In this week's CX Passport, "The One With Connective Core Communication", Melissa Bardsley talks about what actually holds a customer experience together. Spoiler: it's not the poster on the wall. Most companies have a version of the same mission statement. World class. Above and beyond. Customer first. Yaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwnnnnnn. AI slop before AI slop was (un)cool. The words sound right. They get printed on badges and painted on walls and dropped into all-hands decks. Then the customer...
25 days ago • 2 min read
In this week's CX Passport, The One Where the Brain Doesn't Lie, Dr. Laura Beavin-Yates draws a line. Real-time emotions are automatic. Unconscious. Happening in the brain whether you're aware of them or not. Feelings are something else entirely. They're what you consciously reflect on after the fact, filtered through whatever is happening in your life at that moment. "You can go ahead and do social media. ... We can create blogs. We can create what we call knowledge base articles ... but as...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Most companies think they're talking to their customers. They're not. They're talking at them. There's a difference. A big one. The FAQ page, the knowledge base, the social posts, the email campaigns ... those are broadcasts. Carefully packaged, one-directional, designed to answer questions before anyone asks them. Efficient. Scalable. And completely missing the point. Because no matter what you build, customers still want a human. They always have. The volume of resources you throw at them...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
The Wrong Debate There’s a divide in most organizations. The people responsible for the numbers sit in one set of conversations. The people responsible for the customer sit in another. Both groups care about growth. Both groups want results. But they approach decisions from different starting points, and the gap becomes clear in how the business operates. In this week's CX Passport, The One With the CFO Who Thinks Like a Customer, Mohamed Isa brings a unique perspective to CX leaders... he’s...
2 months ago • 2 min read
They think they know what's needed In Episode 254 of CX Passport, Lisa Guzman talks about how startups often believe they already know what their customer experience operation needs. They usually don’t. Founders are brilliant at product. They’re bold with vision. They’re comfortable with risk. But when it comes to CX infrastructure, many of them assume the basics are already handled. An inbox becomes a ticketing system.Response volume becomes the performance metric.Support becomes something...
3 months ago • 2 min read
One in Four. And You’re Not Designing for Them. In this week's CX Passport, The one with leading neurodivergence CX, Stine Marsal talks about something most companies treat as compliance ... but should treat as strategy. "Turns out one in four has a hidden disability. One in four. 15 to 20 % neurodivergent." - Stine One in four. That’s not a niche segment. That’s not a CSR initiative. That’s not a footnote in your annual report. That’s scale. Stine discovered this while leading experience at...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Doable Is Dangerous In this week's CX Passport, Gloria Gupta and I talked about transformation inside a complex organization. It’s about choice. “It’s figuring out how to do what is worth doing, not just doable.” – Gloria I’ve seen this tradeoff play out more times than I can count. A leader knows the right long-term move. Fix the broken authentication process. Redesign the experience properly. Invest in the infrastructure that prevents friction instead of patching over it. But the quarter is...
3 months ago • 1 min read
We Keep Promoting the Wrong People In this week's CX Passport, The One With the Answers in the Field, April Sabral and I got into something that shows up in retail… but isn’t limited to retail at all. “Just because you were really great at sales or driving results does not mean that you're going to be really good at leading 10 people.” - April That’s obvious. And yet, we do it constantly. Retail does it because results are visible. Your store hits plan… you get promoted. You exceed KPIs… you...
4 months ago • 2 min read
Designing shame into the experience? In this week's CX Passport, I talked with Joe Macleod about something we still don’t design with the same care as the rest of the journey: the end. We spend a lot of time empowering customers early. We give them tools to compare, investigate, customize, and choose. Agency is designed into the experience from the start. When the relationship winds down, that support often disappears. Joe said: “What we’ve done with the consumer is bamboozle them in this...
4 months ago • 1 min read