Mystery shopping: it’s that common practice where companies hire professional “shoppers” to evaluate and report on how your customers experience your business and gain valuable perspective on the customer’s journey. But, like many things today, the pandemic has shifted how customer experience pros approach their practice. Host Steve Walker welcomes guest Michael Mills, global vice president of sales for HS Brands International, to discuss why CX pros should consider broadening their toolbox with this practice.
A resource for customer experience (CX) and experience management (XM) professionals. 
Episodes tagged “Steve Walker”
There’s a ton of science behind something as simple as a customer making a decision to purchase a product or service. Behavioral economics is a field that seeks to help us understand the biases and errors in a person’s decision-making process. Understanding this field can also provide CX pros with better insight into customer behavior, thereby finding ways to improve the customer experience. Host Steve Walker welcomes guest Richard Jordan, CEO of Raggit, a customer-service review app, and one of the contributing authors of a new book, “Customer Experience 3”, to discuss how CX professionals can look to behavioral economics to help improve customer experience.
It’s been over a year since a global pandemic has forced companies and organizations across the globe to rethink how they do work. While not an option for many companies, some began moving their operations to a work from home model, and it’s a trend that most CEO’s think will not go away. So how will this new work trend affect the employee and customer experience? Host Steve Walker welcomes Shanika Ofori, director of key accounts at 5CA, a company specializing in work-from-home global CX, for a discussion on how the work-from-home environment affects employee and customer experience.
In the United States, people typically don't think of themselves as “customers” to the government. However, governing bodies from the local, state, and federal levels have been embracing customer experience as a way to connect to the community, and commercial businesses can learn from their efforts. Host Steve Walker welcomes Qualtrics experts Chelsie Bright, global head of government, and Sydney Heimbrock, chief industry advisor for government, for a discussion on understanding how CX works in government at all levels.
It’s important for those leading a company’s CX efforts to make certain the customer experience delivered by your front-line employees matches the customer’s expectations. And that means your employees need to understand your brand and the expectations it promises. Host Steve Walker welcomes Chris Wallace, co-founder and president of the InnerView Group, for a discussion on how to ensure your front-line employees deliver the experience promised by your brand.
CX professionals understand the difficulties in expanding existing programs: organizational silos, by-in from leadership, sunsetting older programs… It’s a stressful task. However, a recent study by the Qualtrics XM Institute discovered that programs successful at expanding throughout their company have a common “cycle” to how they operate. Host Steve Walker welcomes Ben Granger, the principal XM catalyst at the Qualtrics XM Institute to discuss the “XM Diffusion Cycle,” a “set of techniques that allow organizations to strategically expand [experience management].”
An area critical for many companies is their product and customer feedback can play a critical role in how designers and engineers develop and improve a product, so it’s important to gather the right data. Host Steve Walker welcomes guest Myles Grote from Upper Hand, a provider of full-suite sports and fitness management software, to discuss how customer feedback informs product decisions.
Companies often get stuck between the data gathering and discovering meaningful insights into how they can better their customer’s experience. Especially when you’re talking about qualitative data – conversational, open-ended data that can be difficult to quantify. But there are tools that will allow a CX pros to utilize the vast amounts of "conversational data" that companies collect. Host Steve Walker welcomes Matt Dixon, chief product and research officer, and Ted McKenna, SVP for product at Tethr for a discussion on how customer experience leaders can take advantage of the vast amounts of qualitative data typically collected by companies.
There are certain truths within the practice of customer experience that CX pros often observe. But when something becomes a “law”, like the laws of nature, that has a much more fundamental connotation. Host Steve Walker welcomes Isabelle Zdatny, an XM Catalyst and certified customer experience professional at the Qualtrics XM Institute, to discuss “The Six Laws of Experience Management” which helps companies understand the realities of human behavior within the context of XM.
Customer experience pros are often tasked with proving the ROI of CX within an organization. Utilizing experience data – or “X-data” – combined with operational data – or “O-data” – can be an effective tool in proving ROI of your CX efforts. In part 2 of exploring the ROI of CX, host Steve Walker welcomes Troy Powell and Brad Harmon from Walker to discuss practical ways to use X- and O-data to prove the return on your customer experience efforts.