"Should they have offered me a free cookie?"
💭I pose this as a sincere question as it rattled through my brain when I walked away from the sandwich shop, the second time.
All Hail the Front Line
🕵️♀️Your #Frontline knows more about your customer than you do.
🙈🙉🙊Why is it that the front line is often underutilized...or let's use real language...ignored...by "headquarters" when it comes to customer insight? What makes the corporate teams think they know more than the ones actively working with the customer?
Don't just design them but...LIVE your experiences
🛫Airports are RIPE for #CustomerExperience observations. My return to business travel has my mental notepad full!
👀This week got me to thinking about how it’s VITAL to LIVE your designed operational experiences to understand how they impact your customer’s experience
📢It is a good idea...and was a good process choice...to ask gate agents to make announcements that are informative to the people waiting in the gate area
⏳It is a good idea...and was a good process choice...to have flights arriving/departing at the same time to be close to each other to optimize ground, catering and other crew functions
🏃♀️It is a good idea...and was a good process choice...to try and let late passengers know that the gate is about to close...and broadcast that announcement in others areas of the terminal, not just the gate
🔊😭But...blend all those together? Yeah...you’ve all experienced it. Cacophony. Passengers have no way of understanding what is being said. It creates confusion which often...guess what...then prompts the passenger to ask questions of the gate agent. Bad #CX and bad #EmployeeExperience
👐That’s why it’s so important to get out there and LIVE your customer experience. The ingredients might all be wise and good but the meal that’s made with those ingredients might be toxic.
Why does Juneteenth matter?
🖤Tomorrow is Juneteenth. Juneteenth matters. It matters to humans. It matters to business. It matters specifically to those of us in the #CX world.
🙋♂️Why does Juneteenth matter?
📜For those who may not know (as this is a US...and originally a Texas...celebration), #Juneteenth remembers June 19, 1865, a day that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation (finally!) reached Galveston, Texas, the first time residents there learned that slavery had been abolished.
▶Why does this matter? It reminds me that while we’ve come so far from the evils of slavery in the US, we’ve got a long way to go. (That is a MASSIVE understatement but words are failing me now.)
🎨Why does it matter to business? A business succeeds when it incorporates the full #diversity of people, ideas and experiences to make the right choices...for their business, their employees, their customers, the world.
📢Why does it matter to CX? Developing the best possible experience for ALL customers, requires that those who create/design/champion CX reflect the beautiful diversity of their customer base.
Right now, I still see mostly people who look like me in the CX world and feel that Black voices are underrepresented. I am so thankful for the people I know who DON’T look like me and I welcome learning from their different perspectives...but I’m increasingly convinced we don’t have enough voices that have different experiences than what I have.
👐I’m not astute enough to say why this is the case...I just know that it exists and I want to use my energy to do what I can to help encourage and elevate Black voices in CX...and really any voice that comes from someone different than me.
🎉So...happy Juneteenth everyone. For those who know this celebration, I eagerly celebrate with you today. For those for whom it is a new discovery, I hope this encourages you to think about how you can help ensure all voices are heard in CX, in business, in the world.
