Culture change is not easy. I was running a workshop with a utility client many years ago about the concept of Customer Experience. There were 20 people in the room, and we were kicking around ideas of what changes could deliver an improved experience. One young lady, much younger than her surrounding co-workers, had an idea, several actually. However, with every one of her suggestions, one of the others would say, “We already did that; it didn’t work,” implying that it wouldn’t work now, either. This cycle happened many times before she gave up. It was clear that changing the culture at this utility was going to be challenging.

It still happens today, too. I was talking to a chief marketing officer (CMO) of a multinational company the other day who wants to change the organization (and believe me, I know this organization; he’s right). I started to talk about how people within his organization needed to understand customer emotions and focus on customer-centricity. The CMO stopped me because he knew right away that it wouldn’t work for their company. I challenged him on this, explaining that if he took that view, the organization would never change. We will see what he decides.

However, I don’t think his situation is unique. We know this process is a challenge. To help prepare you mentally for it, we comprised these five rules for affecting real culture change.

1. Create or define a burning platform.
2. Recognize this is a long-term goal.
3. Be clear on your vision for the future.
4. Remember that “you don’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
5. Lead from the top.

Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

Rule #1: Create or Define a Burning Platform.

Essentially, this first rule is for you to make it clear why the organization should change. If everybody thinks business-as-usual is working, no one will bother to make any changes; it’s too inconvenient and uncomfortable. It’s the classic idea that to effect change, one must realize that the pain of change is less than the pain of staying where you are. If you don’t believe me, consider the fate of these previously successful brands: Circuit City, Sears, Blockbuster, Kodak, and probably soon, J.C. Penney. Moreover, with the pandemic and the recession and everything else that will follow looming, we could see some more big brands take a fall. However, if these former brands had a more customer-centric culture, they would probably be here today because they realized that the market is moving on and appropriately adjusted.

To illustrate what I mean, consider how diets work (or don’t work, as the case may be). Weight loss is a common goal for many people, but they often fail to do so over and over again. However, some people succeed. The difference between those that fail and those who lose weight is that people who lose weight have the goal of losing weight for a specific event, e.g., a wedding or class reunion. The special event is the burning platform, which creates a sense of urgency.

I have talked about Loss Aversion before, and one of its implications is that when you are in a gain frame, which is what most companies are in most of the time, you tend to be risk-averse, meaning you don’t want to change. However, when you get into a loss frame (aka, there is a platform on fire and it threatens to burn the whole enterprise down), your risk preferences flip, and you become more risk-seeking. In other words, you are more willing to take a chance because you can see that the status quo threatens to destroy your success.

Rule #2: Recognize that this is a long-term goal.

I’ve been in many organizations where people want to make a culture change in the next six months. In my experience, it takes a lot longer than that. You may be able to start it in six months, and even make progress, but you will still have a way to go. Cultural changes usually range from three to five years.

If you think you will achieve culture change in six months, my advice would be don’t even try it. You’re not going to see it through to completion in six months.

Rule #3: Be clear about your vision of the future.

Your articulation of the vision, the philosophy, is vital. However, it is equally crucial that you know what you want it to do. Break it down into all the new things you want to do and all of the old stuff you want to stop. Also, include how you want to measure it.

In my early career in corporate life, the philosophy flavor of the month at that particular time was Total Quality Management. I was with a big corporate telecom at the time, and we went on a training course for Total Quality Management. One of the remarkable things that came out of the training was the idea that you should have a plan and objective for every meeting. It would be best if you also articulated those things beforehand, estimate the time needed for the meeting, and then stick to it. What I like about these concepts is that these are solid, definable things you can do. Moreover, if you don’t do it, it is obvious you aren’t doing it. This level of clarity for your vision will help you achieve the same.

The culture of your organization reflects on the experience your customers have. For example, we were working with an airline that wanted to improve their experience. We discovered in getting to know their culture that internally, they referred to passengers as “self-loading freight.” In essence, this alone tells you everything you need to know about this airline. As we worked with the airline to develop a Customer Experience Statement, which defines the experience they wanted to deliver, the airline wanted to improve punctuality. However, we explained that being late was a company culture for them; they had been late to every meeting we ever had with them. While starting meetings on time has nothing to do with how quickly planes are loaded and unloaded, being late to meetings can send a powerful cultural signal within an organization that being late is acceptable.

The ability to articulate what you want people to do and what you don’t want people to do is essential here. You want to make these actions definite and measurable, too, so it’s obvious when somebody is doing it—or not doing it.

Another cultural signal I always like to check is where Customer Experience falls on the meeting agenda. If it is at the end, then that tells me a lot. What you put at the end of the list is rarely the number one priority. If you always do customer metrics last, it sends a subtle message to everyone in attendance that it is not that essential to the organization or not as critical as all the other items on the list.

Rule #4: Remember that “you don’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

The reality of culture changes is that they are tough, and some people will not want to go on the journey. You will encounter resistance to your plan, and it won’t always be forthright. Ultimately, you might have to sack individuals that aren’t on board with your planned cultural change.

The last corporate organization I worked at was implementing a change program involving six sectors. One sector was not on board. The guy running even placed a bet that the change program wouldn’t work. It should come as no surprise that when it was time to go live, their sector wasn’t ready because that senior person convinced everybody that it wouldn’t work.

If you consider the teachings from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, you have to choose your battles. You can’t win every battle, so you need to select the crucial ones. From a business perspective, that can mean breaking a few eggs to make your Customer Experience omelet. In other words, you might have to fire someone who isn’t on board, particularly if that person is a high-profile, senior person. If you remove them, that sends a signal that you’re serious about your program for change. I wouldn’t fire people just as a matter of course, but if they’re undermining what you’re doing, you do have to get rid of them. Which leads me to…

Rule #5: Lead from the top.

Good leadership provides an excellent employee experience and the employee experience you provide is essential. In fact, my book, Happy Employees Make Happy Customers explains in great detail how this works. Regarding culture, one of the points I make in the book is that people often stay in jobs because of great managers, and leave because of poor ones.

Your words and actions have to be the same. If you want to make that cultural change, you have to live it and demonstrate to people that you live it, even when (and particularly when) it’s causing you some pain. Principles are great, but they mean nothing unless you sacrifice something for them. Make sure that you’re doing what you’re asking your teams to do.

A vital part of that is to look at your schedule. If you say the organization needs to be more customer-centric and spend more time with customers, look at your schedule and see where you’re doing that. Otherwise, your words ring hollow to those who follow you. It goes back to the importance of these subtle signals. If you say one thing and do another, it undermines that culture change.

The first call center I managed many years ago had 550 people in Bristol, England. The call center was in one building, but their manager before me had his office in another building entirely. The effect was that the team never saw their manager in person at all. There were offices at the call center building; he just wasn’t in them.

When I took over, I wanted to make the point about being accessible. I would j sit out on the floor with everybody else. From a cultural perspective, I was saying I was equal to everybody else. Moreover, I stayed as long as the call center was open. I wanted to make myself available to the team and these tactics were my way of sending that signal to people. In a way, the most essential signal we can send is how we use our own time.

These five rules can help you in your efforts to effect change at your organization. By creating urgency with a burning platform, you prioritize the need for change. Then, working with the long-term in mind, you can present a clear vision for the culture you envision for your organization and work out what you should (and shouldn’t) do in that new environment. Recognize there could be some battles, and maybe some people you need to move on because they’re not going to be part of the new culture. Perhaps most importantly, you must match your words and actions because the little things matter and will resound around the organization.

To hear more about this idea in more detail, listen to the complete podcast here.

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post The Five Rules for Affecting Real Culture Change appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

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 from the old term “priming a water pump.” So many old water pumps would need someone to pour a little bit of water into the pump so that the water would come out.

“There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” -Oscar Wilde

Social psychologists often use Priming in their experiments. For example, some researchers did a study in a wine store. They discovered that music playing affected customers’ choices. When playing French music, French wine sales went up by a ratio of five to one. The exciting bit was if you had asked the customer, “Why did you buy French wine?” customers wouldn’t say, “because of the French music.” Priming is a subconscious element. Customers don’t understand why the French wine looked more appealing to them that day, but the social psychologists did.

Priming Memories

Memory is crucial to customer loyalty. You can’t be loyal to something that you don’t remember. However, memories are like a fishing net, and understanding why could help you know a little about the significance of Priming.

So what do I mean by memory being like a fishing net? Imagine there’s a fishing net that’s under the water. You pull out the net by one knot. As the knot breaks the surface, some tangles are out of the water, and some under the water.

Now imagine that the one knot you are holding is a customer memory. All the other knots in and out of the water are customer memories, some above the surface and below. The memories are connected, just as the fishing net knots connect.

Those knots’ strength is affected by many things, not least because some memories were more emotional than others. Regardless of the strength, all the memories connect, and when you activate one of them, you activate the rest to a certain degree.

This fishing net example helps us understand what Priming does. 

If, in this metaphor, the water represents our subconscious and pulling some of those knots above the water level means bringing it into consciousness. Therefore, those memories are the ones that we’re aware that we’re thinking about it. Priming pulls some of those knots close to the surface, lurking just below consciousness in the subconscious. We are not aware of remembering these.

Some of those knots around the one you are holding can be different things like images or pictures, an advert that you saw the night before, or that as you walk past the aisle in the grocery store. You see the same picture that makes you remember the product or service.

For example, if I make it cold, you’re consciously aware that it’s cold. That knot of coldness and everything associated with it may have pulled above the surface. But under the surface, maybe a desire to feel warmer and situations where you felt warmer probably haven’t broken the surface. But because you pulled up a part of the net, you’ve primed one knot. Then, the other ones around it are now closer to the surface where they can start to influence your behavior even if you’re not aware of it.

Smell is a vital memory evoker and primer, too. Have you ever been to a Lush store? Lush sells bath salts, soaps, various things that have the feel of handmade or at least not mass-produced. The smell is strong. You can tell there’s a lush store a hundred yards away. If you smell something, you’re probably aware that you’re consciously smelling something, but that smell will pull up a part of that net, and that’s going to pull a lot of other things up to the surface, maybe including a desire to go into the store.

Regardless of the strength, all the memories connect, and when you activate one of them, you activate the rest to a certain degree

Priming Experiences

When you apply Priming with the Customer Experience lens, you also realize that some organizations are not aware of how the little things they are doing are priming the customer. For example, cable companies do not prime you properly. (What a surprise!) You are already fired up because your bloody Internet’s gone down for the 497th time that week, and they are trying to sell you bundles through the hold. Of course, that intermixes with the repeated message that that “your call is important to them.” The effect is the opposite. Each time the terrible music pauses to let in the “your call is important to us” message, I cringe. It reminds you of every other time you’ve been frustrated and waited on the line for resolution and every different negative feeling.

Primers pull some of those responses to the surface. So, as an organization, you have to ask yourself, are you drawing positive or negative reactions?

We worked with an insurance company in the UK, where we were looking at the fact that they had several repeat calls into a call center. We discovered that after placing an order, the insurance company agent would tell the customers, “Your policy documents should be with you within five days.” And 76 percent of people that had that experience were then phoning back after three days and saying, “I’m sorry, but when was I meant to be getting my policy documents?”

It was the word “should.” By saying, “you should,” it primed feelings of doubt. We had the agents say instead, “Your policy documents will be with you within five days.” The call volumes move from 76 percent down to six percent within three weeks.

It is important to note that the callers had no idea why they called back before making the change. If we had asked, they would have said something else. However, the words you use are essential when it comes to priming correctly. While I dislike scripts, guiding people on the type of terms you would prefer for them to use, and giving them feedback is appropriate. These subtle word changes can influence people’s reactions to their situation.

When managing your customer experiences, think about whether you can steer customers in the right direction by pulling up some of these more positive associations in their memory’s fishing net instead of some of the more negative ones.

The idea of priming properly to evoke positive associations dives down into Journey Mapping. When you’re designing your customer journeys, understanding how you prime customers can explain what causes them to do things you don’t want them to do. Furthermore, look for what you can do to prime the memories that influence customer behavior in the most important ways for your business. It would be essential to consider:

• What music are you going to be putting on hold?
• Which images are you going to be using?
• How does it smell in your physical location?
• What are the words that you want to use?

All of those things should be priming customers to do something that you want. However, it should be appropriate.

Anchoring is a heuristic, which you might recall means a shortcut in our thinking to help us make decisions, resulting in a bias. Anchoring describes where you start with something, typically a number, and then adjust from there. The bias occurs because we choose bad anchors, and then we often under-adjust from there. For example, if you have people list at the last four digits of their Social Security number and then have them estimate the price for something, the price they estimate will be biased towards whatever number they listed first—even though people know that a social security sequence has nothing to do with the cost of the item they are estimating.

Anchoring is like Priming because you put a thought in somebody’s mind. There is a sales technique that somebody was talking to me about the other week where you tell a customer the rough price. It becomes an anchor, but also it weeds out those customers who can’t afford it, helping you qualify your prospects. Moreover, much evidence shows that the first party in a negotiation who offers the opening bid becomes an anchor. Typically, it is better to open the talks yourself because you’ll end up somewhere closer to where you want to be rather than if you allow the other person to open negotiations.

Some of the things you’re priming your customer with you might not realize. It could be you are priming them to have an unrealistic expectation. A lot of advertising does this. Customers see great things on TV, these incredible images of what it’s going to be like when you interact with this organization, and then it’s something terrible in reality.

We’ve talked before about the two cognitive systems that people have, the Intuitive System and the Rational System. Priming occurs because your Intuitive System is always there in the background, trying to help monitor what’s going on. When you’re trying to decide, your Intuitive System is trying to make you more efficient. It will pull up related ideas if you might need those, pushing those closer to the surface so that they’re available. With Priming, your intuitive system is monitoring what’s going on and sees the prime and says, “oh, this might be important.” It pulls up these memories, these thoughts, these feelings, and pushes them closer to the surface if they might be useful to you, and influences your behavior.

So, we shouldn’t think of Priming as something malicious. It doesn’t turn people against their best interests, hijacking them. Instead, Priming makes ideas available that the Intuitive System processes and then can bring to bear for the person who’s for the customer.

So, What Do You Do With This Information?

The first thing you should do with this information is to recognize that you will be priming your customers now one way or the other. There’s no neutral point on this. It will impact your customer. The issue for me is, is it deliberate? Did you mean to do it?

The second thing you should consider is whether you want to continue with these primes. Are they yielding the right behavior? Are you getting the results you want?

The third thing you should do is adjust your primes. Given the experience you want to give your customer what new primers should you be putting in place? Bear in mind that these are not universal. Different groups of customers will feel other primes depending upon what’s important to them. So the whole area of customer segmentation and everything else plays a part in this.

Moreover, if you are not aware of why primes will inspire what behavior, or even what primes your customers want, we recommend undertaking research. When you understand what customers value, you can design an experience that gives it to them.

However, it can be challenging to discover what customers really want; sometimes, customers don’t know themselves. In these cases, it is vital to undertake research to uncover them. Our Emotional Signature Research® discovers what level of emotional engagement you already have with customers and which emotions will drive the most value for your organization. The method we use can uncover these hidden needs, meaning the ones even customers didn’t know they wanted. Having the hidden-needs-want list is an excellent way to design Priming elements that inspire the customer behavior you want.

Most importantly, remember that you’re already doing this. People’s Intuitive Systems are already on the lookout for these primes because that’s what the Intuitive System does to help. So, give some thought to it. Are there ways to improve the customer experience by being sensitive to the primers you’re sending out instead of being ignorant and potentially making things worse accidentally?

To hear more about this idea in more detail, listen to the complete podcast here.

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post Small Things That Have a Dramatic Impact on Your Customer’s Experience appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Lewis Carbone, a Customer Experience management expert, speaker, and founder of ExpereinceEngineering™, was on a recent podcast to discuss how to get inside the customer’s mind and move to this next level of Customer Experience Management. He compares where we are for the transformation of Customer Experience as the transition from driving cars with gauges to driving Indy cars. Moreover, he sees it as a fusion of art and science, a science that has evolved over the years.

Per Carbone, people are aware of the impact of unconscious thought. Moreover, the study of neuroscience and psychology has amassed more knowledge about the best way to apply it to consumers over the last ten years than it has over those disciplines’ entire history. The key, it seems, is in the clues we leave for customers in our Customer Experience design. In Carbone’s Book, Clued In How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again, Carbone emphasizes the significance of clues and signals for our unconscious mental processes. The brain takes in information, interprets, and filters it all the time. Much of it is unconscious, and all of it is essential to understand.

Lewis Carbone, a Customer Experience Management Expert sees [CX] as a fusion of art and science, a science that has evolved over the years.

Many years ago, Carbone made Deep Metaphor Elicitation his preferred methodology and applied it to experience management. He and his team learned that the unconscious mind decides even before we articulate or rationalize it. It happens at a primitive and emotional level. Therefore, Carbone’s team uses this fact as a fundamental building block for all their experience design and management programs, aiming to create greater emotional engagement with customers.

Both Carbone and I agree that emotions are the key to designing and delivering excellent Customer Experiences. However, we are both still surprised by how few organizations adopt this methodology. Carbone thinks that could be because they don’t know what to do with this information, so firms stick with what they know because it’s comfortable. Or companies only take a shallow dive into the idea, hoping that a little effort will yield big results.

Clues Send Signals in Experiences

Carbone says he would rather know how people think about something versus what they think. With that “code,” he can unlock how to help them experience what they want and feel the way they want to feel. Carbone does this in experiences by leaving clues. Clues, he says, are the signals that help our brains process information.

Carbone did some work with hotels over the years and learned that people thought of the hotel room as a “safe container.” If there is a breach of safety, then, unconsciously, it reflects poorly on the experience.

Consider a time you walked into your hotel room after checking in. The first time you use the bathroom, you might remember there is a triangle that is folded at the end of the toilet paper. This triangle is a clue or signal that the staff has just cleaned the bathroom toilet you are using. Carbone says if he notices that the triangle is missing, then unconsciously, he feels uneasy and wonders if someone has been there before him or forgot to clean the room.

For my part, I understand what he means. I feel the same way about hotel rooms and the idea that people have been in there that I didn’t know about. Although, it depends on who was in there. For example, I don’t feel weird when I come to my hotel room and realize I have received turn-down service. (The chocolate didn’t hurt with that feeling, either.) However, if someone came in to do some maintenance and I wasn’t aware it would happen, it would bother me. I would also wonder why the front desk didn’t tell me about it. These little things are essential.

More than hotel stays at the moment, digital experiences are crucial these days. Digital experiences present an excellent opportunity for many organizations to manage Customer Experiences. After all, one of the beautiful things about digital experiences is that you can measure everything. However, one of the daunting things about digital experiences is that you can measure everything. The danger I see is that few people are trained in using the information they measure to identify what it means for customer behavior. They lack the training in the behavioral sciences and misinterpret the underlying behavior that exists. In other words, they have the data, but they don’t know what to do with it.

Carbone says that what’s under the data and the depth you dive into the data will help move digital Customer Experiences forward. Many times, data analysis will result in fixing broken things in the experience, which is excellent. However, it is not enough. Carbone and I would both like to see more organizations move beyond remedying problems and get into creating digital experiences that consider the customer’s mind. The signals and clues we unconsciously process demand it, especially now in the COVID Era.

These same considerations of our mindset during the COVID Era also carry over into physical experiences. Carbone says designing experiences that appeal to the unconscious mind’s need for safety are crucial. He recalls a recent stay in Wisconsin where the hotel staff had seals on the door to indicate the room had been sanitized from its previous occupant. The team also opened doors and pushed elevator buttons for guests, so people didn’t have to touch too many surfaces. Carbone said that he had the distinct feeling that the hotel was showing they cared about him. These actions had an improvisational feel, meant to adapt the hotel experience to a customer’s needs in a COVID environment. Carbone calls this type of experience management adaptive impulsivity.

However, Carbone says that intentional design is critical to experience management. In other words, understanding in depth how customer emotions work in experiences, creating a deliberate strategy that appeals to customer emotions, and then implementing them consistently is critical. Moreover, he wants organizations to think of it as an integrated system.

Organizations should ask themselves how to determine the emotional end frame and then make it a reality from the fusion of their experience. Carbone also says that organizations should understand that the ultimate value they create is the experiential value, which can be managed to make an emotional response.

If you want customers to feel comfortable, safe, or cared for, paying attention to these little things […] will make a big difference.

I talk a lot about decision shortcuts that customer use, called heuristics. Many times, heuristics place importance on small things in experiences. Our subconscious mind processes information and makes decisions differently than our rational mind. It relies a lot on these shortcuts, symbols, and signals. Therefore, if you want customers to feel comfortable, safe, or cared for, paying attention to these little things—like toilet paper triangles or opening doors for customers during COVID—will make a big difference.

So, What Should You Do With This Information?

Carbone says that the most critical factor for getting inside the customer’s mind is self- awareness. Understanding where you are on this continuum of increased knowledge and sophistication in experience management will help you move forward into the next era of Customer Experience. Carbone also has five absolutes to Customer Experience Management:

1. Move from the world of making and selling to sensing and responding.
2. Think about emotional and rational bonds with customers.
3. Understand and leverage the role of unconscious thought.
4. Become “Clue conscious” of your signals in language, physical space, and gestures.
5. Develop a rigorous system that manages clues and creates a Clue-Conscious culture at your organization.

It would be best to understand that we are entering a whole new era of opportunity to apply these new thoughts and move beyond this improvisational bridge we have created. The behavioral sciences have led to understanding experiences more deeply than we’ve ever understood them before. Applying new tools and techniques to understand how experiences make the customer feel is essential.

Carbone says that organizations need to go back and look at signals they send in their experience and understand those signals’ power. Moreover, you have to change your approach to research. Surveys tend to be a popular way to get feedback from customers. Unfortunately, Carbone says that the way you ask the question changes the answer. Instead, he would try open questions that do not aim for specifics and then “wander through the maze of their mind and let them take you where they want to go.”

Many organizations have yet to grasp what the new world is going to look like post-COVID.

Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective, too. We often undertake Customer Experience Health Checks, where we assess an organization’s Customer Experience by acting as a customer and performing internal interviews within the organization. After a couple of weeks, we will present our recommendations based on our findings.

The world has changed, and before we could experiment, we moved ahead. Many organizations have yet to grasp that and what the new world is going to look like post-COVID.

What we do know is it’s going to be a lot different. Getting under the skin of what that means and what clues you should be sending is critical for all organizations.

Understanding your customers’ motivations is also vital, whether they want safety, convenience, or feeling cared for—or all three at the same time! Knowing that opens up what you can do creatively to facilitate those motivations. In problem-solving mode, your solutions are going to be much more tactical and much more narrow. But if you widen your scope, you can create a robust experience with the proper clues and signals that deliver the appropriate customer emotions.

To hear more about this idea in more detail, listen to the complete podcast here.

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post Getting Inside the Customer’s Mind appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

We discussed these five rules on a recent podcast. The rules are as follows:

1. Do not think there is one “silver bullet.”
2. Do not over-emphasize the easily-measured costs.
3. Strive for balance.
4. Look at the lifetime value of the customer.
5. Select the areas that drive the least value for you.

Let’s take a deeper dive into each of these.

Rule #1: Do not think there is one “silver bullet.”

Clients often tell me that they need a big idea to cut costs. They are looking for one thing they can do, like reducing the call centers or moving the labor force offshore, and other solutions like these. It tells me that deep down, my client thinks that cutting costs can be a single, dramatic action. However, in my experience, which is extensive, I know it’s the sum of many efforts essential to cutting costs. Moreover, a five percent reduction across several different areas is also going to be less painful and traumatic than a single action would be.

Instead, I would advise taking a lateral look. When I was working in corporate life at British Telecom, and we were looking at reducing costs, I discovered the benefits of taking this approach. For example, the knee-jerk reaction was to adjust our headcount (salaries) to reduce our costs. However, we chose to consider other expenses, like recruitment and training costs and advertising costs. We had much more significant cost savings by including these different areas than if we only considered headcount salary costs. Therefore, if your target was to achieve X amount of savings, thinking laterally is critical.

Rule #2: Do not overemphasize the easily measured costs. 

Many people attribute Einstein with a quote that is useful here:

“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.” —Albert Einstein.

When you are looking to cut costs, some things on balance sheets, income statements, or financial records are easy to see (e.g., the salary costs we mentioned in rule 1). Other hidden costs are easy to miss (e.g., the recruitment costs). By making changes that save you some money in the short term, like reducing head counts, you could incur much higher hidden costs in the long-term by accident, like recruitment. So, your overall savings will be less than if you considered all the harder to pinpoint costs. In other words, it would be best to avoid taking a siloed perspective to this exercise and considering even the harder to measure cost areas.

Rule #3: Strive for balance.

I’ve never been involved in a Customer Experience improvement program that has not ended up saving costs. Why? When you are providing a poor experience, there are two forms of expenses. First, there is usually a lot of operational overlap that causes poor experience and increases your costs. Second, there is a lost opportunity cost.

For example, I was running a workshop for a client in the mobile communications market. The VP of customer service was late and came into the workshop after about an hour looking fraught. I asked him what the problem was. He said one of the marketing teams had decided to reduce their costs by bundling a mailer that was going out to all their customers, which numbered around 500,000. The call center was in meltdown. Customers were upset about the fact that they couldn’t get through, which led to loads of angry tweets. And, well…you can probably imagine the rest.

This story is an example of unintended consequences. The marketing department had good intentions. They chose to send the mailer out at once to save costs; it seemed like a good idea. However, that well-intended decision concluded with the call center unable to handle the response.

In another client situation, I spoke with a senior manager at a water utility we were consulting. He had been reviewing a customer complaint. He explained that the process was that complaints start in the call center, and then escalate up the chain until the customer is satisfied with their resolution. In this case, the complaint landed in a big meeting with ten senior managers hashing it out.

“How much was the complaint about?” I asked.

“$1,500.”

“The meeting that you just had cost more than the $1,500, let alone everything else that happened before that,” I said, astonished.

If the water utility had resolved that complaint at the first call with the customer, it would be better off. Moreover, all the stats will tell you that when you deal with a complaint and the customers happy with it, they are more satisfied with a lower monetary amount and have a higher level of loyalty than when they aren’t pleased with the resolution.

It’s a matter of balance. Taking action earlier would have cost less and improved customer satisfaction. Also, empowering the front line employees to make decisions up to a certain amount can drive costs down. For example, employees at Ritz Carlton can give people up to $2,500 to compensate a guest with no questions asked.

Striving for balance emphasizes that you can reduce costs in more ways than to stop doing something. It could be the experience design you implement that improves the process and saves money at the same time.

Rule #4: Look at the lifetime value of the customers. 

It is essential to consider the revenue generated by your customers over the lifetime of your relationship. So, not just the revenue over the next year, but several years, maybe even 20 or 30 years. That value is the number it would be best to be mindful of when cutting costs.

You also need to realize how much it costs you when you need to replace customers, i.e., customer acquisition costs. You are likely to lose some customers between the effects of the COVID-19 economic downturn and cost-lowering efforts that could impact the experience. Ensuring that you don’t lose your best customers is critical because their lifetime value and customer acquisition costs are high.

With the Ritz Carlton example, the $2,500 they are authorized to use to satisfy a customer complaint was not pulled out of thin air. That was based on extensive customer lifetime value calculations. Ritz Carlton knows how valuable their customers are to them over the long haul, which drives their decisions. If we were advising Motel 6, we would probably not suggest that they spend $2,500 per customer at the drop of a hat because there’s a different lifetime value calculation.

Think about these long-term relationships, know what your customers’ value is, and incorporate that into your decision-making.

My favorite example of what not to do is cable companies, who have terrible customer service, as I have mentioned more than once. Let’s say you pay them $150 a month for 12 months. Your annual value is $1,800. That is a significant number, but not as significant as your 10-year value of $18,000, or a 20-year value of $36,000. When you consider those long-term values, it should impel the cable company to carefully consider how they treat their customer—especially when you factor in the acquisition and onboarding expenses associated with the service. It would be best to ensure that cost-cutting measures do not drive a customer out after two or three years instead of the natural, longer life cycle most customers have.

Think about these long-term relationships, know what your customers’ value is, and incorporate that into your decision-making. Perhaps most importantly, avoid short-term cost-cutting strategies, especially if it’s going to increase the friction of interacting with your firm marginally. Over multiple interactions, your customers could determine it’s not worth it and go somewhere else, which can be higher than what you saved.

Rule #5: Select the areas that drive the least value for you. 

There are parts of your experience that drive value for your customers and other factors that don’t. What you don’t want to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater. In other words, don’t cut your costs and reduce your experience quality in the areas that drive the most value for you now.

I have a story about the milkman that explains what I mean. A few years back, my wife Lorraine used to have the milk delivered daily to the house by the milkman. I told her we should cancel and get our milk at the market like everyone else. She disagreed. Lorraine explained that the milkman, Kevin, came around on Friday to collect money, and they had a friendly chat, and she didn’t want to cancel. Eventually, Kevin moved on, and his replacement decided that he would leave a bill and collect a check on Friday, that we would place under the mat. After a couple of months, Lorraine canceled. She wasn’t getting the laugh and joke anymore, which was what she valued in the experience.

My milkman story illustrates how essential it is that you know what parts of your experience drive the most value for your most valuable customers, so you can make the best possible choices. You need to know your different types of customers and what that group values because it could differ. If you don’t know, then find out. An outside perspective can also help. For example, our consultancy services can help you discover what drives (and destroys) value for your firm and even how to discover what customers want that they might not know themselves.

Even when there isn’t a global pandemic wreaking havoc on the economy, it is essential to reduce your costs. However, it is equally critical to cut costs without driving away customers, which is by all accounts trickier. If you can avoid looking for the silver bullet fix and overemphasizing the easy-to-measure costs while striving for balance in your cost vs. customer satisfaction processes, you are off to an excellent start. Just remember to consider the lifetime value of the customer when you manage customer experiences so that you don’t drive the best ones away. Moreover, ensure that you select the areas that drive the least value for the organization or you could end up driving down costs—and your profits in one fell swoop.

To hear more about this idea in more detail, listen to the complete podcast here.

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post 5 Rules for Driving Down Costs in a Customer-Focused Way appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

It is critical to remember that people won’t trust you just because you’ve turned up. You have to earn it and prove you are trustworthy.

1. Remember that trust is earned, not given. A friend of mine who is very knowledgeable about Customer Experience said this to me, and I thought, “Bloody Hell! He’s right!” As a rule, we don’t start off trusting people in general, especially businesses. We believe that companies are always trying to get something out of you, so we have our defenses up. When a door-to-door salesman you don’t know and haven’t done business with before comes to the house asking to trim the Palm trees, as happened recently at my Florida home, you think, “hmmm…what is he up to?” The only way to build trust with customers is to do things in a particular way, meaning a strategy with deliberate actions that build credibility and facilitate trust.

2. Be authentic.  While it is true that people are willing to buy from companies they don’t completely trust, that relationship only goes so far. When push comes to shove and the product or service in question is a crucial purchase, customers revert to buying from companies they trust. Genuineness is where you build trust. One way to show you are genuine is with contracts. Contracts imply that if the customer is unsatisfied with your work, they have recourse. You could even say it makes you vulnerable to the customer. It also has the added benefit of allowing both sides of the agreement to relax a bit and see what happens during the job, rather than micromanaging one another. Usually, contracts give people peace of mind to the point that often no one feels the need to enforce the contract.

3. Remain transparent.  In some cases, being transparent means giving the bad news upfront. Hiding bad news will only delay the customers’ discovery of it, and that will only lead to feelings not conducive to trust. So, if you make a mistake, admit it and resolve it as quickly as possible. As Stephen Covey says in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you build up an emotional bank account with customers, and when you make a mistake with them, you make a withdrawal from it. However, if your emotional bank account is in good standing with customers, the error you made won’t ruin the relationship. Moreover, this same concept of transparency should be part of your employment relationship. Your employees should be able to trust the organization for whom they work. This relationship sets you up for them to provide the same for customers.

4. Do what you say you are going to do. I realize this idea is simple to say; however, it is not always simple to do. For example, this past summer, I promised a client that we would have a proposal ready for them by the end of the week. However, a couple of my team members had an issue or two that delayed their contribution to the proposal, and we were going to be late. So, I told the client we would have it over by Sunday night so that the client would have it first thing Monday morning. It meant we had to work over the weekend to get it done in time, but we did it because that’s what we said we were going to do. These types of signals are essential to customers because it matters to them whether you keep your word. As a customer, I have been on the other side of this, too. Potential vendors have told me they were going to get in touch with their proposal by a specific time and then didn’t. Guess which vendors I cut from my list of considerations as a result? I figured if they couldn’t get back to me about the proposal, it would only worsen once we were working together. So, yes, this concept is simple to say, and it makes sense when you hear it, but it is also harder to do than it sounds. Nevertheless, doing what you say you are going to do is critical to building trust.

 5. Provide consistency. It is essential to build proper expectations and then deliver on them every time. Global brands get this concept. You know that when you stay in a Hilton somewhere in the world or go to McDonald’s in another country, there is a reasonable expectation of what you will get. I have talked before about Heuristics, which are shortcuts in our thinking that help us make decisions. Trust helps fuel these shortcuts. Consistent achievement of our expectations is essential. So, we look for signals that we can trust a brand to deliver. These signals also indicate whether we can trust the company for more important things later. For example, when choosing a specialist doctor to perform surgery, we often have NO idea if they are skilled surgeons. However, we know that the practice is organized, that they return our calls, listen to what we say, look at us in the eye when they talk to us, and other details like these. These little things do not shine any light on the surgeon’s ability, but they do indicate a level of trustworthiness that helps us move forward. In terms of managing a Customer Experience, it is important not to discount the importance of these small, maybe even objectively irrelevant things, because they’re all your customer has to focus on judging your trustworthiness.

So, saying all this isn’t tricky; doing it is. It is critical to remember that people won’t trust you just because you’ve turned up. You have to earn it and prove you are trustworthy. However, if you are authentic, transparent, do what you say you are going to do, and do this consistently, you can build trust with customers, and that leads to the type of relationship that benefits your bottom line.

To hear more about this idea in more detail, listen to the complete podcast here.

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

The post 5 New Rules Guaranteed to Build Trust appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

I have recently been included in Brand Quarterly’s ‘Top 50 Marketing Thought Leaders over 50’ and they asked me an interesting question: “What do I think the next industry trends would be for the year?” I thought I would expand on my thoughts here and give a better explanation.

For those of you that do not know about this,  behavioral economics embraces the fact that often Customers make irrational decisions and as a consequence this affects what they buy. In short, you need to embrace the fact that Customers are irrational.

In our bland world everything is the same to many marketers who still only focus on the 4P’s (Price, Place, Product and Promotion)  and use this as a crutch. Marketers need to recognize that human decision making is far more complex than this. They need to elevate their thinking to a new level of  understanding and embrace behavioral economics to break through the glass ceiling that is engaging them.

Let us start with three simple questions:

1. What emotions are you trying to evoke in your Customers?
2. Do they drive value for your organization ($)?
3. Have you designed these emotions to be evoked in your marketing?

Not sure? Well you should be. To do your job effectively you should understand how emotions are evoked and design this into your Customer Experience or campaign. You therefore need to understand behavioral economics  and how to make the most of Customer’s irrationality. When you have mastered this I then suggest  you look into the whole area of predictive analytics and define how you can predict customer’s true behavior.

The last piece of the jigsaw is making this ‘live’ in an experience. Imagine that you have just designed a campaign that drives the customer into a store and they then have an interaction with  store personnel. How are you going to ensure that the emotion you want to be evoked is actually evoked during the ‘in store experience’? The answer is that the store personnel need to be trained on recognizing how the Customer is feeling when entering the experience. This is achieved through advanced soft skills training. This covers  recognizing Customer’s verbal and non-verbal cues (facial expression, body language, tone of voice ,etc.) in order to identify how the Customer is feeling. Then the store personnel can  implement their training to convert how that Customer feels,  maybe from ‘confused’ to one of the specific emotions that drive value for their organization.

Sounds far fetched? It’s not. This is what our more advanced clients are doing today with great success. One client moved their Customers from:

• ‘Feeling out of control’ to ‘in control’ by 25%.
• ‘Feeling Anxious’ to ‘feeling at ease’ by 10%.
• When Customers were asked, “Would you hire this person?” , a reply of ‘yes’ increased by 25%.

So, understanding that Customers are irrational, embracing behavioral economics, using this to predict their behavior and finally designing your experience and training people on how to convert customers emotions is the new world. Welcome to the new world of practical behavioral economics!

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Colin is proud to be recognized by Brand Quarterly’s as one of the ‘Top 50 Marketing Thought Leaders over 50’.

The post ‘Top 50 Marketing Thought Leader’ Reveals Latest Trend appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

September 1st, the high-end yoga-wear maker introduced their new Pant Wall. The new fits are arranged according to how they feel when worn, rather than the silhouette as it was in the past. The new pants range from Tight fit to Relaxed and include other fits such as Held in, Hugged or Naked.

I realize of course that I am not the target of Lululemon, since I would never wear yoga pants (you’re welcome!). They certainly wouldn’t have my size. And if they did, the sight of me wearing this is enough to put everyone off their food for a week! However, the last fit description sounds interesting, to say the least!

The new fit descriptions are designed to help Customers know which fit is appropriate for what activity. The new wall is in response to Customer Feedback that they were confused about how the pants should fit and sometimes bought them too big. The Pant Wall was designed to help Customers feel less confused in the store more satisfied with their purchase after they leave.

The Customer response to the change seems to be positive, according to analysts. They are upgrading the stock and forecasting a positive turning point the brand by the 4th quarter. Morgan Stanley upgraded LULU, predicting that the stock will continue its success in earnings for 2016.

The VOC is the Key

So what does this story show us? It shows us two things. First, that listening to the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is an important part of your brand strategy. Second, that incorporating what you hear in the VOC to your Customer Experience pays off for your bottom line, a.k.a. stock price value rising.

An important part of your success (a.k.a. stock price value rising), is having a few ways to keep in touch with the VOC. Lululemon has a few channels in place to listen to the VOC:

• There is the Ambassador program, designed to give local athletes and brand ambassadors a way to weigh in on the product lines.
• Then there is the heylululemon.com site (also called their feedback page) where they invite their Customers to make suggestions and submit ideas.
• There is the Guest Education Centre, where they answer all questions and concerns via email, live chat, or call center.

They also do roundtable research at the store level. One of my work associates emailed me recently regarding a recent experience she had with Lululemon. When she was invited to an event at the store, she thought it was a party with drinks and snacks and would feature an exclusive preview for new products. However, it turned out to be something much more rewarding. Here’s what she described:

“…Don’t get me wrong, there were drinks and snacks. However, I, along with about 10 other people, had the opportunity to not only network a bit, but also sit at a round table where we were asked about our lives and what inspires us, as well as our thoughts, likes, and reasons for shopping with Lulu.  Then, they offered us a chance to give feedback on our concerns and what they could change and improve (whilst notes were taken by the store and Regional managers of the brand). They also had new products we were given the opportunity to try on and give feedback as well. At the end of the evening, it was also a nice surprise to be given a gift card to shop with them again.”

All of these listening channels are paying off—and according to stock pundits, by next year or even the fourth quarter this year, quite literally.

It’s nice to see a brand remember what makes Customer Loyalty and Retention work. Lululemon had begun to lose their balance with their Customers coming out of their pose as the top Yoga-wear brand.  But by realigning their strategy with a Customer focus and listening to the VOC, they are once again finding their Customer Center, and positioned to take the top spot once more.

How are you listening to the VOC with your brand?

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

5 Ways to Make a Great Impression on Your New Customer

When It Comes to Customer Experience, You Have to Keep Rolling the Dice

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in Customer Experience Lately

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter & Periscope @ColinShaw_CX

The post Yoga Pants Can Realign Customer Experience appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

Why do we need to plan for emotions? Simply put, because then we can manage them in others when necessary.

Over 50% of any Customer Experience behavior is driven by emotions. Emotions cause you to grab the product further back on the shelf to avoid people’s cooties and they are why we buy fishing lures we don’t need (or maybe that’s just me).

We’d like to think we buy rationally, but we don’t. It’s emotional and because of that, we assume it’s unpredictable. However, science keeps taking steps to gain the ability to predict emotional responses in people.

A study published in the journal PLOS Biology out of Dartmouth reveals a way to predict human emotions based on the subject’s brain activity. The Dartmouth team found an accurate activation pattern of negative emotions that estimates how negative a person will feel when they look at upsetting photos. The findings are important for treating people with mental or health disorders, and, on a higher level, for understanding how your brain generates emotions. Moreover, because the pattern they mapped out works “remarkably well” with new participants, it shows emotional responses are similar across large groups of people.

These scientific discoveries translate into helpful prompts for how we handle the emotional moments in our business transactions. Let me explain.

In business, there are times in a Customer Experience when things don’t go well, and it is not your fault. Let’s say there is a weather delay during the holiday season and you work at the airline that now has to inform passengers they aren’t going to make it to their destination. You can’t do anything about the weather or the fact that the news is going to generate stress for passengers.

Here’s where predicting the intensity of negative emotions comes in handy. When you predict the emotional response of your Customers, you can prepare to deliver the news in a way that helps mitigate the impact for the Customers.

Stress is caused by the strain of adverse or pressure-filled situations. In the case of a weather delay and being stranded at the airport, stress is caused by not knowing what to do next. A way to mitigate this is to have resources available that help passengers figure out what to do next. Maybe it’s a referral to another airline or car rental agency. Maybe it’s a drink ticket for the local bar. Whatever it is, it should address the problem of “what to do next,” so it can soften the intensity of the stress the passenger feels during their experience with you.

The idea is that by having a resource available to mitigate the predicted emotional response proactively, you soften the blow of the bad news and create a positive memory for the passenger associated with your airline. And based on the study from Dartmouth, you know those emotional responses will be the same with your Customers.

The key takeaways here are simple: Emotions are more predictable and more common amongst a group of people than you thought they were. When you predict emotions, you can plan to manage them to a better emotional outcome than if you don’t plan. If you work for the airline with no plan for how to deliver the weather delay news to passengers, I predict you will wish you had one of those drink tickets I suggested for yourself.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

• Science Proves What Really Makes People Happy
• Discovering What Customers Don’t Know Themselves
• The Emotional Experience: Shedding Some Light on Emotions

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter & Periscope @ColinShaw_CX

The post Customers Emotions are Predictable appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

According to the 2015 U.K. State of Multichannel Customer Service Report published by Parature and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it’s not a moment too soon. It’s the law of Customer Experience Supply and Demand: they demand it so you better supply it!

How are companies blowing it? They evoke the wrong Customer emotions during the experience. According the report, the common complaints from those Customers surveyed included:

Feeling Hassled:

•      Feeling passed around between different agents during an interaction (23%)
•      Needing to contact a company several times to resolve a single issue (23%)

Feeling Frustrated:

• Not finding their information or getting resolution online (16%)
• Waiting on hold too long (15%)

Not Feeling Valued:

•      Navigating automated systems, feeling unable to reach a real person (13%)
•      Suffering impolite agents (9%)

All of these complaints correspond with feelings. That’s because over 50% of a Customer Experience is how a Customer feels about it. Organizations that fail to make a Customer feel a certain way during their interactions get dropped by them.  As the numbers show here not feeling valued and feeling hassled and frustrated are the type of emotions that facilitate getting dropped!

We know from our work with London Business School (that culminated in my bestselling book, The DNA of the Customer Experience, How emotions drive value, Palgrave Macmillan 2007) the emotions Frustrated and Valued are two that destroy and drive value, respectively. We normally establish how an organization is performing against a benched market research called Emotional Signature.

Customers are more demanding than in the past about the online presence of a company, too. Of the U.K. Customers surveyed, 92% of them expect a self-service portal on the website for Customer service, with 43% also saying they that portal to be mobile responsive. Sixty-five percent of these Customers also expect a response within 24 hours when they tweet about something to a company.

That’s just the U.K. For the U.S. Report, Parature and Microsoft Dynamics CRM,they produced this infographic:

It’s great that more companies are working on improving the Customer Experience for Customers. The thing about improvement is that it’s a journey, not a destination. Believe me, as soon as you think you have arrived, the destination gets changed again. Companies that didn’t even have a mobile site until last month shouldn’t relax now—they need to make sure it’s responsive to the online self-service Customer portal. Organizations that came up with great new live-agent systems at the call centers can’t relax until they learn how certain call protocols  employed by agents come across as abrupt or cold with Customers calling in for help.

It comes down to this: Customer Experience needs to move to the next level of Customer Experience. And there is always another level to reach.

Customers are a demanding lot. They want the best price with the most comprehensive service, and they want access to all of these things 24 hours a day, seven days a week—on their smartphone! However, the truth is, organizations better give it to them. In today’s competitive and global marketplace, if Customers don’t get what they demand, they aren’t in short supply to go somewhere else to get it.

Are you ready to move your organization to the next level of Customer Experience?

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

• British People Don’t Always Say What They Mean…Neither Do Customers

• The Unforgiving Brits: Unhappy Consumers in the UK Punish Poor Service More Than US Consumers

• The Value of Complaints

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter & Periscope @ColinShaw_CX

The post Customers Want Better Customer Service…or Else! appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.

When the stock market tanks like it did recently, most CEOs would be worried about their revenue also falling (not to mention falling figures from those CEO bonuses we all hear so much about).  Most are likely to suggest people need to work harder to weather the storm.

Not Schultz.

In a memo early September, Schultz decided to address the emotions both his employees and Customers feel in a falling market like the one we bore witness to earlier in the month.

To his employees, he said, “…although we are not immune from the global stock market selloff that has now made its way to Wall Street, my confidence in our company and in all of you has never been greater.”

About how we wanted his partners (retail employees) to treat Customers he said:

“Today’s financial market volatility, combined with great political uncertainty both at home and abroad, will undoubtedly have an effect on consumer confidence and perhaps even our customers’ attitudes and behavior. Our customers are likely to experience an increased level of anxiety and concern. Please recognize this and – as you always have – remember that our success is not an entitlement, but something we need to earn, every day. Let’s be very sensitive to the pressures our customers may be feeling, and do everything we can to individually and collectively exceed their expectations.”

I talk a lot about Customer-centricity of organizations. We use a model called Naïve to Natural that measures how an organization is oriented toward Customers, with the Naïve not having a Customer focus and the Natural having the most Customer focus. This communication to employees shows me a customer centric company that is lead by the top down on this principle.

I love the line that says, “success is not an entitlement, but something we need to earn, every day.” Never truer words were spoken, particularly when you are addressing Customer Experience.

Customer Experiences happen in the moment, and these moments happen every day, every hour of operation, in every channel. In all of these moments, an employee can make or break a Customer Experience. This is why training and employee engagement are so key to its success. They need the tools and tactics at their disposal when these moments occur.

It is also why it so important to have the buy-in of your senior management and leadership teams for your Customer Experience agenda. This important training takes time and money, two things on which most leaders have a lot of opinions, especially about how they will be spent. Without this commitment, you could end up with a great plan that everyone ignores because it isn’t the priority at the moment.

I also like how his retail employees are considered partners. How employees feel about their job shows in the Customer Experiences they provide. When they feel they are a valued member of the team, it shows. Schultz understands this in the way he refers to them and also with key phrases like “my confidence in all of you.”

Schultz understands that Employees and Customers feel emotions caused by the world around them and these emotions affect their behavior. He values his Customers enough to care how they feel coming into his experience and takes steps to help his employees have the appropriate tools to react. He also leads his Customer-centric culture by example. He works to ensure employees felt valued and cared for so they will continue to deliver the experience that makes Customer feel valued and cared for. When it comes to Customer-centricity, there is no question that he gets it.

Does your CEO get it, too?

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

• 5 Reasons Your KPIs Are Hurting Your Customer Experience

• Starbucks: Real Concern or Just Good Marketing?

• 7 Signs That Your Executive Team is Not on Board With Your Customer Experience Agenda

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter & Periscope @ColinShaw_CX

The post Starbucks CEO Gets It, Does Yours? appeared first on Beyond Philosophy.