All Things Experience: Edition 4

Happy Monday, and welcome back to the All Things Experience newsletter — your new favorite place for, well, all things experience.

This week, we’re exploring what the optimal pattern of a customer journey is, going back to the basics with CX, and highlighting an upcoming event that should be on your radar.

Now let’s get into it.

Watch & Learn | Trends CX Leaders Will Adopt in 2023, Featuring Forrester Research

Choosing the right customer feedback management (CFM) platform is vital to understanding and retaining customers — and attracting new ones.

Colleen Fazio , Senior Analyst at Forrester , and Brandon McGovern , Senior Director of Customer Experience Impact at HP , discuss CX trends and what features to look for in a CFM platform during our webinar on April 26. We’re also going to share how our mission-critical, cost-effective platform is designed to address current and future challenges in the market.

Interested in this in-depth conversation? Register here, and we’ll also share the recording if you’re unable to tune in live next week.

Worth the Read | What is the Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey?

Many CX leaders think about the customer journey as only a series of touchpoints, but have you considered looking at it as continuous patterns of mental experiences over time?

Experiences that improve over time, and consistently positive experiences, are — as you might’ve guessed —typically the most successful. While that doesn’t seem revolutionary, understanding this helps CX leaders decide where to focus their efforts.

Julian De Freitas explains how to build the optimal pattern of a customer journey:

1. Think beyond just stage models: Collect higher-resolution data that gets to the heart of your customers’ journeys.
2. Avoid yo-yos: You want your customers to have smooth patterns.
3. Leverage language: You can learn a lot about your customers through the language they use to describe their experiences, from one-word prompts to full-on feedback surveys.
4. End with a bang: Think fireworks at the end of the day at Disney. Investments farther along the journey are impactful.
5. Ramp things up: Arrange your offerings so that they ramp up from least to most impressive.
6. Add a climax: If one touchpoint is particularly impressive, it will become a memorable peak for your customers.

To learn more about how to create the optimal pattern and how CX managers should invest their resources, take a look at this article in Harvard Business Review . 

Back to Basics | Customer Experience 101

Leading brands in every industry prioritize customer experience, and it pays off through high customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. It also leads to increased revenue. But how do you actually get to this level of success? Start with the basics.

In our Experience 101 Hub, the Customer Experience 101 guide takes you through the foundational areas of CX. It covers everything from what customer experience is to planning and launching a CX program. And if there’s a term you come across that feels unfamiliar, take a look at our Glossary as well.

Whether you’re further into your CX career or just getting started, the CX 101 guide is an excellent resource to brush up on the basics.

Quick Hits | Notable News & Notes

Before you go, here are a few things we thought you might find interesting:

• Help your customers and contact center agents feel less stressed and frustrated by empowering your agents with empathy.
• Building a social listening strategy? Here’s how to accomplish it with tips ensuring your brand keeps a pulse on what customers say and how they feel.
• To improve the customer experience, you first have to improve the digital employee experience — check out this article in CIO Online to see how it’s done.
• Consumer expectations for customer service from the contact center are evolving — here’s what teams need to do to meet today’s customer service expectations.
• We’ve joined the RedThread Research Tech Consortium, which is a group of innovators in HR technology contributing to research and analysis benefiting organizations around the world.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks!

- Madeline Buyers , Content Marketing & Social Media Senior Specialist at Medallia