Your Guide to Customer Experience Transformation
June 2016
Emotional Design, CX Maturity, and Australia 
 
 
I'm excited to announce that Aimee Lucas, Karen Temkin, and I will be heading to Australia in August, a first for Temkin Group. We'll be holding a one-day CX bootcamp in Sydney, before moving on to Melbourne, where I'll be speaking at the Customer Experience Tech Fest and then we'll host our two-day journey mapping workshop. Join us at those events or let us know if you'd like us to spend some time with your organization.
In this journal, we highlight two new reports:
  • Emotion-Infused Experience Design. A customer's experience with a company is made up of three distinct components-success, effort, and emotion. Our data shows that companies are woefully inept at dealing with the emotion component, which is unfortunate as it is the area that has the greatest impact on customer loyalty. To help companies create a stronger emotional connection with customers, this report introduces an approach called Emotion-Infused Experience Design (EIxD).
  • State of CX Management, 2016. This is the seventh year we've benchmarked the CX competencies and maturity of large companies. Our research examines how well companies have mastered the four CX competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness.
Have you seen the 2016 Temkin Experience Ratings (our annual large-scale benchmark of customer experience)? Not only is it chock-full of interesting findings, but it's a free report! In the past month we've published detailed snapshots for each of the 20 industries. 

If Australia is a bit out of the way for you and you'd like to learn CX skills closer to home, check out our schedule of hands-on workshops. We still have openings in our next workshop, Driving CX Transformation, on July 19th & 20th in Boston.

Temkin Group Logo

Temkin Group is a leading CX research, advisory, and training firm. We help the world's largest brands accelerate their transformational journeys towards customer-centricity and build loyalty by engaging the hearts and minds of customers, employees, and partners. Our team combines CX thought leadership with a deep understanding of the dynamics of organizations to accelerate results.
CX Workshop in Boston on July 19th & 20th 
In Case You Missed It...
Join the $1,000 Intensify Emotion Challenge

In our CX Trends for 2016, we named 2016 "The Year of Emotion." To help organizations focus more on emotion, we created an Intensify Emotion page with numerous resources, including the opportunity to win part of our $1,000 award.
Report: Emotion-Infused Experience Design

Our new report Emotion-Infused Experience Design (EIxD) shows that emotion is often a missing link in customer experience. While emotions may seem ephemeral and subjective, we developed a concrete methodology you can use to design for emotion. We define EIxD as:
An approach for deliberately creating interactions that evoke specific customer emotions.
To master EIxD, you must address three questions throughout the design process:
  1. Who exactly are these people? You cannot design emotionally engaging experiences without a solid grasp on who your target customers are, what they want, what they need, and what makes them tick.
  2. What is our organizational personality? Research shows that people relate to companies as if they are human beings rather than inanimate corporate entities.
  3. How do we want our customers to feel? People are inherently emotional beings, and every interaction they have with you will make them feel a certain way-whether you intend it to or not.
This report shows how you can apply these three questions across four different facets of emotion:
  • Senses: Looks, Sounds, Smells, Feels, Etc. People's senses have a powerful and immediate effect on their emotions because sensory input is linked to the limbic part of the brain--the same area that's responsible for feelings, pleasure, and memories. And while each individual sense is important for eliciting an immediate emotional response in customers, companies can only build a coherent organizational personality by developing a consistent sensory identity across multiple senses.
  • Feelings: Positive Sentiment. While companies should of course work to maximize positive emotions and minimize negative ones, fixating on eliciting a single positive feeling, like delight, may blind you to the moments when another positive feeling--like confidence, relaxation, or inspiration-would be more appropriate.
  • Social: Sense of Community and Belonging. Brands play an enormous role in the formation of people's social identity, both who they are as individuals and how others perceive them. Consequently, customers are more emotionally attached to the brands that are able to broadcast and reinforce their identity to their communities and connect them with other like-minded individuals.
  • Values: Purpose and Meaning. People tend to stay away from organizations whose policies and practices clash with their personal values and instead actively seek out companies whose principles, ideals, and attitudes align with their own. People also want to interact with companies who make them feel like they are contributing, albeit sometimes indirectly, to a worthy cause.
Report: State of CX Management, 2016

For the seventh straight year, Temkin Group surveyed large companies to evaluate the state of their Customer Experience (CX) management. This year we found an abundance of CX ambition and activity. Most companies have a CX executive leading the charge, a central team coordinating significant CX activities, and a staff of six to 10 full-time CX professionals. 

Temkin Group has identified four CX core competencies that companies must master if they want to become customer-centric: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness. Using Temkin Group's CX competency and maturity assessment, we found that only 10% of companies have reached the highest two levels of customer experience.
Temkin Group Research Plans and Updates

We have quite a few exciting new reports underway, including, Social Media Benchmark, 2016, Temkin Customer Service Ratings, and Mobile Disruption of VoC.

 

Here are some ways that Temkin Group can help accelerate your CX success:


If you're interested in Temkin Group's research or services, then drop me a line at 
bruce@temkingroup.com, visit our website at www.temkingroup.com, or give us a call at (617) 916-2075.

 

Sincerely,

Bruce Temkin, CCXP
Customer Experience Transformist & Managing Partner
Temkin Group 

 

Co-founder, Customer Experience Professionals Association 

 

 

Net Promoter Score, Net Promoter, and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Satmetrix Systems, and Fred Reichheld. 

Customer Experience Matters is a registered trademark of Temkin Group.