In today’s climate, learning and development leaders need learning that drives behaviour change, aligns to strategy and scales across teams. That is why blended CX training is fast becoming a core part of modern L&D strategies.

Every organisation has their own challenges and priorities when it comes to CX. That is why we were delighted to deliver an in-person Customer Experience Masterclass for the team at Stora Enso in Helsinki recently.

This event is a perfect example of our blended learning approach, which combines the flexibility and depth of our globally recognised online CX courses with customised in-person training tailored to each company’s specific needs. The Stora Enso session was not just a training seminar but a collaborative experience designed to create real impact.

As Ida Hallberg, Business Excellence Analyst at Stora Enso, shared:

“We had the great opportunity of having a Customer Experience (CX) Masterclass conducted by The CX Academy. Michael’s expertise and passion for customer experience were evident throughout the session. The workshop provided our team with valuable insights and supported our journey towards achieving CX excellence. We left with new perspectives and a better understanding of how to create exceptional experiences for our customers.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to both Michael and Lee for their exceptional collaboration and the value they brought to our event. We are truly thankful for your outstanding delivery from start to finish. It was a pleasure to work with you. We highly recommend The CX Academy for any organisation looking to enhance their customer experience strategy and drive business growth through Customer Experience.”

Thank you to Ida Hallberg and the Stora Enso team for their warm welcome and engagement. We would also like to acknowledge The CX Academy’s Michael Killeen and Lee Muldowney, who led the session with expertise and passion.

Why Blended Learning Works in Customer Experience

Blended learning gives participants the best of both worlds by allowing them to learn at their own pace, work on specific company-related content, while also engaging with CX experts in an interactive setting. This results in effective learning which is personalised to participants’ priorities and challenges.

Our Customer Experience Masterclass nurtures connection, discussion and problem solving. While our online courses provide you and your colleagues with the knowledge and tools to deliver CX excellence consistently and at scale. This blended approach continues to deliver measurable results across industries worldwide.

For L&D leaders, blended learning offers the structure of a training model with the flexibility to tailor it by business unit, region or learner group. One key benefit is scalability. Whether your team includes ten learners or hundreds, our blended approach helps you roll out CX capability with consistency while still providing learning that’s meaningful and specific to your organisation.

Let’s Create Exceptional Customer Experiences Together

Blended CX training is helping organisations worldwide improve how they serve customers. If you’re interested in a personalised Customer Experience Masterclass for your team, we’d be happy to prepare a customised proposal that meets your needs.

Great CX doesn’t just happen. It’s driven by teams who understand the customer, work together and take meaningful action. Blended learning helps CX professionals develop the right skills while giving them the support and freedom to work through real challenges and find practical solutions.

Every organisation has their own challenges and priorities when it comes to CX. That is why we were proud to deliver an in-person Customer Experience Masterclass for the team at Stora Enso in Helsinki recently.

This event is a perfect example of our blended learning approach, which combines the flexibility and depth of our globally recognised online CX courses with customised in-person training tailored to each company’s specific needs. The Stora Enso session was not just a training seminar but a collaborative experience designed to create real impact for CX professionals looking to take action on their customer challenges.

As Ida Hallberg, Business Excellence Analyst at Stora Enso, shared:

“We had the great opportunity of having a Customer Experience (CX) Masterclass conducted by The CX Academy. Michael’s expertise and passion for customer experience were evident throughout the session. The workshop provided our team with valuable insights and supported our journey towards achieving CX excellence. We left with new perspectives and a better understanding of how to create exceptional experiences for our customers.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to both Michael and Lee for their exceptional collaboration and the value they brought to our event. We are truly thankful for your outstanding delivery from start to finish. It was a pleasure to work with you. We highly recommend The CX Academy for any organisation looking to enhance their customer experience strategy and drive business growth through Customer Experience.”

Thank you to Ida Hallberg and the Stora Enso team for their warm welcome and engagement. We would also like to acknowledge The CX Academy’s Michael Killeen and Lee Muldowney, who led the session with expertise and passion.

Why Blended Learning Works in Customer Experience

Blended learning gives participants the best of both worlds by allowing them to learn at their own pace, work on specific company-related content, while also engaging with CX experts in an interactive setting. This results in effective learning which is personalised to participants’ priorities and challenges.

Our Customer Experience Masterclass nurtures connection, discussion and problem solving. While our online courses provide you and your colleagues with the knowledge and tools to deliver CX Excellence consistently and at scale. This blended approach continues to deliver measurable results across industries worldwide.

For CX teams, one of the biggest challenges is alignment. Different departments often view the customer experience through their own lens. Blended learning gives people a shared language, a practical toolkit and the space to connect theory with what is happening on the ground. The combination of self-paced online learning and a face-to-face workshop means everyone comes in prepared, engaged and ready to contribute.

Let’s Create Exceptional Customer Experiences Together

Blended CX training is helping organisations worldwide improve how they serve customers. If you’re part of a CX team, want to level up your customer impact and are interested in a personalised Customer Experience Masterclass for your team, we’d be happy to prepare a customised proposal that meets your needs and help bridge the gap between CX goals and real outcomes.

If you’ve ever needed a lawyer you know how stressful it can be going through any legal action. On the other hand, if you’re a lawyer you understand how important the loyalty of your clients is for your firm. More than likely, the way you get your clients now isn’t through mass marketing but mainly through referrals and positive client reviews. 

Although it may not be evident because law firms usually judge their company’s success by how many cases they sign, CX is one of the most important aspects of running a successful business – including law and accountancy firms. 

Why is loyalty and advocacy so important in CX? 

When customers of any business become loyal advocates they advertise your business as the best option for solving a specific problem, to others. Think about iPhone users who swear by their life that Apple’s phones are the best device you can ever use. 

When it comes to your clients, if they become loyal the next time their work colleague, friend or relative will be in need of an accountant or legal advice, they will recommend you. 

Choosing a lawyer or an accountant can be very difficult. Every client of yours has to put more than faith into a relationship with you. It’s not just a package delivery that they’re waiting for. They must trust that you will help them understand their situation, and be empathetic towards their specific circumstances. This is especially important in legal cases. 

In the article ‘Interpersonal Dynamics’, Joshua D. Rosenberg says, “Success in law (as in other fields) correlates significantly more with relationship skills than it does with intelligence, writing ability, or any other known factor”. Many lawyers believe that to be successful you need to focus only on the facts of the case. However, when you incorporate concern about the emotional state of your clients you will be able to grow stronger bonds. 

As we teach in our courses, when you have a strong bond with your clients, built on Trust, Personalisation, Meeting Expectations and Fixing Mistakes brilliantly, your clients will become loyal advocates that will promote your business on your behalf. 

Loyal clients can spend even 67% more than new clients. 

In an accounting firm if you have a client who you provide payroll services for, and you give them an excellent experience throughout the year, more than likely they will ask for more services from your firm. 

It’s definitely a chain reaction – for which you should put a deliberately planned strategy in place. 

Remember: Clients who recommend your company to their friends and family are a more legitimate source and will plant a seed of trust for your company in them. Clients who come from referrals usually are more trusting from the get-go.

Shifting Client Demands

According to Modern Lawyer Magazine, “the percentage of clients recommending law firms is at an all-time high of 69% (up from 49% in 2020 and 47% in 2019)”. Clients and customers all around the world in every industry are in an increasingly large majority, choosing the brands they work with based on the recommendations of others and their own experiences. 

Clients no longer expect just good service and accurate handling of their accords, they are now consciously choosing which organisation to deal with based on their customer experience. 

50 years ago, there possibly was just a single lawyer and accountant in the town. But as the world grew, communication abilities expanded and equal opportunities arose, we now live in cities with hundreds of firms competing against each other. 

This not only gives rise to the need for differentiation (see below), but also it gives your clients the opportunity they didn’t have before – they can change who they work with like they change their clothes. 

As brutal as it sounds – today your clients don’t need you – you need them. This is why keeping a great experience, making them feel listened to and understood and creating a strong bond based on trust are vital for today’s business success. 

Differentiation

When it comes to law and accounting firms, differentiating is exceptionally difficult. 

• The prices can all be replicated in most cases, the services are almost identical to every law or accounting company.
• Specifically for the law industry, unless you get to deal with a celebrity or other high-profile case you will be dealing with the same type of cases as your competitors. 
• Incredibly competitive market  –  over 1 million accountants and auditors in the US alone.

Differentiation in legal and accountancy firms is so difficult because the practice of both is basically the sale of your expertise – so the only way you could have stood out from the crowd is if you had vastly more knowledge than your competitors.

But today you can utilise the power of Customer Experience – which can never be replicated or reproduced. 

The industry that’s left behind 

Accountancy and law firms have one big thing in common. They are vastly falling behind CX Strategy design. 

According to The Professional Services Customer Journey Report, legal films are failing to get the basics in CX consistently right. “Out of all the professions analysed, the legal sector was found to be performing worst when comparing NPS (Net Promoter Score), with a sobering -54, a sharp decline from its score of -15 in 2019.” 

Simple actions like introducing yourself when picking up the phone, having compassion and empathy for your clients and answering queries from all channels in a timely manner can improve your CX dramatically – yet so few legal firms do this. 

The truth is that some accountancy and legal firms will implement these changes, hire a CX specialist and improve their customer’s experience in order to become the only lawyer or accountant anyone needs (and wants to work with).

The question is – Will you be the one? 

If you would like to learn how to deliver excellent customer experience and keep your clients for years to come and gain more clients without spending thousands on advertising, enrol in our Professional Diploma in CX today. 

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We are not experts on Law and Accounting so we gathered more resources if you wish to continue reading: 

The Heart of Lawyering: Clients, Empathy, and Compassion

The CX Factor

CX – Customer Experience in the Legal Sector

Role of Accounting in Customer Experience

What Is Customer Experience in the Accounting World?

Customer Experience (CX) focuses on how your customers feel about every interaction they have with your business. As a CEO, if you still believe that all you need is a great product and a good price, then your customers will leave you… 

Why? Because they may just feel like it!

We are living in the age of an Experience Economy, where experiences are more valuable and important to customers than anything else. This is because products, services, prices and special offers can all be copied and reproduced. These can no longer differentiate your business from your competitors. 

Experiences, however, can.

The Hot Dog Example

In a Ted Talk, ‘The Secret Ingredients of Great Hospitality’, Will Guidara, describes a story from when he was working in Manhattan’s Eleven Madison Park that got the restaurant the title of the best restaurant in the world in 2020. 

As Guidara describes, the restaurant is “very fancy. We’re talking servers wearing suits and ties, like crisp, ironed white tablecloths. More than 30 cooks in the kitchen serving 10-15 course tasting menus.”

He goes on to explain, “Our kitchen served unbelievably delicious and incredibly innovative food. Our service was so gracious and as close to technically perfect as possible. And our dining room is one of the most beautiful out there.”

As a result, they were consistently one of the top 50 restaurants in the world. “But it was a hot dog that earned (them) the number one spot on that list.”

He explains that it was ‘unreasonable hospitality’ that got them there, and it was simply turning ordinary transactions into extraordinary experiences.

“In early 2010, on a busier-than-normal lunch service, I was in the dining room helping out the servers, when I found myself clearing appetisers from a table of four foodies on vacation to New York. And they were going to the airport to head back home after their meal. I overheard them talking. ‘What an amazing trip! We’ve been to all the best restaurants. Per Se, Le Bernardin, Daniel, Momofuku, now Eleven Madison Park. But the only thing we didn’t get to try was a New York City hot dog.’” 

“You know those moments in a cartoon when the animated light bulb goes off over the character’s head, signifying they’re about to come up with a really good idea? If you’d been in the room with me that day, you would have seen one appear over mine. As calmly as I possibly could, I walked gracefully back into the kitchen, dropped off the plates, and then literally ran out the front door and down the block to the hot dog cart. I bought a hot dog and ran just as fast back into the kitchen.”

“Now came the hard part, convincing the chef to serve it in our fancy fine dining restaurant. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind… Eventually, he agreed to cut the hot dog up into four perfect pieces, adding a swish of ketchup and a swish of mustard onto each plate and finishing them with a quenelle of sauerkraut and a quenelle of relish. Then, before we served the table their final savoury course, we brought them their hot dog.”

“To make sure you don’t go home with any culinary regrets, a New York City hot dog.”

CX vs CS

Customer Experience is not Customer Service. Customer Service is functional and technical – it’s the agent on the phone trying to help your customer find their lost package. It is reactive compared to CX which is proactive. Creating a customer experience strategy allows you to put a process in place that will ensure that your customers keep coming back, spending more and encouraging others to do the same.

You need to understand that CX is ultimately a long-term initiative that has the potential to bring very high results if implemented fully within the company. CX focuses on the relationship your customers have with your company – it might surprise you that every interaction, no matter how small, affects how they feel about you and ultimately if they are willing to do business with you. 

This is why creating the distinction between the two and gathering a team dedicated to designing, optimising and implementing CX strategies is crucial to your business success. 

If you don’t realise the importance of CX now, your churn and marketing costs will inevitably get higher as you spend more and more on acquisition rather than retention and advocacy. 

Increased profitability

We have many articles and information guides on the benefits of CX. Increased loyalty, advocacy, differentiation, increased lifetime value, and reduced churn are just some of them. 

However, it all comes down to increased profitability and shareholder value. A great example of a company that delivers a great customer experience is Calm. Calm is a meditation app that aims at every step to meet users’ wellness needs. In 2021, when the user data indicated that the usage spiked before bed, the app launched “Sleep Stories”, which included celebrities like Kate Winslet reading, claiming bedtime stories for adults.

According to Tellus International, “The change also contributed to a boost in sales, with revenue in the first quarter of 2021 totalling $23.2 million, up from $19.7 million the year prior according to Statista.”

Later Fact Company named Calm as one of 2021’s most innovative companies. 

This example shows that listening to your customer’s needs and delivering the value they expect can have enormous financial benefits.  

The Statistics Don’t Lie 

Whether you want to believe it or not, CX is here and here to stay. Customers are now willing to walk away from companies just after one bad experience – without a single complaint. 

Here are some top statistics about customer experience for 2023: 

1. Of companies that focus on CX, there’s an 80 percent increase in revenue (Zippa)
2. Customer-centric brands report profits that are 60 percent higher than those that fail to focus on CX. (CX Index)
3. 90% of businesses, regardless of the vertical they are operating in, have stated that they have made CX their primary focus. (Oracle)
4. 41 percent of customer-obsessed companies achieved at least 10 percent revenue growth in their last fiscal year, compared to just 10 percent of less mature companies. (Forrester)
5. 73 percent of customers now say CX is the number one thing they consider when deciding whether to purchase from a company. (PwC)
6. 49 percent of customers who left a brand to which they’d been loyal in the past 12 months say it’s due to poor CX. (Emplifi)
7. Consumers are willing to pay a 16% price premium in return for a superior customer experience. (CX Index)
8. More than 70% of people state that they would recommend a product or service following a pleasant experience.(CX Index)
9. 42% of customers are willing to pay more when offered a friendly, more welcoming customer experience. (Zippa)
10. 72% of customers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people. On the other hand, if a customer is not happy, 13% of them will share their experience with 15 or even more (Esteban Kolsky)

As you can see we live in an age where experiences matter more than price and product. So if you are wondering if investing in CX is worth it – it is. 

Read more: The Experience Economy 

If you would like your business to succeed and your CX initiatives to be successful, enrol your staff today in our Professional Diploma in CX or contact jessiaca@thecxacademy.org for Tailored Team Training opportunities.

Customer Experience has become the fastest-growing business discipline in the world. As a result, 95% of leading organisations cite CX job roles as crucial to achieving business growth. Business owners are becoming more aware of the necessity for CX Professionals in their companies, so job opportunities keep increasing. 

So if you are working in customer service, marketing, sales or operations, CX might just be the next step in your career ladder.

It’s fascinating and it’s worthwhile.

What does a career in a senior CX role involve? 

In an interview at one of our Masterclasses, our Managing Director, Julian Douglas spoke with Loraine Walsh, the CX Director at Laya Healthcare. Laya Healthcare is one of Ireland’s largest health insurers.

Loraine studied marketing in college and then quickly found that it was quite difficult to get a job in the field without any experience. So instead she went to work in customer service for Laya Healthcare in Ireland. 

When an opportunity arose she got into the Marketing department and progressed up the ladder to become Head of Marketing for many years. In 2019, Customer Experience started becoming central to the business strategy and a new position opened up – Director of Customer Experience. Lorraine got the position and was able to represent the customers at the “top table” in all company decisions being made. 

Here is a snippet of the Masterclass Interview: 

You came from a marketing background, there may be a lot of people who are in a customer-facing role, looking to move into a Customer Experience role, what does your day-to-day look like? 

Good question, I ask myself that regularly when I’m in many meetings and writing emails. It’s different. I try to spend as much time as possible with the teams dealing with customers regularly because you get the most important information from them. 

So for example this week, I’ll be listening to some calls to hear directly what the customers are saying about our proposition, service and products. I’ll be meeting with Team Leaders to talk to them about some results of different campaigns and then provide an open forum for them to say how we can do things better. 

A lot of ‘looking out’ as I call it. This afternoon I’m meeting with heads of customer experience in a different company because I learn something from them and they learn something from me. 

You’re looking at research very regularly like Net Promoter Score Research – where are you doing well, where are you not doing well? A lot of strategy meetings as well – we have two things now going through strategic change, and one of them is a customer journey that’s going through a big revamp, so there will be a lot of meetings about how that’s progressing.

How do you do the customer journey map at Laya Healthcare? 

Everyone does it differently. In the past, we had external support that helped us, but really it’s about getting the people at the touchpoints of the customer journey into a room, we get all the data from all the touchpoints of the customer journey as well and we get the feedback.

Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks of Laya Healthcare first, so you have to think, ‘Well how did they even start the journey’. What does their day look like and really stand in the shoes of the customer. And then you use the data and the member insights and the people who are involved in the process and you literally map it out. It can be as in-depth or as light as you want. This particular journey will be quite in-depth [For the Strategic Change]. Sometimes you can take a lighter view – it depends on how transformational you are going with it. And sometimes external help can be supportive as well. 

And do you use whiteboards, paper, or technology? How do you plan and map out that journey? 

It’s kind of a little bit of the old-fashioned way of just mapping it out with the old markers and A4 pages. There are lots of tools you can use like Moodle, but we sometimes just find bringing it together and talking through it works for us. Bearing in mind that we’re in a luxurious position and most of our team members are in Ireland and an hour in any direction and we’ll all be together. But it might be different for others for sure. But we find the old-fashioned way works for us and then you draft it up in a more tangible format. 

In your role as the CX Director, how important is senior leadership and how important is the fact that they’re bought into customer experience? And does that come right at the beginning – is it one of the most important things? 

It’s absolutely the most important thing for customer experience to be successful. You need it at the senior leadership level and throughout the business. I fundamentally believe that if you have culture at the heart of customer experience everything else will fall into place. You might have the best technology, and processes that can help you with customer experience but if the culture isn’t there and if it’s not from the top down and the bottom up, I think you’ll struggle to make it work. 

So all of our board members are very customer-centric. Our MD has always been really proactive when it comes to the customer and every single person at the senior leadership level talks about the customer all the time. And we call them members at Laya Healthcare. It might surprise you that some areas like IT and Finance might get a bad rep for not thinking about the customer, but in Laya everyone always speaks about it. It’s phenomenal – it really helps you to get your job done when you have that strong culture. 

Do you have and use customer profiles? 

Yes. We always start out by looking at what the customer looks like, what their day looks like, and what is the internal data that we have and then the external data about what their lives look like. So we really try to bring to life for our team what the customer really wants and needs. 

For example, we sell life insurance and we have quite a young team, and they don’t necessarily know the value of life insurance. They were like, ‘Why would anyone want to buy life insurance’. They might’ve not even been on the property ladder for a mortgage, so they didn’t connect with it. 

So we had to describe the customer and their personas, but we actually got the customers in to describe an experience, where they have lost a family member and didn’t have life insurance and another where they did have insurance. So we had to try to bring it to life for people as well depending on what you’re talking about.

Do you sit in on any product development meetings? 

Yes, we do. If it’s not me it’s my team. In fairness, collaboration for anything here is key, and there’s a strong culture of collaboration where it would be very unusual for the customer to not be represented in any of those discussions. So for new products and new services, there would always be a customer experience person involved. We always start with the data and the insights and trends and then we work from there. So it starts with the customer and then it works beyond that in terms of innovation. 

I’m getting great enthusiasm here. It sounds like an amazing career. You’re dipping in and out of and you’re working closely with many different departments. You’re not always stuck in one area, whether it’s data, web, marketing, etc. You’re moving around the company all the time – is it fascinating? Do you love it? 

100%, you can’t do this job on your own. There’s no way you can make a difference for customers by yourself and in silos. You have to work with everyone around you – they need you and you need them. You get information from every aspect of the business. And it’s the same for customers, it’s not just one thing that’s customer experience, it’s everything you do so it has to work both ways. 

You can watch the full masterclass here: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/play/7VSEag8erguQkb_esd7VBiKF9PsmTP0ILaHpSihWqyVx8BJrwjq1f_kGaQ0kP93GQmSBaSaiat-CYfcA.WJVPYib0YIe7Njs9?autoplay=true&startTime=1675252426000

Learn more: How To Be a Good CX Leader?

What are the wages like? 

Really, if you want to work in Customer Experience you need to have a passion for customers otherwise you won’t succeed and your customers won’t ever be satisfied with their experience. However, money is important, especially in times of economic turmoil. 

According to talent.com a Customer Experience Manager’s salary can start at €49,000 and can even get as high as €84,250 per annum or more (In Ireland).  

A Customer Experience Champion’s salary can range from €30k – €40k.

This shows that working for customers and working hard to make their experience better really pays off – not just for the company, but also for you. 

If this sounds like something you could be interested in, then enrol in our Professional Diploma in CX today and take your career to the next level.

Whether it was a premonition or a hunch, B.Joseph Pine II knew he was onto something when he wrote ‘Welcome to the Experience Economy’ with James H Gilmore back in 1998. In their article, they explore the idea of ‘staging experiences’ and argue that this is where the ‘competitive battleground’ lies.

Twenty-five years later it’s clear they predicted accurately the evolution of Customer Experience (CX) and the way customers would come to value experience over products.

Now 25 years later it’s clear one of the key priorities for businesses worldwide is CX excellence. It is no surprise when you realise that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Moreover, CX is the only way to differentiate your company from the competition today. Services and products can be replicated but experiences as Pine describes them, are ‘memorable’ and it is through these experiences that loyal advocates are born and your company can grow.

Why experiences have taken over the way customers make decisions and buy?

It all comes down to the ‘progression in economic value’. In their article, Pine and Gilmore describe the history of economic progress changing from customers simply paying for the exact commodities needed, to paying for made goods, then for delivered services, and ultimately for staged experiences.

As they describe it, many businesses already “wrap experiences around their traditional offer” however to really utilise the potential of providing a great experience for your customers you need to design a CX strategy to ensure that your customers become loyal advocates.

A well-planned out CX Strategy will include the when, where, how and why. It will ensure that every single one of your customers is receiving the same treatment and the highest standard of experience that your company can provide. It will eliminate the room for improvisation and will guarantee a higher profit.

As well as this, providing a great experience builds a strong bond between the customer and your company. It is only through this bond that your customers will become loyal advocates. A positive one-off experience will have zero value to your business. That’s why you have to plan and design a CX Strategy that will ensure a continuously high level of positive customer experience at every step of the customer journey.

Providing an excellent experience means:

• Building trust in everything you do with your customers
• Treating your customer as an individual and understanding their needs
• Making it easy for the customer to do business with you
• Understanding what it’s like to be in your customer’s shoes
• Managing, meeting & (where possible) exceeding expectations
• Fixing problems brilliantly

Customer experience is all about emotions, and you know you have a loyal customer when they have a strong sense of allegiance to your brand or organisation. They are not actively searching for alternatives from competitors offering similar benefits, even if the price could be lower. They trust that you can take care of their needs and meet or exceed their expectations.

Experience VS Price

The article’s authors’ argue that ‘you are what you charge for’, or in other words, companies who ‘stage’ experiences are still only charging for the products and services – not the experience itself. However, today we know that customers are willing to pay up to 16% more for products and services, provided they have an excellent experience. So while charging an admission fee for the experience itself may not be the way to go in most businesses, the amount you charge for the product/service may be higher.

It has to be noted that price does affect the overall interest in a product, however, if your customer becomes a loyal advocate they will be doing the marketing for you and even if the price is higher than your competitors, your business can have great results.

Remember: Customers will rarely complain about a high price, but they will often complain about a process or how a telephone call with a customer service agent made them feel. 

The way customers feel as a result of doing business with you will be affected by many factors. Today, more often than not customers want to be associated with a brand. This means that they will choose brands they trust and ones with values they associate with. (For example, today customers will often choose brands that are environmentally friendly or that promote work equality etc.)

The Key Differentiator

“Even the smallest cue can aid the creation of a unique experience”

Experiences will only be memorable if they are unique. In their article, the authors provide this example,

When a restaurant host says, “Your table is ready,” no particular cue is given. But when a Rainforest Cafe host declares, “Your adventure is about to begin,” it sets the stage for something special.

CX excellence comes about from listening carefully to your customer’s needs and addressing them while helping them reach their goals. The article provides another great example of this:

Standard Parking of Chicago decorates each floor of its O’Hare Airport garage with icons of different Chicago sports franchises—the Bulls on one floor, the White Sox on another, and so forth. And each level has its own signature song wafting through it. “You never forget where you parked,” one Chicago resident remarked, which is precisely the experience a traveller wants after returning from a week of travel.

‘Staging experiences’ is happening all around us, and is part of a carefully thought out strategy. Another great example from recent years is Apple. Apple stores are a wonderland for people to touch and play around with their gadgets. But what makes their stores great first and foremost is that they have  “an unrivalled commitment to building strong customer relationships” and second, they don’t actually think of their stores as stores.

Apple is removing the word ‘store’ from the name of their retail venues and is consciously trying to make their venues feel like a town square. They want to enhance their customers’ lives rather than just sell their products. In an interview with Fortune, Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of retail described their new spaces; “Accessories are avenues, and the huge digital screen in each store is the forum,”

And as Future Stores describes it, “The community aspect of the new Apple locations is key. Not only including boardrooms, which visiting entrepreneurs may use to meet up and discuss their ideas, the new stores also hold coding classes – called “Hour of Code” workshops – for kids, teaching Apple’s programming language, Swift. “Hour of Code embodies our vision for Apple stores as a place for the community to gather, learn and be entertained,” said Ahrendts.”

In a way, Apple has really taken to heart ‘staging experiences’ as they are really building a new way of experiencing their products for potential customers. So, “Welcome to the Experience Economy” the economy in which customers are seeking enhanced experiences and actively engaging with businesses like never before. If your customers aren’t, you need to ask why?

If you would like to learn more about Customer Experience and how to design the ultimate CX Strategy that will bring you long-term success, enrol in our Professional Diploma or Certificate today. 

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Source of the article this blog post was based on: https://hbr.org/1998/07/welcome-to-the-experience-economy 

If you missed any of the tips, please find all of them below gather in this handy blog post for your convenience.

Tip 1: Focus your resources in the ‘Delight’ stage of the sales funnel.

In the recent years there has been a growth in referrals by existing customers among their friends, family and colleagues. Investing in ‘Delight’ motivates customers remain loyal, to buy more and refer your company to others feeding the sales funnel at a fraction of what marketing costs. We call it Organic Customer Acquisition!

Tip 2: Design your customer journey from the beginning of the relationship.

It is the first time a customer is likely to hear of your customer promise and you need to make sure to meet or exceed your promise from your initial marketing right through to a heroic resolution after a complaint is made.

Tip 3: Don’t over-promise.

Trust can be affected when the customer expectations differ from the delivery. If you over promise and under-deliver, it creates a negative customer experience. If you under-promise and over-deliver, it creates a positive customer experience.

Tip 4: Do The Right Thing!

Always do the right thing for the customer. What’s good for the customer is good for the company.

Tip 5: Create a highly motivated CX Action Task Force.

Ensure that the CX Action Task Force is made up of dedicated staff, from different department and different seniorities. To deliver great CX, arm them with key benchmarks on how the company is currently performing in the eyes of the customer.

Tip 6: Design a clear Customer Promise.

The Customer Promise should not just engage the customer but is also motivating to all staff within the company.

Tip 7: Use CX for Differentiation.

CX is now the only way companies can differentiate themselves from competitors. Where customers can’t differentiate between the offerings, they will make their decision based on who offers the best experience.

Tip 8: When handling an issue, listen intently and solve the customer’s problem exceptionally.

When a company listens, the customer feels valued, respected, understood and their trust in the company grows. All of this leads to increased loyalty and a deeper emotional bond.

Tip 9: Turn problems into opportunities.

A Harvard Business Review study showed that that the customers who received an appropriate response to their negative tweet, were willing to pay more for a product or service from that company after the fact.

Tip 10: Empower Staff

Provide the right tools and empowerment for your staff. This creates trust which is a great motivator for them to carry out their tasks exceptionally.

Tip 11: Delivering CX Excellence Reduces Costs.

Acquisitions Costs, Costs to Serve, Recruitment and Training costs are all reduced when you invest in CX.

Tip 12: Keep your language simple.

When companies use complicated words and jargon, customers may start to believe that the company they are dealing with have something to hide.

Tip 13: Personalise Customer Experience (CX).

Using the customer’s name, actively listening and making the customer feel special will help build trust and loyalty.

Tip 14: Customers are busy, so make their time with you as pleasurable as possible.

Ensuring that customers don’t have to do all the work themselves, keeping the process down to three steps and letting the customer speak to someone after no more than 2 minutes will have a great impact on customer satisfaction scores.

Tip 15: Show Empathy at every step of the customer journey.

Understanding each customer’s circumstances and being able to deliver the right emotional response to improve things for the customer, will build a strong emotional bond.

Tip 16: Educate your staff about timings.

When you educate your staff about timings for different processes and empower them to inform the customers of updates, there is confidence and consistency in how they inform and manage customer’s expectations, which creates trust.

Tip 17: Utilise feedback to your advantage.

Customer complaints and feedback offer a huge opportunity for companies to identify issues and design better solutions.

Tip 18: Invest in Employee Experience.

When you invest in EX you will ensure that your employees are happy to help customers, stay with you longer and recommend the company to their friends and family.

Tip 19: Don’t Overuse Technology.

Technology is there to make it easier for the customer and not for the company!

Tip 20: Get the CEO Buy-In

The first stage for any company to deliver CX Excellence is the CEO Buy-In. CEOs need to support CX Excellence, understand that CX can help differentiate the company and that it increases profitability.

If you would like to learn more and become a high;y skilled, fully qualified CX professional, enrol today in our Professional Diploma or Certificate course. 

It is true that Customer Experience at its core is about human emotions and feelings. Ultimately the goal is to make your customers happy. But as with everything, CX is a little bit more complicated than just ‘making customers happy’. 

A good customer experience strategy is developed on the foundation of good research, statistics, and learnings from fields like psychology, sociology, behavioural science or biology. This is the science behind CX.

When you realise this you can dive a lot deeper into your business actions and develop a sturdy foundation that will last any turmoil. 

Customer Behaviour 

Valentin Radu describes Customer Behaviour as “the study of consumers and the processes they use to choose, use (consume), and dispose of products and services, including consumers’ emotional, mental, and behavioural responses.” When you study customer behaviour you can make better and more informed decisions regarding your customer experience. 

Please note, we are not advocating for you to study your customers to use the data against them, while improving your gain. The trick is to use the data you collect to improve your CX strategy so that your customers become loyal advocates of your brand. 

Customer Behaviour includes perception, reason and will. While reason and will are a fight between, our self-discipline and our desires, customer perception is created from past experiences and the unconscious. This includes any experiences they may have had – whether it is with a competitor of yours or a business completely not-related to your sector. Perception and expectations can be formed by customers’ attitudes to brands and experiences outside your particular sector.  It’s not just past experiences with you or in your own sector where customer perceptions are formed.

Read more: Your Company is Compared to Everyone. 

There are many models of Customer Behaviour and how to analyse it correctly, however the key steps include: 

• Analysing your customer journey
• Dividing your customers into large groups of similar characteristics
• Analysing and recognising each groups selling points
• Gathering quantitative data
• Qualitative vs quantitative data
• Optimising your CX strategy

Sociology

As explained by UNC, “Sociology is the study of human social relationships and institutions.”.The key here for CX is ‘human social relationships’. 

In The CX Academy courses, we use our CX Academy Framework to connect with customers on an emotional level, and to create strong lasting bonds. These bonds are built on 6 factors: I trust you, You know me, You make it easy, You get me, You deliver on your promise and You fix things. All these stages allow you to build relationships and unbreakable bonds with your customers. 

Ultimately, you can study sociology to understand how you can build a strong bond with your customers. As well as that general knowledge about different social groups, can help in delivering your CX to different social groups or communities. It can also help you manage safety within your business’s premises. 

As well as this, one of the most important parts or goals of a good CX strategy is to ensure that the strong bonds you create with your customers – turns them into loyal advocates, advertising your services and products to their friends, family and colleagues. Studying these ‘referrals’ can give you insight into the quality of these newly acquired customers. In a study documenting the economic post-acquisition effects, referred customers had a higher contribution margin, and a higher retention rate. 

This is important because when you realise how your advocates share information about your business, you can influence it. 

Psychology

The science of mind and behaviour. A great example of how you can study your customers behaviour and apply psychology to resolve their pain points would be an airport scenario. 

At an airport passengers were complaining about the long wait times at the luggage pick-up belt. The airport company hired more staff to speed up the process of getting the luggage out. They reduced waiting times to five minutes, but the complaints kept coming. After analysing the customer journey, they realised that it only takes a minute for them to get to the baggage reclaim. The airport company changed the arrival gate so it now takes them 5 minutes to walk to the baggage reclaim. 

The complaints stopped. 

What you can learn from this example is that to achieve CX Excellence – you should analyse customer behaviour, sociology and psychology. As just delivering a great experience, may not be enough. 

If you would like to learn more about how to achieve CX Excellence, enrol in our Professional Diploma or Certificate today.