MC: 0:00

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready, set, action.

Jeannie Walters: 0:32

Are you ready to count down to CX Day? It's coming up on October 1st. And listen in for why we're talking about it today.

Listener Question: 0:41

Hey, Jeannie, I've been following you for a little while and so I wanted to ask. I'm a customer experience leader and I was wondering if you have any ideas for customer experience day. We have a small budget, not a big team, but I want to show how important customer experience is to our organization. I'd love your ideas. Thanks.

Jeannie Walters: 0:59

What a great question, and this is something that I hear a lot Now. For those of us who are customer experience leaders or customer experience professionals, maybe you've heard of CX Day, maybe you haven't, but it's been around for a while. We now celebrate it every first Tuesday of October, and this year that is October 1st. So mark your calendars. CX Day is really about you. It's about celebrating the work that customer experience professionals all over the world do. It's about making sure that we are really celebrating the organizations, the leaders and, frankly, the efforts and the work that make those fabulous customer experiences around the globe. Now, this was started by the CXPA, the Customer Experience Professionals Association, and I would encourage you to go to their site at cxpa. org to learn more about CX Day and what you can do. But since we got this question about maybe not having a big budget or the largest team, but still wanting to recognize it at the organization, I wanted to give you a few ideas. I've been lucky enough to celebrate with some of you even, around the globe, when we have celebrated CX Day. We've done this through virtual panel discussions with representatives from around the world. There was one year I had to get up in the middle of the night to do that. I've also been with you for special keynotes or organizational events. We've had fireside chats and roundtables, and really it's about discussing best practices, collaborating, commiserating a little bit, maybe, and just celebrating the CX leaders around the world, and I'm so proud to have been a part of it.

Jeannie Walters: 2:50

Now I want to give you a few ideas that you can take on, maybe with a smaller budget or not as much attention as you might want. The first is to consider how can you acknowledge the unsung heroes in your organization who are really helping deliver that customer experience. Look for people who maybe don't always get that recognition. Are there ways that you can acknowledge them? Just by simply promoting them in internal communications, maybe providing a small recognition reward or even just celebrating them by saying hey, we really appreciate you. Buy them lunch in the corporate cafeteria or send them a Starbucks gift card. We really are looking for ways to just recognize those folks who deliver again and again on behalf of your customers.

Jeannie Walters: 3:41

Another great thing to do is to really mine what you have for great customer stories. If you can share customer stories, it helps humanize the efforts that you're putting into your customer experience strategy. So find some things that maybe people don't know about, how you've actually delivered. Now there was a great example of this with an organization that we worked with where they realized that their security cameras had caught a custodian actually helping somebody who was having trouble with their car in the parking lot. Now this was way after the establishment was closed. The doors were locked, there were no technically customers involved, but there was somebody in the parking lot having trouble with their car. The custodian was able to go out there, help them get their battery jumped, help them go on their way, and then just came back in the building and continued their work. But thanks to that video footage, it was a great example of somebody going above and beyond to make people feel welcome and safe, which were part of the values of this organization. So look for things that really represent the values that your organization has.

Jeannie Walters: 4:55

If you have a customer experience mission statement, this is a great time to really recognize and celebrate the customer stories that really show when your organization has really delivered on that mission. And the other thing to think about here is when you look at customer stories, it's not just about the individual employee-customer interaction, it's about when the whole thing goes right. So consider is there a process or a technology or a tool that you've introduced that maybe not everybody has adopted? Maybe you've had some change management issues around that, but when it's worked, it's worked really well. This is a great time to showcase stories that really show that as well, saying this customer got faster and more efficient products and delivery because of the new technology and tools that we embraced here at the organization. It's a great time to share those stories far and wide throughout your organization as part of celebrating CX Day.

Jeannie Walters: 5:58

Now, if you don't have a lot going on as far as budget, if maybe you don't even have time to carve out, can you carve out a lunch hour? Another idea for you is to consider a lunch and learn. Do people really understand what customer experience is? Do they really understand a universal, centralized definition of what a great customer experience means for your organization and your customers? Do they understand why we're collecting feedback and what we do when we get that feedback? Do they look at dashboards but maybe not really understand what those represent? There are so many micro ideas that you can use in a lunch and learn. I would really encourage you to look for a way to kick off a series here.

Jeannie Walters: 6:46

I have seen this work really well with organizations that try things like CX Champions. If you have ambassadors throughout your organization who maybe don't have CX in their title but are still helping support what you're trying to do with your CX strategy, invite them in for a special lunch and learn, or maybe just a lunchtime celebration at CX Day. Now many of us are in remote workplaces. Now that's okay. We can do this virtually. We can also do things where maybe we say, hey, lunch is on us this day because it's CX Day, and send them a card for a food delivery service or maybe a local restaurant by them. So lots of different ideas for you there.

Jeannie Walters: 7:29

Another fun one is a CX Day appreciation wall or a question wall. So what I mean by this is you can do this with a physical wall and post-it notes or maybe a virtual wall where people can contribute. You can ask people to recognize other people in the organization who have really delivered for customers, in an act of appreciation and recognition. You can also ask people to really think about what would make the customer experience better and invite their questions, invite their ideas, engage them in the idea that you know what customer experience is ongoing. We have to continue to dedicate ourselves to the strategy and the discipline around it by helping them engage with questions and ideas. Then you can come back and maybe in a month and say here are all the things we heard on CX Day. Let's talk about why we're going to approach them or maybe how we're going to learn more about how we can implement some of these ideas.

Jeannie Walters: 8:31

Engaging people throughout the organization in the concept that you know what customer experience is everyone's business and it's about the entire journey. It's not just about customer facing professionals, it's about every single person in your organization. By having a CX Day appreciation wall or idea wall or maybe both, you're inviting people into that through an act of engagement. One of the critical points here is that you want to make sure that you close the loop, just like we talk about in customer experience. You want to get out there with these are all the great ideas we heard, so that people feel heard if they provide that valuable feedback for you, and then, finally, you can just make this a celebration. You can just say it's CX Day and we're celebrating all the great work and all the amazing customers that we have.

Jeannie Walters: 9:25

Now I've seen so many different ways that organizations do this. Sometimes it's a full day. They have guest speakers, they have fun and games. They have some trivia. If you have a large customer base, sometimes it's fun to have trivia like how many customers do we actually have? You know what is the furthest country where we have a customer? Or something like that. You can have all sorts of fun with trivia and games. You can even do things where you ask people to walk through as a customer and get rewarded as they kind of overcome barriers. It's a fun way to actually highlight some of the challenges in the customer journey. But again, it's an active engagement. We want to make sure that people are connecting with what is the actual experience that customers have and what do we have to do with it.

Jeannie Walters: 10:13

Now you can also do this just by celebrating the people the CX teams, the customer insights teams, maybe market research or product delivery all the different teams that really make it happen. So celebrating is valid and if that's all you can do this year, you know what? Get a nice cake, invite people into the break room, put on some party hats, blow up some balloons and call it a win. We have to really look for what are the ways that we can make a little bit of impact, even if we only have a little bit of budget, a little bit of time and maybe not the biggest team. I really hope that you will continue to celebrate all that you do, all that the people around you do, and make sure that you are looking for ways to celebrate CX Day this year on October 1st. But if you can't celebrate it on that day, you can make any day CX Day. You can make sure that you are celebrating, appreciating, engaging the people around you so that you can deliver for your customers. So I hope you'll have fun.

Jeannie Walters: 11:18

We have a little bit of a countdown to CX Day. If you haven't subscribed to the Weekly Win our newsletter, we have some more ideas for you there and, of course, I would love to hear your ideas. Let us know how you are celebrating CX Day. Are you looking for more ideas? Do you need different resources to really make it happen? Let us know that too. We are here for you because we know you're putting in the work on behalf of your customers. Thank you so much for your questions. We always love hearing from you. Don't forget. You can leave me a voicemail, too, at askjeannie. vip. Until next time, keep up the great work and happy CX Day. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigators. com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.