Hi Jason, tell us about yourself, your background
I am Jason S. Bradshaw a leading thought leader on Customer & Employee Experience and 1 of 30 Global Gurus on Customer Service. I help organisations transform and accelerate growth through an intentional focus on experience management. I started my first business at 14 years of age and when interviewed said that I was competing on Customer Service not Price and since these beginnings I have launched and operated 4 successful businesses and worked across 7 different industries including for brands like Target and Volkswagen. In 2018 I released my first book It’s All About CEX! The Essential Guide to Customer & Employee Experience. The book was a global best seller and was named the most gifted business book of 2019.
Online commerce was booming in 2020, and so did consumer reviews. – How can brands better utilize this data to improve their customers’ experience?
Always listening, always acting is key. A constant customer (and employee) listening post is essential to business in 2021 however the key is to ACT on your customer (and employee feedback). The focus needs to be resolving friction points that cause the greatest amount of dissatisfaction. Building a habit of continuous improvement based on the voice of our customers and employees will ensure that the business is always evolving and getting closer to meeting or being slightly ahead of customer expectations. However the watch out here is consistency – delivering an amazing experience today and an average one tomorrow is not enough – you need to deliver a reliable consistent experience to achieve customer trust.
What is one element that must always be considered when working on a CXM (Customer Experience Management) strategy?
The employee experience is key to every customer experience management strategy. Think about the blockbuster movie Titanic, what most people instantly think of Leonardo DiCapro and Kate Winslett’s award winning performance – Leonardo and Kate are the employees of the production and as employees they deliver the experience that we know, like and talk about. Therefore every customer experience management strategy needs to consider the employee experience and when designing new customer experiences ensure that it is easy for employees to deliver the desired experience.
Do you think personalization and customer-centricity are going to become increasingly more relevant in the coming year? How so?
Personalization has been the goal of many organizations for decades, I think before organizations focus on deep personalization they should be absolutely sure they are delivering a consistent, reliable experience that meets customers where they are at today. Then from there they should consider how to add value to a customer beyond the initial purchase transaction. Only after they have developed a relationship with customers should they start to move towards individual personalization, until then stick with segment personalization.
Jason’s tips for eliminating the CX gap
What are some of the ways companies can strive to eliminate the CX Gap?
The CX Gap is likely always going to exist on some level because customers aren’t measuring their experience with you based on the last time they did business with you or someone like you, their experience expectations are set by the latest best experience they had from any business. For this reason I believe the CX Gap will always exist as customers’ expectations are continuing to evolve. So the key is to build a culture that is obsessed about continuous improvement, finding those 1% improvements that can be implemented to narrow the CX Gap.
What’s the most insightful book you read in 2020?
Cult Status by Tim Duggan is a great book exploring how he built a major media brand with purpose and how other emerging brands are leading and growing by being obsessed about achieving their purpose/mission.
Last but not least, what is your favorite CX metric?
I don’t think you can go past Net Promoter Score, used correctly it can accelerate improvements in every aspect of business. I do like to pair it with Customer Effort Score because I believe that delivering an effortless experience is a key to generating positive word of mouth.
