Customer Experience University - Winning Loyalty & Engagement One Customer at a Time

This is the fourth in a 5-part series and we're continuing on through the business concepts in my book Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles to Connect with Your Customers, Your Products, and Your People. In the context of my principle, Mobilize the Connection, I talked with, then CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz about digital transformation. He noted, “We started before there was a digital revo...

This is the third in a 5-post series, How to Deliver World-Class Customer Experiences – Leading the Starbucks Way, as we continue through the business concepts in my book Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles to Connect with Your Customers, Your Products, and Your People. In the context of my principle, Reach for Common Ground, I highlight two competing perspectives held by cultural anthropologi...

This is the second in a 5-post series, “How to Deliver World-Class Customer Experiences – Leading the Starbucks Way." In this installment, we continue to explore business concepts in my book Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles to Connect with Your Customers, Your Products, and Your People. When sitting across from Howard Schultz (the former CEO of Starbucks) it doesn’t take him long to get to...

For context and based on requests, I’m in the process of presenting key concepts from my ten McGraw-Hill customer experience and leadership books. This is the first in a five-part series, “How to Deliver World-Class Customer Experiences – Leading the Starbucks Way."   The story of Starbucks' meteoric growth during the 1990s and early 2000s is well chronicled in a series of books about the company...

This is the final post in my series titled – “Customer Experience Excellence – The Airbnb Way." This week we continue to journey through key concepts found in my 10 leadership books, as we finish our quick review of my book titled  The Airbnb Way - 5 Leadership Lessons for Igniting Growth through Loyalty, Community, and Belonging . Throughout this series, we’ve explored belonging, trust, hospitali...

This is the fourth in a 5-post series titled "Customer Experience Excellence – The Airbnb Way." This week we continue to journey through key concepts found in my 10 leadership books by diving back into our cursory review of my book titled The Airbnb Way - 5 Leadership Lessons for Igniting Growth through Loyalty, Community, and Belonging. Last week we touched on hospitality. This week we will spotl...

This is the third in a 5-part series. This week we continue to journey through key concepts found in my 10 leadership books. Let’s rejoin our brisk review of my book titled The Airbnb Way - 5 Leadership Lessons for Igniting Growth through Loyalty, Community, and Belonging. Last week we touched on trust. This week we will highlight hospitality and in the weeks ahead we will explore empowerment and ...

This is the second in a 5-part series. This week we continue to journey through key concepts found in my 10 leadership books and pick up our exploration of my book titled The Airbnb Way - 5 Leadership Lessons for Igniting Growth through Loyalty, Community, and Belonging. Last week we touched on belonging, this week we highlight trust and in the weeks ahead we will explore hospitality, empowerment,...

This is the first in a 5-part series. In late 2019 I released a book about Airbnb’s meteoric rise. It was titled The Airbnb Way - 5 Leadership Lessons for Igniting Growth through Loyalty, Community, and Belonging. As you can imagine, the timing of The Airbnb Way wasn’t optimal, as Airbnb faced its share of challenges with dramatic decreases in travel in the early phases of the pandemic. That said,...

This is the final post in a series titled "Customer Experience IS Team Member Experience." Given the current challenges of attracting and retaining employees and the resulting impact of those challenges on customer experience delivery, this series has focused on engaging your employee base. Last week, I offered 10 evidence-based practices for driving employee engagement and retention. This week, I...

This is the fifth post in a series titled "Customer Experience IS Team Member Experience." As this post's name implies, there are many best practices when it comes to increasing employee engagement (EE). For our purposes, I’ll stick with evidence-based approaches (those that show reliable and replicable results) featuring 10 employee engaging activities this week and 10 more to close out the serie...

This is the fourth in a series titled "Customer Experience IS Team Member Experience."  Generally, the benefits of a highly engaged workforce fall into two categories – increased financial performance and improved employee performance and well-being. Since employee engagement looks like the best thing since sliced bread, how do we increase it in our workplaces?

This is the third in a series titled "Customer Experience IS Team Member Experience." As promised, this week we will look at how to best measure attitudinal and behavioral elements of employee engagement or EE. While many commercially available employee engagement metrics exist, I am a fan of the Gallup Q12. Next week, we’ll look at employee engagement outcomes. For now, here are three challenge q...

I’ve spent considerable time talking about adaptivity and learning resilience. As such, I’m intrigued by the role of "vigor" and “absorption” in concepts of employee engagement. As you'll recall from my last installment, employee engagement or EE was conceptualized in 1990 but didn't gain research traction until approximately 2008. In that post, I asked you to think about whether employee engageme...

This is the first post in a series titled "Customer Experience IS Team Member Experience." As much as I am a people person, I worry that some human-focused leaders and consultants veer a bit too far away from research and data when it comes to understanding team member and customer behaviors. Amid extreme staffing challenges, I have read and heard a lot of employment guidance that runs in oppositi...

Previously, I've unpacked the first six skills outlined in Professor W. Warner Burke's research-based model of learning agility, namely: Flexibility Speed Experimenting Performance Risk Interpersonal Risk Taking Collaborating In this installment, we’ll explore the final three skills presented in Dr. Burke's book, Learning Agility. Those skills are: Information Gathering Feedback Seeking Reflecting

Risk can come in the form of stretch opportunities or interpersonal sharing. In all cases, we need to proactively leave our comfort zones to grow and spark innovation. Volunteering for a new assignment, increasing appropriate, personal disclosure, and reaching out to others for collaboration, all require a courageous stretch. Think of a project or task that would force you to grow. How would you a...

Professor Burke is an organizational psychologist who began studying the characteristics of high potential individuals and high-performance teams. In 2017, Professor Burke released his ground-breaking book, aptly title Learning Agility, Dr. Burke, along with partners at the Center for Creative Leadership, assessed hundreds of leaders to determine the behaviors needed to adapt and maximize leadersh...

Dr. Dweck is a Stanford University professor of personality, social, and developmental psychology. Her work looks at how beliefs shape individual differences, and her book Mindset -The New Psychology of Success is a must-read for anyone trying to drive personal or organizational change. Mindset offers insights on how belief systems foster or hinder growth and development. The good news from Carol...

Given the complexity of business, specialization is a natural and powerful force. Often in larger organizations, the research and development department owns much of the innovation. For example, a customer experience leader might enlist the services of their agile team to gather input, create a minimally viable solution, and iterate product or service improvements. In that case, it's easy to concl...

In A Whack on the Side of the Head, Roger suggests that clarity is essential for communication but can be limiting when it comes to ideation. In essence, when we don't embrace the multi-faceted nature of problems we often rush to simple and incomplete solutions (typically selecting the first logical solution that comes to mind). Similarly, Roger believes that errors "are a sign that you are diverg...

In 1983, while pursuing a Ph. D. at the University of Southern California, I got a creative nudge from the book A Whack on the Side of the Head – How You Can Be More Creative. The book's author, Roger von Oech (who received his Ph. D. from Stanford in the history of ideas and creativity), offered keen insights which were foundational to professor Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset and professor...

Recently, I have been asked to highlight companies that demonstrate breakthrough (CX) customer experience innovation. So, before I launch into another series, I'll highlight a world-class CX leader named Zameer Kassam Fine Jewelry. As you may know, the Manhattan-based jeweler serves upscale clients across the globe who are looking for custom-designed jewelry, especially engagement rings or other i...

Fairly early in my career, I was fortunate to happen upon customer value theories and research conducted by Professors Sheth, Newman, and Gross. In their book, Consumption Values and Market Choices – Theory and Application, these authors reviewed more than 200 studies on customer value. The book is a rich resource on what drives customer choice, ways to inquire about customer value and data analyt...

his is the sixth and final post in a series titled "Team Member and Customer Experience Value." In my recently released book Stronger Through Adversity , Natasha Hritzuk the Vice President and Head of Consumer Insights at WarnerMedia Entertainment shared the challenges leaders can face when mining consumer insights to understand value drivers – especially in the context of a pandemic. According to...