28 Insights from the 2018 Customer Experience Conference

November 16, 2018 | Article

“Businesses often forget about the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can’t deliver good service from unhappy employees.”

Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO, Zappos

“People don’t always remember what you say or even what you do, but they always remember how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou, poet and author

The Data, Culture, and Innovation Driving Extraordinary Customer Journeys

Customer experience is about building trust and you build that trust through the experiences you create. Your customers are human and have emotions, so the best way to differentiate yourself is to create an experience that connects with those emotions, regardless of what industry you’re in. There is no one-size-fits-all way of doing this—each company needs to create its own strategy based on culture, business objectives, and empowering employees to serve customers in an individual way. Getting the entire company to operate this way will take a lot of planning, a change management approach, and collaboration between the sales, marketing, HR, corporate communications, engineering, finance, operations, and customer service departments.

When 112 practitioners and experts met to talk about customer experience, we took notes. Here are the highlights:

Find out where your customers’ biggest pain points are and what they really want.

Talk to both employees and customers when looking for ways to improve the customer experience. Create an online community to see what customers want and ask front-line employees what problems customers encounter the most. Also ask front-line employees how the company can help them do their jobs better. They may also have great service ideas that require little to no investment.
Get to the root cause of a problem. For example, if customers complain about long lines in a store, ask: Why are there so many people in line? Is the store too crowded? Do you have enough staff? Is staff adequately trained? Or is it something else, like customers complaining to cashiers? If so, what are they complaining about? Are they all complaining about the same things?
Get to know different segments of customers and

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