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The Modern Customer Podcast

Go behind the scenes with customer experience leader Blake Morgan to explore the secrets of the world’s most customer-centric companies. Blake is one of the world’s top keynote speakers, authority on customer experience and the bestselling author of “The Customer Of The Future” The Modern Customer reaches thousands of people each week conveying a message of how we make people feel - in business and in life - matters. Her weekly show explores how businesses can make customers’ lives easier and better, featuring experts that provide simple, tangible advice you can immediately apply at your own organization. Today’s customers have the luxury of choice. The answer is simple; choose customer experience and customers will choose you. Learn how to put a stake in the ground on customer experience by tuning into The Modern Customer Podcast each week with Blake Morgan.
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Now displaying: September, 2017
Sep 26, 2017

When it comes to building strong relationships and experiences, organizations are often faced with a difficult choice: do they focus on employees or on customers? Like many companies, Adobe had two groups working parallel to each other—one focused on reaching out to employees and the other on building experiences for customers. But then Adobe realized that the two audiences actually worked together, and Adobe’s leadership combined customer experience and employee experience under the direction of Donna Morris, EVP Customer and Employee Experience.

People have always been Adobe’s core asset, and that focus is part of the reason the company has seen such rapid growth. For years Adobe focused on being a great company to work for and building a strong employee experience. But at the end of the day, customers actually drive the business, so the company adjusted its focus to be as great to work with as it is to work for. The two ideas go hand in hand—satisfied and engaged employees are more likely to give their best effort and represent the brand well, while satisfied customers are happier and easier to work with. Central to the idea of bringing employees and customers together is to focus on people and make them the core of the organization’s culture and strategy.

Although they are similar, uniting the focus on these two groups isn’t something that can happen overnight. In order to be truly successful, there must be a cultural change that emphasizes the importance of employees and customers. Employees need to understand the metrics of how customer experience and satisfaction are gauged and know what the company’s goals are to improve the scores. Each person should see how his or her role plays into the larger customer experience.

With a changed mindset, companies can evaluate their processes to see how employee and customer experience can be connected. According to Donna, many organizations will be surprised by how easily their core mechanisms can be aligned to streamline the experience model, especially if employees are using the same products and becoming customers themselves. Adobe does this by using employees as advocates for its customers’ needs. Any employee can report an issue about the software or service quickly and easily, which means that issues can be resolved as soon as they are spotted instead of waiting for customers to find issues and go through the entire reporting process themselves. Employee compensation at Adobe is also tied to customer experience, which drives a greater incentive to put the customer first. Regularly checking in with employees through engagement surveys provides the company with periodic updates to see where it is improving and where it can continue to grow. It also helps measure how connected employees feel to the customers and creates opportunities for feedback.

One of the keys to building a strong customer and employee experience is to focus on the long-term relationship with each group. Instead of simply getting a customer to make a sale or pushing an employee to hit their quarterly goals, organizations should look for ways to build lasting relationships that keep customers and employees satisfied and coming back for more. An often overlooked aspect of building relationships is focusing on empathy and understanding where people come from. When leaders and organizations focus on emotions, they can foster better employee and customer bonds.

Although customer and employee experience are similar, organizations can’t just apply a one-size-fits-all solution. One of Adobe’s biggest challenges and opportunities is providing the right experience for its wide array of customers. With more than 100 different products, the company’s customers range from individuals to large global corporations, and each group has a different set of needs. Adobe hopes individual customers can be entirely self-directed and get great service and answers without contacting the company. On the opposite end of the spectrum are large companies, where Adobe is considered a thought partner and who require more interaction to understand and address their concerns. In order to best meet the needs of customers at varying levels, employees need to receive the right training and be aware of the service required for each type of product. Putting that in motion means that employees must understand the products and their customers and feel comfortable and supported in the workplace to deliver quality service.

As customer experience and employee experience both become a larger focus at organizations, it seems only natural that they will grow together. Both of these experiences are connected and should be constantly evolving based on the trends, technology, and needs of both groups. By focusing on the connected experience of employees and customers, organizations don’t need to put one group ahead of the other and can enjoy a cohesive experience with a strong people-centric culture.

 

 

Disclosure: Adobe is a client of Blake Morgan’s speaking business.  

Sep 18, 2017

Imagine a city where people travel seamlessly on their way to and from work, new technology is integrated into everyday life, the air is clean of pollution, and people feel safe and welcome. It may sound too good to be true, but for a number of entrepreneurs and engineers, it’s a reality they are working towards every day.

            Ford is leading the charge to bring together all kinds of thinkers and creators to consider the future city—a place where new technology is used and executed smoothly in a way that is useful for the people and sustainable for the environment. From city planners to scientists and engineers, people from across nearly every discipline are involved in the conversation. In order to make the future city a real possibility, everyone must be involved and on board.

            There are a number of things to consider when creating the city of the future, including transportation, logistics, weather, safety, and much more. One area that is a central focus for many companies, including Ford, is transportation. Cities of the future over the next 20-100 years can’t rely on cars because it will lead to too much congestion and pollution. Instead, these thinkers are considering new ways to move people around that harness the power of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other new technologies. Ford is doing it through its recent acquisition of Chariot Shuttle—a micro-transit company that operates vans that can hold up to 14 passengers. These vans operate throughout cities to get passengers where they need to go, but the routes are entirely crowd-sourced, meaning that if enough people need to travel to or from a certain spot, the routes can be changed to accommodate their needs.

            There’s no doubt that people love the convenience of living in cities. In fact, cities are expected to grow by 60% by 2030. Now it’s up to the city managers, local leader, engineers, entrepreneurs, and more to turn those cities into sustainable entities. Creating the city of the future requires thinking outside the box—building more freeways won’t fix LA’s notoriously bad traffic, for example, so the conversation has moved to creative alternatives with public transportation. As the number of options available for public and shared transportation grows, cities need to better understand the trends and what is happening so they can continually improve the systems.

            Creating the city of the future is both a daunting and exciting challenge, and it all starts with a conversation across industries and expertise. With resources, new technology, and a collection of creative ideas, the city of the future might be here sooner than we think.

 

 

 

Sep 12, 2017

Online shopping and new technology has changed how customers interact with brands and make purchases, and it has had a huge effect on the customer experience. Knowing who your customer is and what they expect from your company is huge, especially when it comes to understanding why customers shop online. How customer experience is put into action changes based on the type of company and industry and what customers need to best have their needs met. However, there are always core similarities; Dr. Volker Hildebrand, Global Vice President at SAP Hybris and author of “The Customer Experience Edge”, has narrowed customer experience down to four fundamental principles: convenience, speed, relevance, and reliability. Companies that have the best customer experiences do a great job with at least three of the pillars.

            Customer experience is a holistic experience, and being able to offer a personalized approach for each customer can give your company a big advantage over the competition. Although companies may have internal silos, customers don’t see that and want a cohesive experience. Volker cites the example of a bank that was having difficulty getting customers to sign up for online banking. When it realized employees in the branches didn’t have any incentive to refer customers online and that the two entities were being run separately, it made changes to unite the branch and online experience and combine the metrics. Customers don’t care about what’s going on behind the scenes as long as they can have a quality and convenient experience, so companies need to take down silos for a unified experience.

            The internet has made the customer journey start way before the customer actually buys a product or steps into the store. Now, customers are doing their research to find out what products are best, and they expect to be able to find all the answers they need quickly and easily. If a company can’t provide those answers, either through a chatbot, online community, or human, they risk losing that customer to a brand that can provide the answers. Thinking about things from the customer’s perspective and making sure all the information is accurate and easily available can start the customer experience off on the right foot.

            One disruptive aspect of online shopping that is changing business models is subscription services. These days, customers can have subscriptions for everything from rental cars to toilet paper. Subscription models offer customers the convenience of not having to worry about ordering something, and they often come with discounts. However, using a subscription model means customer experience is more important than ever. In these cases, the experience and service is really what makes the difference—you’re no longer selling a product, you’re providing a service. Making customer experience an integral part of everything the company does, especially online, can drive growth and customer satisfaction.

            The key to customer experience is finding a way to stand out and putting yourself in the customer’s shoes to provide a cohesive experience from end to end, no matter if it is online or in store.

 

Sep 4, 2017

Every company wants a magic elixir that makes employees happier, profits higher, and the outlook rosier. According to leading business strategist Charlene Li, that secret sauce is growth. When a company is focused on growing, customers and employees are excited and enjoy an upward spiral. But in order to grow, companies need to be willing to take risks and go outside their comfort zones. Growth and meeting customers needs need to play a critical part in an organization’s strategy.

            Companies that take risks tend to have better customer experiences. Think about it—customers will more naturally want to shop from a brand that is new and finding the best ways to meet their needs instead of a company that is stuck in the past and hasn’t updated its products or practices in decades. In order to take calculated risks, companies must build the growth mindset into their company under the direction of top leadership. The speed of change depends on the industry, but companies should strive to keep up with the fastest moving customers they serve. For fast-paced tech companies, that could mean new initiatives every few months, while other manufacturing companies might take a big risk every few years—it all comes down to what your customers want and expect from your service.

            Part of growing is always finding customer solutions before customers even know that’s what they need. Charlene points to the example of T-Mobile, which talked to a number of customers about their mobile experiences. A common thread was that cell customers hated their carriers, no matter who that carrier was. They didn’t like being chained to a contract and limited in what they could do. With that in mind, T-Mobile took the risk to create the Un-Carrier strategy that has been successful for the company. If T-Mobile didn’t have a growth mindset and a strategy of listening to customers and thinking about the future, they would have missed out on a huge way to set themselves apart from the competition.

            Customer experience is also affected by how companies are organized. In many cases, it can be helpful to have a single person serve as the Chief Omnichannel Officer to bring together the various call centers and customer technologies. This is especially important early on in a company’s customer experience maturity when one person needs to hold the organization’s hand and set the tone for interacting with customers. As things grow and develop and the strategy becomes more engrained in the organization, that person can act more like an organizer to bring together all of the aspects of customer experience instead of being expressly in charge of every detail. No matter the size of the company, everyone needs to have a customer-centric mindset that helps them do their part to create a strong customer experience.

            Understanding where your company is today and where it needs to be in the future can help set a strategy that encourages customer interaction. Charlene suggests creating a customer advisory board and inviting customers to be open and honest and what the company can do better in its customer interactions. Staying one step ahead of the competition and always keeping an eye on the customer can lead to tremendous growth and success, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Instead of being distracted by things that don’t really matter, companies need to create strong strategies to guide their actions and meet those unseen customer needs.

 

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