Open-Source Compassion Network, A Guide to Practical Compassion from Leo Babauta, Zen Habits

12 May, 2013 in Leadership, Life by

From Leo Babauta Zen Habits blog post, A Guide to Practical Compassion, shares that:

“To practice compassionate actions, you start with yourself. A lot of people see suffering in the world and feel bad about it, but they don’t know how to take action. The best way to take action is to take action with your self. The only person you can control with any degree of success is yourself… Your self-compassion becomes a model for everybody else… Will the same method that worked for you work for everyone else? No, but it may work for some people, who can replicate it and then they can show their way to others, try each other’s methods, and create new methods to try with others. It is a kind of an open-source compassion network.”

Leo shares with us, these steps:

  1. Be aware of your own suffering. Be willing to face, and accept, the suffering you do on a daily basis. This includes stress, doubt, fear, anger, frustration, disappointment. Watch it happen, and be OK with the sensation. Don’t run from it.
  2. Ease your own suffering. Learn the cause of your suffering. The cause is the ideal you’re holding onto in your mind — how other people should act, how your life should be, how you should be better, how things will turn out, how people will think of you, etc. Let go of this ideal, and you’ll suffer less.
  3. See the suffering of others. Pay attention to the other people in your life, strangers you pass. Notice the signs of their pain, empathize with this pain, and understand them because you’ve experienced it too.
  4. Reach out to them, and connect. Ease your own suffering (that comes from seeing their suffering) by reaching out and making a connection. Smile, be open to who they are, let go of your expectations of that person, and just connect.
  5. Share your suffering, and your method. Share ways that you’ve suffered that the other person might relate to, and this in itself will be helpful, because then you share suffering. Then share how you solved it, and that method can then be useful to the other person, if they decide to try it (it’s their choice). Don’t be preachy, just share what worked.
  6. Learn from the methods of others. Just as you share with others your method of easing your suffering, there’s much to be learned from others. If others have solved a problem that’s causing you some suffering, learn how they did it. By sharing with and learning from each other, we can all get better at our methods of compassion.

I know this isn’t my “usual” post – but I was compelled to share this. I hope you find it useful.

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Customer Enchantment: An Interview with Bob Caruso

21 Apr, 2013 in Customer Experience, Emotional Design, Quotes, Service Design, Voice of the Custostomer by

Bob Caruso is a Managing Director at Endeavor Management bringing over 20 years’ experience in reinventing, redefining and energizing customer experiences. He’s been a part of the irreversible power shift in the relationship between customers and service or product providers and to the complex personalized experiences of today.

As an alumnus of powerful global consultancies, PwC, Deloitte and J.D. Power and Associates he’s been assisting clients all over the world to bring CX from the basement switchboard operator to the C-Suite. Designing and implementing CX strategies, systems and performance metrics are his passion. 

Today’s conversation revolves around his view that the best path to a customer’s mind is through their heart.

In a recent CXPA SoCal meeting during our open discussion I was intrigued when you talked briefly about the concept of Customer Enchantment.  What’s that all about?

Today’s society is all about emotionally connecting to our stuff.  We love our cars, our technology, and our apparel lines because they represent who we are to others.  Apple addicts would never consider any product not created in Cupertino.  Southwest Airline fans would rather make two stops to get across the country than resort to booking another airline.  We are enchanted by these experiences.  They touch our emotions.  They embed in our minds. We are as emotionally invested in experiencing the products and services of these providers as we are in our own personalities.

Winning in today’s economy demands that organizations deliver enchanting experiences flawlessly. Customer Enchantment is a method and toolset to build the strong bond between provider and consumer.

You’ve mentioned a couple of examples of enchanting companies.  In your experience what allows them to build such powerful connections to their customers?

Sean, in my experience with really enchanting organizations I’ve learned that they share some key attributes.  First and foremost is a clear mission that employees can rally around and customers enroll in.  Let’s take the consistent CX leader in financial services USAA as an example.  Each member of the USAA team clearly understands their mission to support active duty military members, veterans and their families.  There is never a doubt about what the CX should involve.  The folk in San Antonio dig hard and deep to ensure that when a military member is deployed and they need help USAA is there to deliver on their mission.

Secondly, believing that every employee is the most important product the company supports.  I’ve heard the rhetoric from every business in the world about their commitment to employees.  In reality a very low percentage of those that espouse the value of employees actually deliver on that belief.  Let’s be real.  C-Level executives seldom ever meet a customer, let alone serve them.  The individuals that build emotional connections and enchant are the guys like Danny with United at my home airport in OrangeCounty that’s the best gate agent ever.  Danny always has a smile, assists flyers and balances issues with answers.  Without enchanting Danny to commit fully to his role the CX strategy fails.

Deep understanding of customer wants, needs and perceptions is crucial to Customer Enchantment.  It’s pretty tough to get a date if you don’t know what gets your heartthrob’s attention.  Same is true when building relationships with customers.  Enchanting companies use every method at their disposal to collect feedback, mine data, innovate, pilot and divine what moves their intended customers.

I get the Customer Enchantment idea.  It sounds like a high bar to get over.  What’s the roadmap look like?

Getting to Customer Enchantment is more of a closed-loop cycle than a roadmap.  The Enchantment Cycle has 5 Phases of activity that should constantly be in motion.  Listen to customers, their influencers, employees and other stakeholders to truly understand wants, needs, and perceptions.  Take that data and Define how the organization will meet or exceed those determined expectations.  Make a clear, resonant Promise to customers and employees.  Shout it from the highest mountain and commit to Deliver on that promise.  It’s all in the delivery, words are cheap.  Flawless execution on the promise is where enchantment happens.  Reinforce the promise and flawless delivery in every interaction and communication with customers and employees.

Five clearly defined phases all constantly moving in their own cycles connecting to one another.  Each phase develops cultural behaviors in enchanting organizations.

Enchantment is a pretty soft and fuzzy word.  How’s it going over with your clients?

You’re right.  Enchanting customers does sound like a squishy way to describe something that’s incredibly hard to achieve.  Initially executives chuckle a bit about the characterization and then begin to understand their own enchantment with experiences.  Hey, we’re all consumers.  Just because we have a passion for understanding and delivering compelling experiences doesn’t preclude us from having those experiences.  Once we make the personal emotional connection that our clients have with their Harley or hair product acceptance of enchantment follows.

How would I know if I was part of an enchanting organization?

As a member of an organization that enchants you love what you do, have opportunities to develop and grow while feeling valued and respected for your contributions.  Your strong connection to the organization is accentuated by your customers’ validation of the business through continuous feedback and a commitment to making your organization a regular part of their lives.

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La Madeleine in Alexandria, Virginia

6 Apr, 2013 in Customer Experience by

I was recently traveling in Alexandria, Virginia on business and stopped at La Madeleine Country French Café on King Street for breakfast. I went to pay for my meal and my personal credit card was declined. I was using my personal credit card because my corporate credit card was declined the night before. (Yes, my cards were compromised – but that is another story)

Obviously frazzled, the Store Manager, Sam Wells, said “this meal is on us” – I said he didn’t have to do that but he insisted. Sam and I had been chatting so he knew that I was from out of town and couldn’t really be a repeat customer – so why did he do this?  Sam did know that I was at a conference across the street and I may tell someone about the generosity of his establishment, their excellent service, and great food!

Kudos to La Madeleine to empowering their managers to make these customer engagement decisions! And my deepest thanks to Sam for his generosity.

I will always remember my customer experience at La Madeleine and will tell this story over and over for many years to come. (I think Sam knew what he was doing…)

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Customer Experience Strategy, Measurement, and People

31 Mar, 2013 in Uncategorized by

In Ian Golding’s blog STRATEGY – MEASUREMENT – PEOPLE, he provides a simple framework for managing customer experience. Here’s how Ian breaks it down:

Strategy

Ian warns that “Not knowing your strategy means that employees do not know what direction they are going in, and customers are unlikely to know what to expect.”

Your CX strategy should answer the questions such as ‘what is our proposition?’; ‘why do customers transact with us?’; ‘why do customers come back (or not)?’; ‘what do we want our business to be for customers?’.

Measurement

Create your Customer Journey Maps to understand your customer touch points and measure your “Moments of Truth.” Measure your Voice Of the Customer with systems like NPS, CSAT or Customer Effort Score to capture what your customer perception is of the promise your brand delivers.

Ian shares that “Granular customer feedback mechanisms will enable you to determine where in the journey the customer thinks your problems are.” Aligning your CX measurements with your internal business measurement is the key to determining priorities for improvement.

People

Studies have shown a direct correlation between employee engagement and customer engagement.

“Ask yourself the question – are you a fan of the business you work for? People engagement and advocacy is all about the CULTURE that underpins the organization. This is why it is often so difficult. Changing an organizational culture is not a quick fix. It can take years, and it requires strong and committed leadership.”

To develop, determine and deliver a great customer experience, you must have a clear, concise strategy that everyone in your company understands; that you consistently measure, monitor, and improve; and create loyal, engaged employees that are your biggest advocate.

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Ten Critical Components of a Great Customer Experience Journey Map

10 Mar, 2013 in Customer Experience, Voice of the Custostomer by

Jim Tincher is the Customer Experience practice lead at SMS Research Advisors. In his blog post, Customer Experience Journey Map – the Top 10 Requirements, he shares with us detailed criteria they use to design and build their journey maps:

  1. Represent your Customer’s perspective.  The customer experience map needs to represent the interactions as your customer experiences it.  It often includes interactions that happen outside of your control, such as a social media interaction or a web search.
  2. Use research.  Do not use internal staff to build these – that just makes a process flow. Depending on the scope, the journey map process can involve interviews or ethnographies, possibly combined with surveys.  Some companies bring customers in and build them interactively internal staff.  This can be a very powerful experience, although the small sample size can create bias.  Better to do the research first, then bring in your customers to build the final map.
  3. Represent Customer segments. You will be amazed at how different segments have different customer experiences.  For example, you may find that one segment typically spent two hours researching the category, while another consistently spent more than six weeks doing the same, using very different tools.
  4. Include Customer goals.  A great journey map shows what the customer is trying to accomplish at each stage of the process.  Goals can change as the process unfolds.
  5. Focus on emotions.  Emotions are critical to any experience, whether B2B or B2C, and a great customer journey map communicates these emotions.
  6. Represent touch points.  The customer journey map is often built to demonstrate the order and type of touch points – including those not in your control.
  7. Highlight moments of truth.  Some interactions have more impact than others. Great maps separate those critical moments of truth from the rest. For example, when visiting a hospital, a bad check-in taints the rest of the patient experience.
  8. Measure your brand promise. A critical outcome of a great customer experience map is the measurement of how the experience supports the brand promise.  If your brand promise is to have an experience that is either effortless, highly customized, or unique, then your journey map is an excellent way to document whether your customer feels you are meeting that goal.
  9. Include time.  Experience length provides important context.  Does the typical call last 30 seconds or 10 minutes? Did shoppers spend 20 minutes or 40 hours deciding on a product?
  10. Ditch the PowerPoint. Use a desktop publishing application to communicate the richness of the experience.

I recommend reading the entire post for Jim’s optional criteria to consider and a few of his favorite posts customer journey maps.

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Jeanne Bliss’s Five Customer Experience Competencies

2 Mar, 2013 in Customer Experience by

The first book I read on customer experience was Jeanne Bliss’s Chief Customer Officer. Like many of us, it changed my life. In Jeanne’s blog, Framing the 5 Customer Experience Competencies, she shares with us the five CX competencies. She states right up front that:

“To make customer experience stick as part of your operation, you need an organized and phased approach for integrating customer experience into your organization… These competencies don’t need to be tackled in order. Relevance to your operation is most important.  Getting traction is paramount.”

The Five Customer Experience Competencies

Company Wide Alignment around Experience

Many organizations say they focus on their customer “experience” but few do the hard work to define the stages of their experience from the customer journey point of view. In the absence of this, all of the operating areas do their own thing, driven by their internal tasks and agenda and scorecard. A lot of work is done, often in the name of the customer, but it doesn’t add up from the customers’ experience to deliver a unified experience. Customer experience reliability isn’t managed because each silo manages projects to their own annual priorities and scorecards.  The big things don’t get systemically fixed. We miss the opportunity for the big “wow” moments.

Critical Checkpoint: Define the stages of the experience and “the moments of truth” that comprise all of the experience touch points.

Experience Based Listening and Feedback

Determine your “Listening System” - Collecting and organizing the information is important to prevent “one off” fixes and to attach issues to the appropriate stage in the customer experience. You need to determine how you can connect all of these listening “pipes” to take advantage of the information that enables you to trend and track it. (This includes discussing the IT implications of “buying” vs. “building” a listening system.)

By having “everyday” listening feedback, we loosen our reliance on surveys. We can take real-time action and also gain focus on the things that really matter.

United (Cross-Silo) Experience Reliability and Accountability

Reliability in your experience is proactively managing the key “touch points” with shared accountability across the silos. This approach emancipates your organization from the one-note dependency on survey results for driving change.   Operational KPIs means not waiting for survey results – but knowing before the results come in where your operation delivered, and where it did not. Take these steps to begin to manage experience reliability:

  1. Identify and Establish Key Operational Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for your top 10-15 customer experience touch points.
  2. Bring Cross-Functional Teams Together to Take Experiences from “Broken” to “Reliable” (and ultimately to a differentiating moment). Once you get this process down, you can move past the top 10-15 touch points.  But start with just these few – otherwise the work will become too overwhelming.
  3. Establish a “Customer Room.”

Prove the ROI Connection between Experience and Growth

Reconcile “Customers In” with “Customers Out” to know how well you are managing customers as an asset of your company.

Critical Checkpoints: For many companies, since every silo frequently has varying definitions, putting together these simple articulations of “incoming” and “outgoing” customers requires:

  1. Alignment in definition (What is an “incoming” customer? What is an outgoing customer?)
  2. Alignment in data and databases

“One Company” Customer Experience Culture

To get started on your one company culture, I suggest four simple actions you can do now without spending much money. All it takes is passion, commitment and making customer experience a priority.

  1. Call lost customers
  2. Be a customer
  3. Connect with the frontline
  4. Do customer math

To learn more about Jeanne’s ideas, please visit her blog, Chief Customer Officer 2.0.

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CXPA SoCal: Twelve Essentials of Customer Experience

24 Feb, 2013 in Uncategorized by

The Customer Experience Revolution: Twelve Essentials of Customer Experience
with Sean Van Tyne

 Customer Experience Professional Association of Southern California

Thursday, February 28, 2013

11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. PT

Irvine Company
3210 Park Center Drive at Pacific Arts Plaza
Costa Mesa, California  92626

Online registration is available until: 2/28/2013
Register for this event »

Join us at the Irvine Company Thursday, February 28 from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. to hear Sean Van Tyne present the “Twelve Essentials of Customer Experience” From the business leadership book, The Customer Experience Revolution – How Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks have changed business forever, Sean will share an aggregate view of some of the best customer experience companies and the practices that make them better, different, and more valuable than their competitors. These “Twelve Essentials of Customer Experience” are the elements that are keys to building a company focused on delivering great customer experience.

Lunch will be provided.

Sean Van Tyne, co-author of The Customer Experience Revolution and the User Experience Director at FICO, the global leader for predictive analytic solutions, where he provides leadership for teams across the United States, Europe and Asia.

Sean is a sought-after speaker, moderator and facilitator on such topics as customer experience, leadership, and experience design strategies. He is the President of the Customer Experience Special Interest Group; founding board member of the Customer Experience Institute; and an advisor on numerous professional and corporate boards.

Agenda:

11:00 – 11:15 a.m. Welcome greeting & networking

11:15 – 11:30 a.m. Hosts/CXPA welcome

11:30 – 11:45 a.m. Lunch will be served

11:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Presentation by Sean Van Tyne

12:15 – 1:30 p.m. Roundtable discussions

1:30 – 2:00 p.m. Adjourn and networking

Cost: CXPA Members – FREE*
Non-members – $20

Not a member? Join today and attend this CXPA event- for FREE.

*CXPA Members take advantage and take 2 friends for FREE!
Any member that registers for either event has the option to bring two non-member guests for FREE! (Details on registration form)

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LA UX Meetup: Ask, Watch and Listen with Sean Van Tyne

17 Feb, 2013 in Uncategorized by

The Customer Experience Revolution: Ask, Watch and Listen

with Sean Van Tyne

The Los Angeles User Experience Meetup

Thursday, February 21, 2013

7:00 PM

Cross Campus

820 Broadway

Santa Monica, CA 90401

Join us at Cross Campus on Thursday, Feb. 21 when author and speaker Sean Van Tyne shares his insights of User Experience in the Customer Experience revolution.

Sean Van Tyne is the co-author of The Customer Experience Revolution and the User Experience Director at FICO, the global leader for predictive analytics solutions, where he provides leadership for teams across the United States, Europe and Asia. Mr. Van Tyne is a sought-after speaker, moderator and facilitator on such topics as customer experience, leadership, and experience design strategies. He is the President of the Customer Experience Special Interest Group; founding board member of the Customer Experience Institute; and an advisor on numerous professional and corporate boards.

We are fortunate that Sean Van Tyne will be having a book signing at the end of the event. You can order your book now so it arrives in time or you can purchase one at the event for $19.95. You can order your book in advance from:

Order The Customer Experience Revolution from Amazon

or

Order The Customer Experience Revolution from Brigantine Media (bulk discounts)

This is also your chance to revisit our host, Cross Campus – a state of the art 11,000 square foot engine of creativity and innovation located in the heart of Santa Monica. The goal of Cross Campus is to inspire creative collisions through space design, learning platforms, and extraordinary events, fostering member-driven collaboration that ultimately leads to game changing ideas and enterprises. For information about becoming a Cross Campus member, review their various plans.

AGENDA

7:00 – Registration

7:05 – Food & beverages provided by DIRECTV’s Digital Innovation Lab

7:30 – Community announcements & speaker introduction

7:35 – Neysa Pelletier to introduce DIRECTV Digital Innovation Lab

7:40 – Presentation

8:30 – Q&A

8:40 – Book signing (order your book now!)

 

After party at the Bodega Wine Bar, 814 Broadway Street, Santa Monica

Street parking is available and to see real-time available parking areas use “Park Me”: http://tinyurl.com/Cross-Campus-Park-Me

 

Event Hashtags: #CXRevolution, #LAUX, @Sean_Van_Tyne, @LAUXmeetup

Sponsor hashtags: @CrossCampusLA & @we_ideate (DIRECTV Digital Innovation Lab)

 

The event space has been kindly donated by Cross Campus.

Food and beverages have been provided by DIRECTV Digital Innovation Lab.

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The Four Customer Experience Core Competencies

10 Feb, 2013 in Brand, Culture, Customer Experience, Emotional Design, Experience Design, Leadership, Service Design, Voice of the Custostomer by

In the latest Temkin Insight Report, The Four Customer Experience Core Competencies, it highlights what it takes for an organization to become truly customer-centric. The report focuses on these four competencies:

Purposeful Leadership: Companies need to make sure that all of their HR practices reinforce the company’s purpose. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, explained that the company’s 10 core values, which start with “Deliver Wow Through Service” and end with “Be Humble,” are the cornerstone to how he runs the company. He hires, fires, and promotes people based on how well they support those values.

In The Customer Experience Revolution, Larry Tesler, Vice President and Chief Scientist at Apple Computer, shared that Steve Jobs would delay product releases until the experience was right. And Kaaren Hanson, Intuit’s Vice President of Design Innovation, explains that their CEO, Scott Cook, spends many hours out with customers, partly because he wants to stay in touch with customers and partly because he is modeling the behavior that he expects from everyone on his team and throughout the organization.

Compelling Brand Values: TNT, a European transportation leader, has identified 10 specific promises to customers that include “We promise a friendly voice at the end of the phone” and “We promise to resolve problems promptly.” Each of these promises has specific elements such as “Your calls will be answered professionally and promptly, with our aim to answer at least 85% of calls within 10 seconds.”

Your brand can either draw your customer towards your products and services or away from it. Mini Cooper surveys its customers and creates a Customer Service Index (CSI) score for their sales and service staff. If a customer has an issue, a staff member must respond within 24 hours. All the dealership employees know their scores and can monitor them in real time on their intranet, logging into their internet to track their CSI scores. And the employees are properly motivated because Mini sales reps’ bonuses are determined by these scores. Read all about it in The Customer Experience Revolution.

Employee Engagement: Hershey Entertainment tells stories about their own Service Action Heroes in company newsletters, training programs, and new hire orientation. These heroes are employees who have been recognized for going above and beyond living Hershey’s values for guests or their co-workers.

In The Customer Experience Revolution, we explain how companies like Netflix create experience labs where every employee can observe their customers interaction with their products.

Customer Connectedness: If a USAA member calls in to change his address, the reps are trained to understand why and deal with bigger issues. If the call is from a soldier who is about to be deployed, then the rep might check to see if the member has thought about items such as a will, power of attorney, and life insurance.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, understands that making a bad purchase decision isn’t just a waste of the money a customer has spent on the product, it’s a waste of the customer’s time spent with the product. Amazon was one of the first companies to introduce a customer rating system for their products – despite the discouragement of their vendors. Read more in The Customer Experience Revolution.

 

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Customer Experience Design Best Practices for Mobile

3 Feb, 2013 in Customer Experience, Experience Design, mobile by

Forrester (and others) have put out some useful tips for designing experiences for mobile including Mobile App Design Best Practices and Best Practices in Mobile Banking. What I like best is seeing the fundamentals of experience design being applied to mobile. Here some basics:

Take a Systematic Approach to Understanding Your Customers

Success in designing great mobile experiences follows the same process as designing any great experience – with a systematic approach of understanding your target audience. Organizations by now should know better than to rely solely on “instinct” or surveys to discover latent wants. Watch customer behavior across channels and look for problems that you can fix. Stop guessing! Even when smart people guess – it is still a guess. Get out there and observe your customers interaction with your solution and know what they like, love, hate, ignore, want, and really need to have a great experience.

Focus Your Design On Helping Customers Complete Their Goals

Customers’ expectations for mobile are high and rising. To deliver great experiences, you need to work closely with customer experience experts and application to design mobile interactions that are easy to use, meet customers’ desires, are enjoyable, and take into account the mobile context. Context of use is everything – especially with mobile. The mobile experience takes place in a small space and the design patterns and metaphors are unique to this experience. Get to know these patterns and understand when to apply them in the right context.

Encourage Customer Adoption by Promoting the Benefits

To drive mobile adoption and use, like any experience, you must guide customers from their first encounter with your mobile experience to habitual use. Promote mobile solutions that help customers overcome the barriers to adoption. You got to make it easy to engage on the first encounter and be concise and clear on what your solution does for them – not what it does – but what it does for them. (Jeof calls these the “Do Fors” in The Customer Experience Revolution)

More and more of our experiences are mobile. We are busy and on-the-go – interacting with our handheld, tablet or mini devices. Knowing and applying these best practices will help us all have better experiences.

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