Last week we announced the formation of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA.org)...

Here's the mission for the CXPA:

The Customer Experience Professionals Association is a global, non-profit organization that supports the professional development of its members by enhancing networking, providing research and education, establishing standards, promoting the industry, and creating a better understanding of the discipline of customer experience

Here's why Jeanne Bliss and I co-founded this organization:

• There are many customer experience networking groups, but the industry has hit a stage where it needs a single, collective voice to map its evolution
• We want to help customer experience professionals embed customer experience management skill sets across their organization
• Our goal is to identify standards and best practice approaches and transfer those skills across the industry
• We want to ensure that that customer experience management continues to generate a vibrant set of opportunities for customer experience practitioners

We already have more than 20 organizations signed up as Founding Corporate Members, showing their commitment to leadership in customer experience. Other companies can also become founding members if they sign-up by the end of July. Individuals are also welcome to sign-up, so I urge you to consider joining!

We also have Gold, Silver, and Bronze sponsorship opportunities.

In short, great customer experience comes from great professionals doing great work in supportive environments. The CXPA is here to help them succeed!

We recently published the 2011 Temkin Loyalty Ratings, that evaluates the loyalty US consumers to 143 companies across 12 industries. Let's start with kudos to the top five:

• 1. Amazon.com
• 2. Kohl's
• 3. Costco
• 4. (tie) Lowe's
• 4. (tie) Sam's Club

While those were the top overall, I also want to give credit to the  companies with the most loyal customers in each of the 12 industries we examined:

• Amazon.com (retailers)
• USAA (insurers)
• Southwest Airlines (airlines)
• Vanguard (investments)
• TriCare (health Plans)
• Hyatt (hotels)
• Credit unions (banks)
• TracFone (wireless carriers)
• Apple (computers)  
• USAA (Insurance)
• Cox Communications (Internet service providers)
• DirecTV (TV service providers) 

When we examined customer loyalty by industry, we found that  retailers enjoy the strongest consumer loyalty while TV service providers have very weak levels of loyalty. 

You can see all of the data at the Temkin Ratings Website. 

Voice of the customer efforts are still in their early stages, but the next generation practices are emerging and will dramatically change how companies operate.

In the new report, Voice Of The Customer Programs Grow Up, we  identify 20 leading practices for a closed-loop voice of the customer (VOC) program and discuss how the next generation of VoC programs will require technology investments and force market research organizations to change.

The report focuses on how companies need to master the 6Ds of a closed-loop VoC program:

• Assessments of customer experience efforts, to identify gaps and opportunities to accelerate your transformation efforts
• Speeches and webinars on a wide range of customer experience and leadership topics
• Interactive workshops for executive teams or other groups to gain alignment around key customer experience principles and priorities or to develop plans in areas such as voice of the customer programs
• Educational curriculum to establish and reinforce an understanding of proven customer experience principles across an organization
• Strategy reviews of marketing and product plans for vendors who want to help companies transform their customer experience