Today’s interview is with Nienke Bloom, customer experience speaker, advisor and co-founder of The Customer Experience Game. Nienke joins me today to talk customer experience, The Customer Experience Game, why play is so important in business and how and why we should put more play and fun into everything we do.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Going from good to great in customer experience – Interview with Rachel Haworth of Coventry Building Society – and is number 291 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Nienke:

• Nienke is commonly know as the speaker in the blue dress.
• Nienke and and her colleague Babs Asselbergs have developed a game called The Customer Experience game.
• The game aims to bring the idea of customer experience alive and to align people around different facets of customer experience.
• It’s styled on a retro board game and is played by teams of participants competing against each other all of whom are in the same room. Proceedings are helped along by a facilitator/judge. There is no digital or online elements to the game.
  
• The game contains questions and assignments around the voice of the customer, brand delivery and the customer journey as well as employee ambassadorship i.e. how to develop a customer centric culture.
• It gives different people the opportunity to tackle different types of tasks and display different talents that they may not normally get a chance to display at work.
• It also pushes them to try things that are outside of their comfort zones.
• The game is tailored to each client situation.
• They have hosted game playing sessions for all sorts off companies including:
  • A B2B German company as part of their voice of the customer and customer ambassador program annual get together. That session delivered 40 new improvement and enhancement ideas in just two hours.
  • A large bank as part of their new employee on-boarding programme where they wanted their new employees to learn not only their brand values but also all about NPS too.
  • A large office supplier, with call centers all around the world, where they taught 12 of the company’s coaches and trainers how to play the game so they could train employees in the contact centers about customer centricity to support a new Salesforce implementation.
• When Nienke did her MBA, her professor said to her “with every pair of hands you get a brain for free.”
• Too many companies treat people like they’re stupid.
• Learning is better and more effective when it is fun.
• The game is a good tool to bring customer experience alive.
• It also helps colleagues see each other in more of a 3D way.
• If you are involved with customer experience or business, in general, its important to have a bit of fun.
• If you are too serious then that rubs off on what you are trying to do and the people around you.
• How can you reward people that are doing brilliant things?

About Nienke

Nienke Bloom is a customer experience speaker and advisor and co-founder of The Customer Experience Game. She is often called the Customer Experience Guru. She is an international keynote speaker and inspires her audiences with best practices and proven methodologies. Besides a public speaker, she is a trusted advisor for boards. She has worked for 20 years in large corporates; 13 years in insurance, but also in finance and telco, so she knows how large organizations work.

She is co-founder of the Customer Experience Game, because there needs be more fun when learning about customer experience. She a Certified Customer eXperience Professional (CCXP) and hosts Masterclasses to share knowledge and methodologies. It is her mission to make the world a more beautiful place for customers and employees and does that in her own practical and fun Dutch way.

Find out more about Nienke at her website, find out more about the game here: The Customer Experience Game, say Hi to Nienke on Twitter @NienkeBloem and do connect with Nienke on LinkedIn here.

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Thanks to Pixabay for the image.