Employees want to feel a sense of commitment to their work. And in return for that sense of real, authentic meaning, they will be willing to give more of themselves, aspire to higher productivity, spiraling innovation, and off-the-charts customer satisfaction. Of these three rewards, the highest correlation exists between employee engagement and customer satisfaction. These two [...]
Self-organizing models of governance, like holacracy, are comprehensive approaches to structuring and running businesses. They replace the top-down hegemonic system most enterprises still use, replacing the traditional schema with a new way of distributing real authority that instills adaptiveness and employee engagement in the fabric of an organization. Leaders have always delegated, but what makes holacracy [...]
People live in their own functional domains. They have their responsibilities, their metrics, and they can become defenders of their domains. Though from the best intentions, internal competition ultimately creates the reactionary boundaries that we have come to call silos, which harm an organization in ways that are becoming increasingly fatal. I won’t spend an inordinate [...]
For a Customer Experience (CX) initiative to succeed, it needs broad support across the organization, and it needs deep, gut-level support within the C-Suite. CX is not like a sales methodology, or a new technology. CX is not a tool; it is a creed, a creed that McKinsey asserts “...require organizations to make cultural changes and [...]
Graduation rate is an extremely significant metric for every senior administrator in every higher education institution. US News and World Report uses this important metric in its scoring algorithm, as does every credible media source I can recall. I am personally familiar with this pain and pressure on administrators to boost this number because I lived [...]
Until maybe 20 years ago, people were fine with businesses that were in it for efficiency and strategy. Andrew Carnegie didn’t need to worry about maintaining above-average customer satisfaction. He just had to deliver at the right price. He was building a fortune and a monument to industry; that’s what mattered. “What customer experience needs to [...]
As soon as an organization wants to embrace a change initiative like customer experience, it runs smack-dab into tradition, and the problem of actually executing the very changes it wants to execute. This is one of the largest reasons why change initiatives fail 70% of the time (Mckinsey, Changing Change Management). So even before we talk [...]
Do you know how much small and medium-size businesses (SMEs) contribute to total GDP growth? This segment, comprised of your friends, moms, dads, and others is an enormous contributor to the general welfare of our communities. Companies with fewer than 500 employees: Employ 48% of the total workforce (US Census Bureau, 2016) Produce 44.5% of GDP [...]
In an era when disruptors like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon are reimagining markets and eroding the boundaries between markets, incumbents know they need to change. The problem most are confronting is how to begin, where, and how much? One answer to this question is digitization. Our competitors are able to deliver greater levels of efficiency and [...]
I just returned from a wonderful annual conference of the Customer Experience Professionals Association at the Biltmore Waldorf Astoria, a Hilton property in Phoenix. The hotel, its service, and staff were well prepared- they know how to delight the customer, sometimes with surprises. For example, I walked into the Spa and was immediately greeted by two [...]