THE ULTIMATE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PRIMER
A comprehensive starting point for new Customer Experience professionals.
There are more and more business leaders being called upon to guide Customer Experience (CX) initiatives. It’s no longer an optional function of the organization, but has risen over the past decade to become one of the most critical and strategic aspects of the company. If you are new to the wonderful world of CX, welcome! You will find Customer Experience professionals to be among the most generous, kind, intelligent, and passionate people in the corporate universe. Even so, the path you are on can be overwhelming. It’s taken the CX Accelerator team years to achieve any level of proficiency, and it will be many more before we achieve any form of mastery. The good news is we are giving you a massive head start! This resource exists to teach what Customer Experience is and how to do it well. We will start by defining Customer Experience, followed by a step-by-step guide on how to perform the foundational disciplines. Once the basics are covered, we will provide you with a curated list of the very best resources the Customer Experience community has to offer!
WHAT IS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE?
Customer Experience (CX) is quite simply “How customers perceive their interactions with your company” (Forrester). While related, CX is quite different from Customer Service in that service is just one of many aspects a Customer Experience professional must coordinate. CX brings the entire organization together under the banner of customer success. It’s scientific in the sense that CX is made up of repeatable steps and behaviors, however it’s artistic in the sense that you are dealing with human emotions as the measure for success. Because of this dynamic, it requires a special type of person to be a CX leader. You must be capable of telling compelling stories through a combination of both the empirical and the theoretical, as well as overcoming significant obstacles of all types. The customer perception will generally be based on a series of different “touch points” or moments in which a customer interfaces with your organization. It’s the job of the CX leader to identify and analyze each of these touch points, thereby isolating key CX improvement opportunities. There are a whole variety of tools and techniques that CX professionals use to accomplish this objective. We will explore the three foundational disciplines beginning with VOC (voice of the customer), followed by experience engineering, and closing with the employee experience.
QUICK LINKS
Learn how to create a customer feedback engine.
CORE CX DISCIPLINES
DISCIPLINE #1 - VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER
The way a brand collects and responds to feedback from their customers says more about their CX maturity than anything else. Establishing a voice of the customer (VOC) program is absolutely critical, and will act as the cornerstone for everything CX. VOC is the process in which the organization monitors, collects, analyzes, and reports on all feedback associated with your brand. It may be the voice of the customer, but it’s the heartbeat of the Customer Experience.
Most VOC programs are anchored with an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey. If you are new to NPS, begin with this fantastic series by Jennifer Rowe at Zendesk. Historically, organizations have implemented some form of an “NPS” (Net Promoter Score) program and checked the VOC box. The reality is fewer and fewer customers are taking the time to fill out traditional surveys. Fortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg when you consider all the feedback an organization receives on a daily basis. The trick is tapping into this unstructured feedback across the organization. By creating organic “listening paths” as Jeanne Bliss would say, you can effectively centralize the customer’s voice from a whole variety of channels. While it may take time to break the “survey mentality” so many are plagued by, doing so will greatly increase the quality and the value of the data received. In a nutshell, you are creating a centralized location for any member of your organization to take feedback from a customer and quickly document it. Imagine how much you’d learn if you could actually view and learn from all the comments coming to your sales staff, support team, implementation group, finance team and every other group in your organization! Learn more about how to build listening paths on Jeanne’s blog here.
Pro Tip - One “hack” that I’ve used to get employees excited about and using the listening path channel is to purchase USB webkeys. This is simply a button with your CX program logo on it that connects to the employees docking station. Whenever they get meaningful feedback from a customer, they slam the button and go straight to the simple form. The adoption rate resulting from this inexpensive gamification technique has been amazing. Talk about a CX easy button! Learn how to implement your own button system here.
KEY METRICS FOR CUSTOMER SUCCESS -
BUILDING YOUR CX DASHBOARD
A huge part of your VOC program is creating a vehicle by which to communicate customer information to a widespread audience. If you are about to embark on an effort to improve the Customer Experience, it’s critical to establish a baseline of customer related data as soon as possible. How else will you be able to validate the positive or negative results of your actions? Before your organization will truly invest in your initiatives, you must be able to prove the ROI with a dashboard of CX and revenue related metrics. NPS and listening paths are a great start, but you will need additional data points and perspectives to drive change. Below are the most essential metrics for effectively measuring Customer Experience. You may need additional metrics depending on your audience and industry.
CES - The Customer Effort Score was introduced by the CEB (now Gartner) in 2013. According to extensive research by a variety of firms, CES has a powerful correlation to customer loyalty. The “effort” question would be asked on your surveys and is simply “how quickly and easily were you able to resolve your issue.” It’s more transactional when compared with NPS, and is great for measuring the experience on a touch point by touch point basis.
Additional Reading - “Stop Trying To Delight Your Customers” on HBR
NPS - People love to bad-mouth Net Promoter Score. Yes it’s a bit dated (2003)...and no it’s not perfect...but regardless NPS absolutely has a place on your CX dashboard. NPS has been helping companies understand customer perceptions long before Customer Experience was even a mainstream function. Introduced by Fred Reichheld, Net Promoter Score is calculated on a 10 point scale by asking “How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” The goal is to turn “detractors” into “promoters” under the assumption that promoters will help you to generate more business and spend more with your brand over time.
Additional Reading - “What Is Net Promoter?” on netpromoter.com
Customer Growth Engine - Your customer base is the organization's most valuable asset and should be managed as such. Introduced by Jeanne Bliss, the power of this metric is it’s ability to create a “mic drop” moment with your leadership team. On a quarter by quarter basis, measure how much you were able to increase your customer base by volume and value, followed by how many customers were lost by value and volume. Customers lost subtracted from customers gained is your Customer Growth Engine score for that quarter. These straight-forward terms allow you to see how many customers are entering the journey, versus how many are choosing to leave. If your customer base is in decline, the obvious question is why? This one heavy-hitting number should accelerate a robust dialog and a sense of urgency among stakeholders. There is quite a bit more to this metric then the simplified version presented here, so be sure to pick up Jeanne’s book below.
Additional Reading - “Chief Customer Officer 2.0” By Jeanne Bliss on Amazon
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) - While it focuses on a specific interaction or event, CSAT is a helpful companion to NPS and CES. There are several CSAT related questions that can be asked on a survey, but the core question is “how would you rate your experience with (fill in the blank). There are typically five answer choices ranging from very satisfied down to very dissatisfied. This could be a support interaction, a purchasing experience, a demo, or just about anything else. It’s calculated by establishing a percentage of those answering either “satisfied” or “very satisfied.” Checkmarket has a helpful chart showing comparing CSAT, CES, and NPS HERE.
Additional Reading - “CSAT: The Happy Customer KPI” on Emolytics
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - Customer Lifetime Value is a measure of all the money a customer spends with your brand over the entire relationship. There are many ways to calculate this, (most of which are extremely complicated) but it doesn't have to be. A simple version can be achieved by taking the annual profit per customer, multiplied by the average number of years a customer remains, subtracted by the cost of customer acquisition. CLV can be a powerful companion to NPS if you can show how much greater the lifetime value is for a “promoter” versus a “detractor.” This provides a direct association between NPS and revenue growth. CLV Calculator has an Excel template for download to as well as some examples. For a more robust option, Optimove has a formula and tool used to calculate CLV below.
Additional Reading - “How To Calculate Customer Lifetime Value” by Optimove and “Understanding Customer Lifetime Value: A Non-Geek’s Guide” by Adam Toporek
Total Motivation (ToMo) - You may be scratching your head on this one a bit, as ToMo is not a direct customer metric. It’s an employee engagement metric. Even so, total motivation or a similar employee engagement metric is just as critical to your CX dashboard as Net Promoter Score. The reason for this (as we will explore more in discipline three) is that the Customer Experience is directly related to the employee experience. The organizations who regularly top the charts in CX are the very same ones who win “best culture” and “best places to work.” If you really want to predict and measure customer success it begins with your employees. Naturally, it can be very difficult to measure something as abstract as culture or employee engagement. The good news is that Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi have found a way! It’s called “Total Motivation (ToMo) and is born out of the intrinsic motivators discussed in Daniel Pink’s book Drive and depicted in the adjacent infographic. This score will tell you to what degree your employees are motivated to perform consistently well. By increasing the positive motivators, you are improving the quality and consistency of work, and in turn the overall Customer Experience.
Additional Reading - The article “How Company Culture Shapes Employee Motivation” on HBR has everything needed to get started using ToMo, including a link to their free survey.
Renewal / Churn Rate - If your business deals in subscriptions, customer renewal rate is your life blood. This is the percentage of customers who, given the option, decide to remain as a customer versus discontinuing service. The inverse to renewal rate is called the “Churn Rate” and is often used within SaaS businesses. This is simply the percentage of customers who stop subscribing to a service. As is made abundantly clear in this great collection of statics from Insight Squared, increasing your renewal rate is essential for long-term revenue growth. Considering how hard it is to acquire new business, a Saas company with a high churn rate likely won’t be in business for very long.
TELLING THE CUSTOMER'S STORY -
JOURNEY MAPPING
With all the great data you're receiving from your VOC program, you are ready to use a powerful storytelling vehicle that brings this information to life. Enter the “Customer Journey Map.” This is a summarized and "storified" depiction of key interactions (or touch points) that a customer experiences with your business. Designed through the lens of the customer, it will explore the emotional state, priority objectives, established expectations and most importantly, pain points for each key interaction. The reason it’s a key arrow in the quiver of the CX professional is the simplicity of a narrative format. The CX professional is required to take complex, abstract data and make it meaningful to anyone in the organization. Journey maps are fantastic for this. Your litmus test for success is as follows - within a couple minutes of looking at your map, anyone in the company should understand what the key moments in the customer’s journey are and how they specifically play a role.
The first step in creating a customer journey map is identifying “personas” or groups of customers who share similar touch points with your organization. You will need to create multiple maps for all the major customer personas. I’ve seen executives push back on this and try to consolidate everything into one massive map. This becomes nothing more than another internal process document (and a poor one at that). Next, identify the key touch points in which a customer interfaces with your brand. This will be everything from when the customer became aware of your offerings, to the continual relationship or support stage. What you do from here is really up to you. Journey maps come in thousands of different formats and contain all sorts of different relevant data. The ultimate goal is to capture the story of the customer and their experience in a compelling, easy to follow visual. This article by Paul Boag on Smashing Magazine has a ton of great recommendations and creative ideas for effective journey mapping. You will also want to follow the world's foremost expert on journey mapping, Annette Franz. Her blog is CX-Journey and there is a ton of great advice both on mapping and voice of the customer in general.
While journey mapping is the most popular, there are other story-based vehicles that can be used to educate stakeholders. One such tool is a “CX room.” This is a space dedicated to providing an immersive experience for your guests and employees to understand the customer journey. It can incorporate all of your senses and be highly creative in order to consolidate a whole customer lifecycle into 10 minutes. Read more about CX rooms and the brands that use them on this blog from Forrester.
In conclusion, a successful VOC program will give you real-time insight into what your customers are actually experiencing. This feedback will allow you to identify both your “moments of truth” (most critical touch points in the customer's journey) and your key improvement opportunities. Your CX dashboard will allow you to depict the relationship between customer experience and revenue, as well as creating a sense of urgency for CX improvements. Now that your data engine is in place, let's talk about how to use it.
CORE CX DISCIPLINES
DISCIPLINE #2 - EXPERIENCE ENGINEERING
To keep with the “CX Accelerator” theme, this is where the rubber meets the road! The first discipline was all about helping your organization to gain transparency into the customer journey using a “Voice of the Customer” program. Our second discipline is all about taking this great new information and actually doing something about it. Before getting your hands dirty with internal process change, you will want to ensure you have the required organizational support to be successful. There are three essential types of buy-in you will need to earn:
Executive Level / CEO - Without a customer-centric CEO who is an active advocate for CX change, you will be fighting a major uphill battle. The CEO and executive team are required to create a sense of urgency and drive accountability over the long-haul. By directly associating Customer Experience to revenue gain, you will attract and keep executives attention as the business evolves. Be sure to read Jeanne Bliss’s article entitled “Yes Good CX is Tied to Revenue Gains” as well as “3 Strategies to Sell the CEO on CXM” from a variety of top practitioners written by Bob Thompson.
Line Managers - The mid-level management tier is where behavior and process changes actually happen. If the executives talk a good CX game, but fail to gain commitment from the line managers, failure is inevitable. These managers survive the sea of shifting agendas by focusing very intentionally on the things they are accountable to. With competing priorities coming at them from all sides, line managers will choose the ones that lead them to numeric success, (whichever metric that is). A CX professional will want to ensure two things. The first is that one of those metrics middle managers are held accountable to is a customer related metric. This could be CES, CSAT, NPS or any other from the list above in the VOC discipline. Secondarily, paint a clear picture of how improving the customer experience will ultimately give them a greater chance of success in relation to whatever metric is closest to their heart.
The Front Line - Leadership buy-in is critical, however you must intentionally engage the front line staff as well in order for changes to take root. As Ken Booker would say, this is called “building the ground swell." It's very easy while inside the daily grind to lose sight of the customer's journey. We have to remind them. Through creative and frequent communications, allow every member of the organization to feel both the customer's victories and their pain. Resist the temptation to utilize only corporate-wide communication with this group, as it will get lost in the noise. You must make CX relevant to each individual, generally through 1:1 conversations, educating them on the critical role they play inside of the larger Customer Experience.
No CX leader can change the experience by themselves. In order to be successful, you must establish a “CX Change Coalition”. This is a cross-functional group of employee stakeholders who represent every major customer touch point. As John Kotter recommends in “leading change” you will want to ensure the members have enough authority to actually drive change within their functional areas. These champions, who are strategically embedded across the organization, will be your framework for accountability and consistency of execution.
It’s important to begin with a realistic outlook concerning the rate of change. When it comes to moving the CX needle, it’s a marathon…..not a sprint. Improving the Customer Experience is a major culture shift for most organizations. Considering culture is “the way we do things,” you will be asking people to work differently in order to positively impact your customer’s lives. Any modification in human behavior takes time and a significant amount of repetition for it to finally sink in. Equip yourself and your “CX Coalition” with the long-term perspective required to be successful.
EXPERIENCE ENGINEERING -
IDENTIFYING TOP PRIORITIES
Considering the Customer Experience is made up of every single process within a business, there’s an endless number of things to be improved. It’s very easy to become overwhelmed and discouraged at this stage. The key is to identify the right priorities for maximum impact. A mistake many business make is to assume they know what their customers want and what would improve the experience for them. Luckily for us, we've established a Voice of the Customer program that takes the guess work out of this equation. By focusing on your "moments of truth" on the journey maps, this isolates a touch point of great importance. Now look at the associated pain points for top improvement priorities. Considering there are multiple journey maps for various customer personas, you may be juggling a large number of significant pain points. There are three principles that may help to narrow the focus:
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Maximum Impact / Minimum Effort - A bit of "agile" thinking can go a long way. One framework would be take your list of improvements and assign positive point values to each in accordance to their impact potential. Now assign negative point values based on how much perceived effort is required to solve the problem. The top of your list should be those improvements with maximum impact and minimum effort. This is a great exercise to do together with your CX Change Coalition.
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Leadership Synergies - Do you know what keeps your CEO awake at night? If you are on the fence between various customer improvements consider which of them have the most impact on your key internal stakeholders.
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Quick Win? - It's always a good idea to get a quick win and build positive momentum before tackling any big hairy monsters.
Having now isolated the most promising improvement opportunities, you will want to maximize your chance of getting them done. As you are selecting a methodology for process change, consider what people are already accustomed to in your organization. There will be less resistance if you are able to tap into a known framework for execution as you can focus on the change itself versus how the change is being done. Some examples would include Lean / Six Sigma, ITIL, Value Stream Mapping, and Agile. Once a framework is selected, it's time to mobilize the CX Change Coalition and get to work. As long as you keep the "marathon" mentality and maintain leadership buy-in, there is nothing that can stop you from marching toward positive change.
One key theme of your experience process improvements will be effort reduction. When Gartner / CEB released "The Effortless Experience" in 2011 it was like an awakening within the CX field. Their research has been overwhelmingly validated in the past 7 years and is still increasingly relevant. At the end of the day, customers value their time above essentially everything else. Much of your work will be finding methods to reduce the amount of time and energy a customer spends to achieve success with your brand. As it happens, our customers are not the only ones for whom we need to be protective of time. We need to also consider how we can equip our employees with the tools and knowledge to facilitate effortless resolutions. Speaking of our employees, that's a perfect segue to our third and final core discipline, the employee experience.
CORE CX DISCIPLINES
DISCIPLINE #3 - THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
It’s become abundantly clear over the last several years that the backbone of any CX initiative is rooted in the employee experience. It’s not enough for a CX leader to focus on the needs and perceptions of customers alone. We must also become an advocate for those representing the brand every day. Imagine your organization is a car you are responsible for taking care of. Focusing on the Customer Experience exclusively would be like keeping your vehicle perfectly washed and polished on the outside, but in reality the vehicle is falling apart on the inside due to a lack of critical maintenance. The car would look very nice as you passed it on the side of the highway after breaking down. A CX leader is not just a champion for their customers. This person is a force within the organization, helping to create a customer-centric culture and motivate employees to excel for those whom they serve.
Given the overlap of objectives, one key member of your “CX Change Coalition” will likely be your HR Director. Take a look at this fantastic article on Forbes by Christine Comaford. "According to Temkin Group’s research when HR is significantly involved in CX the organization is 50% more likely to be a CX leader." She goes on to say that "HR owns the cultural programs, so it’s key that they are first looped into Employee Engagement (EE) so they can help support CX. First a strong mission, vision, values sets the tone for your tribal purpose and code of conduct."
Let's look closer at the positive "Total Motivation" factors that contribute to a highly engaged workforce from "Primed To Perform."
Play is the most powerful motivator of them all. When employees have a sense of curiosity and excitement, customers can feel this immediately. Alternatively, a customer can usually tell when they are interfacing with staff who are burned out or bored. This is much more then putting a ping-pong table in the break room. Developing a culture of play requires leadership to put forth engaging challenges and give employees the opportunity to discover new things. When done well, play and innovation go hand-in-hand. Customer-centric cultures are consistently asking their employee population how they can serve customers better and even giving them the autonomy to experiment with new ideas.
Purpose is an excellent motivator when work offers a compelling response to the question of "why?" Why should your employees not only get out of work and show up, but offer the very best they can everyday? When a CX leader successfully closes the gap between employees and the customer's experience, it creates a lasting sense of purpose. When someone shares both the customer's pain and successes, they will be highly motivated to produce quailty work. Employees who do not understand or care about the customer journey will work only hard enough to not lose their job. Also, don't forget to weave your organization's unique mission into your CX vision. There is something your company does that no one else can do. Be sure to tap into your "uniqueness" and use this as a motivator.
Potential motivates when work moves an individual toward their goals. Channeling an individual toward their ambitions requires a leader to really get to know that person. Only then can the leader challenge them and provide opportunities that will grow their career. Also, be sure leadership is not sending a mixed message in regards to what they value most in people. When organizations recognize employees who take good care customers in the form of promotions and rewards, everyone takes note. Alternatively, if an organization says it values it's customers, but does not back this up in the way decisions are made, employees will become frustrated and revert to selfish behaviors.
One great way to infuse both the play and the purpose motivator into daily work is utilizing a system such as Kudos. When an employee demonstrates customer-centric behaviors, peers or leaders can easily award them points. These are redeemed for fun things like gift cards at the end of the month. The beauty of this is in the simplicity and the collaborative nature of the program. There are also many great gamification platforms out there, but be cautious before implementing as many of them are unnecessarily competitive in nature. This can work against creating an atmosphere of helpfulness, which is essential for consistently great customer experiences. Source of image - Kudosnow.com.
Tapping into these motivators is what creates an engaged, capable, and loyal workforce. Refer to the "ToMo" metric in the "CX Dashboard section to learn how you can measure for total motivation in your company. While we may have put the employee experience as the third core discipline of CX, it's really the foundation. The other CX activities may have a short team impact, but without the base of engaged employees and a customer-centric culture there will be no lasting CX improvements. Here's an nifty infographic to summarize it all!
As we conclude, it's critical to note making changes to the Customer Experience is a culture change at it's core. Going back to the definition of CX, it's all about managing people's perception of a brand. It's the fundamental desire for a human to connect to the brand in a meaningful way. There is no short cut to creating an organization capable of delivering a positive human to human interaction across every touch point. It can only be done when all employees are part of a purpose-driven culture, hence mirroring their experience to the customer. If you take nothing else from this resource, watch this video below from Bob Chapman. Above all else, truly human leadership is the way we design outstanding experiences for our employees and our customers. Special thanks to Annette Franz for introducing me to this video.
We hope you've enjoyed and benefited from our "Ultimate CX Primer!" We will be adding to and updating this document regularly, so be sure to bookmark it and use as an ongoing resource. Speaking of resources, our final gift is a curated collection of all the best CX thought leaders, books, conferences, podcasts, and more!
THE VERY BEST CX RESOURCES
FUEL FOR RISING CX CHAMPIONS
Now that you've been "primed" in the preceding sections, it's time to accelerate your results by tapping into the greatest CX resources available today. The customer experience function is still relatively new, and like most disciplines it’s constantly evolving. Seeing as how CX impacts every organization in every industry, just about everybody has their two cents to add to the conversation. With tens of thousands of blogs, whitepapers, and webinars out there, and hundreds more being added every day, it can be incredibly overwhelming. New key perspectives are being added on a regular basis, so staying fresh is essential. This curated list will tell you who to follow, communities to join, and conferences to attend to keep you on the cutting edge of Customer Experience best practices.
TOP CX THOUGHT LEADERS
With all the clutter out there on Customer Experience, it can be easy to become overwhelmed or misguided. The following thought leaders are the very best of the best. By absorbing these books, blogs, and podcasts, you will be learning the most trusted names in the CX community!
Jeanne Bliss, CCXP
Jeanne quite literally wrote the book on Customer Experience. She has been a pioneer in this space since the beginning and continues to innovate and set the bar year over year. She is an expert when it comes to establishing sustainable CX methodologies inside of enterprise level organizations. Book - Chief Customer Officer 2.0 Twitter - @JeanneBliss
Annette Franz, CCXP
Annette is the best CX mentor around. She has 25 years of experience in the field, and has become widely known as the world's foremost expert in journey mapping and voice of the customer programs. Twitter - @annettefranz
Adam Toporek
Adam is a wonderfully friendly and knowledgeable guy. With roots in both entrepreneur endeavors and customer service, Adam can visualize and guide toward great customer experience better and faster then just about anyone. He also runs a fantastic podcast called "Crack The Customer Code" with fellow CX expert Jeannie Walters. Book - "Be Your Customer's Hero" Twitter - @adamtoporek
Jeannie Walters, CCXP
Jeannie is the Chief Customer Experience Investigator™ and founder of 360Connext. She has almost 20 years of experience helping companies improve loyalty and retention, employee engagement, and overall customer experience. Walters is also a co-host with Adam Toporek on the popular podcast "Crack The Customer Code". Twitter - @jeanniecw
Shep Hyken
There are few conversations about Customer Experience in which Shep Hyken is not brought up. He's an extremely dynamic speaker and the a leading authority on Customer Service. HIs podcast, "Amazing Business Radio" is essentially required listening for CX / CS professionals. Book - "Amaze Every Customer Every Time" Twitter - @Hyken
Jeff Toister
You may recognize Jeff's face as one of the over 140,000 who have taken his Customer Service courses on Lynda.com. Jeff is the ultimate problem solver, combining a deep understanding of both people and process to create a customer-centric culture. His most recent work, "The Service Culture Handbook", has taken the Customer Experience space by storm. Book - "The Service Culture Handbook" Twitter - @toister
Bob Thompson
Bob is a veteran of the CX space and a customer-centric business guru. Bob's writing is fantastic for getting deep into the numbers and science behind Customer Experience. He also curates the largest collection of customer-centric blogs on the planet, CustomerThink.com. There is so much great material on this site you could read for weeks and still not catch up. Book - Hooked On Customers Twitter - @Bob_Thompson
Nancy Porte, CCXP
Nancy Porte is the Vice President of Global Customer Experience for Verint. She is an advisor on CustomerThink authoring the column "A CX Practitioner's Playbook." Nancy has several created ground-breaking CX strategies for enterprise organizations and is a wonderful resource for aspiring Chief Customer Officers. Twitter - @nporte
Colin Shaw
Another founding-father to the space, Colin takes a very cerebral and analytical approach to Customer Experience. Reading Colin Shaw is guaranteed to challenge your thinking and make you a smarter CX professional. Books - "The Intuitive Customer" among many others Twitter - @ColinShaw_CX Podcast - "The Intuitive Customer" Podcast
Sue Duris
Sue is a wealth of knowledge on every CX discipline and has loads of experience on everything customer-related. Sue is a driving force behind our slack channel and co-facilitator for #CXChat on Twitter. Sue writes for CustomerThink and you can also see her insights on her company's blog, M4 Communications. Twitter - @SueDuris Linkedin - Sue Duris
Ian Golding, CCXP
Ian's approach to CX is both brilliant and accessible. He has a wonderfully authentic and relational tone in his writing, but can also go deep into solving big problems as a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt. You will want to follow Ian for advice and inspiration on big process improvements. He's got a new book coming very soon so keep your eyes out for that :) Twitter - @ijgolding
Dan Gingiss
Dan Gingiss is absolutely your guy when it comes to creating great Customer Experiences on social media. He has a ton of energy and a great way of explaining things. Dan's an avid reader as you can see from his fantastic list of favorite books! Book - "Winning At Social Customer Care" Twitter - @dgingiss Podcast - "Experience This! Show"
John DiJulius
John's Blog
Combining a strong Customer Service background with a lot of good ol' fashioned common sense, John is great to motivate an organization toward a customer-centric culture. Book - "The Customer Service Revolution" Twitter - @JohnDiJulius
Brad Cleveland
Brad Cleveland has been a strong voice in the Customer Experience space globally for over two decades. You may recognize him from his popular Lynda.com courses or one of his many appearances on major television networks. As both one of the most credible and personable leaders in the space, Brad is a must-follow. Books: Call Center Management on Fast Forward and more Twitter: @BradCleveland
James Dodkins
James is a wonderful resource for Employee Experience as it relates to Customer Experience and a wide range of other CX topics. Book - "Put Your Customers Second" Twitter - @JDODKINS
Lynn Hunsaker
Lynn has been doing Customer Experience work since 1991 and has risen as one of top consultants in the field. She has fantastic content on a wide variety of CX topics and is ranked as the number one author on CustomerThink! Twitter - @clearaction Book - "Innovating Superior Customer Experience"
Bruce Temkin
Bruce is a veteran to the CX space and co-founder of the CXPA. The Temkin Group creates many of the best benchmarking reports for CX professionals and their work is a must-read. Twitter - @btemkin
TOP CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE COMMUNITIES
Often times the best way to solve big CX problems is by collaborating with others outside of your organization to get a fresh, external perspective. These are the very best communities of CX professionals both virtual and physical!
ICMI (International Customer Management Institute)
ICMI has a rich history in the contact center and customer service communities, but has more recently become a powerhouse in the CX space as well. Their #ICMIChat on twitter hosted by Erica Marois is always wonderful for learning and meeting new CX professionals. Their spring "Contact Center Expo" is not to be missed!! Check out a full list of ICMI events here.
CXPA (Customer Experience Professionals Association)
The CXPA is fantastic for both ongoing CX education and networking. If you are lucky enough to be in a town where there is a local CXPA group, I highly recommend getting plugged in. The association offers everything from mentorship, to certification, to a whole variety of events listed here.
Support Driven
Support Driven is an awesome community for customer service professionals. They have a slack channel with great dialog, local meet ups, and shared knowledge base, and much more.
HDI
HDI is a fantastic community for technical support professionals. They have a wide network of local chapters, as well as large national level events. I've used their certification content for years and it's very helpful stuff.
ClearAction Continuum
ClearAction Website
ClearAction Value Exchange accelerates outside-in, collaboration, metrics momentum and alignment with customers. It’s professional development designed for daily access with personally tailored solutions in short-bites, on-demand, do-it-yourself and interactive, for marketing, customer success, customer care and customer experience roles.
CX Accelerator Community
What kind of community manager would I be if I didn't plug our own 😜? CX Accelerator is a small but wonderful community for new CX professionals looking to accelerate their CX career. We offer a slack channel, mentorship program, and a variety of resources. Come join us!
TOP CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE CONFERENCES
This 2019 list includes all of the best Customer Experience conferences in North America, arranged by date. Also this list from Howard Schulman is quite comprehensive and includes many of the top European events.
Chief Customer Officer, USA By Corinium
This event is considerably smaller when compared to the others on the list, but that can be a very good thing. CCO USA is event designed for C-level CX executives. One benefit will be your considerably expanded network having met essentially everyone from this more intimate group of like-minded professionals.
Adobe Summit
Abode is famous for their massive Spring summit. This year there is a full track dedicated to CX called "Design-led Customer Experiences." While the price tag may give you pause, this conference is sure to awaken your creative spirit. They always feature lavish gifts for attendees as well. 😁
Oracle's Modern Customer Experience
This pure Customer Experience focused event will be a must-attend for those looking to enhance digital CX for their customers. Also for those like me who appreciate some classic alt-rock they've got Weezer playing on April 11th. 😎
HDI Conference and Expo
HDI is an awesome conference especially for those looking to advance CX in a technical support capacity. Their "Reinventing the Customer Experience" track has all kinds of relevant sessions on topics such as artificial intelligence, self-service experience, customer service bots, journey mapping, and how to think like a customer.
NICE inContact Interactions
NICE inContact is throwing a huge CX event called "Interactions". inContact is known for pulling out all the stops for their conferences and this will be no exception. They've even got Jay Leno as a keynote! It's a jam packed schedule with a bunch of fun activities and over 100 breakout sessions.
CXPA Insight Exchange
This is the primary event hosted by the CXPA (Customer Experience Professionals Association) and is chalk full of the top names in CX. The event is very focused on the attendees themselves and creating an ongoing robust dialog.
ICMI Contact Center Expo
While much of the content is geared toward contact center professionals, there is a full CX track and lots of great stuff for any customer experience practitioner. The keynotes are always both inspirational and extremely relevant. I'm especially excited this year for Nataly Kogan and her "Cultivating Happiness At Work" session.
Forrester 2018 CX NYC Forum
This conference is all about CX innovation and is a great fit for those who like to be on the cutting edge. Forrester attracts practitioners from huge brands, as evidenced by the fact that over 65% of companies represented pull over a billion dollars in annual revenue.
Frost & Sullivan's Customer Contact West
As my friend Matt Beckwith describes it - "Perfectly sized events with contact center, customer service, CX leaders from a bunch of different industries. Speakers and breakouts have all been very valuable." This is event has a more intimate group and a laid back feel, but still packs in a bunch of fantastic content.
We hope you've enjoyed "The Ultimate CX Primer!" Don't forget to bookmark this resource as we will be updating and adding to it on a regular basis. I'd like to extend a huge thank you to Adam Toproek, Dan Brown, and Annette Franz for their guidance and support :)
Nate Brown
CX and Customer Service Writer
Nate is the Co-founder of CX Accelerator. While Customer Service is his primary expertise, Nate is able to leverage experience in professional services, marketing, and sales to connect dots and solve the big problems. From authoring and leading a client success program, to journey mapping, to implementing gamification strategies, to managing a complex contact center, Nate is always learning new things and sharing with the CX community.
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