It’s been two weeks since we’ve returned from New Orleans where we connected with over 300 other customer experience professionals at the 2018 CXPA Insight Exchange. The overarching theme during this two day event was to create business value – something that we really relate to at Nepa.

A keynote delivered by Graham Tuttom from Comcast was a great start to the two day immersion into CX. He is no stranger to these events and his experience in CX is impressive. His philosophy is that organizations should think of CX as their best product. According to him, the holy grail of CX is having all business units behave as a team and employees that are empowered to empathize with customers. This makes CX part of the company culture and employees feel like owners. At Nepa we agree that our mission as CX professionals is to create tools that provide information and opportunities for empowerment. For the majority of the organization, CX is a strange and complex animal, it’s our job to make it more approachable with better tools and technology.

Another great talk by Bruce Temkin of Temkin Group, was a state of the union address for the CX Industry. Titled Past, Present, Future of CX(PA) he expounded where the CX profession is heading and stressed four principles for making CXPA grow within a well managed organization:

● Focus on people

● Connect CX to business and brand

● Stay positive and passionate

● Support our collective community

His main point was that we as CX professionals have a great opportunity to take our rightful place at the C-level discussions, but in order to achieve that goal we need to continue to push our industry forward by following the four principles.

If you were at CXPA to meet new partners, you were in the right spot. It was a who’s who of vendors providing a broad array of services from CX design to Customer Service solutions, to CX feedback platforms. It was great to see many complementary solutions that we use as inputs in our CX analytics applications. If you felt a little overwhelmed by the number of partners, drop us a line – we’ve worked with many and are happy to share our experiences.

The most valuable takeaways came from the opportunities we had to exchange ideas with other CX professionals during shorter round table discussions and one-to-ones. In smaller groups, we explored a diverse range of subjects from creating a CX cultural change to the growth trends in the industry to methods on how to calculate ROI on CX investments. In discussions with our fellow CX professionals, we sense a budding optimism that organizations are realizing how important CX is for future business success, but with attention comes expectations.

A CX professional needs a diverse set of skills: change management, business development, analytics, technology, story telling, financial, design etc…the list goes on. We need to understand how to improve the experience and drive business efficiently. Are CX professionals the birth grounds for future CEO’s?

We can talk CX all day. Have a question? Email us at sales.us@nepa.com.

As Customer Experience (CX) professionals gather in New Orleans for the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) 2018 Insight Exchange, I’m still reflecting on key themes from the recent CX Next 2018 conference in Boston. This exclusive event, which Nepa was honored to Chair, featured heavyweight CX thought leaders and a great roster of practitioners. Here’s what still resonating two weeks later:

Empathy is the bedrock of Customer Experience

Understanding and embracing customers’ needs and their context is the basis for delivering great experiences. Katherine Deschene of Steward Healthcare preaches that hospital staff must first connect with the patient before completing the task. Marijke Maartense from Philips Healthcare doubled-down on this point with an insightful talk about how to keep it human amidst a sea of technology and digitization.

CX professionals have an obligation to help every person in the organization understand their customers and their context. CX Author & Thought Leader, Kerry Bodine, introduced a bold vision for moving from orchestrated experiences to emergent experiences, guided more by simple principles or rules than a detailed playbook. Kerry borrows the concept from emergent properties in the natural order, best exemplified by the beautiful formations of starling flocks. Every employee in your company should act as individual starlings do –  following a simple set of shared rules – to create beautiful customer experiences. Companies that are already doing this, like Zappos.com and Southwest Airlines, are already reaping the customer retention benefits.

Delivering on Customer Experience is heavy lifting

While empathizing with customers and having a vision for better experiences is the starting point, there is a lot of nuts-and-bolts work behind the scenes to make improvements a reality.

Dave Hodgman, Digital Transformation Strategist at Comcast, shared what goes into meeting his team’s goal of having customers spend less time on routine service requests (like paying a bill or changing a plan). Enabling new experiences for customers requires applying a deep understanding of available tools, data management systems, and corporate policies to customer needs. And, creating new experiences is not enough – CX professionals need to drive the customer adoption of new service methods. This work requires collaboration across many groups at Comcast, and without it, dreams of better experiences would not become reality.

Customer Experience Professionals need to learn a new language

The standard measurements for Customer Experience success – C-SAT, NPS, Customer Effort Score – are no longer sufficient to gain the commitment of executives. The essential metric of business is money, and we must point to financial results – including increased revenue and decreased costs – to earn the investment required to deliver better customer experiences.

Diane Magers, CXPA CEO, hammered this point in “Building and Executing a CX Strategy in an ROI Driven World”, a workshop on mapping techniques that lead you to the business value of a strategy. Diane cited an example of a CX professional who delivered on their goal of improving NPS. The program was then closed, in favor of other investments that visibly demonstrated cost savings and/or increased revenue.

The good news for CX professionals is there are many opportunities to demonstrate how their strategies and programs are driving bottom line results. There are also new ways to translate your CX measurements into financial values – a topic that I spoke on in my “Level up Your CX Measurement” presentation. The key is to link each aspect of customers’ experience to its financial impact on company financials, which both validates the current impact and enables further optimization. It’s all available in our Cultivating Customer Experience Measurement eBook.

I’d like to thank Knect365 for organizing this great event and for asking Nepa to chair this gathering of CX professionals. Look forward to next year!