Free eBook: 25 Tips For Tapping Into Customer Emotions

As part of our CX Day celebration, we’re giving away this free eBook: 25 Tips For Tapping Into Customer Emotions.

Here’s the executive summary:

Emotions play an essential role in how people form judgments and make decisions. Consequently, a customer’s emotional response to an experience with a company has a significant impact on their loyalty to that company. To help you improve your customer experience, we’ve compiled a list of 25 examples from companies who are tapping into customer emotions, which you can emulate at your own organization.

The eBook contains 25 tips across four areas: Experience Design, Organizational Personality, Organizational Empathy, and Customer Segmentation.

The bottom line: Apply these lessons to tap into your customers’ emotions

eBook: 15 Tips for Engaging Employees

In honor of CX Day, Temkin Group is publishing a free eBook: 15 Tips for Engaging Employees. Here’s the executive summary: 

It is impossible for an organization to deliver a great customer experience without an engaged workforce. To help you engage your employees in your customer experience journey, we have compiled a list of 15 examples of how leading-edge companies are practicing what Temkin Group calls the “Five I’s of Employee Engagement”—Inform, Inspire, Instruct, Involve, and Incent—which you can modify and emulate at your own firm. 

eBook: 25 Tips for Amplifying Empathy

Happy CX Day 2014!

As I mentioned in my 14 Customer Experience Trends for 2014, this year will be the “Year of Empathy.” Given the focus on this key area, Temkin Group created the Amplify Empathy movement. So when we were thinking about our CX Day celebration, it seemed like a perfect fit for us to do something about empathy.

That’s why we created this free eBook: 25 Tips for Amplifying Empathy.

Download free eBook

The eBook discusses these tips from a wide variety of companies:

The bottom line: Pick a few tips to replicate and amplify empathy in your organization

Free eBook: People-Centric Experience Design

A few months ago, I introduced a new concept called People-Centric Experience Design™ (PCxD™), which is defined as

Fostering an environment that creates positive, memorable human encounters

Since we believe that the concept can significantly help organizations deliver better customer experience, we’ve decided to publish the concept in a free eBook.

Download eBook for FREE

Experiences are all about people, the customers who interact with your organization and the employees who shape those interactions. Most approaches to customer experience, from voice of the customer programs to customer journey mapping, deal with the logical, left-brain elements of customer experience. But they often fall short on the right-brain, emotional side. That’s where PCxD comes into play.

To achieve PCxD, companies must master three principles:

1. Align through Purpose. Just about every large organization has vision and mission statements floating around their hallways. But when it comes to making decisions on a day-to-day basis, these documents are nowhere to be found. They play NO ROLE in how the company is actually run. However, customer experience leaders operate differently. Rather than making empty promises, they create and sustain a clear sense of purpose that inspires loyalty from customers and alignment from employees.
2. Guide with Empathy. People have a natural capacity for empathy. Unfortunately, companies often bring out people’s more selfish tendencies and suppress their empathetic ones by playing into their personal biases and arranging the organizational structure to reward self-centered behavior. For instance, while a typical customer interaction cuts across many functional groups (a single purchase, for instance, may include contact with decisions by product management, sales, marketing, accounts payable, and legal organizations), companies push employees to stay focused solely on their own functional areas. This myopic view is often reinforced by incentives focused on narrow domains, which creates a chasm between empathy and personal success. Companies must elicit human empathy, not selfishness, by sharing a deeper understanding of customers and their needs.
3. Design for Memories. When it comes to loyalty, customer experience isn’t very important. That’s right, customer experience is not very important. What is important? Memories. People make decisions based on how they remember experiences, not on how they actually experienced them. This distinction is important because people don’t remember experiences the way they actually occur. Rather, people construct memories as stories in their mind based on the fragments of their actual experiences. An improved understanding of how people truly remember things can help you focus on improving the most important moments.

Download eBook for FREE

The bottom line: Tap into the power of purpose, empathy, and memories.

50 CX Tips: eBook and Infographic

I recently completed a series of 50 customer experience (CX) tips. To make it easier for people to read and download all of the tips, I assembled them into a free eBook: 50 CX Tips: Simple Ideas, Powerful Results.

Each of the 50 CX Tips is aligned with one or more of Temkin Group’s four customer experience core competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness.

The CX Tips include examples from a wide variety of companies including Adobe, Amazon.com, Apple, BCBS of Michigan, Becker and Poliakoff, Big Lots, BMO Financial Group, Bombardier Aerospace, CDW, Charles Schwab, Citrix, Disney, EMC, Fidelity Investments, Hampton Inn, Hilton, IBM, Intersil, Intuit, JetBlue, Microsoft, Oklahoma City Thunder, Oracle, Safelite AutoGlass, Salesforce.com, SanDIsk, SimplexGrinnell, Southwest Airlines, Sovereign Assurance of NZ, Sprint, Starbucks, Stream Global Services, Sam’s Club, USAA, VMware, and ZocDoc.

While you may have a hard time applying all 50 CX TIps, you should be able to identify several that will work for your organization. I challenge you to select three or more of the CX Tips to implement. Here’s an idea: Have each of your team members pick the five CX Tips that they think would be the most powerful for your organization. Use a team meeting to discuss everyone’s selections and pick the ones you want to implement.

We also created an infographic with the 50 CX tips. Here’s a version with the top 10 CX tips (click on the graphic to get a .pdf of the full infographic).

The bottom line: A handful of CX Tips can propel your customer experience.

eBook: 10 CX Mistakes to Avoid

FREE eBook: 10 CX Mistakes to Avoid: Advice for improving your customer experience efforts. This is a valuable guide for any organization that is undertaking or considering a customer experience (CX) transformation journey.

While good customer experience can build loyalty, not every effort to improve CX leads to success. We’ve worked with dozens of companies on their customer experience journeys and studied hundreds of other organizations. Through this work, we’ve identified 10 common mistakes that companies make along the way.

This eBook is written in simple language so that the lessons can be easily shared with all CX practitioners as well with other leaders across your organization. The goal of the eBook is to help your organization recognize these common mistakes before they become an issue within your company. We also provide detailed steps for avoiding them.

Can you get most of the information from the blog without buying the eBook? Sure, just follow the links below. We created the eBook as a self-contained educational resource on CX best practices. We added a “Forward” that provides context around CX by drawing upon data from The State of CX, 2012 and The ROI of CX.

Hopefully you will find this a valuable eBook to share within your organization, so we’ve created pricing that make it easy to share. You can purchase packages for sharing the eBook with 5, 10, 20, 50, or 100 people, and there’s even a package for sharing with an entire organization of any size.

Here are the posts about each of the 10 CX mistakes to avoid:

1. Faking Executive Commitment
2. Over-Relying on Customer Surveys
3. Neglecting Experience Design
4. Treating All Customers the Same
5. Un-Engaging New Customers
6. Ignoring Employees
7. Obsessing About Detractors
8. Forgetting to Celebrate Success
9. Falling in Love with a Metric
10. Mapping Internal Touchpoints

The bottom line: There’s no reason to repeat other people’s mistakes

Free eBook: The 6 Laws Of Customer Experience

A few weeks ago I introduced the 6 laws of customer experience. Since then, I’ve written posts for each of the six laws. It turns out that these posts have had extremely high readership. So I decided to pull the content together in a mini book: The 6 Laws Of Customer Experience: The Fundamental Truths That Define How Organizations Treat Customers.

Since it’s not really a novel (only 11 pages), I’m giving it away for free. Just click on the picture of the cover. You can then print it out or save it to your computer. Go ahead and share this book(let) with as many people as you’d like. Spread the word!

The bottom line: Hopefully this book is worth more than its price.