This Is Cx

In this episode, Mike and Paul are once again joined by Kyle Hutchins, Senior Director and leader of WMP's Digital practice, and Nick Hahn, Director in WMP's Digital practice, to discuss CX's impact on an organization's digital transformation efforts. During this conversation, the group discusses the need to be a "capabilities-led" organization that puts the customer journey at the heart of the business, including potential overlap or alignment with CX capabilities, to make digital transformation successful. The conversation wraps up with a couple of key takeaways for CX leaders to fully support (or lead) their organizations' digital transformation efforts.

In this episode, Mike and Paul and joined by Kyle Hutchins, Senior Director and leader of WMP’s Digital practice, and Nick Hahn, Director in WMP’s Digital practice, to discuss CX’s impact on an organization’s digital transformation efforts. During the conversation, the group talks about how organizations create new value for customers within rapidly changing environments (thanks to digital enablement), key tips for success, which issues trip companies up in their transformation efforts, potential organizational structures that manage these large transformations (including CX leadership roles), and how to get started within the organization.

In this episode, Paul and Mike welcome back their colleague John Sprunger, Senior Architect in West Monroe Partners' Technology practice, to give us an update on three key emerging technologies that were highlighted last year as opportunities for CX professionals to support or lead experimentation efforts to improve the customer experience for their organization, including: Conversational Interfaces (chat bots), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and Machine Learning (ML).

In this episode, Paul and Mike discuss five key trends they see impacting the CX world in 2019 with which CX Professionals should be considering for their own organizations and profession, including experimenting with new technology, the consolidation of the CX Tech space, focus on value creation to avoid CX's demise, CX's place in recession-proofing your business, and the continued focus on linking Employee Experience and Customer Experience. Paul and Mike would like to thank all of their listeners for following along in 2018, and look forward to picking back up in 2019. Have a wonderful holiday season!

In this episode, Mike and Paul are joined by Kayvon Hosseini, a Blockchain expert at West Monroe. We explore what Blockchain is, what it means for customer experience leaders, how firms are getting started with it and the opportunities for CX pros to ensure the needs of customers/employees are met.

In this holiday-themed episode, Paul and Mike discuss the importance of organizations showing their thankfulness for customers (i.e. no customers = no business) and the different ways this is done by CX leaders. They also highlight the importance of organizations thanking their employees, as they drive key experiences for customers.

In this episode, Mike and Paul discuss some troubling statistics about the customer experience field that threaten its future. They discuss the business failure to realize financial benefit or differentiation through customer-centric transformations, the reasons for this lack of success, what it means for CX professionals and business executives, and what organizations can do to fix the problems.

In this episode, Mike and Paul talk about some key challenges organizations face in broadly taking action on customer insights that organizations identify. They discuss changing behavior by making insights more approachable and integrated in employee tools and daily activities to enable real-time decisions based on customer data, while avoiding the dreaded score-chasing culture mistake.

In this episode, Mike and Paul are joined by Eric Freshour, a Senior Manager in West Monroe’s Organizational Change Management practice, to discuss the role of employee engagement in the success of large-scale customer-centric transformations and the importance of a Voice of the Employee capability to have a pulse on the thoughts and emotions of your employees.

In this episode, Paul and Mike talk about the intersection of Customer Experience and an emerging role called Customer Success. They talk about what it is, why it’s important to businesses, and how it relates back to customer experience. During this discussion, Paul and Mike talk about how these two functions within the organization can work together and learn from each other to help the organization deliver a positive customer experience and build longer, more loyal relationships with their customers ( with some key statistics) by ensuring their success when using an organization’s product or service. They also suggest to CX leaders outside of the B2B tech industry to borrow ideas from this new set of practices.

In this episode, Mike and Paul are joined by colleague Alex Foucre-Stimes, a Manager in West Monroe’s Customer Experience practice, to discuss the use of the same human-centered design tools we use to improve customer experiences - including personas, journey maps, “customer” research, etc. - to ensure success in improving employee experiences from recruitment and onboarding through technology initiatives (e.g., employee collaboration or portal platforms, Microsoft Office 365, CRM, and core business platforms).

In this special “CX Day” episode, Mike and Paul are joined by special guest Heidi Shelton – Senior Director, User Experience at SEPHORA – to discuss the evolution of her career focus from “user experience” to “experience design and optimization” while helping transform large organizations into becoming more customer and employee centric, and highlighting the impact that a better employee experience has on delivering a better customer experience.

In this episode, Mike and Paul discuss employee experience: what it is, what it means for organizations, and its impact on customer experience. There are a number of terms out there related to EX (employee engagement, experience, empowerment, etc.), and we discuss how they are the same and not, and how companies can start to address EX efforts within their organization.

In this episode, Mike and Paul discuss business-to-business, or B2B, customer experience (and B2B2C or other business models) and the impact of individuals' B2C customer experiences on it. As part of this discussion, they discuss the similarities and differences across the core CX competencies (strategy, customer understanding, governance, measurement, and delivery), including the different challenges these B2B organization face.

In this episode, Mike and Paul discuss the CX Operating Model: what it is, why an organization needs one, and the components that are required to build one. During their discussion, they talk about the purposed of the Operating Model (the "charter"), how the operating model helps make the organization's CX North Star real, the people and structure of the CX function, the processes required to make decisions (governance), metrics to show success, and core tools for the CX Operating Model.

In this episode, Mike and Paul are joined by John Sprunger, a Senior Manager in West Monroe's Technology practice to talk about Augmented Reality - what it is, why it's valuable, how to get started, and what challenges exist, ultimately discussing the potential impact on CX by delivering new experiences via Augmented Reality.

In this episode, Mike and Paul revisit the topic of Business Agility, the advantage it can provide organizations when done properly, and the role CX leaders and functions can play in driving agility within organizations. They discuss some of the results identified from research completed by West Monroe Partners and the CXPA, including what are top challenges for achieving more business agility, who is leading these initiatives within organizations, and top reasons and tools that make CX Leaders successful in leading these initiatives within organizations.

In this episode, Mike and Paul welcome Mike Rowland, a Director in WMP's CX Practice and leader of the CX Strategy team, to discuss a broader CX Measurement Framework to demonstrate the value that CX can deliver to an organization and its customers. We recap what CX Measurement is and how using the "Balance Scorecard" framework to measure the perception of CX, Employee Empowerment, and Operational Efficiencies, and Financial Outcomes and provide the appropriate "balance" when managing Customer Experience within an organization to deliver value. We also discuss that value of "hallway metrics" and the future of CX measurement.

In this episode, Mike and Paul are joined by Mark Snyder, a Senior Manager in West Monroe's Operation Excellence practice to talk about Robotics Process Automation - what it is, why it's important, and its impact on an organization's ability to deliver a great customer experience. Mark highlights some of the key challenges that organizations are facing while implementing RPA, including a discussion around the impact of automation to employees.

In this episode, Mike and Paul are joined by John Sprunger, a Senior Manager in West Monroe's Technology practice to talk about Conversational Interfaces and Chatbots - what they are, why they're valuable, how to get started, what challenges exist. At the end, we talk about the potential impact on CX of talking to machines, instead of humans, and the ability to deliver a great experience to customers.