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In this episode, I talk with my friend and former colleague, Ryan Hart about how to build anticipation for a great experience. Ryan highlights a great example of designing for anticipation from Development Bank of Singapore. After my conversation with Ryan, I share how building anticipation and setting expectations for the experience pairs well with creating surprise and delight moments during the experience and the best ways to plan for those surprise moments. Hint: It involves your employees.

Links:

Ryan Hart

Ryan's blog post on The Dawn of Anticipatory CX

How Emotions Are Made, by Lisa Feldman Barrett

The Power Of Moments, by Chip & Dan Heath

Full transcripts for all episodes are available at the accompanying CX Patterns Newsletter.

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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The first mini episode of CX Patterns, what I'm calling Loose Threads & Missing Threads, correcting any mistakes, and adding any overlooked examples or points from the main episode.

Links:

Push Notification Fatigue

Carrot Weather App

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Full Transcript: Loose Threads and Missing Threads: Anticipation Edition

Hi, Sam stern here again. So new cx patterns episodes will drop every two weeks but I had a few things I didn't cover in the last episode And it occurred to me that this is probably going to happen every episode.

You put something out in the world and the minute you do a few more examples or ideas pop into your head but also feedback and suggestions from people who engage with the content thank you by the way makes you wish you could update the episode. At least it makes me feel that way. So instead of editing every episode incessantly, not a healthy habit, I thought I would release a mini episode in between the main episodes to share a few more tidbits.

I'm calling these Loose Threads and Missing Threads riffing on the pattern's theme. Loose Threads are where I think I got something wrong, or at least not quite right. And Missing Threads are something left out that I want to include.

So first a loose thread from the anticipation episode. There was a wonderful cartoon shared on LinkedIn this week that made its way to me thanks to Gloria Gupta. Appreciate the share. The cartoon, linked in the show notes, highlighted the absurd number of notifications we get. Estimates Range as high as 80 per day for an average smartphone user. And so the implication of that is that it is easy to take an idea like the one I shared in the first episode of the podcast: set reasonable expectations for the upcoming experience, and build anticipation for it so customers are excited. You can take that to an extreme that is no longer a good experience. That's the lesson from this cartoon and it's a great caveat of caution to add.

And now a missing thread. I mentioned in the podcast that barring a few notable exceptions surprise and delight moments are always provided through human interactions. So I wanted to share one of those notable exceptions the Carrot Weather App. The snarky, funny, insulting tone of the weather updates it provides makes my day, almost every day. You can set the notifications along a few dimensions, politics for instance from apolitical to anarchist with stops in between from conservative to liberal you can imagine all the different settings. You can also turn the profanity on or off and turn the personality up to 11, if you like which is my preferred setting the Overkill Personality. Anyway, I think the creativity, the humor, the surprising references in the notifications, combined with actual accurate weather forecasting available with one click or as a notification - see above - which makes it effective and easy while also having a strong emotional appeal that the user can personalize. I think all of that together nails the equation for digitally delivered surprise and delight moments.

That's all for now thanks for listening to the first loose threads and missing threads Mini episode of the CX patterns podcast I'll be back next week with a full episode.

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In this episode, I talk with my friend and former colleague, Elena Garvey about the importance of Trust to customer expeirence. We cover the two general models for customers to trust companies they do business with, strategies for buildng trust, and for maintaining and restoring trust when it is threatend.

Emotion matters most to CX perceptions, and Trust is a foundational emotion in customer experience.

Links:

Elena Garvey

Tylenol Poison Pill Scandal

The Power Of Trust book

Using Good Friction To Build Trust

Full transcripts for all episodes are available at the accompanying CX Patterns Newsletter.

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Whatever happened to Enron, WorldCom, ArthurAnderson or ValuJet? Hint: Loss of Trust

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Transcript

Hi everyone. Here's the second edition of the loose threads, missing threads mini podcast episode for the CX patterns podcast.

This week, I wanted to circle back on trust. A couple of additional things to share first, a loose thread, something I want to revisit from last week's episode, that was maybe not quite right. And I want to go back to the equation for trust, because I don't think that I mentioned clearly enough that it connects to what your brand is promising and what you are promising your customers about your experience. So for example, Think about Southwest airlines, they do not offer assigned seats on their flights. But that is not a betrayal of their customer's trust because Southwest never promised, assigned seats. It's customers have chosen the airline, knowing that they won't get to choose their seat. That's part of the equation for keeping ticket prices low. Conversely, if I fly in one of the mainline carriers, let's say Delta, for example. And I choose my seat as I book my flight. But then Delta moves me to another seat without my consent, or I get on the plane and another passenger has decided to sit in my seat. And if Delta didn't do anything about it. Either of those scenarios would be a breach of trust. The upshot of this is that you want to think about what promises you are making both implicit and explicit. And that if you don't uphold those promises, it will be a betrayal of customer trust. And now a missing thread something I didn't mention in the podcast last week. Loss of trust with your customers. Is such a bad outcome that it can lead to brand death. I think Enron Arthur Anderson, WorldCom value jet. I'm sure you can think of a few others. If you remember those brand names at all. It's in part because of their notorious betrayal of customer trust. So to put a fine point on it. The absence of trust means a company cannot 📍 exist. That's it for now. I'll be back in a week with a full CX patterns episode.

​ 

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In this episode, I talk with my former LinkedIn colleague, Lara Nowak, about adopting Agile for customer experience work. Neither Lara nor I are Agile experts, far from it in my case. But our recent experience of having to learn Agile and apply it to customer experience work gives us "Fresh Eyes" to both the challenge and opportunity of using Agile.

We cover the important elements of Agile, concepts like Sprints, Retros, User stories, Planning Poker and the like. Fittingly, in a podcast called CX Patterns, we also talk about using the Fibonacci Sequence for estimating time and effort during sprnt planning.

More background on the meaning of Slow is Smooth. Smooth is fast.

Planning Poker Overview

Planning Poker Online Tool  

Fibonacci Sequence

The Treasure Hunt Retro

Miro – Tool for customer journey mapping, among other experience design methodologies

Lara Nowak

Check out the CX Patterns Newsletter for a complete transcript of every full podcast episode (Loose Threads / Mini Threads transcripts are included in the show notes)

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A cautionary note that Agile does ask you to commit a lot of time to meetings, and communications.

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Transcript

 hi, everyone. Another loose threads missing threads mini episode from the CX patterns podcast. This is Sam stern. This week, I wanted to circle back on two things from the agile for CX podcast episode with Lara Nowak last week. First, a loose thread. We talked about all of the meetings, ceremonies and communications that come with agile.

And I talked about it as if that was only an unalloyed good. But of course, all of those meetings, all that communication that takes time. And attention. And it can be burdensome to maintain, especially over multiple sprints and with larger project teams. Now that's not a reason to avoid adopting agile, but as someone who personally is always trying to push back on the number of meetings on my calendar each week I did want to flag that agile can be meeting heavy.

And then a missing thread. Agile for customer experience is not just agile for customer experience design projects. That's what Lara and I have experience with directly. And so that's what we talked about in the episode. But I have other colleagues, one being May Lugemwa in particular. And thank you may for sharing your experience here. And I also know of other CX teams who are applying agile to ongoing programs.

So, for example, other agile uses for customer experience include continuous iteration, when running an ongoing customer experience program like onboarding or customer attention, agile is a great methodology in those situations to continue making steady progress against the goal of customer retention or smoother customer onboarding. Similar impacts for some teams using it on cx measurement initiatives as well.

Anyway i missed that in last week's episode and so wanted to highlight it In the loose threads, missing threads mini episode. That's it for now i'll be back with a full episode next week excited to share a conversation i had with my former Forester colleague megan burns sharing ideas and examples for how to galvanize your entire organization To take action on cx transformation 

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Ambiguity is the enemy of action.  

Countless customer experience transformations have been killed by ambiguity. CX teams must devote time and attention to galvanizing all employees to contribute to a CX Transformation.

But how do you do that? Activation

That’s the term my guest in this week’s Edition of the CX Patterns Podcast, Megan Burns, gives to the process of clarifying, specifying, and motivating that must happen for all employees to get on board with a CX transformation.

"You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place" - not a Mark Twain quote, no matter what I said in the episode...

Resources:

The Project Pyramid

Megan Burns on LinkedIn

Megan Burns The Company

Check out the CX Patterns Newsletter for a complete transcript of every full podcast episode (Loose Threads / Mini Threads transcripts are included in the show notes)

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Full Transcript

Hi, everyone. Another loose threads, missing threads mini episode from the CX patterns podcast with Sam Stern. This week, I wanted to circle back on two things from last week's episode with Megan Burns. The episode was CX transformation needs employee activation. First a loose thread. I had a suspicion I was misattributing the quote to mark Twain when it was someone else's.

And it turns out it was right to doubt myself. It was actually Jonathan swift famous satirist and author of Gulliver's travels among other books, who said you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. As a reminder of the context, Megan and I were talking about the fallacy of CX teams to try to convince their colleagues

of the value of CX by using data to demonstrate its impact. Look, this is a misstep I'm guilty of myself. So not throwing stones here. Uh, but it is important to bear in mind that your colleagues who are reticent or skeptical of CX don't feel that way because they have carefully considered all the data and decided after much reflection that customer experience just isn't worth it.

No. If they've even thought about it at all, And many haven't, they have not given customer experience an in depth evaluation. Count on that.

Now a missing thread. Megan and I perhaps didn't quite emphasize how much activation is an ongoing project. Not a one-off. Look, we didn't say it was easy far from it, but I also want to be clear that once you start focusing on employee activation,

You should know that it is now a longterm part of your CX transformation efforts. It's worth it to get to a point where all employees across your company can make the right contributions to delivering great customer experience. You have to activate them. And then you have to empower enable and inspire them on a continuous basis.

Uh, activation. Is the start and then don't stop.

That's it for now, I'll be back with a full episode next week, excited to share a conversation with another former Forrester colleague. And Hey, if you're wondering if this podcast is just an excuse to have in-depth conversations with smart people, about my favorite topic, customer experience. Well, trust your instincts, Talk to you soon. And if you're enjoying the podcast would be very appreciative if you shared it with someone, you know, who you think might like it as well.

Thanks. Bye. 

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Great conversation with Andrew Hogan, focusing on specific advice for how to get important customer experience project work done in a post-pandemic world where it's hard to count on colleagues all being in one place at one time.

Learn about the One-story test for projects.

And hear why Customer experience teams need to embrace, not hide from the realities of project work in 2023:

1. You need to include more colleagues and stakeholders
2. You need to be more transparent and communicate more work in progress
3. You need to work harder at getting to know your colleagues as human beings beyond the work itself.

Get these right, and you have a mutually-reinforcing set of trends that will make your customer experience work stronger.

Resources:

Andrew Hogan on LinkedIn

Videos from Config Conference

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Andrew's slides

Andrew's talk

Diverse Teams Perform Better And Are Smarter

Diverse Teams Feel Less Comfortable

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Transcript

We talked about the one-story test for customer experience and design projects. The idea that every member of a project team should have the same story they're telling.

With the test coming when a new member joins. Can they also tell the story of the project? If they can, that's a sign that the purpose of the project is clear and simple, and that the communications about the project are clear and consistent.

The one-story test is also a great test for your team.

Do all members of your team tell one story about the team, and what you do? And is it easy for new members to your team to pick up the story? I've been on teams that couldn't pass the one-story test and it was tough for us. So administer the one-story test for your project, for your team, and see how you do.

Second idea I want to come back to was Andrew's contrasting cooperative mess and collaborative magic. Collaborative magic maybe sounds like it's easy. Everything is working well. Every piece of feedback from a colleague or project team member resonates and you incorporate it.

But it's not like that. Andrew shared a quote from a head of product design. "Whilst people were tired, at the end of it, they said it was the best project they worked on. Really productive collaborations take work. And they can be hard. So when it is feeling that way to you. Don't run from the difficulty.

Andrew's contrast between cooperative and collaborative, reminded me of the research from McKinsey, HBR and others that consistently show that more diverse teams outperform more homogenous teams.

Diverse teams are more innovative. They get better results, and they make fewer incorrect decisions.

But why? Because diverse teams focus on facts and are more likely to correct misstatements. They are more careful and deliberate in decision-making. They examine problems from more angles and thus they get better outcomes. Again and again.

And maybe you picked up on the fundamental contrast between diverse and homogenous teams. Diverse teams put in more work. But then it's not surprising that people report that being part of a diverse team feels less comfortable. Working hard isn't comfortable.

And that brings me back to cooperative mess versus collaborative magic. Don't mistake comfort for effectiveness. Don't expect collaborative magic to feel magically easy. It won't.

So here's another test to go with the one-story test: The easy work test. If your project work does feel easy, see that as a symptom that maybe something isn't working, not a sign that everything is fine because it's going easy.

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Great conversation with CX expert Joe Wheeler about his brand-new book. The Digital-First Customer Experience. We talked about the 7 strategies he covers in the book, and went deep on several of the case studies he wrote about, including Starbucks, Lemonade, Nike & Amazon.

My favorite part about the book and our conversation was Joe's assertion that "Digital-First does not mean human second." He speaks in detail about how to humanize digital experiences, and how to weave together digital and human touchpoints, and also about how to scale human-powered touchpoints with digital capabilities.

Having read the book, I recommend it, and I think our conversation will convince you it's worth your time.

Resources & Links

Joe Wheeler on LinkedIn

Joe's speaker page

The Digital-First Customer Experience On Amazon

Howard Behar - who Joe references as his source of Starbucks wisdom

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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The Digital-First Customer Experience

Joe Wheeler

Sam Stern

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Transcript

Employee enablement to deliver great customer experiences. If employees don't have information about the customers they're serving or about your intended experience and about how they, as your employees are supposed to deliver their piece of that intended experience.

They're not going to have much chance of success. And further in enablement if their technology, their tools or their training, let them down, well, then it's also unlikely to be a great customer experience. The best customer experiences contain moments of human connection. Your humans, your employees, they need all the support. You can give them to make those moments of human connection Magic.

Employee enablement is a critical often overlooked component of great customer experience. Simply put, without it, you cannot deliver great customer experiences, not for long. I've seen some companies paper over the cracks with a customer centric culture. There was a term for that approach that is pretty fitting. It's called culture driven heroics.

But you rely on your employees to be heroes every day and what happens? They burn out. And then the reality is that the failure of critical systems or the inadequacy of those systems. It can undermine the efforts of even heroic employees, which still leads to bad experiences.

And if systems failures, technology failures, letting down, otherwise customer centric employees, if that sounds like a problem that might've played, some airlines recently, airlines that usually score near the top of the customer experience rankings. Well, trust your instincts.

Foster ownership through customer community. And co-creation, he used the example of VMware, which has a thriving customer community. That is a shining example of the recommendations he made for design strategy. Number four. What I love about this strategy and why I wish I'd brought it up is that it is rare that brands can get on the same side of the table. Metaphorically speaking as their customers.

But a thriving customer community that helps with product Co-creation is certainly one way to do it. When your customers are invested in your success because it's their success, well, here in a different kind of relationship with them, not provider customer, but partners.

I'm not saying that's possible for every company, or in every industry. But it may not be as unlikely as you think. Lemonade, the insurer that Joe featured in his book is an example of a company that aligned its interests with those of its customers through its business model that donation to charities of unused funds means that customers and lemonade are hoping for the same outcome. And in next week's episode, I'll talk about an experience design strategy that some companies are using to find greater alignment with their customers, especially when they can't be sure that all their customers would want the same solution in the design.

There you have it folks, another podcast cliffhanger. You'll just have to come on back next week to hear the rest of the story. Talk to you soon. 

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Start by considering if the peak is positive or negative. Most memorable peaks and ends are negative, so lowering those peaks is the first part of designing for Peak / End experiences.

Then, how can we make it more positive, either completely forgetable for an experience that shouldn't be memorable, or positively memorable because it can be a memorably good experience, if you get it right.

Resources

Kelly Price on LinkedIn

Peak / End Rule

Thinking Fast And Slow

Daniel Kahneman

GE MRI Machine Adventure Series

Article about the Disney Tram Driver Time stamp trick to help customers find their cars when they leave the park

Why is Sam buying pasta online? Sfoglini has crazy new pasta shapes like Cascatelli, invented by Dan Pashman of the Sporkful podcast

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Kelly Price

Sam Stern

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Transcript 

Welcome back to the CX patterns podcast with Sam stern in this loose threads, missing threads mini episode, I'm returning to my conversation with Kelly Price, where we talked about designing experiences for the peak end rule.

Kelly And I talked to a lot about addressing negative experience peaks. And tackling those first. For many of those negative peaks in the experience, the answer as Kelly said is to fix them so that they are smooth and unmemorable, and that's right. And Kelly had some great suggestions for how to do this. But I also wanted to note that some of these peak moments are avoidable. So you don't have to redesign them. You don't have to fix them. You don't have to obsess over them. You can just avoid them altogether. For example. Heavy equipment manufacturers think  caterpillar, John Deere, and similar. They now have sensors on their equipment that collect data and can help predict when key parts will wear out or break. I'm sure there are other examples of this in other industries, too. This is just One I'm familiar with. Anyway, the goal is to use the sensors, to provide forewarning of needed parts, maintenance, or replacement, and to do that proactively. This avoids equipment downtime for the farmer, the construction company, or whomever owns the equipment and completely sidesteps that negative peak of a broken piece of equipment. So imagine that they could have fixed the repair experience. But instead they're avoiding the repair experience. So it's now not only not a negative peak. That you're lessening the severity of, or smoothing out. It's one that you've avoided altogether. And a repair experience like in this example is not only a negative peak for the customer. It's also usually expensive and consuming a lot of resources for the manufacturer. So I wanted to  share this example because sometimes the answer to a negative peak is not to fix the moment or , that discrete journey, but to make the moment or that journey irrelevant to the overall experience. Second, a loose thread, something we touched on, but didn't quite cover the point I wanted to highlight today. What gets remembered about the experience are the peak moments, either good or bad, and how the experience ends either good or bad. We talked about that, you know, this. And Kelly alluded to this additional point in the episode related to peak and moments in memory. And I didn't pick up on her point as well as I could've. It's not just how good or bad those moments are that make them memorable. It's also about how they stand out from the rest of the experience. Peaks are peakier. That's a word. When they come out of nowhere. To stick with the metaphor for a second. Mountain peak appears taller. When it's surrounded by a flat plane. Then when it's nestled in among other peaks in a mountain range. So now I can come back to Kelly's advice to address negative peaks first. And in many instances, maybe even most instances. Making them as unMemorable as you can, is the right approach. And then the remaining positive peaks will look even better by comparison. They stand out more. That's it for now. I'll be back with a full episode next week, Kelly Price and I in a second conversation this time talking about design research, another good one with Kelly. Talk to you soon.

​

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Part 2 of my conversation Kelly Price. This time we talk about the right way to do research for customer journey mapping, and the importance of knowing the limitations of journey maps, so that you make benefit from their tremendous insight.

It was Alfred Korzybski who cautioned that "The Map Is Not The Territory"

And George Box who coined the beautiful paradox: "All Models are wrong, some are useful."

 From Sylvie and Bruno Concluded by Lewis Carroll, first published in 1893.

 "That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"

"About six inches to the mile."

""Only six inches!"exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"

"Have you used it much?" I enquired.

"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."

Resources

Kelly Price on LinkedIn

Sam Stern on LinkedIn

Peak / End Rule

GE MRI Machine Adventure Series

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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The Map May Not The Territory, but it still helps you plot a path forward.

Thanks to Steve Mannino for the suggestion!

Find me on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Sam Karpinski and I talk about how companies can work well with their partners and intermediaries to deliver great customer experiences, including figuring out what you want your partners to do for your customers, whether you're treatingt them more likely employees or customers, and how to enable partners to be successful.

McDonald's Menu Items From Around The World

Hilton Hotels Brand Standards

Sam Karpinksi on LinkedIn

Find me on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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More on how partners can help you deliver great customer experiences, but only if you enable and empower them to do so. Sam Karpinski shares more knowledge.

Sam Karpinksi on LinkedIn

Find me on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Zanna walks through her approach to identifying the most important drivers of customer experience outcomes. This conversation is at once scientific and deeply practical. How does Zanna do it? Listen to find out.

Zanna's website

Zanna van der Aa on LinkedIn

Find me on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Happy CX Day. Let's recommit to creating great customer experiences.

Find me on LinkedIn

Thanks to Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Zanna van der Aa is back for Part 2. She talks us through the importance of humanity to great customer experience, how to bring the human touch to digital experiences, how to measure humanity in a customer experience, why that human touch makes employee experience and company culture better, and why NPS is overrated.

It's an action-packed episode!

Zanna's website

Zanna van der Aa on LinkedIn

Find me on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Stated preferences or revealed preferences? Which should you honor? It's complicated, but in this mini episode of the podcast, I offer my suggestion on how to strike the right balance.

Find me on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Great conversation with Mark Levy this week about best practices for getting a CX team, program or transformation off the ground. Mark shares his 4 priorities at the start of a CX transformation, and how he determines when it's time to move from listening to action.

Mark on LinkedIn

Sign up for Mark's DCX Newsletter

DCX Accountability Coaching - 1:1 coaching for customer-obsessed business leaders to unleash their full potential

365 Days of Accountability – Inspiration and motivation on your journey to success

Find Sam on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Loose Threads, Missing Threads talking about what to do if it's too late for a great first impression.

Find me on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Mark Levy is back, sharing incredible insights and vulnerability about accountability. An important topic in its own right, but Accountability is critical for Customer Experience.

Mark on LinkedIn

Sign up for Mark's DCX Newsletter

DCX Accountability Coaching - 1:1 coaching for customer-obsessed business leaders to unleash their full potential

365 Days of Accountability – Inspiration and motivation on your journey to success

Find Sam on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Loose Threads / Missing Threads mini episode talking about mutually beneficial accountability partnerships for CX teams, and learning from hard-won wisdom...

Mark Levy resources:

Mark on LinkedIn

Sign up for Mark's DCX Newsletter

DCX Accountability Coaching - 1:1 coaching for customer-obsessed business leaders to unleash their full potential

365 Days of Accountability – Inspiration and motivation on your journey to success

Find me on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Find me on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Doug Kennedy shared so much wisdom with us in this episode - preparing employees to deliver great expeirences, the importance of leaders modeling, and mentoring the behaviors they want to see.

Doug also introduced me to a wonderful Spanish word: Sentipensante - Sensing & Thinking - a fantastic distallation of what it takes to deliver great customer experiences.

Guest Loyalty Is Created By People, Not Points Or Perks

Kennedy Training Network

Doug Kennedy on LinkedIn

Find Sam on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Samspon Lee's Blog Post about the Pain Of An Actual Disney Experience vs. The Pleasure Of Its Memory

Monadnock - a lone mountain that stands out from a plain

Find me on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Talking to Emily Tolmer, yes, the Emily Tolmer who created the CX Patterns logo, about how to do remote journey mapping right.

Journey Mapping Tips From Nielsen Norman Group

Find Sam on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Happy New Year From The CX Patterns Podcast. A bit of self-reflection, why is CX stuck? How do we get unstuck? I make my commitment to stay focused on this challenge in 2024.

Find me on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Small world story, and full-circle story. Rick & I met when he was my client at Forrester, and now we were introduced again as people who should be talking. And we have been talking! You'll hear this episode on the Process Renaissance in CX, and then you'll want to find his podcast, CX Passport (links below), and listen to an episode with Rick and I talking about more CX topics.

Rick's Links:

CX Passport YouTube channel youtube.com/@cxpassport

Audio Pod Apple | Spotify or your fave pod site

Sign up for CX Passport newsletter www.cxpassport.com

Accelerate business growth📈 by improving customer experience www.ex4cx.com/services

Rick on LinkedIn 

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Nerd alert on this one, as I'm excited to share a new word I've learned, Allostasis, and what it means for customer experience.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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A surprising fact about the brain that explains why accurate expectations are so much better than low expectations.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Customer experiences remembered as great are not great in every moment. In fact, just the opposite. Most of the experience is completely forgettable at best, and a bit frustrating or boring at worst. That contrast makes peak moments more memorable. Let go of perfection.

In this episode, you'll learn about the Enterprise Pause, and why L.L Bean and Mercedes-Benz scaled back on legendarily generous services that their brands were famous for.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Not easy, but easier. We're in a moment of pessisim for CX, but I argue that it has never been a better time for someone who wants to create great customer experiences.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Tom Quish from Rightpoint joins in this episode to talk CX Strategies. Listen to hear Tom explain why executive alignment is a can't-skip step, how to ensure your research refreshes your strategy over time, and the right way to ensure the cusotmer insights get used.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Tom Quish from Rightpoint is back for another, shorter episode talking about the importance of having a definition of Customer Experience for your company that is both shared by all employees, and inclusive of all employees.

One company, one CX definition.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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In this episode, Ryan Hart and I talk about the imperative we see for companies to cut costs, and the danger of doing so without starting from the customer and working back.

Ryan Hart on LinkedIn

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In this episode, Ryan Hart and I talk about the promise and the peril of using Generative AI to delivery customer experiences. Does it replace CX teams with and customer-facing employees? Or does it empower personalization, and better delivery of human experiences?

Ryan Hart on LinkedIn

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Memory is a time machine. It brings forward past experiences to the future where those memories guide loyalty behaviors. Today on the CX Patterns Podcast, I riff on the importance of reinforcing positive memories to make the memories

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Maybe the drop in customer experience scores is simply down to customers expecting more. In this episode of the CX Patterns podcast, Megan Burns rejoins to discuss why we are seeing a drop in customer experience scores, and she is not ready to chalk it up simply to companies doing the wrong things to improve customer experiences.

During the episode, I talk about some of the non-linear ways to design great experiences that can push back against the Hedonic Treadmill effect that Megan highlights.

My LinkedIn Learning Course: How To Create Great Customer Experiences, goes into more detail on how to do this.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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It is not easier than ever to create great customer experiences. The debate continues! Megan Burns shares a compelling reason why it's not easier than ever to create great customer experiences.

My LinkedIn Learning Course: How To Create Great Customer Experiences, goes into more detail on how to overcome the long odds against delivering great experiences.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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In the last episode, Megan Burns and I talk about the Hedonic Treadmill . It is a problem that looms ove customer experience improvement efforts. What do you do? Improve the experience, only to have that improvement raise expectations for customers as they adapt to the new normal?

Well, in this episode, I go describe two ways of improving customer experiences that will not activate the Hedonic Treadmill. You first set clearer expectations for the experience to come, and meet the expectations you have set. Rather than customers expecting you to raise the bar, they expect you to fulfill your promises. That's a great experience.

Second, empower and enable employees to deliver surprise and delight moments at scale. Human-powered moments feel more authentic and of-the-moment, and therefore something that they are less likely to adapt to and expect every time.

My LinkedIn Learning Course: How To Create Great Customer Experiences, goes into more detail on how to do this.

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Ben Geheb on LinkedIn

VML on LinkedIn

Warren Buffett talking tides and skinny dipping

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Friction, for lack of a better term, is good. In this solo episode, I riff on Gordon Gekko's famous "Greed Is Good" speech to explain why there is good friction in customer experiences, what makes it good, and how to distinguish between good and bad friction.

I also wrote about this for CMS Wire: Friction Is Good For CX

The Ikea Effect

Better Crocker Cake Mixes

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Nicole Ornelas on LinkedIn.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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CX Scores have reached a new low, according to Forrester's latest CX Index Rankings. I am not suprised, and I'll explain why they will go even lower. But your company doesn't have to get caught up in this disappointing trend. In fact, I'll explain why now is the best time to differentiate your company on the basis of great experience, all thanks to your competitors who are giving up on CX.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Nicole Ornelas on LinkedIn.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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The concept of negative space

Frontier Airlines drops customer-service

Why Chick-Fil-A Closes on Sundays

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Stacy's LinkedIn Learning Course On Agent Experience

Stacy Sherman on LinkedIN

Doing CX Right

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Andrew Carothers on LinkedIn

Connect with Sam on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Connect with Sam on LinkedIn

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Waiting in line is a bad experience. Except that's not always true. Learn what makes some waits unbearable, while others are tolerable at worst, and a memorable part of the experience at best.

·       Where is my bus? Impact of mobile real-time information on the perceived and actual wait time of transit riders

·       Timing is right for T riders, businesses

·       Subway Countdown Clocks Are Good For Business

·       Houston airport baggage claim

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Connect with Kerry Bodine on LinkedIn

Kerry's master-class on Designing For AI in CX & EX

Bodine & Co.

Research Paper On The Difficulty Of Designing For AI

Creating Design Resources To Scafold The Ideation Of AI Concepts

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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The only thing that is slower to change than culture is nature.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Beth Karawan on LinkedIn

Some of Beth's writings:

Are Boy Scouts Masters of Change Management? 

Brand Management: What’s Customer Experience Got to Do with it? 

Silver bullet post 

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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The Obstacle is the way.

The hard thing about hard things

I can tell you the secret, but you won't want to hear it.

.

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Bezos 70% Rule

Extinct by Instinct

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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In this episode, Lily Vitale and I talk about the difference between Voice Of Customer programs and trust customer research efforts, why they are complimentary, not synonmous, and how Lily thinks about using different research methods, and working with stakeholders to ensure that insights from research turn into improvements in experiences.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Greg and I talk about the current state of the CX profession, the balance required by companies to ensure that CX is sustainable over the long-term, and what the CXPA is doing to shepherd the profession through a period of uncertainty.

The CXPA

Greg on Linkedin

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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My LinkedIn Learning lesson on Bright Spots Analysis

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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The second part of my conversation wth Greg Melia this time with a focus on the future, what are Greg and the CXPA doing to ensure the long-term health of customer experience.

The CXPA

Greg on Linkedin

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When someone tells you you're being too emotional, and not rational, send them this episode.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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The varied career paths that lead to becoming a CX professional. The ways those expeirences help you be better at your job. The ways that focusing on customers can help you in other jobs.

Jeff Louden on LinkedIn

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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The Law Of Emotion: Emotion matters more than you think, even if you remember the law of emotion.

Yes, inspired by Hofstatder's Law

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Onion expertise. The Ikea Effect & The mythology of the Betty Crocker cake mix research. This episode has it all.

Jeff Louden on LinkedIn

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Service Recovery is even more magical than you think, but only if you do it right.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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The greatest irony is that CX teams who are responsible for customer experience don't actually deliver customer experiences themselves. Except Beth and Scott do. And in this episode, we hear their stories from the front lines!

Beth Karawan on LinkedIn - be sure to subscribe to her newsletter - Donut Friday

Scott Gilbey on LinkedIn

Scott's article in Entreprenuer magazine on his experience

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Unclosed loops are very, very bad customer experiences. I explain why, and how to avoid leaving unclosed loops with your customers.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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If you agree that observing the real customer experience is valuable, then how do you do it? Beth and Scott are back with recommendations for how to do that

Beth Karawan on LinkedIn - be sure to subscribe to her newsletter - Donut Friday

Scott Gilbey on LinkedIn

Scott's article in Entreprenuer magazine on his experience

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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Let's check-in with each other, and with our customers during the holiday period, and at the turn of the year.

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Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

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4 ideas for getting off 2025 to a flying start with your customer experience initiatives.

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