Tag Archives: Stephen Van Belleghem

The World of CX

As life gets back to normal, and our superheroes begin to control the pandemic, businesses are holding onto the CX strategies that they had adopted earlier. Many companies have come to realize that the only reason some brands managed to weather the storm of Covid was because of the support and undeterred loyalty of customers. And they were able to achieve this by offering memorable and effective customer experiences.

So, here I am again, sharing some of the most insightful and exciting new CX posts from months past. I have provided the link for each post so that you can explore it further if interested. Happy Reading!

The Age of Personalization for CX Leaders

Every customer wants to feel valued and noticed. They are always interested in learning about your business and all the drama that occurs behind the curtains. This is why all brands are on this unstoppable personalization spree.

Jill Goodwin perfectly encapsulates the significance of a personalized customer experience in her riveting post. Personalized marketing makes customers feel more connected to the company they are in business with. And this encourages them to invest more in the respective brand.

Jill begins the post by discussing the many benefits of personalized marketing. She mentions how modern marketers use this effective tool to engage with customers and launch profitable campaigns. Marketers acquire all relevant data via emails and surveys and identify what customers like. This data helps marketers build different customer bases and then offer personalized experiences that appeal to each demographic.

Personalized marketing goes beyond just recording the email and name of the customers. This type of marketing is an entire strategy designed towards communicating with customers effectively and interacting with them.

She also provides the following compelling reasons as to why brands should implement the personalized customer experience strategy:

  • This way brands can connect with and address the queries of specific demographics. This allows brands to cater to the target audience and widen their reach to them by particularly learning their interests.
  • This approach helps in creating more creative and compelling content. This offers a competitive advantage to brands as they can create memorable content that persuades the target audience.
  • Personalization adds value to brands and creates a healthy brand identity. Customers get emotionally involved and connected with the brands.
  • Personalized experiences translate into more sales and higher revenue. The financial aspect associated with this strategy is remarkable.

Three Keys to Unlocking Personalized Customer Experience

The entire customer experience, in today’s technologically advanced world, gravitates around customer engagement. As everybody is hyperconnected in these times, customer loyalty is mainly driven the customer experiences. Therefore, brands are investing generously towards devising an effective approach that offers a customizable and personalized experience to customers.

In his engrossing post, Brent Brown talks about how brands can maneuver technology to their advantage. He condenses his knowledge of offering meaningful customer experiences into three main pillars:

  • It’s imperative to understand the needs and wants of customers so that brands can influence them before they make a purchase decision. Businesses must be able to harness data they obtain from across the enterprise and not just one area. They should incorporate their understanding of market dynamics and collected data to identify what customers like and what they do not.
  • Brands should tailor their offers and promotional campaigns based on categories of customers. Brands do segregate the population based on the target audience, but even among them, customers can be classified based on who they are and what they have purchased. This allows retailers to streamline their approach and better cater to the needs and wants of every customer. Individualized customer analysis can greatly contribute to this strategy and help in building compelling customer experiences.
  • As online shopping becomes the new purchasing approach, it’s become vital for businesses to make in-store purchases just as smooth as online. Many businesses are failing to offer just as good of a customer experience in person. To avoid this, brands must install sensors to identify choke points and traffic patterns. This way brands could improve their customer experience, both online and in-store. 

Everything You Need to Know About Customer Success

Annette Franz is a well-versed writer who always shares new and exciting insights on improving customer experience and building value for customers. We’ve mentioned her in several posts already – Top 5 Customer Service Blog Posts of June 2021 where she talks about Customer Confidence & Top 5 Customer Experience Blog Posts of September 2020 – where she discusses how customers need to be the focal point of a business.

Her posts have always captivated me, and she did not fail to impress me in one of her recent points either. In this post, Annette discusses how brands can build value for their loyal customers faster.

Her post is a summarized version of a conversation between her and Rav Dhaliwal, an expert on customer success. They define customer success as a functional role that’s concentrated towards building value for customers faster than they can on their own. But the crucial point isn’t just building value faster, but also building value for the business. And this is focused on creating the right environment for customers through which value can be achieved.

Annette also introduces the Customer Success Managers who are the real heroes. She explains how they combine their experience, knowledge, and expertise to carefully engineer the best customer experience.

The key metric used to measure customer success is net revenue retention. This loosely translates into business value and the growth of customers. Annette also listed the following roles of CSM:

  • Rav categorized sales into three types: inbound, outbound, and continuous. The latter is concerned with recognizing the value of customers’ investments.
  • After recognizing values, upsell and cross-sell opportunities are discussed with customers.
  • In continuous selling, the initial roles and skills are practiced that led to the first sale with the customer.
  • CSM needs to have detailed product knowledge, product and commercial skills, and consultative potential so that customers can easily engage with CSM.

The post further capitalizes on achieving customer success.

Learning the Attributes of the Best CX Leaders

This enthralling post by Stephen Van Belleghem is based on the best-selling book by Stephen R. Covey, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. This book revolves around the traits of winning leaders who weren’t only inspiring but brought great change into the world.

This book applies to CX leaders too as the habits explicitly discussed in this book are the fundamental behaviors of a successful leader. These habits are:

  • Being Proactive

Successful CX leaders are proactive. Such leaders do not let uncontrollable variables obstruct their path. Rather they arise and make the path themselves.

  • Begin With the End

Covey believes that such leaders develop this map in their mind and then follow it. This map leads them to their goals in life. They figure out the destination and then figure out the route. Do First Things First

This point is concerned with prioritizing tasks and activities. If CX leaders are organized and have a regimented plan in place, there is nothing they cannot achieve.

  • Focus on Win-Win

A great CX leader will always look for a win-win situation rather than getting entangled in a toxic situation that results in a winner and a loser.

  • First Understand, Then Be Understood

It is important for effective leaders to first listen, without the intent of replying or offering a counter-argument.

  • Synergize

Successful CX leaders know that a seamless customer experience requires the efforts of a network, this is why it is important to involve everybody and acknowledge the opinions of all.

  • Sharpen the Saw

This metaphor refers to improving the tool, even if it means investing time. Good leaders always investigate ways via which something could be done faster.

Technology is the Light in the Dark

Every great customer experience is built on desirable customer interaction. Forrester’s research shows that not many companies do well at offering seamless customer experiences. And they can see the impact of this in declining financial rewards.

In his post, James McCormick lays great emphasis on incorporating technology in CX practices to maximize the gains. He mentions that many brands fail to obtain the right data that must be analyzed to understand customers and perfect their experiences. Such brands:

  • Lack of proper coordination between obtaining data and employing the right technology. Most CX teams rely greatly on advanced tools and instruments like Excel and Survey tools. But what they fail to understand is that they need to integrate their results with experience and speech analytics to better understand and manage customer experiences.
  • Fail to use all relevant data assets provided by the organization. Many CX leaders have access to all the modern technology, but they are unable to obtain data from other parts of the business. This results in inadequate analysis.
  • Prioritize customer opinion on data signals. Many CX leaders ignore the results of data analysis that offers close insights into the behavioral and engagement attitude of customers. Rather they trust the opinion of a handful of customers, which is not even an accurate representation of the entire demographic.

James also mentions some suggestions for CX leaders to follow:

  • Use a wide range of tech. Try to gather customer feedback and opinion and use tools to observe the behavior and response of customers.
  • Use experience analytics tools and include partners from other departments to diversify the tech portfolio. Make sure that all CX leaders agree on a single plan.

Conclusion

I hope you all enjoyed my favorite picks and to be perfectly candid, it was challenging for me to narrow my list down to just 5. CX leaders all around the globe have some educational and productive insights about improving customer experience.

Please share your views and opinions in the comments below. If you want to be featured on this interactive platform with our audience, please feel free to share the link to your content below. I’d love to check it out and continue advancing my knowledge and skills! Adios till next month!