Today’s interview is with Jeanne Bliss is the Founder and President of CustomerBliss, and the Co-Founder of The Customer Experience Professionals Association. Jeanne is one of the foremost experts on customer-centric leadership and the role of the Chief Customer Officer and joins me today on the podcast for something different. Rather than conducting a straight up interview, we rummage around some of the big issues and challenges in customer experience right now in a short and punchy rant-off. We also talk a little bit about Jeanne’s new book: Would You Do That to Your Mother?: The “Make Mom Proud” Standard for How to Treat Your Customers. Hope you like it.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Agatha, NLU and turning customer support agents into geniuses – Interview with Deon Nicholas of Forethought.ai – and is number 319 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 Jeanne:

• Creating a great customer experience isn’t just something you do, it requires a fundamental shift in leadership including how you choose to grow your business, lead your people and enable them to do the right thing.
• However, for many organisations it’s becoming just a checklist exercise.
• That’s creating lots of ‘mechanics’ or people that want to make money off of the rise in customer experience and, thus, too many are focusing on the mechanics, not the meaning of the work.
• If this industry doesn’t start delivering results for the organizations that are buying into customer experience then we’ve got maybe 18 months before customer experience potentially gets put in the ‘too hard to do’ column and the industry goes the same way as CRM did about twenty five years ago.
• Leaders, especially CEOs, have to take responsibility for delivering great customer experience. You can’t delegate it to a function.
• CEOs have to come to accept it as their responsibility.
• To help achieve that CEOs also have to unite the C-suite.
• If you don’t unite the C-suite, everybody comes in with a different version of the truth.
• Success comes from taking a holistic approach and one that measures and manages net customer asset growth or loss.
• There is an absolute truth that silos don’t organically unite.
• Only managing for acquisition is not sustainable.
• Customer service is the reactive response to a problem.
• Customer experience is the proactive architecting of how you’re going to deliver value.
• We should start with a directive of what we want the experience to be and that will help us line up our operations, people etc. to facilitate that.

About Jeanne

Jeanne Bliss is the Founder and President of CustomerBliss, and the Co-Founder of The Customer Experience Professionals Association.

Jeanne Bliss pioneered the role of the Chief Customer Officer, holding the first ever CCO role for over 20 years at Lands’ End, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker and Allstate Corporations. Reporting to each company’s CEO, she moved the customer to the strategic agenda, creating transformational changes to each brands’ customer experience. She has driven achievement of 95 percent loyalty rates, improving customer experiences across 50,000-person organizations. She is now the President of CustomerBliss, where she guides the C-Suite and Chief Customer Officers around the world on earning business growth by improving customers’ lives.

Her clients include: AAA, Johnson & Johnson, Brooks Brothers, Bombardier Aerospace, and Kaiser Permanente.

She is a sought after speaker and thought-leader and the author of three best-selling books.

Check out Jeanne’s new book: Would You Do That to Your Mother?: The “Make Mom Proud” Standard for How to Treat Your Customers and her podcast: The Chief Customer Officer Human Duct Tape Show.

Finally, say Hi to Jeanne on Twitter @jeannebliss and connect with her on LinkedIn her.

..

..

Thanks to Pixabay for the image.