This Is Cx

In this episode, Mike and Paul "gaze into the CX crystal ball" and talk about some trends they're seeing in the market and its impact on customer experience, including chatbots and conversational interfaces, robotics, augmented reality, and the like.

In this episode, Mike and Paul are once again joined by Dan Magestro from West Monroe's Analytics practice to discuss "journey analytics", including the value of using data to help personalize customers' experiences with organizations by measuring and understanding the current experience and predicting and prescribing "next best actions" within experiences to deliver a more effortless experience.

In this special 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 and times this is done by CX leaders, from highlighting customer success to gamification. They also highlight the importance of organizations thanking their employees, as they drive key experiences for customers.

In this episode, Paul and Mike are joined by Jamie Fishman, an Experienced Consultant in West Monroe's Advanced Analytics practice, to talk about how organizations use Descriptive Analytics to better under their customers, including who they are, what behaviors they show, and what drives their experience. Jamie and Paul walk through the analytical analysis to begin segmenting customers based on the data that companies have about their customers and some of the challenges organizations have when trying to complete this type of analysis.

In this episode, Mike is joined by Dan Magestro, Senior Manager in West Monroe Partners' Advanced Analytics practice, to talk about the Enterprise Analytics Landscape required to support data-driven CX. In our discussion, Dan walks us through some of the core components of the Enterprise Analytics Landscape, including the importance of having an articulated strategy around data and analytics within the organization, the right leadership and governance, and a foundational set of capabilities and technology to shift an organization towards a "data-driven" organization.

In this episode, Paul and Mike introduce the first episode of our "Customer Experience and Data Analytics" series, in which we discuss some of the reasons why organizations are looking to leverage the data that they have to ultimately provide a better experience with more value to their customers. We discuss the three high-level types of analytics that organizations can use to deliver insights, including Descriptive, Predictive, and Prescriptive Analytics. We start off our episode by discussing the value (or maybe lack there of) in measuring customer experience through the use of emojis.

In our sixteenth episode, we are joined by West Monroe’s Organizational Change Management West Coast SME Bill Kirst. We dive into the world of managing large transformational change within organizations, discussing different tools that can be used to help increase the overall success of these change initiatives – including CX transformations. During our conversation, we discuss how empathy is a crucial tool to be used to understand both the customer and the employee during these activities, and how poor communication can lead to break-downs in successfully managing change. You can find more content from Bill on his podcast, “Coffee and Change”, which can be found through the West Monroe Partners’ Blog site or found at https://soundcloud.com/bill-kirst.

In our fifteenth episode, we begin exploring the importance of building a customer-centric culture to ensure a successful customer experience transformation, including how organizations define roles and responsibilities, hiring employees, training employees, and communicating to employees through a customer-centric lens. We also discuss how culture grows out of the CX governance structure that is initially implemented when an organization begins its CX journey.

In this episode, we continue our discussion about CX Governance and talk about the various leaders/sponsors of CX within organizations, specifically diving into the role and responsibilities of Chief Customer Officers (or CCOs, or Chief Experience Officers, or any number of titles by which they go by). We also explore the different types of CX organizations that they head within organizations to drive CX, including three different ways in which they are structured.

In our thirteenth episode, we discuss the framework of CX governance, specifically the different People, Processes, and Technology needed to manage customer experience within an organization through accountability. During the conversation, we highlight CX steering committees, their function within the governance structure, their make-up, and their role in decision making. We also talk about the role of governance vs. the role of culture over the course of an organization’s CX transformation. We wrap up our conversation talking about CX project portfolio to help organization understand what and where they need to invest in CX.

In our twelfth episode, we dive into a discussion around business agility and innovation, what it is, why its important for companies to begin adopting this model, some first steps that can be taken to make the changes, and how these concepts support organizations' customer experience transformations. As part of this discussion, we talk about a recent article about Amazon's CEO describing how its most popular feature was not something asked for by customers, and highlight some different innovation design toolkits that are publicly available.

In our eleventh episode, we discuss the art of the survey, CX professionals go-to tool to begin measuring customer experience, specifically to understand what makes up a good survey and how we can start to reduce the dreaded survey-fatigue. In addition, we chat a little bit about some of the issues United has dealt with and talk about text analytic tools to help analyze surveys.

In our tenth episode, we begin exploring the foundational Voice of the Customer capability, including what it is, why it’s important, how to build a program for it (including our "LARA" framework), and how to take action based on the feedback. We wrap up by talking about Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) tools to help execute VoC programs.

In our ninth episode, we discuss how organizations can begin measuring CX, or the customers’ "perception" of experiences with an organization, including the different types and levels of metrics. We also talk about the "unintended consequences" that result when redesigning experiences through the newer Starbucks mobile ordering experience. We finish by talking about CX Scorecards as our tool of the week.

In our eighth episode, we conclude our two-part series focusing on customer journey mapping by talking about the different uses of journey mapping, including making strategic business decisions and executing organizational CX governance. We also talk about how we use journey mapping to identify key metrics used to measure CX, and the future of journey mapping.

In our seventh episode, we begin a two-part series focusing on customer journey mapping, a key tool use by CX professionals, including the different ways we use journey maps to help organizations understand their current experiences and begin designing future experiences. We also comment on some of the mergers and acquisition activities and its impact on customer experience for Virgin America, and talk about customer "jobs to be done" to help organizations understand what customers are actually trying to do by using their products and services.

In our sixth episode, we discuss ways to tie customer experience back to a quantifiable ROI, and the components necessary for building a successful CX business case. We also discuss some of the behavioral economic theories behind recent events with Uber in our "CX in the News" segment.

In our fifth episode, we take some time exploring one of our primary customer research tools, customer personas, including what it is and our methodologies for developing them - both quantitatively and qualitatively. We also highlight who we follow and what we read to keep up the latest CX happenings, and talk about how companies can gather customer feedback through our "CX Tool of the Week" highlight of "customer diaries".

In our fourth episode, we have our first guest host - Pat McClure, Principal in West Monroe Partners CX Strategy practice - to help us talk about Customer Research Methods, what they are, how they can be used, and talks about our "Triangle of Truth" POV. We return to our "CX in the News" segment to talk about Nordstrom and the perception challenges they've recently faced, and highlight the importance of using "observations" in our "CX Tool of the Week" segment.

In our third episode, we explore the different core CX competencies that organizations need to build within to ensure overall success of the CX programs, including Strategy, Design, Measurement, Governance, and Customer-centric Culture. We talk about some of our daily experiences through the use of "clues", and we highlight maturity models as our CX Tool of the Week.