Customer Experience University - Winning Loyalty & Engagement One Customer at a Time

Embrace Ambiguity, Failure, and Fun | Mindset & Agility – The Rocket Fuel for Customer Experience Success

In A Whack on the Side of the Head, Roger suggests that clarity is essential for communication but can be limiting when it comes to ideation. In essence, when we don't embrace the multi-faceted nature of problems we often rush to simple and incomplete solutions (typically selecting the first logical solution that comes to mind). Similarly, Roger believes that errors "are a sign that you are diverging from the well-traveled path" since an error can be "a stepping-stone to some new idea you might not have otherwise discovered." He goes onto suggest that you must "strengthen your 'risk muscle.' Everyone has one, but you have to exercise it, or else it will atrophy. Make it a point to take at least one risk every twenty-four hours." Routinely, I help leadership teams enter a playful and safe ideation space before we tackle serious customer experience challenges. In what ways do you and your team embrace ambiguity?

There’s More than One Way | Mindset & Agility – The Rocket Fuel for Customer Experience Success

In 1983, while pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California, I got a creative nudge from the book A Whack on the Side of the Head – How You Can Be More Creative. The book's author, Roger von Oech (who received his Ph.D. from Stanford in the history of ideas and creativity), offered keen insights which were foundational to professor Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset and professor Warner Burke's research on learning agility. Since customer experience elevation requires flexibility, creativity, and adaptivity, this series of posts will cover the work of Drs. von Oech, Dweck, and Burke and will start with three of von Oech's ten mental locks, which he says are hazardous to creative thinking.

World-Class CX Leaders | Storytelling – It‘s Worth its Weight in Gold…and Diamonds

Recently, I have been asked to highlight companies that demonstrate breakthrough (CX) customer experience innovation. So, before I launch into another series, I'll highlight a world-class CX leader named Zameer Kassam Fine Jewelry. As you may know, the Manhattan-based jeweler serves upscale clients across the globe who are looking for custom-designed jewelry, especially engagement rings or other items that celebrate a milestone. The CX superpower for Zameer Kassam is storytelling. How are you helping your customer create the story they will share about your product or service?

Deliver 5 Levels of Value | Team Member and Customer Experience Value

Fairly early in my career, I was fortunate to happen upon customer value theories and research conducted by Professors Sheth, Newman, and Gross. In their book, Consumption Values and Market Choices – Theory and Application, these authors reviewed more than 200 studies on customer value. The book is a rich resource on what drives customer choice, ways to inquire about customer value and data analytic approaches to consumer preferences. I will highlight the core tenets of the theory expressed and tested by these researchers and outline five types of consumer value.
Read more at https://www.josephmichelli.com/blog/levels-of-value/.

Find the Value in the Data | Team Member and Customer Experience Value

his is the sixth and final post in a series titled "Team Member and Customer Experience Value."
In my recently released book Stronger Through Adversity, Natasha Hritzuk the Vice President and Head of Consumer Insights at WarnerMedia Entertainment shared the challenges leaders can face when mining consumer insights to understand value drivers – especially in the context of a pandemic. According to Natasha, “In the first two months of our journey with COVID-19, we were concerned about a consumer survey being unwelcomed and receiving a low response rate. So, we initially engaged people in ways that were a bit unusual for us—through online focus groups and ethnography [descriptive or immersive studies using tools like customer journals]—before we returned to a survey approach.”
How would you rate your ability to drive customer success by using customer analytics at scale through formal listening?

It’s Not What You Value | Team Member and Customer Experience Value

I believe that even greater customer value comes from moving from services to experiences (rather than from products to services). I also believe physical and digital service experiences are not mutually exclusive. In other words, service is table stakes in the value equation of most customers, and well-designed branded, emotionally enveloping experiences are differentiators. Further, the future success of a business depends on a shift to digital self-serve bolstered by elevated human experience delivery – not a choice of digital versus physical.
For more about the role of value creation in the future of customer experience success, please pick up or gift a copy of my book Stronger Through Adversity or you can download one of my complimentary eBooks including one I just wrote about Stronger Through Adversity.

Think Efficiency and Effectiveness | Team Member and Customer Experience Value

Writing for the online magazine Simplicable, technologist John Spacey defines value creation as “any process that creates outputs that are more valuable than its inputs.
For me, customer value often is more a function of reducing clutter as opposed to increasing complexity. Clutter removal often involves streamlining cumbersome processes that hamper value delivery.
For more about the role of value creation in the future of customer experience success, please pick-up or gift a copy of my book Stronger Through Adversity or you can download one of my many complimentary eBooks including one I just wrote about Stronger Through Adversity. You can do that by visiting josephmichelli.com.

It’s Not About Price. It’s About Perceived Value. | Team Member and Customer Experience Value

For the sake of example, let’s assume you purchased a beverage and you pay full price for it. Let’s further assume you received half as much of that beverage as you usually do for that price. You likely will perceive the transaction as having been 50% less valuable to you even though the price was the same as normal. Since perceptions of value are affected by far more than the quantity of an item a customer receives, experience designers seek to drive perceived value across a range of dimensions like product quality, environmental aesthetics, service consistency, and even the gratitude of the provider.
The ultimate goal of this approach is to leverage research on perceived equity to produce customers who will refer your business to others. Equity research has shown that to optimally drive loyalty customers should feel they received slightly more value than they paid for. If they receive less value than they paid for they feel cheated. If they received value commensurate with what they paid, they feel satisfied but they are vulnerable to churn. If they receive far more value than what they paid for they often lose respect for the provider and fear the company will go out of business. So, the optimal end state is to give slightly more value than your customers expect.

What‘s Value Got to Do With It | Team Member and Customer Experience Value

How do you create value for team members and customers? In Stronger Through Adversity, Amir Dan Rubin, Chair and CEO of One Medical, discussed how he adjusted value drivers in response to the pandemic. For more about the role of value creation in the future of customer experience success, please pick-up or gift a copy of my book Stronger Through Adversity or download one of my many complimentary eBooks at josephmichelli.com.

Make it Simpler & Less Cluttered

According to retired four-star general Colin Powell, “Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.” I would argue extraordinary customer experience brands are also great simplifiers.
This is the fifth and final post in a series titled "How to Deliver Memorable Experiences in a Pandemic and Post-Pandemic World."
In the midst of all that confusion, team members and customers rushed toward leaders and brands that simplified their experiences and made their lives as easy as possible. In Stronger through Adversity, Ben Salzmann, President & CEO of Acuity Insurance offered insights on how to simplify the employee and customer experience by effectively leveraging technology and empowering team members through training.
Have you looked at your customer experience and sought to remove complexity, corporate-speak, and unnecessary steps?