Connect your customer experience management efforts across the company, and enjoy exponential benefits, according to the 2011 Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Benchmarking Study.

Companies with managers (of their top five methods to achieve CEM goals) who meet together quarterly or more often for coordination purposes, or have dotted-line reporting to a single executive or committee tend to enjoy advantages* in the following areas:

Are customers or employees the number one priority of management's decision-making hierarchy? ... Or perhaps investors trump all? These questions may be in the consciousness of most customer experience practitioners. The title of this recently published book Employees First, Customers Second emphasized this stakeholder hierarchy notion. The book chronicles the CEO's efforts at HCL Technologies to re-align his company with customers’ changing priorities: “The increased complexity of the customer’s business, combined with the increasing complexity of solutions (usually sourced from multiple vendors), made it necessary for customers to focus on execution and implementation.” From various customer interactions he came to realize that “our biggest problem with the organization structure was that it did not support the people in what we call the value zone: the place where value is truly...

“How did we make you feel? That's what really matters.” This was the focus of my recent online interview with Steve Pinetti, Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants. Kimpton has achieved outstanding customer satisfaction scores that surpassed several luxury hotel companies including Loews Hotels, Ritz-Carlton, W Hotels and Mandarin Oriental, and airlines including JetBlue and Southwest Airlines, according to Market Metrix Hospitality Index. Pinetti explained: "On the hotel side it's not about whether the bed was comfortable, whether the staff was friendly, or the internet connection was fast. Those are things that need to be in place. What we track in surveys is how we made our customers feel. We're conscious about every moment: are we really connecting with customers and aware of what they're feeling and wanting? This feeling connection is a huge part of our...

Imagine the power of pictorially summarizing your customer survey results so that stakeholders can understand possible customer experience improvements within 10 minutes! Reality Maps help your project teams learn about end-to-end customer experience and pain points in a storyboard format, with an eye toward future innovation.

"By using a Reality Map, our project team solved a systemic customer challenge in less than two months, with a huge impact on revenue", explained Kimberly Dunwoody, Director of Global Customer Experience Design Strategy at Western Union. In her Pioneering Customer Experience Design presentation at the 2011 Satmetrix Net Promoter Conference in Miami, Kimberly said, "We use the Reality map as a global customer experience framework to consistently deploy improvements across all organization silos".

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