Jeannie and Adam share research and expert tips for getting chatbots and humans to work together in harmony. Are chatbots and humans working well together? Chatbots are here to stay, and new research says we love them! However, we have a long way to go before they can fully operate on their own. For instance, bots are great for answering simple questions, but real humans do need to step in to answer the tough ones. “Not all chatbots are created equal not are all humans.” -Adam Toporek Even the b...
Aug 14, 2017•11 min
Adam and Jeannie share tips to unlock your full mobile potential and deliver what customers need most in the moment. What’s your mobile potential? We talk about mobile a lot on this show, but that’s because capabilities and expectations are always changing! Are you keeping up? Because there are many ways to leverage mobile technology to make it easier to do business with you. “Ask yourself, ‘What does a customer really want via mobile?’” -Jeannie Walters There are many ways mobile can be used to...
Aug 10, 2017•12 min
Adam and Jeannie interview Merit Gest to discuss powerful sales engagement and onboarding strategies for customer-focused sales teams. Onboarding for outstanding sales engagement Sales is often treated as separate from the customer experience. Consequently, sales staff is often not trained to deliver a customer-focused experience from start to finish. Even when customer experience principles are included, typical sales training falls short on empowering sales professionals to deliver great exper...
Aug 08, 2017•22 min
Adam and Jeannie explore recent research about prevailing ecommerce experience pet peeves and offer creative solutions. How does your ecommerce experience stack up? Ecommerce experiences have come a long way since the 90’s, but recent research shows that we still have a long way to go. Customers are still having problems with navigation, personalization, functionality, and just plain poor user experiences. “It’s still not really about the customer at the end of the day…” -Jeannie Walters After g...
Aug 07, 2017•11 min
Adam shares surprising statistics about first contact resolution, why it’s important, and tips for putting this knowledge to better use. First Contact Resolution (FCR) is not always customer-centric How many steps must a customer take before resolving an issue? More importantly, how does the customer feel about the experience of making contact? Because speediness for speed’s sake tends to harm the way customers perceive the experience. First Contact Resolution (FCR) is a common metric in call ce...
Aug 03, 2017•7 min
Jeannie and Adam interview podcaster and employee attitudes expert Julie Ann Sullivan live from the NSA Influence 2017 conference. Employee attitudes vs overall success While you may have a solid business strategy and great employees, you may still struggle with engaging your workforce to deliver the best experiences possible. Do your employees WANT to come to work? Even more important: Is their attitude conducive to a healthy and engaging culture? Because policies and and skill sets aside, a he...
Aug 01, 2017•20 min
Jeannie and Adam discuss creative ways predicting behavior and risk without investing in advanced technology. Predicting behavior is not a new thing Predictive analytics is amazing as it sounds, and the technology is improving rapidly. Machines can now analyze data to predict customer behavior, calculate risks, identify who is likely to upgrade or buy more… The list goes on. But what if you don’t have the budget and resources to take advantage of this amazing technology? “You can find behaviors ...
Jul 31, 2017•12 min
Adam and Jeannie share tips for helping employees understand, align, and stay motivated to achieve goals. You’re setting goals, but are they setting in? Everyone sets goals to drive their business forward… But teams, departments, and the individuals within them have goals of their own. Keeping all those smaller goals in tune with the greater mission of an organization is challenging! “We are what we focus on.” -Adam Toporek It’s critical to make sure employees understand what their mission is an...
Jul 27, 2017•9 min
Jeannie and Adam interview author and medical liability expert Pat Iyer live from the NSA Influence 2017 conference. Nurse your business to health! Stakes can be high in any business... but imagine if you had legal and medical issues thrown in the mix! Today’s guest achieved amazing results turning the experience around in the high-stakes medical liability industry. Dealing with lawyers, patients, and issues that require legal intervention, it’s no doubt medical liability is a touchy subject! Bu...
Jul 25, 2017•15 min
Jeannie and Adam know how difficult it is to hire right. Often, organizations feel tremendous pressure to fill open roles, and too often, these rushed hires are poor hires. In this episode, Jeannie and Adam share tips for hiring well you're under the gun. One way to maintain hiring standards when you don't have time is to compress the hiring process. Make sure to not short the process by eliminating steps but to find a way to execute the full hiring process in a shortened window. Check out the f...
Jul 24, 2017•11 min
Jeannie shares 3 tips to prevent organizational structure from negatively affecting the customer experience. How organizational structure creates bad experiences A solid organizational structure is essential to delivering great customer experiences, creating new ones, or solving issues. But too often, we send customers on a journey through our internal org charts instead of a direct path to success – especially when there’s an issue. While it is important to establish accountability, customers d...
Jul 20, 2017•6 min
Jeannie and Adam interview Rocky Romanella, author of Tighten the Lug Nuts:The Principles of Balanced Leadership. Achieving balanced leadership Leadership in business means gearing not only yourself, but those around you for success. Too often, overwhelmed leaders become more focused on the goals of their business than the people and things that make success possible. How can you achieve consistency in the way you lead, motivate or mentor your people? How do you balance your goals with keeping t...
Jul 18, 2017•27 min
Jeannie and Adam report live from the National Speakers Association’s Influence 2017 conference to discuss the power of situational awareness in customer service. Employees aren't really empowered without situational awareness Are your employees empowered to provide consistently great customer service, no matter what? Giving employees the freedom to act off-script is great, but without situational awareness, that power is not being utilized to its fullest. “You want to proactively anticipate CS ...
Jul 17, 2017•7 min
Adam and Jeannie interview Alison Herzog, head of global social business strategy at Dell, about "deep listening" on a large scale. The art of “deep listening” in social business One of the most important elements to designing experiences is listening to customers. That sounds simple enough, but it’s easy to assume we understand what they’re trying to tell us when we really don’t! “Are we listening to really understand our customers, or are we listening to react…?” - Alison Herzog Our customers’...
Jul 14, 2017•26 min
Jeannie and Adam explore critical customer segments that typically get ignored when designing customer experiences. Are you overlooking critical customer segments? Creating customer segments is a great way to help deliver an easier, more personalized, and more relevant experience for different groups of customers. But in many cases – especially in B2B – the customer journey is much more complex than it seems, and simplifying it is not always an option. Those moving through your customer journey ...
Jul 11, 2017•8 min
Adam shares 7 ways to deliver a faster customer experience without sacrificing quality, vital details, or personalization. Who doesn’t want a faster customer experience!? With more on their plates and fewer resources, customers are busier than ever before. So in most customer experiences, time is of the essence. But nobody wants to feel rushed through a transaction, left without direction, or treated in a cold, impersonal manner. Whatever you’re selling, the pressure is on you to deliver better,...
Jul 10, 2017•7 min
Adam and Jeannie discuss several ways customer service training goes wrong, how that impacts the customer experience, and what you can do to fix it. Customer service training done right Companies talk or even brag a lot about the ways they train, mentor, and educate their employees. But for all their efforts, many of them are still doing it wrong. It’s easy for leaders to think that dedicating the right amount of time and resources ensures all the right ground is covered... so please don’t fall ...
Jul 06, 2017•11 min
Adam and Jeannie explore some universal customer tipping points, or moments of truth in the customer journey, for you to examine today. 3 Powerful moments of truth in every customer journey Where are your customers when they decide whether to stay on board or jump ship? When do they decide to explore your competition instead of becoming loyal or advocating for your brand? These are powerful moments of truth, and every customer journey is filled with them. “Any journey has that moment of truth as...
Jul 04, 2017•7 min
Jeannie shares 3 powerful questions to get actionable feedback from customers. Powerful innovation starts with powerful questions Honest customer feedback is the key to maintaining a strong culture around delivering great experiences, but customers have a lot more to tell you than what you’re asking about in surveys! Sometimes you must pick up the phone, go beyond the surveys, and ask some one-on-one questions. “If you reach out and ask directly, you can listen for the nuance of the answers.” -J...
Jul 03, 2017•5 min
Adam and Jeannie discuss Basecamp’s customer service ethic and tackle some of the top challenges faced by support professionals. Fine-tuning your customer service ethic If there's one thing customer service leaders need support with, it's connecting with, understanding, and supporting their own customers! Today’s guest, Chase Clemons, hears all the challenges faced by businesses of varied sizes, then helps them make the right decisions. He’s made it part of his mission to help them help their ow...
Jun 29, 2017•25 min
In this special edition “live” from C-Suite Network conference, we discuss the importance of including customer experience in business plans with Vicky Smitley, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Hearthside Food Solutions. Why is customer experience missing from business plans? Many business leaders feel that if they have rock solid business plans, then a great customer experience will follow. But few think of creating a culture around customer experience as part of their business plan. Cu...
Jun 27, 2017•13 min
Adam shares his thoughts on the importance of 1-to-1 experiences as we hand parts of the experience over to technology. 1-to-1 or 1-to-none? Customers interact with your brand on many channels at countless touchpoints, whether there’s a human on the other end of the experience or not. And with the power of technology to help deliver these experiences, it’s easy to get caught up in experience design and optimizations. “…the idea of #CustomerService is still as relevant and important as ever.” -Ad...
Jun 26, 2017•5 min
Adam and Jeannie explore how corporate myths affect culture and customer experience, ways to identify them, and what you can do to set things straight. Corporate myths create bad experiences for your customers. It may sound silly, but organizations and the teams within have their own corporate myths and legends. We’re not talking about inside jokes like the goblin that lives inside the copy machine. Employees accept corporate myths as truths and perpetuate them in ways that cause problems intern...
Jun 22, 2017•12 min
In this special edition live from C-Suite Network conference, three-time Stevie Award winner Jason Forrest unlocks the power of customer certainty. Customer certainty and the keys to loyalty We talk a lot about the correlation between sales and customer experience, but now we get to hear it from an award-winning sales coach and expert. Jason Forrest, CEO and Chief Culture officer at Forrest Performance Group, is a three-time Stevie Award winner for Sales Training or Coaching Program of the Year....
Jun 20, 2017•14 min
Jeannie shares tips for understanding customer touchpoints from the customer’s perspective and taking action. Understanding customer touchpoints for what they really are is essential to mapping and evaluating the true customer experience. But common definitions don’t give us an understanding we can act on, and there’s a lot of bad information out there! A watered-down customer touchpoint definition may fit nicely on a page for the general public, but it won’t help you understand what’s really ha...
Jun 19, 2017•7 min
Bestselling author and customer service expert Matt Dixon to uncovers surprising facts and common misconceptions about delivering low-effort service. Think you’re delivering low-effort service? It seems so simple: Reduce customer effort, then you’ll have more loyal customers! But don’t be fooled by that kind of simplicity. Customers perceive effort in different ways than you think! Today’s guest, bestselling author Matt Dixon, has researched and written extensively on how to deliver a truly effo...
Jun 15, 2017•36 min
Adam and Jeannie share common customer survey mistakes and how to avoid them to get thoughtful responses. Losing our way with customer survey mistakes Customer surveys are great for getting the feedback we need, learning how to improve our experiences, or finding out where we need to invest. Recent studies show that most customers ignore surveys, most of those who do fill them out don’t do so thoughtfully, and many who start surveys never finish them. And the survey feedback we DO get? It’s only...
Jun 13, 2017•16 min
Adam shares tips for embracing showrooming to compete with online retailers. Showrooming is not your worst enemy If you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer, it’s likely that showrooming is becoming a big, if not the biggest. Every day, you open your doors to customers who just want to check out the merchandise in real life before ordering from a virtual retailer. And since you may not be able to compete on price and convenience with online retail giants like Amazon, Overstock, and many others, what c...
Jun 12, 2017•7 min
Adam interviews Peter Friedman, CEO of LiveWorld, a social customer experience company, about the changing landscape of customer service messaging. The age of messaging Today Peter Friedman, CEO of LiveWorld, joins us for a fascinating update on the present and future of customer service messaging. Large brands like Walmart and American Express are leveraging new technology to engage customers like never before. Through powerful apps, businesses now engage customers every day, wherever they are,...
Jun 08, 2017•13 min
Adam and Jeannie share 3 powerful ideas to make quick progress with customer experience sprints. Streamline your goals with customer experience sprints Have you heard of business sprints? The idea is to put most long-term goals aside, then focus exclusively on one goal for a predetermined period. This concept has been taking off lately in business and in government, because it works! Sprints are a great way to bring departments together to work for a common goal, and get results quickly. Set you...
Jun 06, 2017•7 min
