Report: The Four Customer Experience Core Competencies (Free)

If you are only going to read only one thing about customer experience, then this report is it. It’s the blueprint for building a customer-centric organization… and it’s free.

We just published a Temkin Group report, The Four CX Core Competencies. This blueprint to building a customer-centric organization is an update to our groundbreaking research that was originally published in 2010 and updated in 2013.

Temkin Group has conducted multiple large-scale studies demonstrating that customer experience (CX) is highly correlated with loyalty across many different industries, in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business environments. When customers have a good experience with a company, they are more likely to repurchase from the company, try its new offerings, and recommend it to others.

While many companies try to improve their CX by making superficial changes, Temkin Group has found that the only path to lasting differentiation and increased loyalty is to build a customer-centric culture. Temkin Group has studied hundreds of companies to uncover the difference between CX leaders and their less successful peers, and has identified four CX competencies that companies must master if they wish to build and sustain CX differentiation:

1. Purposeful Leadership: Operate consistently with a clear set of values. (see video)
2. Compelling Brand Values: Deliver on your brand promises to customers. (see video)
3. Employee Engagement: Align employees with the goals of the organization. (see video)
4. Customer Connectedness: Infuse customer insight across the organization. (see video)

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This whiteboard video describes the Four CX Core Competencies:

Here are the best practices described in the report:

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Report: Humanizing Digital Interactions

We just published a Temkin Group report, Humanizing Digital Interactions.

Emotions play an integral role in how customers make decisions and form judgments. This means that how a customer feels about an interaction with a company has an enormous impact on his or her loyalty to that company. However, companies tend to ignore customer emotions, especially during digital interactions, which is problematic as customers are increasingly interacting with companies online. This report focuses on humanizing digital interactions by replicating the elements of strong human conversations.

Here are some highlights:

• We developed The Human Conversational Model, which is made up of seven elements – Intent Decoding, Contextual Framing, Empathetic Agility, Supportive Feedback, Basic Manners, Self-Awareness, and Emotional Reflection.
• We share over 35 examples of best practices from companies that are designing digital experiences across the seven elements of The Human Conversational Model.
• We demonstrate how you could apply The Human Conversational Model to three types of digital activities: opening a new bank account online, purchasing a pair of shoes through an app, and getting technical support online.

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A gratifying conversation requires two processes:

• Cooperative Interface. Each participant is required to collaborate with her partner to achieve the shared goal of the conversation – be that casually catching up, gathering information, sharing knowledge, etc. This is the part of the model that a conversational partner sees and responds to, and it consists of five elements: contextual framing, intent decoding, empathetic agility, supportive feedback, and basic manners.
• Background Mindfulness. This portion of the model is not observable within what would normally be considered the scope of the conservation as it pertains to what happens internally within person. Each participant has a pre-existing notion of who he is as an individual (self-awareness) and throughout the course of the conversation, learns about how he affects other people (emotional reflection). Though not directly observable, “background mindfulness” informs the way in which each participant communicates with his current and future partners.

Here’s an overview of the Human Conversation Model along with best practices we highlight in the report:

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Report: Lessons in CX Excellence, 2017

We just published a Temkin Group report, Lessons in CX Excellence, 2017. The report provides insights from eight finalists in the Temkin Group’s 2016 CX Excellence Awards. The report, which has 62 pages of content, includes an appendix with the finalists’ nomination forms. This report has rich insights about both B2B and B2C customer experience.

Here’s the executive summary:

This year, we named five organizations the winners of Temkin Group’s 2016 Customer Experience Excellence Award – Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Century Support Services, Crowe Horwath, Oxford Properties, and VCA. This report highlights specific examples of how these companies’ customer experience (CX) efforts have created value for both their customers and for their businesses, describes winners’ best practices across the four customer experience competencies: purposeful leadership, compelling brand values, employee engagement, and customer connectedness. it includes all of the winners’ detailed nomination forms to help you collect examples and ideas to apply to your own CX efforts.

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Here are some highlights from the winners:

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

Report: Emotion-Infused Experience Design

We just published a Temkin Group report, Emotion-Infused Experience Design.

Emotions play an essential role in how people make decisions. Consequently, how a customer feels about their experience with a company has the most significant impact on their loyalty to that company. And yet despite their importance, both customers and companies agree that organizations do a poor job of engaging customers’ emotions. To help companies create a stronger emotional connection with customers, we’ve developed an approach called Emotion-Infused Experience Design (EIxD). To master EIxD, organizations must continuously focus on three questions: “Who exactly are these people (who happen to be our customers)?” “What is our organizational personality?” and “How do we want customers to feel?” This report offers both advice and examples about how to apply these three questions across four facets that affect emotion: senses, feelings, social, and values. And to help infuse these practices across the organization, we have also identified some strategies for how to turn employees into agents of EIxD.

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Our research shows that emotion is often a missing link in customer experience. While emotions may seem ephemeral and subjective, we developed a concrete methodology you can use to design for emotion. We call this methodology “Emotion-Infused Experience Design” (EIxD), and we define it as:

An approach for deliberately creating interactions that evoke specific customer emotions.

To master EIxD, you must ask (and answer) three questions throughout the entire design process:

1. Who exactly are these people (who happen to be our customers)? You cannot design emotionally engaging experiences without a solid grasp on who your target customers are—what they want, what they need, what makes them tick.
2. What is our organizational personality? Research shows that people relate to companies as if they are fellow human beings rather than inanimate corporate entities.
3. How do we want our customers to feel? People are inherently emotional beings, and every interaction they have with you will make them feel a certain way—whether you intend it to or not.

To address the three questions of EIxD, this report shows how to design around four elements of emotion: senses, feelings, social, and values. Here are two of the 26 figures in the report:

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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. 

Report: Behavioral Guide to Customer Experience Design

We just published a Temkin Group report, Behavioral Guide to Customer Experience Design. Here’s the executive summary:

According to recent scientific research, customers make most of their decisions using intuitive thinking instead of rational thinking. Intuitive thinking relies on unconscious heuristics and biases to make decisions efficiently, and as a result, people tend to be more affected by losses than by gains, to prefer simplicity over complexity, to be affected by their current emotional and visceral states, to be heavily influenced by those around them, to make decisions based on context, and to misjudge their past and future experiences. In this report, we identify best practices for tapping into these heuristics and biases across three areas of experience design; companies can Nudge customers in the right direction, Assist them in accomplishing their goals, and Enhance their overall experience. To incorporate intuitive thinking into experience design, companies need to follow four steps: define target customers, identify relevant heuristics and biases, select design strategies, and then test, test, test.

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Here are tactics for applying these human biases in your experience design efforts that we describe in the report:

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The bottom line: Embrace your customers’ natural behaviors.

Data Snapshot: Social Media Benchmark, 2015

We just published a Temkin Group data snapshot, Social Media Benchmark, 2015. This is our annual analysis of how consumers use different social media sites on computers as well as on mobile phones (see last year’s data snapshot).

Here’s the data snapshot description:

In January 2015, we surveyed 10,000 U.S. consumers about how frequently they use social media on their computers and mobile phones, and we then compared these usage rates to analogous data we collected in January 2012, January 2013, and January 2014. This analysis looks at the frequency with which consumers in different age groups use computers and mobile phones to access Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, and third-party rating sites. We also examine how usage rates vary by mobile phone type.

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This research has 14 data-rich graphics. Here’s a portion of one showing the daily social media activity via both computers and mobile devices for U.S. consumers:

Some of the findings form the research include:

• Consumers increased their daily computer usage across all nine social media sites we examined. While daily Facebook access showed the smallest increase, from 46.5% in 2014 to 47.1% in 2015, Twitter jumped the most as daily computer users increased from 13.4% to 16.1% over the past year.
• Social media activity grew even faster on mobile devices. Daily mobile usage of Facebook increased the most, from 29.3% in 2014 to 36.1% in 2015. Pinterest showed the most momentum, growing its audience of daily mobile users from 8.0% to 11.4% over the last year.
• The youngest group of consumers we studied, those between the ages of 18 and 24, lowered their daily computer usage of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, as well as with ratings and review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. Those young adults also lowered their daily mobile use of LinkedIn and Google+.
• These young adults are very mobile-centric, as they are more likely to use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest daily on their mobile devices than on their computers.
• Consumers between the ages of 25 and 34 are the most active on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and ratings sites.
• Across both computers and mobile devices, consumers between 35- and 44-years-old showed the most increase in daily social media activity between 2014 and 2015.
• iPhone users are the most active on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, while Blackberry users are the most active on LinkedIn, Tumblr, and ratings sites.

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The bottom line: Mobile use continues to rise

Data Snapshot: Media Use Benchmark, 2015

We just published a Temkin Group data snapshot, Media Use Benchmark, 2015. This is our annual analysis of how much time consumers spend using different media channels (see last year’s data snapshot).

Here’s the data snapshot description:

In January 2015, we surveyed 10,000 U.S. consumers about their media usage patterns and compared the results to similar data we collected in January 2014, January 2013, and January 2012. Our analysis examines the amount of time consumers spend every day watching television, browsing the Internet (for both work and leisure), reading books (both print and electronic), reading newspapers (both print and electronic), listening to the radio, reading a print magazine, and using a mobile phone. This data snapshot breaks down the results by income level, education level, and, most expansively, by age.

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Use of mobile phones for internet or app-related consumption increased an average of 0.4 hours per day over the past year. This is the largest jump in average usage time over all 11 areas we examined in both 2014 and 2015. Respondents under the age of 35 dedicate the most amount of time to all of these activities, with the exception of TV watching, which is most heavily consumed by 65- to 74-year-olds.

Here’s a portion of the first figure from the data snapshot that contains 12 data-rich charts:

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The bottom line: Mobile use continues to rise

Report: Lessons in CX Excellence, 2015

We just published a Temkin Group report, Lessons in CX Excellence, 2015. The report provides insights from 8 finalists in the Temkin Group’s 2014 CX Excellence Awards. The report, which is 98 pages long, includes an appendix with the finalists’ nomination forms. This report has rich insights about both B2B and B2C customer experience.

Here’s the executive summary:

This year, we chose eight organizations as finalists for Temkin Group’s 2014 Customer Experience Excellence Award. Finalists are Activision Customer Care, Aetna, Crowe Horwath LLP, Dell Inc., EMC Corporation, Texas NICUSA, The Results Companies, and TouchPoint Support Services. This report provides specific examples of how these companies’ CX efforts have created value for both their customers and for their businesses. We also highlight their best practices across the four customer experience competencies—purposeful leadership, compelling brand values, employee engagement, and customer connectedness. At the end of this report, we have included all of the finalists’ detailed nomination forms to help you collect examples and ideas to apply to your own CX efforts.

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Watch Temkin Group webinar about this research.

Here are some highlights from the finalists:

• Activision Customer Care. Activision demonstrates its commitment to creating great game player experiences in a multitude of ways, such as emphasizing the use of player feedback to identify improvement opportunities. Activision combines this dedication to listening to its players with a willingness to redesign significant interactions. For example, it revamped its “Contact Us” page to include ambassador chat and callback scheduling, which resulted in higher satisfaction and lower effort for customers.
• Aetna. Despite being in an industry undergoing tremendous change, Aetna is focusing on its 2020 vision to make the company 100% customer-centric. It has implemented many changes to help achieve this goal, including providing service over the phone and investing in text and speech analytics to better identify customer pain points and improve the behaviors and skillsets of its call representatives. The latter effort has already resulted in reduced repeat calls, improved accuracy, and a higher Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• Crowe Horwath. With a client engagement score towering 33 points above the accounting industry average, Crowe Horwath is seeing the pay-off of its efforts to deliver an exceptional client experience. These efforts include establishing a firm-wide governance model and measurement scorecard, implementing a closed-loop voice of the customer program, incorporating customer journey mapping to uncover moments of truth, and engaging employees through training, client-driven CX recognition programs, and an employee ambassador program.
• Dell. Dell’s CX efforts start with an emphasis on listening to and engaging with customers and employees. Dell enlists different groups from across the company—including engineering, marketing, sales, support, and digital—to make improvements to the entire customer journey. As a result of this work, Dell has opened 16 solution centers—which gives customers a place to experience solutions—and has provided proactive support over a wide variety of social channels, simplified Dell.com for consumer and business users, and implemented more than 540 customer innovation ideas.
• EMC Corporation. The Total Customer Experience (TCE) program at EMC works across the enterprise to enhance the company’s customer experience by listening to customer feedback, analyzing data, and taking directed action based on that feedback and data. The program also raises awareness of how every person at the company impacts customer experience. As its CX efforts have matured, the TCE team has evolved to take on more challenging tasks; its projects now include predictive CX analytics, measuring its partner experience quality, and optimizing the experience across many different customer segments and solutions.
• The Results Companies. To support its work as a business process outsourcing provider, The Results Companies uses its own unique operating model called CX360, which allows for continuous business process refinements that improve the customer experience. Built on three pillars—people, knowledge, empowerment—CX360 has helped the company ensure that its 8,500 employees around the globe remain focused on CX. The operating model has also contributed to Results’ strong growth in new clients and year-over-year revenue.
• Texas NICUSA/Texas.gov. Texas NICUSA provides support for Texas.gov and implements technology solutions for Texas governmental agencies. It serves over 50,000 monthly site visitors and 300 state and local governments. Its three-tiered multi-channel customer service approach includes a general customer service Help Desk (phone and online), a Service Desk to support governmental agency needs, and a group of Technology Subject Matter Experts who can provide escalated assistance to either citizens or agency employees.
• TouchPoint Support Services. TouchPoint Support Services streamlines support services within healthcare facilities. The company’s business goals, known as Top of Mind Objectives, guide the work of its 6,800 associates, helping them to find inefficiencies and improve patient satisfaction, associate engagement, safety, unity, and budget compliance. Touchpoint uses many methods for aligning employees with these objectives, including special training for managers and frontline employees, coaching from dedicated customer experience managers (who visit sites regularly), and associate recognition programs.

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If you enjoyed this report, check out Lessons in CX Excellence, 2014 and Lessons in CX Excellence, 2013.

The bottom line: There’s a lot to learn from these CX Excellence Finalists.

Report: Evaluating Mobile eGift Card Purchasing Experiences

We published a Temkin Group report, Evaluating Mobile eGift Card Purchasing Experiences. The report uses Temkin Group’s SLICE-B experience review methodology to assess the mobile sites of 10 retailers. Here’s the executive summary:

Although smartphones are a convenient interaction channel, their small screens pose serious design challenges for companies. To evaluate the customer experience of mobile websites, we used Temkin Group’s SLICE-B experience review methodology to assess the experience of buying an eGift Card from ten large retailers: Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart, Target, Walgreens, CVS, Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Best Buy, and RadioShack. Home Depot earned the top score for its functionality and minimalist processes, while the user could not complete the full purchasing goal at Lowe’s, Walmart, Target, Walgreens, CVS, Best Buy, or RadioShack.

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The report includes the scores for all 10 companies across each of the six SLICE-B categories, strengths and weaknesses of each retailer, and some best practices across all of the mobile sites. Here is a description of the user and her overall goal that we tested:

Our user was a middle-aged woman looking to send her niece a $25 electronic gift card to help her get settled into her new apartment. While she is reasonably proficient at operating a smartphone, she finds entering a lot of information to be difficult on the small keyboard. She has an iPhone 4s. She does not have an app for any of the companies being evaluated and does not know whether they sell $25 eGift Cards.

Here are the overall results:

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The bottom line: Gift cards should be easier to buy via mobile phones.