As customers move through their journeys the more a brand can make every interaction personal to that customer, the more engagement will result.

Yet “Personalization” tools are failing to deliver better customer experiences (check out this post) so what is going on?

At Journey-Smiths we see Personalization tools as having a rather narrow use - targeting sales offers to customer. They are not generic systems to “make everything personal”. So use them in your customer journeys for sure, but know that your job as a journey manager will be to insert a lot more personalized interactions than you’ll get from your Personalization system.

Listen to this WOW24-7 Podcast where Mark describes how Journey-Smiths can help bridge the gap between long-term business value from CX (doubling growth rates) and the short-term needs of business to show quarterly results.

The answer is our approach Money Journeys, and this Podcast provides a great introduction to the concept.

CX projects really benefit from CEO support, but few get it. Is that because so few CEOs “get” CX?

What if the CEO was previously the CXO, then they’d surely get why it is so important they support CX projects. But if you look at the stats, almost no CEOs come from the CX ranks - they are sales leaders, finance guys or from operations.

Perhaps the reason is that CXOs are usually not close enough to the business, not driven by business success metrics, enough to be considered for the role?

Every business needs to be focused on customers in order to get started - ensuring that it has something to sell that customers are interested in.

Some businesses then need to also get focused on customer experience - because in competitive industries, especially commodity ones - it is the experience delivered that keeps customers coming back and buying more.

There is a point of confusion in the market where these two concepts are getting mixed up. Being customer focused isn’t about measuring CX results like NPS, it is about understanding customers and what they want. If your product is not a fit for the customer, no amount of great experience will save you!

Consumers are looking for brands to “show me you know me” and what better way than providing a “wrapped” summary of their interactions over the past year. This is simple data analytics that any brand should be able to provide.

Spotify started this for music in 2016 but the approach has been picked up by banks and retailers as well. What is interesting is that Gen Z consumers now expect this type of engagement from brands that they know have their data.

There is a big disconnect between the expected long-term value from CX, which any business and its shareholders should value highly, and what companies actually bonus their executives on - short-term profit and cost metrics.

So we are left feeling that nobody cares about CX, despite its potential value to the brand. This article covers the expert research behind CX value, the poor results delivered so far, three reasons why this disconnect happens, and most importantly suggests a way businesses can close the gap.

This article describes the concept of “Brand Pollution” and how it can be explained by understanding the Mental Models that govern what customers expect from customer experience.

We describe how the experience delivered by an airline can undermine that of a bank, and lead to the bank losing a customer.