Talk the CX talk, walk the CX walk

Mission Statement: A brief description of a company's fundamental purpose for being in business e.g. Nokia – “Connecting People”.

 

Vision Statement: Outlines what a company wants to achieve. It focuses on the future; it is inspirational and engages people in a way that is highly focused and energising e.g. Apple ' A computer in every home'.

 

Customer Lifecycle: The progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using, and maintaining loyalty to a product or service. The lifecycle is potentially never-ending, if customer advocacy and loyalty can be maintained through an effective CX Program, the customer would continue through the cycle repeatedly.

 

Customer Journey: A diagram illustrating the steps and actions customers go through to complete a transaction with your organisation.

 

Touchpoint: A point of contact, a moment in time, where a customer interacts with a service provider, organisation or its products and services. A touchpoint is a macro interaction, may contain multiple interactions and represents a place, an artifact, or a physical or virtual interface. Touchpoints host channels and enable interactions. E.g. A passenger checking in at the self-service airline kiosk.

 

Channel: A medium of interaction with customers or users that supports a conversation and exchange of information. Channels can be one directional, or bi-directional.  Social media platforms, mobile applications, call centers, websites, and print advertising are all examples of channels. E.g. A channel is the airline check-in kiosk. A touchpoint would be the customer’s need to check-in and check their upgrade status.

 

CX Metrics: Numerical scores or indices that summarize customer feedback results. They can be based on either customer ratings (e.g., average satisfaction rating with product quality) or open-ended customer comments (via sentiment analysis). Customer ratings can be based on a single item or an aggregated set of items (averaging over a set of items to get a single score/metric).

 

Stakeholder: Someone with an interest in the CX project or process and will affect, or be affected by, its outcomes.

 

Governance: Customer experience governance refers to the way in which a company directs and controls the design and delivery of its customer interactions. An effective CX governance system includes clearly defined roles and responsibilities for decision making and oversight, transparent polices and processes, and clear communication structures.

 

Persona: The common behavior traits of one or more individuals, and in its simplest form for experience management, how they use a product or interact with the service provider organisation, describing common goals, aspirations, and motivations. A persona may represent a hypothetical audience or group and is commonly synthesized from data collected from interviews and insights gained through monitoring actual behavior. A persona matures over time.

 

Hawthorne Effect: A psychological phenomenon that produces an improvement in human behavior or performance as a result of increased attention from superiors, clients or colleagues. In regards to CX, simply the awareness of a CX program could be enough to get employees motivated and begin aligning themselves with the program.

 

Interaction: An interaction is a micro moment in time – an instant when the customer comes into contact with any aspect of a product, service, or provisioning organisation and performs an action.  Channels support interactions, and interactions support touchpoints.

 

Moment of Truth: A key interaction representing an opportunity for the customer to form (or change) an impression about any aspect of the experience, the providing organisation, and the products and services. Moments of truth are key indicators in influencing and determining the level of customer satisfaction.

 

Listening Post:  Any touchpoint along a customer journey where the provider organisation solicits or collects customer or employee feedback.