The CX Leader Podcast provides insights for customer experience (CX) and experience management (XM) leaders to improve their business results by unlocking the potential of their customer experience, helping their customers and prospects want to do more business with them. The CX Leader Podcast is produced by Walker, an experience management consulting firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success.
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Change is hard. And that’s not the first time we’ve said those words on this podcast. When it involves breaking through entrenched practices within a company, it can be especially difficult - but not impossible. With a little buy-in, some quick wins to demonstrate the possibilities, and some awareness to the importance of customer centricity, you c…
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While it might not seem significant at first, securing a place to park your car is an important event. Sure, it’s not life or death, but during large events it can be time sensitive. Sometimes it’s the first experience people have when attending a concert or a large conference, so when the logistics are not working efficiently, it creates a frustra…
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Today’s marketing playbooks put social media at the top of many strategies, but regardless of its prevalence, your website is still your business hub and a vital extension of your brand. But when your customers say your site is not friendly or functional, it’s time to rethink your online experience. And in once such case we’re exploring on this epi…
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Think of some of the best experiences you have had as a customer. What made it great? Did you feel like the experience matched the company’s identity? Did any of it feel like it wasn’t meeting the company’s brand promise? Great experiences are consistent: you know what to expect when you interact with an organization that reflects their brand throu…
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It’s not easy changing people’s minds. But we’re approaching a season in which customer experience professionals are working hard to convince executives and peers on the value of adopting a customer-centric mindset. WE as CX pros know the value of our efforts, but sometimes we have to convince others of its advantages. And sometimes data isn’t enou…
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Listening to your customers is the “window” to knowing how well your organization is performing in its customer experience efforts. Whether it’s an online support chat, a voice of the customer through employee program, or a CSAT survey, each of these touchpoints provide a metric to how your customers view your company. But HOW you create these list…
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Producer's note: this episode originally dropped on October 11, 2022. While some details may have changed since it's original publication, we think Dan Silvert's insights on the importance of healthy relationships between employees is a great example of create excellent employee experiences. Many companies use them: personality tests or evaluations…
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As consumers we’ve all interacted in different ways with companies. Sometimes an automated system, online chat, an app on our phones, or even a live human being. But as customer experience professionals, how do we know which channel is the best option and the most preferred by consumers? And how will AI fit into all this? Host Sara Walker welcomes …
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What’s the first thing you think of when asked, “how well do you listen?” Many CX professionals might think of their listening systems: surveys, close-loop feedback, listening architectures. Some may say they interact with clients on a regular basis. But what about actively listening? Talking less and letting others express themselves, and then rea…
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It's human nature to compare what we do professionally – and even personally – with others and CX leaders are no different. So Walker, along with the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), launched The CX Leader Pulse as a way to give customer experience professionals a look into what companies are, and are not, doing within their CX…
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CX leaders have become increasingly effective at taking action on customer feedback. Today many organizations have effective closed-loop programs that efficiently route insights to the right person for timely action. However, there’s a blind spot – the vast majority of customers never provide their feedback. Actually that’s more than a blind spot. …
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In today's consumer world, we are inundated with advertising from countless online and offline mediums, and too often companies think that's what really drives their brand. But if you're a customer experience leader, you know experience has possibly become the most prominent ingredient in a company's brand. So how do we make it work? How do CX lead…
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If you go back in time 10 or 15 years you'll find it was common for a market research function within a company to send out a single survey each year to all customers asking about their satisfaction with the products and services they interacted with. The field has since greatly evolved as what we now call customer experience regularly receives cus…
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Producer's Note: This podcast was originally released on April 4, 2023. As always with our encore episodes, please note that some details might be different, but the advice from Stacy Sherman regarding inclusiveness in CX and EX is still valuable. People in general want to do good things for others. But it’s easy to assume that everyone sees the wo…
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We'll bet you've heard this one: you call customer support and encounter an automated system. Despite your best efforts to speak clearly, the voice on the other end of the line can’t understand you. Or, how about when you’ve finally reached someone and they need to transfer you to another agent. After waiting on hold for a while, the second agent f…
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In this bonus episode, Pat Gibbons describes his experiences at the Qualtrics X4 event in Salt Lake City, Utah, on May 1-3. With thousands of experience management professionals in attendance, Pat had an opportunity to discuss the top challenges facing XM professionals within their own organizations. Hosted at the Walker exhibit booth, professional…
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It’s common today that, as consumers, we receive a survey after all kinds of experiences – shopping, travel, home repair – you name it. You fill out a survey with the hope that it might change the next outcome to be better. But what about the here and now? As experience management improves consumers are demanding action during the experience. Now t…
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Maybe it’s a concert headlining Beyonce, U2, or Taylor Swift? Or perhaps your favorite NFL team is playing their rivals this weekend? Perhaps you prefer events that allow for some more personal creative expression like GenCon or Comic-Con? While we have our personal preferences, few things compare to meeting up with thousands of like-minded people …
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Conversations around diversity, equity, and inclusiveness have been happening in many companies in the U.S., and healthcare is no exception, especially when it comes to the care patients receive. And listening to patients’ needs and concerns is vital to providing doctors, nurses, administrative staff, and leadership with the insights required to pr…
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We’ve all experienced it: that nagging, frustrating, and sometimes maddening feeling we get when something collides with our productivity. And while it can sometimes feel trivial, that type of friction adds up and affects our interactions with customers, thus affecting the customer experience. So how do we minimize those points of friction in the w…
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Bonus content are audio clips of interviews that we couldn’t include in an episode but still contains great advice for our listeners, and this content is only available to those that follow the show through their favorite podcast provider. In the episode " The Empathetic Frontline" (episode #307) released back in March, guest Victoria Stephens from…
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Producer's Note: This episode originally released on March 7, 2023. Natalie Onions discussed how she became a customer experience professional and offered some great advice for newer CX pros on how to grow their careers in customer experience. Please note that this was recorded back in March of 2023, so some parts of the discussion may be outdated.…
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It's an often-misunderstood industry that exists between healthcare and hospitality and includes all the complexities of strict regulation and event management. And to add more complication, it includes an element of emotional support. Funeral homes and cemeteries walk a fine line of making the final arrangements of a loved one as frictionless as p…
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Just like any other business process, customer experience programs can sometimes get a little stale or outdated. As CX leaders, it’s our responsibility to pay attention to the customers’ needs and expectations, and adjust accordingly. But sometimes it’s best to take a step back and look at the entire customer journey and, if needed, redesign the jo…
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What are some of the more common challenges you encounter with your CX program? Have you noticed a particular common problem among CX programs when you converse with fellow CX pros? Benchmarking is an often-tackled problem for customer experience professionals and is not as simple as comparing your numbers with another company's scores. This episod…
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There are many companies today that have embraced customer experience as a key strategic practice, working hard to put the customer first. But there’s often a part of the customer’s journey that is overlooked: when it’s time to pay the bill. Even in a recent episode, our host Pat Gibbons gave an example of a company dismissing customer feedback tha…
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Great customer experiences comes from great employee experiences. It’s something we’ve discussed in several past episodes of this podcast and you can listen to our CX plus EX episodes on cxleaderpodcast.com. But how can you improve employee engagement for a large group of front-line employees, say a call center or large customer support operation? …
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Producer's Note: March 8th, 2024 is International Women’s Day. This global event celebrates the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women, and serves as a call to action for accelerating women’s equality. To join in this celebration, we’d like to encore an episode that originally aired back in August of 2022 when Sara Walker h…
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If you're a CX professional then you've read your fair share of customer feedback comments. While most CX leaders love to read great comments from customers, there's always feedback that isn't so flattering, and your instinct may be to spring into action to fix whatever it was that caused the less than stellar review. Customer insights can be a pow…
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It goes without saying that designing any kind of product is no easy task. And in the case of software, balancing the engineering needs versus customer expectations can be daunting. Simple things like moving a button from the place it’s been for several versions can cause confusion and frustration. So it’s important to understand customers’ needs a…
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Ever see the old classic Alfred Hitchcock movie, “The Birds”? There’s a famous scene when a flock of crows attack a group of fleeing school children, swarming without mercy and terrifying everyone in their path. It sometimes feels like that with A.I. - people pecking and swarming at you to try and integrate it into your business in any way possible…
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Bonus Content! We interview many great customer experience professionals and they have a ton of great advice to share. But sometimes we have leave some of the interview out of the final episode in order to keep our podcasts a reasonable length. So you're not left out of hearing all the wonderful content our guests provide, we'll occasionally releas…
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Chances are, if you're a regular listener to this show, you at the very least have a healthy respect for customer experience and the value it brings to your organization. But there are a few brands out there that have a following like none other brands like Apple, Costco, Trader Joe's, Chick-fil-A, and, one of our host's personal favorites: Chewy, …
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Producer's Note: This episode originally dropped on February 14, 2023. Steve Walker interviewed Justin Zalewski on how CX professionals can take an ordinary journey mapping process and do more than just find problems and build empathy - instead, Justin describes how to turn your journey mapping process up to "11". Please note that some details and …
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That’s right - 300 episodes! Walker has been producing this podcast since January of 2018 and collected over 150 hours of content, discussed trends and events that included everything from COVID to artificial intelligence, and met some amazing customer experience professionals along the way. And at the beginning of each year we like to take a look …
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The famous quantum theory thought experiment called "Schrodinger’s Cat" imagines a cat is placed in a box with a vial of poison. Schrodinger suggests that until you open the box and observe the fate of the poor animal, it is simultaneously alive and dead – its fate isn’t determined until you’ve observed its condition. Leaders in a company can somet…
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Let’s face it: not every person is well-suited to be, quote, “customer-facing.” Whether it’s their personality, their specific job requirements, or just their preference or personal talents, some people do better on the “behind the scenes” aspects of the company. And it’s easy to assume a mentality that they don’t necessarily need a customer-centri…
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Most customer experience pros know about transactional and relational surveys, but did you know there's a third kind of survey you may need to use? Add the confusion of which surveys are best sent often or once a year, versus how long they should be, it can get frustrating for you - or your customer - on deciding what survey to use when. Walker exp…
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Think about a time when you visited someplace that’s meaningful to you: a special museum, the distillery of your favorite beverage, a presidential library – you walked away from that exhibit or tour with a heightened understanding and appreciation for that particular interest. Or possibly gained a deeper understanding of something new. That experie…
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While there is some historical debate on this, Aristotle is widely recognized as one of the early inventors of the scientific method – the way in which we observe, hypothesize, experiment, and gather data. Experimentation is key to logically understanding our world. And just like any other business practice, experimenting with CX can help you gain …
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It’s a subject on which we’ve dedicated several episodes: employee experience. And we’ve even covered how to effectively combine CX and EX, a subject for which Walker released a report that you can find on walkerinfo.com. But we haven’t really explored the value of combining employee and customer experience – is it even worth it, and what challenge…
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Companies often struggle with knowing their customer's needs and why they actually stay customers. Are they happy? Are they looking elsewhere for their needs? Why are they not happy? Segmenting these customers into a loyalty scale is common, but not necessarily actionable. On this episode of The CX Leader Quick Tips Minicast, Michelle Buretta, a vi…
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According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, the majority of workers in the U.S. say that focusing on DEI in the workplace is “a good thing.” With so many organizations adopting ways to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, it seems that we, as CX professionals, should explore ways we can incorporate this important work into our efforts of…
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There’s so much talk about artificial intelligence these days. With stories of how it is changing the world on so many fronts, customer experience professionals can’t help but explore its impact on their organization’s CX program. And when we think about another common struggle with CX – linking the work of customer experience back to revenue – a l…
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There's an adage that implies designers and data scientists sometimes don't always see eye to eye. Designers look for esthetics and the functionality while developers and researchers lean towards the data. Why is that? We can all get along and there's no reason why we can't work together! You can use data to create usable and esthetic designs that …
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We must warn you: the podcast episode you're about to listen to is filled with frightful tales of deliveries gone wrong, misdirected concert tickets, terrible website engineering, and rental cars that won't start. This can only mean one thing: it's another blood-curdling episode of CX Horror Stories! Hosted by Sara Walker and Gary Szeszycki, guests…
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In 1989, Evered and Selman put forward the idea that looking at managers as “coaches” creates a better culture for employees. They say, “coaching focuses on discovering actions that enable and empower people to contribute more fully, productively, and with less alienation than the control model entails.” We take the same view here at Walker, where …
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You're ready to get going on gathering customer feedback, but there's always that looming question: what will we ask them and how much is too much survey? On this edition of The CX Leader Quick Tips Minicast, Walker expert Molly Work gives helpful advice on how to determine the right amount of questions to ask in a survey. Listen to more Quick Tips…
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Managing your money is already a stressful task, and it's sometimes difficult to intentionally think ahead about what happens when we retire. Luckily, there are some very smart people in the world of personal finance who can help with that aspect of life. But what does the customer experience look like in that field? Continuing our look into the wi…
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Here's a situation you might have heard about, or even experienced: you’re ready to get going on this CX “thing” – you’re going to revolutionize your company. But you don’t quite have executive buy-in, or you’ve got the buy-in but you just can’t get people to do what needs to be done. It’s a common problem with companies new to customer experience.…
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