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Thought Leadership

Customer Experience Quotes to Inspire Your Company’s CX Transformation

The best customer experience quotes can be a great source of inspiration for leadership teams and entire organizations looking to drive their CX transformation. With customer experience management emerging as a key growth strategy for companies across a wide variety of industries, the importance of delivering great experiences cannot be understated. 

According to research:

  • Companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in customer experience. 
  • Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.

For organizations of any size, managing CX can be a complex and challenging process that involves executive commitment, strategy, and integration of technology. Nevertheless, it’s an exciting and rewarding investment priority for any size and type of business. Elements of the process range from mapping the customer journey, deploying customer experience management software, and capturing customer feedback to tracking customer experience KPIs, developing service training programs, and launching strategic sales and outreach efforts.

In the spirit of helping teams adopt an integrated CX approach, we gathered some of the best quotes on customer experience: what it means, how rewarding it can be for brands, what it involves, and how to plan strategically. With the right approach and unwavering commitment, companies can foster a customer experience culture and deepen their relationships with customers, leading to increased loyalty, advocacy, and business success. 

Customer Centric Quotes 

The first set of quotes about customer experience highlights the importance of focusing on the customer. 

While brands may be able to capture the interest of their audience with low prices, catchy slogans and marketing visuals, compelling sales pitches, or savvy social media campaigns, the ultimate differentiator is superior customer experience.

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” (Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon)

This Jeff Bezos quote means that the company views its customers as valued guests, much like attendees at a party. As hosts of this “party,” the company is responsible for ensuring that every aspect of the customer experience is enjoyable and satisfactory. 

After all, now more than ever, consumers rate and judge businesses not by the quality or price of their products and services, but by the experience the business builds around these products and services. This involves continuously striving to improve all elements of the customer experience, whether it’s the quality of products or services, the level of customer service provided, the ease of doing business with the company, or any other aspect that impacts the customer’s interaction with the brand.

Once your entire organization understands and acts on this customer experience quote, you’ll be in a great position to attract customers and keep them coming back.

“Make a customer, not a sale.”

This old business adage is one of the best customer experience quotes for any company. Some companies are focused only on making the sale but don’t pay nearly enough attention to satisfying customers’ wants and needs. To truly drive growth, companies must manage the entire customer experience and offer next-level support. Doing so can lead to transcendental customer-company relationships, which are essential to building customer loyalty and improving customer satisfaction. 

“If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.” (Jan Carlzon, founder and former CEO of SAS Group)

Customer experience is a core value that should involve everyone in your organization, from the C-suite to the frontline. Every team or department, from marketing and sales to customer support and product development, has a stake in the customer experience.

This statement by Jan Carlzon emphasizes the importance of customer focus and service within an organization. It suggests that if an individual’s role or responsibilities do not directly involve serving the customer, then their primary responsibility should be supporting those who are directly serving customers.

In other words, every member of an organization, regardless of their specific job title or function, should ultimately contribute to the overall goal of delivering great customer experiences. Whether it’s providing internal support, resources, or assistance to frontline employees who interact directly with customers, the entire organization should be aligned with this customer-centric mindset and respond to the needs and expectations of customers.

Quotes About Customer Experience and Brand Reputation

The next set of quotes describes the connection between customer experience and brand reputation. 

A positive customer experience enhances the brand’s reputation, fosters trust and loyalty, stimulates positive word-of-mouth, shapes brand image and perception, and contributes to competitive differentiation. Conversely, negative customer experiences can damage the brand’s reputation, erode trust, and impact long-term success. Companies must therefore prioritize delivering exceptional customer experiences to strengthen their brand reputation management and build lasting relationships with customers.

“Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” (James Cash Penney, founder of JC Penney Stores)

One of the best customer experience quotes highlights how great experiences can lead to customers becoming advocates or promoters of your brand. 

It’s important to note that the customer experience isn’t just about the way you develop your products and deliver your services. It’s also about the way you treat your customers. If your frontline employees are unkind, uncaring, and unresponsive, there is no way customers will engage with your business beyond the initial interaction. 

Treating customers right, on the other hand, drives loyalty, strengthens your brand reputation, and engenders positive word of mouth. These satisfied customers who have been treated courteously can become powerful ambassadors for the company, effectively spreading positive word of mouth and contributing to your brand reputation and success.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” (Warren Buffett, American businessman and co-founder of Berkshire Hathaway)

This customer experience quote by Warren Buffett captures how your brand reputation (as shaped by customer feedback, online reviews, and social media comments) can make or break your business. It highlights the importance of online reputation management and the type of impact it has on customer experience.  

With consumers no longer reliant on branded content to guide their purchase decisions, companies must stay on top of customer feedback and engage in conversations where their brand reputation is on the line. The quote also encourages brands to recognize the value of their reputation and the impact that their actions can have on it. By understanding the potential consequences of their decisions, they are more likely to approach their actions and behaviors with caution, integrity, and a long-term customer-focused perspective.

“The more advocates you have, the fewer ads you have to buy.” (Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot)

Successfully managing the customer experience yields powerful benefits for businesses. This customer experience quote by Dharmesh Shah highlights the power of brand advocacy and word-of-mouth marketing in reducing the need for traditional advertising. When your company delights customers, you are effectively building a strong base of advocates: satisfied customers who will actively promote the brand to others and spread positive word of mouth about your products or services.

By cultivating a loyal customer base and providing exceptional experiences that inspire advocacy, you can significantly reduce customer acquisition and retention costs while still achieving strong growth. 

Quotes About Customer Experience and Leadership

The following quotes about customer experience touch on the role that leadership plays as companies look to become truly proactive and intuitive, see through customers’ eyes, and better understand their needs, wants, and expectations.

“Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.” (Clare Muscutt, founder of Women in CX)

One of the best customer experience quotes talks about the importance of intentional planning and effort in creating a positive customer experience. It suggests that creating a good customer experience requires executive commitment as well as deliberate actions and strategies, rather than simply relying on chance or luck. In other words, businesses must actively design and implement processes, policies, and interactions with customers to ensure a satisfying and enjoyable experience for them.

“If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.” (Howard Schultz, former chair and CEO of Starbucks)

Great customer experience involves listening to your customers and creating a relationship in which they feel heard and valued. When they feel they have an emotional connection with your brand and believe they share values with your company, they will show loyalty and consistently choose you over competitors. 

This also underscores the significance of authenticity and consistency in brand messaging and behavior, as they contribute to fostering a deeper connection and sense of trust between a company and its customers. When customers feel a strong alignment between their own personal values and the values espoused by a company, they are more likely to develop a sense of loyalty to that brand.

“My advice is to answer every customer, in every channel, every time. This is different from how most businesses interact with customers, especially online, which is to answer some complaints, in some channels, some of the time.” (Jay Baer, author and founder of Convince and Convert)

This quote highlights the importance of consistently and comprehensively addressing customer inquiries, feedback, and complaints across all communication channels. It suggests that companies should prioritize responsiveness and engagement with customers regardless of the platform or channel they choose to communicate on. 

For example, if a customer wrote a 5-star review or gave your business a nice compliment via email, take the time to say thank you. If the feedback is negative or the review came with a low rating, acknowledge the customer and work on resolving any issues related to their experience.

This customer experience quote also touches on the importance of local listings management. By claiming ownership of specific pages on online channels where your brand is present, you can more easily listen and respond to existing and potential customers. On most directories where you have claimed listings, you’ll be able to present yourself as a representative of your company, answer questions and queries, and learn how to respond to negative reviews as well as positive feedback.

By committing to answering every customer, in every channel, every time, brands can provide attentive and personalized customer support, which can enhance customer satisfaction, build trust, and foster long-term loyalty.

“Pay attention to the way you talk about the work you’re doing. If you design for people, use people language.” (Julie Zhuo, businesswoman and former VP of design for Facebook)

Another important aspect of managing the customer experience is tailoring your messaging and communications so that the voice of your brand speaks the language of your customers. When designing products, services, or experiences for your users and customers, it’s important to use language that resonates with and is easily understood by the audience you are designing for. 

By doing so, you can more effectively connect with your audience, convey the benefits and value of your work, and ultimately create solutions that meet the needs and preferences of your customers.

Quotes About Customer Experience and the Importance of Customer Feedback

Some of the best quotes on customer experience talk about the powerful role that customer feedback plays in CX improvement. Using information from customer feedback, companies can gain valuable insights essential to improving their brand, products, services, and overall customer experience. Organizations that can monitor and manage customer feedback also often have a more complete understanding of their customers, and can easily measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. Valuable sources of customer feedback include:

  • Customer feedback and customer satisfaction surveys
  • Call center transcripts, emails, and phone calls
  • Online reviews and ratings
  • Social media comments
  • Individual customer interviews and roundtables
  • Usability tests

The most successful companies listen to and act on feedback to understand customers better and deliver improved customer experiences. Through feedback, companies get to hear customers’ stories and experiences through their own words and from their own perspective.

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.” (Ernest Hemingway)

Many companies develop their marketing strategies around the many ways they can push branded content, sales messages, and promotional content to consumers. However, success in managing the customer experience is founded on a company’s ability to listen. 

Companies should listen in real-time to customers across multiple touchpoints and channels, as well as provide immediate responses to customer feedback. A Voice of the Customer program should help organizations listen in to every customer and every conversation at various stages of the customer journey — not to mention, dig deeper into data on both macro and micro levels.

“A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is. It is what consumers tell each other it is.” (Scott D. Cook, founder of Intuit, former founder of eBay)

This quote encapsulates the shift in the dynamics of branding and marketing brought about by the rise of social media and digital communication. Previously, companies could control their brand reputation through advertising, messaging, and other promotional efforts. However, with the emergence of social media and online reviews, consumers now have a significant influence on shaping a brand’s reputation, and their expectations of the customer experience are based on how a brand is perceived online, where companies are defined by the collective perceptions, opinions, and experiences shared by consumers with each other. 

This means that your team should prioritize customer satisfaction, engage with your audience authentically, and deliver exceptional experiences, as these factors directly impact how consumers perceive and discuss the brand. Ultimately, your brand reputation is shaped by the conversations and interactions happening among consumers, making it crucial to actively manage and nurture your reputation in the eyes of your customers.

“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” (Steve Jobs, founder of Apple)

Before you can attempt to understand and improve the customer experience, you have to be able to know who your customers are. This is the first step to achieving true customer centricity.

Some of the ways you can get closer to your customers is to capture feedback and Voice of the Customer data as well as map the customer journey. Doing so enables you to gain a deeper understanding of customers’ needs, motivations, and behaviors, allowing you to anticipate future needs and deliver more personalized and proactive experiences.

Knowing your customers also means being able to identify potential pain points or areas of frustration that they may encounter during their interactions. Anticipating these pain points allows you to proactively address them, ensuring a smoother and more satisfying experience for customers.

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” (Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft)

Negative reviews and social media comments can hurt like a gut punch, but this type of feedback can be beneficial for organizations looking to improve the customer experience. Negative feedback is a rich source of insights into areas for improvement, opportunities for innovation, and strategies for enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. By listening to and learning from negative feedback, you can strengthen your relationships with customers and drive long-term success.

Feedback from unhappy customers can also shed light on discrepancies between customer expectations and the actual experience you’re providing. By understanding these gaps, businesses can adjust their offerings, communications, and processes to better align with customer expectations.

“Don’t waste customers’ time asking them questions unless you are prepared to act on what they say.” (Bruce Temkin, co-founder of Customer Experience Professionals Association)

Capturing data is one thing; extracting insights from it is another. Beyond simply collecting data, companies can leverage tools like Voice of the Customer programs, predictive customer analytics, and customer feedback systems to ensure they are really hearing their customers and extracting rich, meaningful insights from their feedback. 

A good mix of both quantitative and qualitative information will help drive action and business decisions. Reviews, star ratings, and satisfaction scores are obvious quantitative measures that you can start with. But you can also dive into the entire anatomy of these reviews with natural language processing technology and customer experience analytics, which help users determine and understand qualitative information like customer sentiment, emotion, and mood.

“Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.” (Walt Disney)

This quote by Walt Disney emphasizes the importance of consistently delivering great customer experiences. The world’s most customer-centric companies are usually able to deliver experiences that inspire customers to become advocates for the brand, eager to return themselves and also to bring others along.

This means that every interaction with a customer should be performed to the highest standard possible; doing so not only helps build customer loyalty but also increases the likelihood of loyal customers sharing their positive experiences with others.

Kickstart Your Customer Experience Transformation with Pearl-Plaza 

Pearl-Plaza, the leader in improving experiences and the most recommended CX platform and services company in the world, can help kickstart your company’s CX transformation. Pearl-Plaza’s all-in-one CX platform helps you collect, integrate, understand, and intelligently act on every signal, so that you can elevate customer experiences and achieve the greatest return from your CX program.

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

This isn't your average trends report – read on to see how your business can lead the charge into a new era of CX

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

Can You Count on ChatGPT Customer Experience Survey Questions?

chatgpt for customer experience

It seems like the internet is full of ChatGPT “hacks” these days. We are all inundated by articles and webinars that start with  “How to Use ChatGPT to…” I have also had way too many conversations with my Gen-Z son and millennial colleagues about how they use the tool to make everyday tasks go by more quickly. And I wouldn’t be the true customer experience nerd that I am if I didn’t ask: “Could we customer experience (CX) professionals leverage ChatGPT customer experience survey questions?”

On the surface, it seems like an obvious application for a ChatGPT customer experience approach. A survey is pretty straightforward, correct? Not so fast.

Keep reading to find out what happened when I tested this approach and why it may not be the best way to go when it comes to your customer listening approach.

Testing ChatGPT for Customer Experience Questions

I started off with a simple question for ChatGPT, hoping for a simple customer satisfaction survey, typing in, “Write me a survey.” You can see the screenshot of the output below.

ChatGPT customer experience survey- Should you use ChatGPT to write customer experience surveys?
A ChatGPT Customer Experience Survey

After reviewing the generated answer, you may be asking, “what’s missing?” Well, to the untrained eye, there could be little to no difference between a traditionally written survey and a ChatGPT customer experience survey. After all, there are demographic questions, the typical “How satisfied were you with your experience,” and other basic survey asks.

But here is what stands out to me as a glaring absence. What is missing is pretty much the most important part of any survey: the link to the business questions you are trying to answer by launching a survey in the first place!

Quick PSA from Jim: Creating surveys is an important topic,  but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that while surveys are a tried-and-true method of collecting customer feedback, they are not the only way (or the best way, in many cases) to hear from customers. With so many channels available for you to monitor the voice of the customer, to restrict yourself to surveys alone is to limit your insights. This is another topic for another day (but if you’re interested, you can learn more about other listening channels here). End of PSA.

 For now, let’s talk about the risks of using AI like ChatGPT to write surveys!

ChatGPT Customer Experience Risks & Best Practices You Need to Know

ChatGPT Customer Experience Questions Miss the Point

Let me ask you a question: Is the point of your CX program to launch surveys? Now, many of you are likely rolling your eyes at me, but I promise, there’s a point to this. Hopefully, you answered no. Because the point of customer experience is not to ask questions, but to listen to customers and the market to help guide your path to achieving business goals. The questions are simply a vehicle to gain insight into what will help or hinder your business on the way to realizing those  goals.

When you look at the output of ChatGPT customer experience questions in the screenshot above, these questions really miss the point. Yes, they are generic questions that we have all likely seen in surveys before, but what are they getting at? The only results I can see this survey gleaning is a scoreboard metric and some customer demographics that we might already have access to via other data sources. 

When you craft surveys, the first questions you should ask should be for you and your team. Do you have a set of northstar goals (GOALS not scores!) for your customer experience program already? Great! If not, start that conversation with your executive stakeholders and team. Only then can you truly design your program, surveys, and other initiatives with the end goal in mind. 

Once you have agreed upon a desired end goal, then you need to ask:

  • What are we hoping to learn?
  • Who are we hoping to learn from?
  • Do we already have access to this data?

If you want to gut-check your surveys, you can check out this CX survey assessment my colleagues developed to help you optimize your surveys!

ChatGPT Doesn’t Know Your Customers Like You Do

Context is everything. And when it comes to ChatGPT customer experience questions, they won’t have any of the contextual data that you do. If your CX program has been around for a while, you likely have a mountain of customer data around. And that existing data will shape what you already know, and what questions you still need to ask. 

(Additionally, you might be tempted to feed ChatGPT some of your customer data, but that can unearth a whole boatload of security complications. Do you really want every ChatGPT user having access to your customer data? Didn’t think so.) 

An effective customer listening strategy is personal and targeted. Speaking to the customer in their language is critical. Many brands have worked hard to develop a brand persona. Asking customers for feedback in a sterile, canned voice will not yield the best results or further endear your brand to your customers. I don’t believe your brand personalization  can be accomplished by a ChatGPT survey—at least not today.

ChatGPT Is a Starting Block, Not the Finish Line

Now you may be thinking, “Jim, you’ve made a good case for the risks of using ChatGPT for customer experience surveys. But there has to be some way I can use it.” I’m glad you asked and yes, there is! 

I know we have all heard the fear-mongering conversations about AI taking jobs. And if we’re being realistic, AI will eliminate some jobs, but it will also create new ones. Those who will be safe from that chopping block are those professionals who learn how to leverage AI to increase efficiency and  perfect skills that AI alone just can’t manage without human input.

In the customer experience space, this could be leveraging ChatGPT as a starting point, then leveraging the additional context you have about your customers and your brand’s identity to perfect its suggestions. 

For example, ChatGPT can give you phrasing ideas for your survey questions as long as you are very specific in your prompts. It can also help you to think of other ways to ask questions you’ve been posing to customers for a long time, giving your same old relationship and post-transaction surveys a refresh. 

It’s not about AI or humans. It’s about humans using AI to improve and become more imaginative and efficient.

I will end with this. I do not want to come off as a “debbie downer” or, even worse, as naive. AI is going to have an increased role in customer experience and in creating the listening posts that practitioners create to capture customer insight. But, I believe true value will be well beyond simply crafting a survey. 

The real power of ChatGPT and other AI tools will be to help understand the data that comes from a survey or the multiple direct and indirect data sources that make up the voice of the customer. And, just to validate this statement, I asked ChatGPT why the voice of the customer is important? In this case, ChatGPT was spot on:

I think we can all agree that ChatGPT is right on target with that answer.

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

This isn't your average trends report – read on to see how your business can lead the charge into a new era of CX

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

Embracing Consumer Duty to Deliver Positive Outcomes for the UK Financial Services Sector

Consumer Duty- How You Can Prepare

The new FCA Consumer Duty is intended to improve customer outcomes and promote better customer experiences in the financial industry in the United Kingdom (UK) by setting higher and clearer standards of consumer protection. By prioritising customer interests and designing products and services that meet their needs, firms can create more positive and beneficial experiences for customers.

What Is Consumer Duty?

Consumer Duty Principle, proposed by FCA, is a significant new legislation for the UK Financial Services sector. The legislation aims to set a consistent and increased standard of care to customers, and mandates organisations to put the needs of the customer first. 

What Are the Details of the New FCA Consumer Duty?

The FCA Consumer Duty has three golden rules that every UK financial organisation will need to adhere to:

  1. Act in Good Faith Towards Customers: Organisations are required to act in the best interests of their customers and prioritise their interests over their own. They must also ensure that their products and services meet the needs of their customers.
  1. Allow and Support Customers to Pursue their Financial Objectives: Organisations must design their products and services to meet the needs of their customers and ensure they are fit for purpose. They must also ensure that their pricing is transparent, fair, and not misleading.
  1. Avoid Causing Foreseeable Harm to Customers: Organisations must provide clear and accessible information to their customers about their products and services, including any risks associated with them. This includes communicating in plain language and avoiding jargon or technical terms that customers may not understand.

How Will the Act Benefit Consumers and Financial Organisations?

If you get it right, our experts at Pearl-Plaza foresee the Consumer Duty Principle bringing many benefits to consumers and financial organisations alike, such as: 

  • Customer Trust and Loyalty: Putting the customer’s interests first can lead to increased customer satisfaction, positive word-of-mouth, and repeat business.
  • Efficiency and Effectiveness: By designing products and services that meet the needs of your customers, you are likely to see increased efficiency and effectiveness in your business operations. This can lead to cost savings and improved profitability.
  • Brand Image and Reputation: By promoting responsible business practices and prioritising customer outcomes, you can enhance your company’s reputation as a socially responsible and ethical business.

Consumer Duty + Experience Improvement = Customer Centricity! 

Customer experience (CX) platforms can help financial services organisations comply with the FCA Consumer Duty more effectively by helping them better understand their customers’ needs, improve their products and services, and ensure that they are acting in their customers’ best interests. With an integrated CX approach of leveraging the right data, technology, and CX expertise you can take the right action to comply with Consumer Duty in the following ways:

  • Data Management: Managing customer data more efficiently helps to better understand your customers’ needs and preferences, which is essential to designing products and services that meet those needs.
  • AI-powered Analytics: Analysing customer behaviour and preferences helps you identify areas for improvement and make adjustments to products and services in order to better serve customers.
  • Communication Management: Managing communications with customers more efficiently ensures that they receive clear and accessible information about your products and services and  any concerns or questions can be addressed immediately.
  • Compliance Management: Tracking compliance activities ensures that all customer interactions are recorded and monitored and reported correctly and efficiently. 

Five Ways Financial Organisations Can Prepare for Consumer Duty

To comply with Consumer Duty, better technology, data management, and improving customer experiences will be crucial to the success of every financial organisation in the UK. At the onset and in the future, it will be necessary to make experiences, compliance, and reporting processes more efficient. Here’s a few ways Pearl-Plaza ca help you to prepare and ensure your organisation is set up for success.  

#1: Proactively Detect Consumer Intent to Complain

Ensure you respond to complaints. Simplify the process by applying a tool that automatically identifies and alerts you to those customers who intend to complain or even switch providers. Using Pearl-Plazas AI-powered technology, those customers who intend to complain, but have not yet done so, can be flagged, with a formal case raised to resolve their issue, avoiding a formal complaint and potential fine.

#2: Comprehensive Review and Audit of Survey and Listening Posts

Start a comprehensive review and audit of all of your existing survey and listening posts, ensuring you are asking the right questions and capturing the most appropriate metrics in regards to consumer duty. We can provide actionable recommendations to ensure your listening posts are set up to deliver the right outcomes, and that your surveys are WCAG 2.0 compliant.

#3: Evaluate and Solve Compliance Issues at Scale 

Delivering consistent and compliant customer communications can feel like a daunting task. We can help you evaluate all structured, semi structured, and unstructured communication to advise if each piece of communication is compliant with the consumer duty before they go live, providing recommendations for areas of improvement. 

#4: Create Seamless Experiences for Your Most Vulnerable Customers 

It is critical that your most vulnerable customers continue to have a seamless experience with your brand. Our technology can automatically alert you to any aspects of your customer journey that are not providing an inclusive experience. Through our unique Consumer Duty Taxonomy consisting of DEI, Compliance, and the Financial Services Industry Pack, we can identify those customers who are NOT getting the right outcomes, and provide recommendations on how to improve their experience.

#5: Combine a Compliance Focus With a Customer-Centric Culture

The most successful brands will be those that focus on enhancing their customer-centric culture, putting the customer at the heart of all decision making, rather than focusing only on a compliance- first approach. Celebrate and socialise positive customer experiences, champion positive customer outcomes across the entire organisation.

If you’d like to learn more about how Pearl-Plaza can help, please reach out to voc@pearl-plaza.ru or click here to read our full consumer duty solution brief!

Watch the Video – See Pearl-Plaza in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

Shopping for Experiences, Not Products: A Primer on Retail Customer Experience in the Experience Economy

Retail customers’ primary objective used to be providing a great product, but as brand competition fiercens and consumer expectations rise, retailers need to find new, bolder ways to stand out from the crowd. Consumers are no longer satisfied with “just” a product, and are finding different, more fundamental means of identifying (and spending money) with brands.
Retail Customer Experience

Retail brands’ primary objective used to be providing a great product, but as competition heats up and consumer expectations grow more complex, retailers need to find new, bolder ways to stand out from the crowd. And that’s why the retail customer experience is more important than ever before.

Consumers are no longer satisfied with “just” a product and are finding different, more fundamental means of identifying (and spending money) with brands.

Andrew Park, Vice President of Customer Experience Strategy & Enablement at Pearl-Plaza, sat down with The Retail Focus Podcast to break down:

  1. Where customers’ expectations have been 
  2. Where they’re going
  3. What retailers can do to keep up with it all

What Is the Experience Economy?

As previously mentioned, customers used to consider a great product the end-all-be-all of an experience, but as those expectations have since evolved—and so must retail brands’ strategy. These days, retail customers prefer to spend money with brands that deliver great experiences, and great experiences go far beyond what’s on a store shelf.

It used to be that a retail experience consisted only of an in-store visit, but in this modern era (and especially since COVID), a customer’s retail experience spans so many different channels. For a customer, their overall experience is informed by a combination of the following:

  • Brand Identity 
  • Online Reviews
  • In-App Experience
  • Website Experience
  • In-Store Experience
  • Employee Interactions
  • And So Much More!

You might sense what we’re getting at here: customers consider experiences to be journeys, not single stops—and brands that fail to approach their experience accordingly won’t be able to differentiate in the experience economy.

For example, an airline may consider a passenger’s flight the extent of that individual’s experience, but this view fails to account for buying a ticket, waiting in the airport, finding a hotel, and all the other parts of the journey besides ‘just’ the flight.

What Makes for a Great Retail Customer Experience Journey?

Brands that focus only on one aspect of the experience are missing a huge opportunity. The winning organizations in the modern experience landscape create journeys that are:

Seamless

Customers should receive the same quality of experience whether they are online, in store or in app. Obviously, there will be some differences in the actual experience (in store purchases provide instant satisfaction, while online requires customers to wait for shipping), but the quality must remain the same.

A positive example of consistency comes from one of our home furnishing clients, who prides itself on the knowledgeability of its staff in store. It wanted to provide that same quality of service on their e-commerce site, and was ultimately able to stand up an online chat that gave its customers instant access to expertise.

On the other end of the spectrum, it’s extremely disruptive to a customer when a product’s online and in-store price tags differ. Customers have come to expect seamless experiences—it’s key for brands to deliver on that expectation.

End-to-End

If you’re a regular on the Pearl-Plaza Blog, you’ll be familiar with our phrase, “design with the end in mind.” And there’s a reason why we return to it time and time again. When it comes to retail customer experience (and really anything in life), if you aren’t actively thinking about your desired outcome when you’re in the planning stages, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll end up with the results you want. 

So, when you are designing a customer journey, be sure to think about every step of the process, but especially the end result. Do you want customers to post about their new product? Share their excitement with friends and family? Come back for more next month? There is so much you can do to influence these actions, if only you plan for them.

Consistent

This one is pretty straightforward. If you provide consistently disappointing experiences (out of stock items, check out lines a mile long, etc.) you will be hard pressed to convince customers to return—or make a purchase in the first place. If you provide consistently excellent experiences, customers will be excited for the next time they get to shop with you, they’ll tell your friends about you, and they’ll likely buy more when they shop with you.

Now, creating consistency across multiple locations with numerous employees is a lot of work, but it is so worth it. Our proprietary research has even found that customers will spend more money with a company that provides a great experience. If you’re looking for strategies to increase consistency, check out this post or this post (centered more around your employees).

Say it with us: Designing best-in-class retail customer experience journeys is a worthwhile investment! In our decades of experience working with the world’s best known retailers, we’ve found that great customer experiences have big business pay off in these four areas:

  1. Acquiring Customers
  2. Retaining Customers
  3. Increasing Customer Lifetime Value
  4. Reducing Business Costs

Learn more about how here!

Customers Expect Great Retail Customer Experiences

It’s become common in the last 5-10 years for retailers to be compared not just to each other, but to brands from other industries and the experiences they provide. It probably comes as little surprise to most retailers that customers frequently compare them to Amazon, but what about a restaurant? 

Restaurants are not retail outlets, but if they provide a great experience, customers will come to expect similar commitment from retailers and vice-versa. The same is true of other types of businesses. (You can learn more about this cross-industry experience expectations in our Retail Experience Trends Report here.)

The final word here is just that: expectation. As we mentioned up top, customers’ expectations are growing more complex as countless brands vie for their attention. This means that, no matter whether a brand sells shoes, cars, meals, or airline tickets, it’s no longer enough to focus solely on a product. 

Make no mistake, offering a quality product is obviously still important, but it’s no longer enough to capture and hold customers’ attention. Experience is the differentiator now, and brands that endeavor to deliver a great experience will come out on top in both their verticals and in customers’ eyes.

To hear more about retail customer experience in the experience economy, listen to the full podcast episode today!

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The Best Way to Identify (and Share) the Moments that Matter with Frontline Employees

Frontline employees

Metrics, metrics, metrics. It’s common for frontline employees like contact center agents to be inundated with them—schedule adherence, efficiency, handle time, and hopefully, amid all of that and more, customer experience (CX) metrics. Ostensibly, the goal with this information is to give contact center agents the guidance needed to create Experience Improvement (XI) for customers, but do they have the time and wherewithal to actually sort through comments and data? Should that even BE an organizational expectation?

Having plenty of data and feedback is certainly important, but inundating your contact center agents with it won’t make them better at their jobs. Today’s conversation briefly covers how to actually leverage data by being tactical and thoughtful with what you share with your frontline employees. We’ll also discuss how best to use data to recognize employees for excelling at the executing moments that matter to customers. Let’s get started!

Sharing What Matters with Frontline Employees

There’s no one specific type of information, insight, or data that supports frontline employees across all industries, but there are several high-level principles that brands can bear in mind when determining what those employees need to know. The first north star to aim for with sharing insights to frontline employees is to consider which of those insights will make your employees not just efficient, but actually better at their jobs and at creating Experience Improvement.

Organizations that make compliance and efficiency the high water mark for contact center excellence will not see remarkable agent performance, let alone the Experience Improvement that you need to acquire and retain customers. Finding the insights, data, and comments that will make employees better at their jobs begins with using an Experience Improvement platform to ingest data (especially customer comments) for actionable insights. Many brands end up wasting time by either trying to manually mine insights out of data mountains, or by gathering metrics and then quitting at that point because they think numbers alone can drive success.

The platform approach can help you avoid both of these pitfalls and make the most of all your data—both qualitative and quantitative. Finding relevant and actionable insights in your data will motivate your employees to act upon Experience Improvement opportunities. Enacting this approach will also enable your frontline employees to provide a far superior experience to customers. This strengthens brand connection and creates a customer-centric culture.

The Next Step

Giving your employees the tools to create Experience Improvement is one thing—demonstrating your appreciation for them successfully doing so is another. All of us—frontline agents, supervisors, and business leaders—can take advantage of data and insights that allow us to simply “be better.” However, there’s one more step on that road that is specifically applicable to driving to top-level frontline work: recognition. 

This is another area in which brands and experience program vendors underutilize  data, unstructured and otherwise. Data is great for strengthening experiences and the bottom line, but with the right plan and structure, it can drive another factor just as if not more fundamental: an employee-centric culture.

Many brands use data to measure employee performance as a matter of course, but  tracking something only accomplishes so much. Brands need to go beyond tracking—they must use data to celebrate success, continually create a positive culture, and recognize a job well done.

This is a fundamental component of being human in all of your experiences, and employees who feel both recognized and a part of the company’s success will be all the more effective in their roles. That is the heart of Experience Improvement, creating a customer-centric and employee-centric workplace, and identifying the moments that matter.

The Frontline Insights Universe

While we’ve covered a lot of ground in discussing how to improve and recognize frontline employee performance, there’s a lot more you can find by checking out my full-length point of view article here. I take a deeper dive into communicating insights to frontline employees, as well as additional strategies you can use to improve experiences for customers, employees, and your wider organization!

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

This isn't your average trends report – read on to see how your business can lead the charge into a new era of CX

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

How Would You Rate Your Experience? A Primer on Transactional Surveys

I’ve seen organizations use transactional surveys to learn everything about their customers’ short-term brand experience, including ease-of-purchase and how quickly that package actually arrived. Customers keep a company going—it literally pays to listen to them.
Leveraging Transactional Surveys

Surveys are one of the most direct and effective means of gathering insights. They provide what many customers crave most: an easy-to-access platform they can use to voice their thoughts and opinions about a brand.

To make this process as efficient as possible (and to make it simpler for companies to source different kinds of feedback), several types of surveys have emerged over the years that make it easy to focus on customers’ opinions about transactions, brand relationships, and the like. I’ve found one such questionnaire, the transactional survey, to be an invaluable tool for assessing almost any customer touchpoint. Let’s briefly discuss how it works.

What Are Transactional Surveys? How Are They Used?

Transactional surveys can be used to gauge many touchpoints, but the one they’re typically associated with (and the one they’re named for) is a key part of the brand experience: the sale. In my experience, transactional surveys are an ideal way to gauge customers’ immediate feelings about a purchase because they can be used to solicit feedback quickly. Below is an example of a post-transaction survey in action:

Transactional Survey in Retail
A Post-Transaction Survey in Retail

I’ve seen organizations use this tool to learn everything about their customers’ short-term brand experience, including ease-of-purchase and how quickly that package actually arrived. Customers keep a company going—it literally pays to listen to them.

Using Transactional Surveys in the Call Center

Transactional surveys are a great way for customers to gauge purchases, but their utility extends far beyond the point of sale. I’ve also seen them be useful for evaluating call center experiences.

Poor call center interactions can quickly land an organization in a sea of bad reviews, but transactional surveys can provide an opportunity to ensure smooth operations, source invaluable feedback, and demonstrate that a company cares about their customer experience. Because surveys can be used to gather all of these insights quickly, I’ve found them to be a valuable tool for streamlining both customer experiences and feedback.

Using Transactional Surveys Online

Whether a customer is browsing an about page or trying to file a product claim, transactional surveys can easily be incorporated into website feedback tools. Companies can implement just about any question at just about any website touchpoint, making it simple to quickly collect feedback about website language, page click orders, and a host of other user experience elements.

This type of feedback is where transactional surveys’ ability to deliver feedback in real time is especially helpful. Companies can be made aware of website flaws or customer complaints just after they occur, enabling product teams to correct mistakes and respond to feedback faster.

Survey Symbiosis: Leveraging Transactional Surveys in Your Feedback Strategy

There’s no better means of capturing immediate feedback about a short-term brand experience than with transactional surveys. Their speed, size, and ease of use make them an invaluable way to connect customers and organizations.

I also believe, though, that while transactional surveys provide plenty of valuable information on their own, there are other types of surveys that can deliver insights that are just as valuable for other purposes. Companies that blend multiple types of surveys into a single feedback strategy can gain a much richer portrait of their audience.

Regardless of how many kinds of surveys an organization uses, though, they’re all only as relevant as the action that companies take with them. Proactivity and a willingness to act on feedback are the keys to whether a survey strategy is ultimately successful. That’s no less true for transactional surveys than for any other insight-gathering tool.

If you would like to learn more about transactional surveys—and how you can pair them with relationship surveys—check out “Uniting Transactional and Relationship Surveys to Capture the Entire Experience” today!

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The Employee Experience Maturity Path: How Does EX Improvement Impact Customer Behavior?

How to Grow Employee Experience Maturity

This article was originally posted on CustomerThink.com

Sacagawea, a knowledgeable young Shoshone woman, successfully guided Lewis & Clark through the Louisiana Purchase territory, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa, whose backyard was the Himalayas, successfully guided Edmund Hillary on the first successful ascent of Mount Everest. Ports around the world have skilled and experienced pilots whose detailed knowledge and map-memory of local shoals, sandbars and currents is essential to guide arriving ships to their berths. 

In the modern era, Tim Berners-Lee was the trailblazer of computer science—the inventor and mapmaker of the World Wide Web and HTML—without whom we simply wouldn’t have the internet of today. And then there’s Steve Wozniak, the technical pathfinder behind the initial system for Apple products and services. Every successful journey greatly benefits from having a reliable, capable, amply proven guide, especially one using a detailed, user-friendly map with signposts to mark steps needed to reach the intended goal. It is as true with employee experience (EX) improvement. There is a clear path to greater employee experience maturity and employee insights success, with a map and signposts to aid the guide.

4 Signposts on the Employee Experience Maturity Path Map 

There are four distinctive signposts which serve as a guide up the employee experience maturity path, each one bringing organizations closer to their goal of optimal employee behavior and value as enterprise assets. These signposts, or markers, represent the points along the path, or the trajectory, employee experience has taken, as companies become more mature in a) how they consider employee contribution, in other words the importance attached to it, and b) what role, or roles, employees have in enterprise culture, strategy, and business outcomes.

#1: Employee Satisfaction

The enterprise EX improvement and insights journey path often begins with very basic employee satisfaction, as companies are principally looking to manage and measure behavior at a macro level. For the employee experience maturity trajectory, it is the point of embarkation. Employee satisfaction will typically include job-related factors like compensation, workload, perceptions of management and leadership, flexibility, teamwork, resource availability, etc. 

#2: Employee Engagement

The next, and first real, EX journey signpost brings many organizations to employee engagement. Engaged employees have a stronger sense of purpose within the organization. Here, the predominant, HR-formed, construct is to consider employees as costs of doing the company’s business, and the overall objective is for their fit, utility, and productivity within the enterprise.

#3: Employee Commitment

This signpost represents and recognizes arrival on the path of a deeper awareness of what creates and shapes the full EX landscape: employee commitment to the organization, to its product and service value proposition ,and customers – and plan to optimize business outcomes and stakeholder value. Part of this more progressive awareness is also understanding, and mitigating, things which can impede EX success. Employee fit, utility, and productivity are certainly important, but they are insufficient where real employee experience and linkage to customer value delivery are concerned. Organizations need to have more contemporary and actionable insight into what motivates employees, connects them to the culture and customers, and drives their behavior as invested, highly contributory enterprise assets. 

#4: Employee Advocacy

This signpost has the EX parallel of the flag planted at the top of a mountain peak. Few organizations are able to reach this terminus point on the path (although it is certainly within reach, with strategic focus and discipline, for virtually any company). Companies with high rates of employee advocacy, and its accompanying strong set of business outcomes, are those which have embedded commitment and customer focus into the enterprise DNA, and where the culture, operations, and processes all flow through stakeholder value creation. 

How Does EX Improvement Impact Customer Behavior?

In looking at the progression from satisfaction to engagement to commitment and advocacy, we have examined research conducted over the past three decades. What we have observed are studies that examined some contributing factors of employee experience and value, such as reward and recognition, job fit, training, career opportunities, work environment, and departmental and management relationships. But the critical component often totally missing, or lightly addressed, from all of this material is the definitive linkage and commitment to customers.

Tony Hsieh, the late founder and CEO of Zappos, said: “The brand is just a lagging indicator of the company’s culture.” He hit the mark with that statement. Brand image needs to be complemented and supported by a culture and set of processes dedicated to both employee and customer experience. That brand promise has to be delivered for customers every time they interact with the company. Contribution to customer experience also needs to be fully, and strategically, baked into the organization and into every employee’s job description.

Consider how frequently your customers come in contact with your employees, either directly or indirectly. Whether it is through a computer screen in a customer service chat, on the telephone, or in person, every employee, whether customer-facing or not, should be an enthusiastic and committed representative for the brand. If, today, employee satisfaction and employee engagement are not designed to meet this critical objective of the customer experience, almost inevitably there will be a sub-optimal downstream result with regard to customer behavior.

The Importance of Creating a Culture of Commitment

In any group of employees, irrespective of whether it’s a service department, technical and operational division, or a branch office, there will be differing levels of commitment to the employer’s brand and the company itself, its value proposition, and its customers. If employees are negative to the point of undermining, and even sabotaging, customer experience value, they will actively work against business goals and outcomes. However, if employees are advocates, and whether they interact with customers directly, indirectly, or even not at all, they will better service and support customers.

For companies to create and sustain higher levels of employee advocacy, it’s also essential that the employee experience be given as much emphasis as the customer experience. If employee commitment and advocacy are to flourish, there must be value, and a sense of shared purpose, for the employee (as well as the company and customer) – in the form of recognition, reward(financial and training), and career opportunities. Combined with advanced analytics and other employee-related data, the advocacy concept can lead and enable any organization to be more stakeholder-centric, flexible, dynamic, and financially successful.

This is a clear path and map to EX maturity. Where is your company on the journey?

Watch the Video – See Pearl-Plaza in Action

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The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

This isn't your average trends report – read on to see how your business can lead the charge into a new era of CX.

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

5 Ways to Ensure Employees Uphold Your Brand’s Values

employees uphold brand values

When a business is in its nascent stage, everyone feels like an owner. Each employee—from the leadership to the frontline—has a personal stake and interest in building success through differentiated offerings and positive customer experiences, all while upholding the brand’s values.

Yet, as companies grow, the founders, owners, and executive leadership become less connected to the day-to-day operations, and in turn, their customers. In essence, they’re handing over the reigns of the company’s vision, mission, values, and culture to the frontline staff—who don’t necessarily harness the same passion and fervor for the company’s success. Plus, with growth comes the increased potential for customer service issues that must be rectified to deliver an experience in line with the company’s values.

So how can companies encourage frontline staff to “act like owners” in their interactions with customers? And when issues arise, how can brands reinforce the positive resolution of customer complaints? We have five strategies you can deploy to get your employees to uphold your brand’s values with pride!

How to Help Employees Uphold Your Brand’s Values

Strategy #1: Empowerment 

The best way to resolve customer complaints? Avoid them in the first place. Empower your employees to make management-level decisions without manager approval. When it makes sense, allow your staff to go outside of policies that frustrate customers—or better yet, remove/change those policies completely. When you empower frontline staff to act above their pay grade, you’ll get performance above their pay grade.

Strategy #2: Training

You need to have clear resolution practices in place that address specific complaints. Ensure your frontline responders know how to resolve common complaints, not only in process, but from an interpersonal point of view (e.g., how to deescalate frustrated customers). Again, allow for some flexibility for resolution as each case and customer is unique.

Strategy #3: Recognition

Everyone enjoys being acknowledged. Make customer verbatims and specific staff mentions in customer feedback visible in high-traffic areas and create a standardized program for recognizing top performers.

Strategy #4: Support

Management must fully support frontline staff in resolving customer complaints by listening, giving advice, and creating a culture where it is evident they have the employees’ best interest in mind. And when necessarily, be prepared to step in.

Strategy #5: Rewards

Especially in lower-paying positions, employees are driven by opportunities to increase their paychecks. Give employees an incentive to perform well—bonuses or even promotions for exceptional resolution rates and engagement with customers.

It’s simply not possible to be a part of every day-to-day customer interaction happening in your business. But when your employees are trained, encouraged, and empowered to act like owners, you know your brand’s reputation is in good hands.

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3 Things You Can Do Right Now to Create More Inclusive Employee & Customer Experiences

A group of people enjoying Inclusive Customer Experiences

Diversity and inclusion initiatives have become front and center for many organizations in recent years. It’s important for brands to create diverse and inclusive customer experiences (CX) and employee experiences (EX)—not ‘just’ because being more inclusive is the right thing to do, but also because organizations have a lot to gain from accommodating greater diversity in every experience they create.

Of course, an organization stating diversity and inclusion goals is a good start, but how can brands like yours translate such goals into tangible Experience Improvement (XI) strategies and tactics that create more inclusive customer experiences? There are many, many opportunities here, but the most important thing to do is to just get started. 

So, here are three quick thoughts you should apply right now to create more inclusive employee and customer experiences.

3 Keys to Creating More Inclusive Customer Experiences

  1. Key #1: Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
  2. Key #2: Engage New and All Audiences
  3. Key #3: Apply What You’ve Learned

Key #1: Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes

It’s understandable for organizations to be intimidated by the prospect of making mistakes while attempting to accommodate and include new audiences. Such mistakes can quickly become viral via social media, review sites, and other tools, creating headaches both for brands and the customers (or employees) at the heart of such events.

Though this worry is certainly a valid concern, it’s better to accept that mistakes might be made and press forward with your diversity and inclusion efforts than to allow timidity to outright impede either. These are the growing pains of becoming more inclusive with your customer and employee experiences, and facing them head-on will also give your team an opportunity to consider how best to handle such mistakes and learn from them. 

Experience shows that both customers and employees accept that mistakes inevitably occur and are a result of activity. Being passive is not an option when trying to create more inclusive customer experiences. Overcome the fear of making mistakes and concentrate on a transparent and authentic way to deal with them when they occur.

Key #2: Engage All Audiences

If you’re still concerned about how best to connect to audiences you haven’t consistently talked to before, this is the section for you. For many years now, the big idea behind CX and EX programs has been to simply gather as much feedback as possible from as many people as possible. However, before turning any listening posts on, you should sit down with your team and design (or reorient) your experience initiatives with your end goals in mind. You must ensure that you give all audiences you want to hear from the opportunity to provide feedback. 

In this case, if your goal is to create more inclusive experiences, you should consider which audiences you need to reach out to and how to do so. This means doing some legwork to find out how those audiences communicate, what their preferences are, and bringing all of those insights to bear when meaningfully improving your experiences to accommodate diversity and inclusion. 

Also, don’t forget: You need the right tool to collect feedback from all audiences as well as to disseminate that information to all members of your organization. Make sure you are using accessibility tools like screen readers, larger font sizes, higher contrasts, etc.

Key #3: Apply What You’ve Learned

You can and should apply the above mindset to any experience goal you have across the entirety of your business. Applying it here will give you the intelligence and landscape map you need to achieve Experience Improvement (XI) for new audiences. 

However, intelligence and roadmaps are only half the battle; taking action is imperative to actually making your experiences more inclusive. The work is ceaseless and oftentimes difficult, but if your team is ready to continue making an effort, you can be assured that the audiences you need to reach will respond.

As you continue to take action on what those audiences tell you, you’ll be able to meaningfully transform your business and realize your goal of a more inclusive experience. Being more inclusive is an invaluable component of marketplace leadership, but it’s also what will set your organization apart from your competitors in your customers’ eyes. The result is a mutually beneficial, meaningfully improved experience that will demonstrate to all your organization’s commitment to diversity and inclusion as well as faster revenue growth and higher profitability.

Click here to learn more about the importance of diverse and inclusive experiences in my full-length point of view article. I take a closer look at the topics explored here and go over a few other best practices you might not have had the chance to read about elsewhere.

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

This isn't your average trends report – read on to see how your business can lead the charge into a new era of CX

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

What the Supply Chain Crisis Means for Your Customer Experience

supply chain crisis and the customer experience

The ongoing global supply chain woes have created massive headaches for both customers and the brands that serve them. One of the many products of lingering COVID uncertainty, the supply chain crisis has resulted in steeper prices, logistics chaos, and a markedly lower supply of everything from video game consoles to garden furniture. Today’s discussion covers three factors brands should be aware of as they consider supply chain issues within the context of customer experience (CX).

3 Supply Chain Crisis Factors to Consider for the Customer Experience

  1. Manufacturing
  2. Logistics
  3. Commodity Prices

Factor #1: Manufacturing

The manufacturing gap is not the only cause of the supply chain’s current state, but it’s certainly one of the most important. As I’m sure you remember during the early days of the pandemic, COVID lockdowns weren’t restricted to offices and restaurants—many manufacturing facilities were also closed due to a combination of quarantine guidelines and falling demand. Now, as the world reawakens after what is hopefully the worst of the pandemic, the manufacturing sector is struggling to match the speed of reemergent customer demand. As a result, many brands find themselves with insufficient stock to actually meet that demand, which poses an obvious threat to customer experience.

Factor #2: Logistics

We’re all hopeful that manufacturing will eventually catch back up to demand, but production capacity is, unfortunately, just one reason the supply chain is currently creaking. The second factor to consider here is logistics, and how both shipping queues and an enduring truck driver shortage are preventing what goods can be manufactured from actually reaching store shelves. Many ships find themselves idling in harbors the world over, which of course increases shipping prices, while the aforementioned driver shortage is an outgrowth of the mass-quitting phenomenon the media have dubbed The Great Recession. Both problems further complicate acquiring stock and providing the experiences that your customers expect.

Factor #3: Commodity Prices

This is a more subtle element than the previous two, but no less important to understanding the supply chain. As it turns out, the higher prices that coffee, sugar, wheat, and other staples command right now aren’t strictly a byproduct of shipping or manufacturing problems. Rather, the reason they’re so high is because, to put it simply, customers bought and cooked with them all while stuck at home! This phenomenon feeds directly into the higher prices you’ve no doubt noticed while grocery shopping, and, of course, brands’ ability to purchase and make use of those same staples for their customers.

How Your Brand Can Respond

The problems I’ve touched on represent significant obstacles for any CX programme. Almost every industry is somehow being affected by the supply chain crisis, and though we all hope that things will improve soon, it’s imperative for your brand to take meaningful action in the meantime. Taking action will help you not just make the best of this problem, but will also help protect your customer experience and to maintain the connective relationships you’ve worked so hard to create. This is what the supply chain crisis means for your brand: action is more important now than ever before.

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The Difference Between Customer Interactions and Customer Experiences

Customer Incentives Customer Experience

Recently, a client asked me what we at Pearl-Plaza thought defines a “customer interaction,” as there had been some debate on the subject within his team. I pondered the subject and brought it back to my colleagues. Quickly, we were asking ourselves not only about the characteristics of an interaction, but beyond that, what falls under the larger umbrella of customer experience? Is there a difference? Today, we’ll be diving deeper into these questions.

What Is a Customer Interaction?

Webster’s defines “interaction” as:

  • Mutual or reciprocal action or influence
  • To act upon one another

From this definition, we see clearly that two or more parties are required for an interaction; for example, a company or brand and a prospect or customer.  

What Is a Customer Experience?

Harley Manning, VP, Research Director at Forrester, once defined customer experience as: How customers perceive their interactions with your company.  He went on to define an interaction as when you and your customers have a two-way exchange.1

Neither Here, Nor There

So what does that mean when a prospect or customer browses your website but does not make a purchase? Or a customer clicks a link in your brand’s email, but does not go any further? According to the definitions above, those are not interactions.  But there are a lot of people in companies working very hard to get these actions to happen (click through rate and time on website/app are very common marketing and ecommerce metrics).  

If they are not interactions, what are they? I would classify them as engagements.  A customer has engaged with your brand, but there was no interaction, because it was only unilateral. Thus, not all engagements are interactions.

And here is where it gets interesting.  If the examples listed above are not interactions, but engagements, are they considered part of your customer experience? You better believe it.  

The Intersection Between Customer Engagements and Customer Experiences

Customer experience is generally held to be the sum of all interactions someone has with your brand and the resulting feelings they have about your brand. But are experiences limited to interactions or engagements? Do customers have to interact with your people, products, services, or digital properties for their engagement to fall under customer experience?  

Today, a company’s policies regarding diversity and inclusion, for example, or the politics, causes, and charities they choose to support have an impact on people’s feelings about the brand. I would argue that these are part of the customer experience as well.  There are prospects out there that will choose to never do business with your company based on these issues and other customers who become more loyal for the same reasons.

Returning to the Question

To return to the original question, I would like to suggest that customer interactions and customer experience are concentric circles. An interaction is a subset of engagement, which in turn is a subset of experience.

Customer Experience versus Customer Engagement vs customer Interactions

And companies have to be attentive to all of the ways customers experience their brands, products, and services. Whether or not an engagement ever advances to the level of interaction is an integral piece of the CX puzzle.

Want to hear more from Eric about customer interactions, engagements, and experiences? Stay tuned for the next post in the series!

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3 Ways Financial Services Customers Are Changing—and How Brands Should Adapt

Financial Services Customers

Technology factors into customers’ changing wants and needs across many industries—especially in the financial services (finserv) world. We’ve noticed a lot of big changes in this sector just in the last few years, which means that banks like yours need to keep up in ways that are meaningful to your customers. Customer experience (CX) programs are a big help here; so too is human expertise that can guide your program goals. With that expertise in mind, here are three major ways we’re noticing how financial services customers are changing and why it matters!

3 Ways Financial Services Customers Are Changing

  • Key #1: Accept the Difficulty of Long-Term Client Maturity
  • Key #2: Finance as A Lifestyle Choice
  • Key #3: The Search for Meaning and Shared Values

Key #1: Accept the Difficulty of Long-Term Client Maturity

One of the biggest changes traditional banks are seeing is that it’s suddenly much harder to mature customers as long-term financial clients. There are two causes at play here: the first is that digitally savvy customers are constantly comparing your bank to the competition. The internet has made it easy to constantly compare brands, which is why customers may up and leave your attempts at long-term client relationships the minute they feel another bank is better.

The other factor, of course, is the rise of small but incredibly agile challenger institutions, which is the bucket that things like financial apps fall into. These challenger brands benefit from being able to offer customers quick, one-stop financial products that many larger banks simply haven’t developed yet, which has changed customers’ perceptions of what a financial product or service should be. The first step to staying ahead of this curve is to accept this paradigm shift.

Key #2: Finance as a Lifestyle Choice

Customers enjoy financial apps for their speed and lower prices, but there’s another element that these challenger brands have tapped into: the idea of specific financial lifestyles. A lot of larger, older banks see selling financial products as just that: a sale. However, the game has changed. More customers than ever before see financial products in a lifestyle sense, not just a monetary one. They want something that speaks specifically to their lifestyle identity, which means that banks must provide.

Turn to your CX program to see what customers are saying about your bank within this context. Understand what they find valuable about the products and services they provide, then think of ways to make your offering more personable. Capital One, for example, leveraged this process to create its novel Capital One Cafes, having learned that this was a feature that would make their brand more personable. Figuring out how to make your own brand more personable will make customers see you as a lifestyle institution, not ‘just’ a banking one.

Key #3: The Search for Meaning and Shared Values

We’ve discussed how finserv customers are constantly looking for the perfect bank, as well as how brands across the financial world must constantly strive to make themselves personable to those customers. This idea of a constantly perfect fit taps into something more fundamental than competing on price or turning your bank into a cafe: the notion of Experience Improvement (XI) and its vital importance to building mutually successful relationships with customers.

The truth is that, even though customers are much harder to retain than they used to be, they’re still looking for the brand whom they feel knows them as people. Couple that with the fact that these smaller challenger brands tend to focus much more on individual transactions than long-term relationships, and the result is an opportunity for larger banks to compete on customers’ search for meaning. This means creating a CX program tied to specific financial goals, uniting customer data from across your organization, and executing on that intel in a way customers will appreciate. This will allow you to build meaningful relationships in a way that challenger apps cannot while retaining and strengthening your book of business.

Click here to learn more about how the finserv customer has changed and what your bank can do to not just stay ahead, but thrive in this digital age. Senior Vice President Ashley Goode takes a magnifying glass to all the changes we’ve seen in recent years and how your brand can succeed with Experience Improvement!

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