story was clearly ...

It's the experience, not the channel

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 12 days ago

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Surely I’m late to the game on this but I had always found it curious and interesting to read accounts of peoples’ CX and more specifically support experiences through Twitter. The concept of pinging a business via their public handle and then getting a resolution seemed pretty cool to me. It’s mostly anecdotal but I feel the vast majority of those instances were travel-related. It may be because that’s all I think about these days, what with the world shut down. But if I remember correctly it usually had to do with people otherwise having issues checking into a hotel or in-the-moment flight cancellations and such. The scenario usually went somewhat ...

Why Customer Memory is More Important than Customer Experience

By Ms. Ozge Koca posted 13 days ago

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There is a big difference between a customer’s experience and their memory of that experience: this has a huge impact on how you design and measure your CX activities. Customers don’t choose your product or service because of the experience they had; they choose it because of the experience they remember. Creating great memories is critical to building customer loyalty. Professor Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist and economist, describes the difference between experience and memory in his TED talk: ‘the riddle of experience versus memory’ . Professor Kahneman explains that we all have two selves: our experiencing self that lives ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of January 4th

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 18 days ago

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Happy New Year! Office Closing Reminder Our team wishes all of our members, sponsors, and supporters a very happy New Year! In observance of the holiday, our o ffices will be closed from December 31st - January 1st . Coming Next Week CXPA RTP Course: CX Metrics & ROI/CCXP Prep by Lynn Hunsaker When: Thursday, January 7th, 2020, 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM EST More Information Live with CXPA: CX Authority--How to Show It and Grow It When: Wednesday, January 6th, 2020, 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM EST More Information ...

Our Most Viewed Posts of 2020

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 18 days ago

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As we all prepare to say farewell to a year like no other, CXPA offers a look at the top 5 posts that you were reading in 2020: from a husband-and-wife CCXP duo, to a community moving forward together in the midst of a pandemic, and to reasons why an investment in yourself is never a bad decision--each of these stories summarized the hope and resilience of CX professionals in the face of any obstacle. In It Together: CX Pros Face COVID-19 Head On In this piece, CXPA members discuss their immediate response efforts to the COVID-19 pandemic. The New CXPA.Org Offers Enhanced Opportunities to Connect, Learn, & Advance Your Career This article ...

Please! Experience Your Customer’s Experience!

By Bob Azman,CCXP posted 25 days ago

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“Terrified. Mortified. Petrified. Stupefied”, so said Russel Crowe’s character, John Nash, in the movie, A Beautiful Mind. And so, I am (am I)! Here’s a sampling of my recent experiences with a broad range of companies across a wide range of industries (consumer goods; automobiles; business services; big box retailers; online marketers; financial services): Mobile applications that have constant chat window pop-ups that impede your ability to complete an order? Websites that insist on pop-up windows on a variety of subjects every time I switched a product view or page. Functions on a website that are simply broken. “Page Not Found”. ...

Throwback: A little bit of Seoul

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 26 days ago

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Here’s a throw-back article I wrote back in 2017, as United Airlines was retiring their 747 airframe. It’s tangentially CX-related, and although I’m no PointsGuy , I think it does a pretty good job as a travelogue. And if nothing else, it’s a reminder that we used to be able to get out there and travel. Enjoy. Earlier this year my partner and I took a trip. Okay well we take trips all the time. But this time we took on an experience. With United Airlines retiring their fleet of 747s, I wanted the opportunity before it was gone to take a trip on the Queen of the Skies. So we booked a flight to Seoul, South Korea. Now, normally an annual vacation ...

CXPA Need to Know for the Week of December 21st

By Joy Wedge posted 30 days ago

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Happy Holidays! Office Closing Reminder Our team wishes all of our members, sponsors, and supporters a very happy holiday season! 🎄 In observance of the holidays, our o ffices will be closed December 24th - 25th and December 31st - January 1st . Give the Gift of CXPA Membership Are you doing last minute holiday shopping?! Consider giving a CXPA Membership as a gift. Looking for the perfect gift for your customer-obsessed colleagues? How about a CXPA membership? Give the gift of CXPA membership to clients, colleagues, ...

CYA is not CX

By Nicholas Zeisler,CCXP posted 30 days ago

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The other day I spent about 45 minutes round-trip (short by standards...read on) and about $45 mailing Christmas cards. Happy Holidays to our family and friends who receive one from us! I use the word “mailing” deliberately because that’s all I was doing. I wasn’t shopping for them, digging through my computer to find the file where I keep my list, writing them, addressing them, or stamping them. This was just to mail them. Some of them are a bit bulky, and the box of cards we bought this year (a very clever, diverse, and creative collection of truly lovely cards with lots of adornments and festoonery) even came with the caveat that they “may require ...

Ho, Ho, Ho--CXPA Member Spotlight of...Kris Kringle?!

By Gabe Smith,CCXP posted 12-16-2020

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I was running some reports last week when I noticed something interesting: a CXPA member with the name of “ Mr. Kris Kringle .” As this is the holiday season in many parts of the world, and the name “Kris Kringle” is the alias of the one and only Santa Claus, I had to learn more. The only other bit of information I had was Kringle’s location--the Lapland region of Finland—and company: North Pole Enterprises. I turned to longtime CXPA member Sirte Pihlaja, CCXP and leader of the Finland CXPA network, to see if Kringle had ever attended a local network gathering. “It looks like he has signed up for several virtual events this year,” she said, though ...

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