Roundup of Good Customer Experience Articles

These articles are recommend by customer experience thought leaders and
practitioners. Below are some brief summaries and links to the original posts.

Resource: The Simplest Win for Improving Digital Customer
Experience

Create peak moments and avoid the one bad pit

This is first in the round up because of how true we found this to be.

"...all great experiences hinge on peak moments, and one bad moment—one
pit—can ruin years of steady loyalty for a customer"

"A company can go for years keeping customers moderately satisfied with
service, but unless you’ve really made them happy—overwhelmed them with
some peak experiences—you’ll never move the customer satisfaction needle
in any significant way."

Look through onboarding processes 'to see where the opportunities were for
elevation, insight, pride, and connection'.

This 'power of moments' article at first appears to be at odds with an article
from the Harvard Business Review which said it's problematic to try and
delight
customers. The
HBR article says that "delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing
their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does".
However, take a leaf from Nordstrom's customer service where staff gave
clients the item they wanted at sale price, 2 weeks before that sale began.
This meant they wouldn't have to wait for that sale and could get their item
now without feeling they lost out. That's reducing their effort and a peak
moment.

Read why Nancy Porte recommends The Power of Moments book

People are desperately looking for organisations they can trust

"All around us, institutional trust is in freefall — across every category,
industry and geography. Yet the research from
Edelman also demonstrates that people are
desperately looking for organisations that they can trust."

How do you create an organisation people can trust?

"The answer may be much closer than you realise. Start by asking the people
who work for you."

Why?

Because employees "look to their employers to be a trustworthy source of
information about contentious societal issues"

How else to build trust?

Anticipate and act before they do.

"When a customer is due a refund, they should not have to search or work for
it — the brand should know this already due to the sophistication of its
systems, and deliver the outcome"

This links into why Nordstrom has such a good
brand. Their
employees will sometimes give a discount to their clients because they're
aware of a sale coming up in 2 weeks, so rather than have the customer wait,
they give them the sale price before the sale has started.

Scrap the annual employee feedback survey and instead ask them how long

their commute is

"We've all been on the other side of what it's like to interact with a person
who is disinterested in their job."

"Companies that see the most marked improvements in customer experience are
the ones that make getting feedback from their teams a core part of their
company culture."

Ask them about:

Dress code

Their commute

Vacation time

Employee benefits offered

Even the charitable contributions your company makes.

Thinking is not worth the hassle

This is something written for marketers but it applies to CX perfectly as
having 5 touch points all getting CSAT scores of 9/10 sounds great but the
mental load of going through 5 steps might be the reason behind an overall
score of 6/10.

We make 1,000 times as many different decisions as our caveman ancestors did.

We're exhausted from making decisions.

See Seth's short post on cognitive load and the convenience
problem

Happier employees = better CX? By 2025, Millennials will represent 75% of

the workforce.

If you want happier employees and millennials start making up 75% of the
workforce then here's what they care about:

identifying with company values
creating a better future
flexibility and autonomy
work/life balance
mentoring and meaningful connections
feeling gratification from our work

Ask, what makes you 'worth it' to your employees.

Want to know what else they care about?

Ask them.

**Lack of Imagination, not technology, holds back superior customer

experience**

"We can do now things that were never possible 20, 30, 40 years ago,"

"We can do these things, so we're limited by our imagination. We're limited by
our current way of doing things"

Educated people have a complexity bias

1/ So often, we think that big problems require complex solutions. This is
what I call the ‘complexity bias’. People who suffer from this bias have
become so ‘educated’ that they don’t see the most obvious and effective
solutions anymore.

— Rutger Bregman (@rcbregman) June 4,
2019

If it's too easy, maybe it's not going to get an A grade? We are given
schooling for a decade where the exam monster is always something in front or
behind us. When something is then easy, it feels like it's wrong.

Understand expectations, get the basics right, it's not always about

technology

I included this article in the round up because there are two simple points
included that are good reminders of something essential that we ourselves
learned from the ground up.

The two points are:

"They want frictionless experience, not necessarily futuristic."
"They want skilled customer service."

As a co-founder of 2 companies, where we started running support ourselves
from the ground up, the best thing we ever did was to reply rapidly with
accurate answers.

We knew the systems inside out, we had the authority to make decisions and
overall we could answer and fix almost any problem in minutes.

We also replied within seconds at any time of day.

In the early days I had my phone set to wake me in the night if someone had a
query and I'd get up at 4am to answer and then go back to bed.

That was the mentality and it worked. We made sales and had customers that
loved the product and the service. We did what it required to solve their
problems when they had problems and the right sort of 'over and above' service
we gave was recommending competitors when we didn't have features they needed.

We're all rushing to create great experiences and technology often comes to
mind, especially with our 'complexity bias' as mentioned further above but
having well trained people who respond quickly and fix problems first time
is a great set of basics to get right first.

Read more about retail customer
experience

Learn more about a simple CX win for your customers: See what they
see.

Pardeep Kullar

Pardeep overlooks growth at Upscope and loves writing about SaaS companies, customer success and customer experience.