Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit Day 1 Recap

1 day, 10 sessions, all customer experience. For everyone in attendance, this was a customer experience event worth every minute. If you weren't able to be there, here's a recap of what you missed. First, make sure you check out the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit Web site and stay tuned for details for the 2013 event. Trust me, after the smashing customer experience topics discussed this year, you won't want to miss this event again.

The State of Customer Experience Today

David Blair, with Rockwell Automation reminded us that the sad truth is that loyalty programs, customer satisfaction programs can all disappear. If people don't find value in it, it will disappear. Our focus is to ensure that keep moving this space forward, evolving.

Managing the Customer Experience - What It Means and What it Takes to Do It Well

Randy Brandy from Maritz and Loy Carbone with Experience Engineering discussed the frequent difficulty customer experience leaders have in connecting their organizations with customer focused action.

The problem is that we often don't have a clearly articulated definition and direction, with the exact role of customer experience management. We end up adding on pieces and components onto something that's already existing. But it's not a clearly outlined process. We spend so much time designing the experience for the customer, but it's critical to design the customer experience internally for the organization!

How to embed a culture of customer experience in your organization.

Kelly Harper, Director of Customer Experience at the Bank of Montreal (BMO Financial) showed us that not all banks are failing in the customer experience game.

BMO is leading the way at turning around the banking industry service model and showed us how BMO is taking customer experience to the next level. Kelly reminded us that customer experience isn't one thing. It's everything.

• Customer experience is how customers feels about us.
• Customer experience is our image and reputation in the marketplace.
• Customer experience is what our customers say it is.

...and effective customer experience management means we should know all of this.

Customer Feedback Systems: What the Academic Research Evidence Says About Customer Experience

Neil Morgan, from Indiana University, probably made the most earth shaking news during the day when his presentation showed what scientific data says about customer experience, customer satisfaction, and the various customer experience programs available to organizations.

 Neil showed that studies show that market oriented organizations are likely to be more innovative and able to implement faster than those that aren't market oriented. When an organization is market oriented:

• Innovates faster
• Greater focus on perceived quality
• More efficient and effective organizational performance

Neil discussed why statistical precision matters. Specifically, reminding that because of statistics, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) requires 13x greater sample size vs. standard satisfaction index. Ultimately, there is 0 academic evidence that customer satisfaction has impact in market share.

That's right. Customer satisfaction DOES NOT lead to greater market share. In all actuality, as the market share of an organization increases, there is a greater likelihood that customer satisfaction will actually DECREASE due to the size of the company, nature of a wider customer base, and inability to please every single customer!

 Does that mean that customer service scores don't matter? NO! But we HAVE to give CONTEXT to what the number say. Don't just give people scores, tell people what needs to be done with scores and what actions scores represent. Focus on actions!

Customer Experience Keeps Going and Going!

At this point, believe it or not, we were still just getting started with day 1!

 Other topics we discussed today were:

• Designing Customer Experience - Going From Strategy to Experience Engineering.
• 
  
• Measuring Successful Voice of Customer and Speech Analytics Deployment. 
• 
  
• Customer Care-opoly: Gamification to Teach Customer Experience! 
• 
  
• How to Effectively Measure and Analyze and Leverage Multi-Channel Voice of Customer Data 
• 
  
• What Lessons We Can Learn From How Voice of the Customer Leaders Measure Customer Experience 

Customer experience is more than numbers and measurements. Some things we do in customer experience has a big impact, but doesn't show up in the numbers.

So remember to give context to the customer experience actions we want to take and the value to the organization.