PHOTO:
Dom Nicastro
Customer experience practitioners have a lot to think about.
Customer experience and employee experience are related. For successful outcomes, contact center managers need the right tools and processes. The contact center has agents in it. Making remote work for customer support staffs. Organizational leaders can be persuaded to allow changes in digital customer experiences despite their old ways of doing things.
This week at the Forrester CX North America conference here at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, practitioners shared insights with us, and that is only a small part of the feedback they gave.
They think about how can they be true revenue drivers that are tied to organizational outcomes and convince senior leaders their existence matters beyond a slide with improving NPS.
Forrester senior analyst Judy Weader said in a video interview that beacon metrics can be useful for providing at least one sense of the perception that customers have of their experience. If you can’t connect that to things like whether customers are going to stay with you, whether they’re going to buy more from you, or whether they’re going to advocate for you, then it’s not worth doing. The numbers speak for themselves, especially to executives who are gold on this, and to shareholders who are making their purchase decisions based on it.
It’s important to focus on the things that matter to the organization. It doesn’t mean that you give up on your customers. It means that when you think about how those things are connected, you tell that story.
What are the thoughts of the customer experience practitioners and those who help them craft these experiences? This week we heard in Nashville.
Supporting CX Operations of the Future
April Viola, manager of business strategy who supports customer experience across the Discover financial services organization, is focusing lately on operations: how internally CX stakeholders are enabled to produce great customer experiences, no matter where they do the work.
When thinking about operations for the future, there are so many important pieces that you should think about. It is no longer bound by the walls of the call center. Intelligence to understand what those important factors are is what I’m hoping to gain from this conference. That expands culture, technology, employee retention, all of those components, so that we can ideate on what we need to do in order to get us there.
She wants to look at the next five to 10 years from a customer experience agent perspective. What will the operations look like?
The way we interact with our customers and employees is different. What’s the technology we need? We don’t get to see our customers and interact with them the way we used to, so what is important to our employees? How do we make our employees feel like they’re part of our culture even though they’re not in the place where we once held our culture?
Customer experience professionals enjoy being at home. They are balancing more being at home than when they were in the office. She said that it’s more than just helping an employee understand how to do the work. It’s helping employees understand how to balance their work with home priorities, how to stay mentally equipped to deal with the more challenging conversations that they’re having with customers, when they call in or go into digital channels, and so on.
While our customers are expecting more, our employees are more relaxed at work. How do we support them? How do we help them balance?
Providing customer experience in times of crisis is something that has been done before.
Data, Insights Fuel Better Patient Experiences
The healthcare professionals face many challenges. There were challenges prior to 2020. You have an extraordinary set of challenges when it comes to patient care and patient experience.
Piedmont Healthcare, an Atlanta-based healthcare system that employs about 37,000 and cares for 3.4 million patients across 1,400 locations, has a director of insights and analytics named Bennett Lee.
Lee leads a team that is focused on gathering patient insights to better improve in-person and digital experiences at Piedmont healthcare properties. How comfortable are you coming into our practice? What level of confidence do you have with the vaccine? When it comes to vaccines, what is the source of truth? What do you want your patient portal to do?
Gathering data and insights, inform internal clinical and other staff, and improve experience are all part of the formula. Customers told them they wanted to be able to schedule appointments directly from their patient portal.
It would be easy to make the changes. Even though data collected directly from patients supports changes, staff still have challenges persuading them.
Data, insights, customer experience, employee experience, and, yes, change management, are some of the things that are included in the world of aCX practitioners. A customer experience professional needs to know how to run a business. Internal communications design employee experience surveys can be helped by Lee’s team.
Lee said that if it’s not aligned, you can not better serve your customers. That’s what’s happening in the healthcare industry Everyone has heard about the staffing issue. It was hard to get nurses during the Pandemic.
Piedmont and customer experience will be the next big task. Its website needs to be updated.
The offline experience can’t be separated from the digital experience. The core strength of Piedmont is not on our website. We see a lot of bounce-back on the web, so we want to improve it. Many people get lost in our website and we need more conversions on it. Another key project that we are focusing on is that.
Empowering Creative Juices in New Working World
Krupa Shah, senior managing consultant for IBM iX discussed the real challenges of working from home in a work-from- home environment. She said that marketing professionals had to use technology to manage their priorities, and that they had to align their work with their needs.
Shah said, “You’re no longer in a studio, you’re no longer creating that brochure, you’re no longer taking that photo the way you used to.” A lot of it is centered around inefficient processes coming to the surface, inefficient workflows and a lack of communication between work being done at an organization and how work is being managed at an organization.
They are still trying to ensure that they are working on the right things with the right priorities for their organizations.
Receive great content like this in your inbox.
You are agreeing to SMG/CMSWire’s privacy policy when you submit this form.
You can join the community by sending an email.
Do we have the processes in place to make us successful, productive and happy? Shah made a comment. How do you keep the work productive? What can you do to increase employee satisfaction? It is possible for experience to be personalized across partners and employees.
Identifying the right balance of products and platforms is one of the main challenges that we have right now.
If Bad Customer Experience Was a Hit Country Song…
Can Customer Experience and Employee Experience Work Together?
Patrick Gibbons, principal, senior VP of marketing and experience management for Walker, said it’s no longer possible to think about customer experience without employee experience. It is important to design a good employee experience and a good customer experience so that they affect each other. He said that no customer experience would be successful without the cooperation of employees.
He said that employee experience leaders should meet on a quarterly basis They can still do their own things. When they compare their data, they’re going to find areas where they’re going to find customer issues that are related to employee issues, and that’s where it becomes valuable because it tells you here are the things we should be doing.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be obstacles in the way of connecting customer and employee experiences. Two departments within an organization are traditionally very split, according to Gibbons. You have both marketing and human resources on one side of the equation.
They can be stuck in their ways, and sometimes they are not in the same building or the same city. Gibbons said that they live by the slogan that creating strong employee experiences means “my customers will have a good experience”.
