We are witnessing history being made. In this age where a pandemic has taken over almost all functional units of the world, it is truly remarkable to see how well companies are managing their affairs. I have browsed through a healthy portion of CX blogs to shortlist the top 5 CX blog posts from April 2021, and I can confidently claim that almost all of them were packed with savvy information.
But, to keep you interested in the CX arena without boring you, I have picked out my five favorite posts. I have discussed the gist of each post. I have also attached a link so you can further explore each post in depth. So, let us get started!
1. Learning from the Customer Experience Gurus Themselves
Over the course of years, I have come across many CX blog posts that are structured on the mere understanding of the overarching concept of delivering seamless customer service. But what caught my eye while I was reading this riveting post, written remarkably by the expert herself, Jeanne Bliss, was that it was a compilation of the most insightful advice of well-reputed customer experience leaders.
Firstly, she shares the lesson taught by Chip R. Bell. He emphasized how crucial the element of truthfulness is in building trust between the organization and the customers. He talked about how cultivating a transparent environment in the organization exudes safety and fairness. It develops a culture where customers can easily depend on the organization.
Next, she mentioned how Joseph Michelli harnesses change. She quoted Joseph on how change is an irrevocable and inevitable constant that will happen. The appetite of customers will change, and they will crave something new, and more delicious. And that is where the CX leaders need to learn, how to harness the power of technology and use it to their benefit.
Then she discusses the insights of Jay Baer. Jay explores a very rare but crucial perspective that precludes prospective customers from delving into a long-term commitment with firms. He outlines how companies only reward their loyal customers by giving rewards and engaging them in clubs. But people who are not their customers yet, are blatantly ignored.
Finally, she discusses Adrian Swinscoe’s views. He compares customer service to a sports team and referred to customers as players. He said that a good and considerate coach keeps a check on all players and makes sure that everyone is interested in playing the game.
2. Are Emotional Metrics the Best Measure of Actual Customer Loyalty?
Many brands have laid great focus on the conventional behavioral metric, they have spent ages trying to perfect these metrics to comprehend, track, and analyze the behavior of customers to deliver precisely what they seek.
But in this post, Mary Pilecki proposes a thought-provoking question; can emotional loyalty metrics be used to measure customers’ actual loyalty? She also discusses the convincing reasons to answer this question.
She raises an important point that both the metrics: behavioral and emotional, must be dealt with together to measure true customer loyalty more accurately. Loyalty is more vastly concerned with how the consumer feels about a particular brand. But marketers find those metrics more useful that offer information regarding purchase behavior, the effectiveness of sales strategies, and retention. And this is elaborated on by behavioral metrics.
But these metrics do not help us in understanding why customers are drawn to a certain brand and why they continue to shop there. So, when the combination of both metrics is studied, the growth of CX is accelerated and this helps customer experience leaders to perfect their customer services. It is pertinent to delivering an impeccable customer service experience that one has a complete understanding of why a consumer is loyal and how their loyalty can be retained.
Emotional metrics are more profound and diverse than a single NPS score. The mere results of a customer satisfaction survey cannot determine how satisfied and happy the customers are with the brand’s services.
Brands should often conduct sentiment analysis, obtain feedback via call centers, and widen the breadth of data used to make important customer experience decisions.
3. Why Customers Behave like Chameleons?
This interesting post is entirely based on the interview with the customer experience legend, Michael Solomon. It is conducted by Adrian Swinscoe and the complete post is a condensed version of the chat.
Michael is not in the favor of the broad idea that is market segmentation. He believes that it is a traditional strategy that is obsolete in modern market dynamics. He has introduced this metaphor where he related customers to chameleons. He capitalizes on the fact that customers change their behavior as they are exposed to new environments.
Customers have this wide variety of brands in front of them, and from that tray, they pick and choose the brands that speak to them, the brands that offer personalized and empathetic experiences. These inherent attributes of the brands resonate with the personalities of the people and based on those mutual interests and qualities; customers stick to certain brands.
He quotes a wonderful saying, “each customer is actually many customers.” This quotation perfectly encapsulates the analogy that is discussed in this post. Customer experience is a tricky game; you have to reach an inflection point; here you are giving customers sufficient options to choose from, but the number is not crazy large that you are unable to accommodate the desires of consumers.
He also added another dimension to his conversation. Adrian talked about perfecting the online experience for customers. He elaborated on how we are heading in a modern, and technologically structured age and digitalizing all departments is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.
4. CX Leaders Are Invincible
Forrester is one of my favorite sites. I always love to explore what new they have cooked up on customer experiences; this site always manages to deliver insightful and compelling CX strategies that can help every organization grow. Similar to their agenda, this succinct and brilliant post by Su Doyle is another great example of how Forrester is leading all CX professionals to the right path.
In her post, Su Doyle discusses how CX leaders have the opportunity and the responsibility to instigate the company’s growth. She highlights a major and awfully common issue: the vision of the CX leaders and CEO does not often align. This can have a grave impact on budgets, staffing, and the overall culture of the organization.
But we have to realize that CX leaders are the greatest asset, they bring in the customers. CX leaders can even leverage their impeccable empathy and communication skills to interact with the C-suites. This way a more wholesome and seamless customer experience can be crafted, as the entire team will be on board.
The C-suites benefit greatly from the deep customer research conducted by the CX leaders. This way, they can connect with the audience better. Together these two teams can map prospect journeys and can integrate the customers’ feedback in the designing process. This well-lubricated process ensures that customers get along with both, CX leaders and the C-suites. This is vital to the growth of the business.
This is an exciting time to prioritize CX. Many brands are using CX as a weapon to accelerate their growth. Kroger made effective use of the consumer data they obtained and used it to achieve 15% growth in sales in their third quarter.
5. A Guide to Building a Customer-Centric Culture
This excellent post by Ganesh Mukundan explicitly talks about how all brand around the globe is gravitating towards an ideology; customer-centricity. This popular concept has made its eminent place in the vision and mission of all brands.
Ganesh defines customer-centricity as not just a closely bounded idea that is concerned with delighting customers. It is a more profound and wider concept. It means that the customer is in the center of all the operations and matters of the business. It is long-term and it hints towards a strong relationship between customers and the organization.
Customer centricity is a way of life, it is a culture; not a technique that could be integrated at convenience. Ganesh mentions some strategies via which the brand can become more customer-centric.
- Begin from the top – This means that the top management should be educated about how to deal and communicate with the customers. They should be aware of which decisions are to be made and which strategies are to be implemented that make the organization’s culture customer-centric.
- Channel Empathy Across the Company – Empathy is the key to customer-centricity. If all employers, irrespective of their department, exercise empathy, the customer experience will itself transform into the best one. If everyone is motivated to be kind to customers and understand their issues with patience, customer centricity can be established.
This whole post talks about different strategies and which in which customer centricity can be cultivated.
Conclusion
The top 5 CX blog posts from April 2021 contribute to our understanding of the quickly changing scenario. The way all brands, all companies, and all CX experts are managing to drive the businesses in these tough times is truly awe-inspiring. These people are tenacious and resilient, they did not let a global pandemic, that initially wreaked havoc on the markets, does much damage to the customer experiences arena. Customers are more satisfied than ever as they see CX leaders connect with them emotionally.
In these crises, people are standing right beside each other and are supporting one another endlessly. These were my favorite picks from April, but it was challenging to narrow my recommendations to just five as I came across many riveting posts.
If you have any of your post to share, or any views and comments, please share with the audience. If you want to be featured, just drop a link below and I would love to read your views on the CX strategies. Till next month, I hope these exemplary posts will keep you busy!
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