Customer

Experience Transformation Introduction:

As has been the case with nearly every incarnation of customer focus activity, this new focus on customer experience is
inadvertently randomizing corporations, sending people out on tactical missions to map customer touchpoints with no future
relevance to the operation, and making a lot of consultants happy.

To make customer experience stick as part of your operation, you need to have an organized and phased approach for how to
integrate this new competency into your organization. Without it, CX becomes one more customer focused hoopla event
that your company tried for a while and then abandoned. So here, based on working with scores of clients around the
worldis the REAL world approach for how to integrate the discipline of customer experience into your operation in a way
that will make this competency stick and change how you do work.

Coaching Approach:

After having led this work for twenty-five years, reporting to CEOs as the Chief Customer Officer, what I know is that this
work has to be led and executed from inside the organization, by a respected member of the company who can navigate
everyone through the journey. However, translating that journey into an operating plan and a set of actions that is
customized to the company and business is complex. Without a clear plan and understanding of how the pieces fit together,
where the stumbling blocks exist and how to keep moving the work ahead, the work can easily stall and be abandoned.

This is where I help. I can cut a minimum of one year from your learning curve.
And get you on a path for success.

To help a select number of corporate partners who want to roll up their sleeves and learn this competency, internalize it
themselves and rework the processes inside their organizations, I offer my coaching services. This process enables them to
plan, facilitate the unification of the silos, break the work into operational pieces and get to the work of executing. In as swift
a time period as possibleusing their resourcesthrough transferring what I have developed over twenty-five years of in-the-
trenches experience to them.

The basic coaching process includes two initial days of on-site coaching, weekly telephone calls, an on-call support system
between myself and the client, and the transfer of the many tools, presentations and materials which have been used
successfully and continuously modified in the real-world corporate environment.

This service additionally provides clients with connections to service providers to support the execution on their customer
experience strategy. These include resources for metrics, VOC systems, training, research, etc. My clients benefit from being
introduced to the right resources at the right time, and to my involvement in the selection process. They have the choice of
partnering directly with the resource or having me bring them on board. These projects tend to become enormous too
quickly, and the key is bringing in resources when the timing is right, and managing the scope of the work. I help with that.

My goal with coaching is to provide it only for as long as my client needs it. Therefore, coaching is offered in three-month
increments of service. When you are ready to advance on your own, you will know it. Three months gives you the flexibility to

add on incremental service periods as you see fit and to end our engagement when you are ready. This approach also gives
my clients the flexibility to add-in additional days of on-site coaching if they need it. They are in control. Coaching is
customized for each client based on where they are in their customer experience journey, the state of their organization and
leadership commitment. Coaching is organized into seven deliverables.

Seven Deliverables:

Deliverable 1:
Review And Understand How Far Along You Are In Your Customer Experience Journey.

This includes reviewing your current research, voice of the customer systems, customer experience, projects and other efforts
to date around customer focus and customer culture. During this review, we go through everything you have accomplished
to-date, how you are organizing the work, teams, leadership engagement, etc. If desired this stage can also include
discussions with leaders and folks throughout your organization to understand culture, current stance on how they do their
work, prioritize it and drive priorities throughout the organization. Finally, some of my clients are interested in bringing
together a cross- functional team of people together to discuss and review how far along they are in mapping the customer
experience. This helps to identify how robust or weak the cross-silo interdependencies are, what metrics exist and how
orchestrated the experience is today.

Since most clients have already begun their journey, this is a very productive deliverable; as I can very quickly provide
immediate feedback and recommendations on your work to date. An outcome of this is a summary and frequently a
discussion with management (again, if desired). It is your call whether I am present at these meetings or not. Many clients
are most comfortable with me behind the scenes as a coach, and I am fine with that. At times, want someone from the
outside to help validate findings, approach and direction and I am comfortable here too.

Deliverable 2:
Create a Roadmap for your Customer Experience work.
During our first two days together, we will begin to identify a high level path for your organizations customer experience
transformation journey. To make it manageable, we will break the work down into 90-day tactical plans. These are thought
through in context of the roadmap below. We customize the work plan for you based on everything we work through on the
days leading up to this planning session.

The tactical plan will customize the specific actions for your company along the roadmap, such as how we will go about
determining your version of Guerrilla Metrics, your customer listening strategy, customer accountability process, driving for
reliability in the current experience and ensuring the success of your teams created for experience improvement and
development. As we progress down refining your roadmap, we will identify the resources required to assist you.

A key part of this is determining the right way to facilitate engagement of your volunteer force that is helping you guide this
work, as well as continuously engaging your leaders and keeping the organization communicating. This culture work is often
forgotten in the planning.

The Customer Profitability Roadmap High Level

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Deliverable 3:
Drive Alignment and Accountability and Unite the Silos around Customer Experience

Insurance industry example below:

Many organizations say they focus on their customer experience but few do the hard work to define the stages of their
experience from the customer journey point of view. In the absence of this, all of the operating areas do their own thing,
driven by their internal tasks and agenda and scorecard. A lot of work is done, often in the name of the customer, but it
doesnt add up from the customers experience to deliver a unified experience. The big things dont get systemically fixed.
We miss the opportunity for the big wow moments.

In this stage of the work, I teach you how to bring cross functional groups of employees together to lead customer experience
workshops and to define and gain agreement on your customer experience. Here you define the stages of the experience and


the moments of truth that comprise all of the experience touchpoints. This includes both the obvious touchpoints, such as
when the customer places their order, and also those opportunities that might be missed, such as when the customer
th
places their 100 order or when the customer has contacted customer service three times in a month.

This is the platform work for a customer experience transformation journey, because once this is agreed to, many things line
up to it, such as operational KPIs to deliver on the key touchpoints, we line up where we gather feedback on the experience,
we connect cross silo operational metrics for the delivery of cohesive experiences, we create reward and recognition that
enforces key moments. In this stage of the work you lead your teams to identify the key top 10-20 moments of truth so that
you can prioritize the touchpoints to begin working on improving in reliability and in weaving in those differentiating wow
moments.

The significance of this is huge. Not enough companies understand that this is the first duct tape exercise to get your
organization moving together in one direction and thats to agree on the stages of your customer experience. This is the
platform work for a customer experience transformation journey, because once this is agreed to, from here, you can

Line up customer feedback to these stages where you gather feedback on the experience.
Connect cross silo operational metrics for the delivery of cohesive experiences.
Establish reward and recognition that enforces key moments.
Give leaders a manner in which to hold the company accountable to cross functional stages of the experience.

Deliverable 4:
Experience Based Customer Listening: Accelerate Your Voice of the Customer Listening System and ROI metrics.
Feedback integrated into daily decisions connected to experiences not just silo based work.

Because of the way we take feedback and then hand it off for resolution down the silos, we inadvertently send a false
positive to CEOs and company leaders that customer issues are being resolved. See if this sounds familiar to you: As your
results come in from surveys, reports, now social media, they are handed over to an operating area or silo to go work on it.
The survey results are sent out into the company, where each part of the organization or silo interprets the results then
decides what they will or will not do. What happens next is

a.
b.
c.

Every leader interprets go work on it differently.

Whatever department who has the survey results handed to them to go work on it does some action inside their own
area, then reports back at the next meeting where its asked about.
Because we take feedback results and categorize them into silo buckets, then dole them out to be fixed by silo the
customer experience doesnt have a chance of getting fixed really from the customers perspective.

Broken customer experiences are often the result of many things across the operation not working exactly right. For
example; billing is a challenging customer experience not just because of what the Billing department does.
Communications, sales, marketing, operations, IT and billing all play a role in what the customer ultimately experiences.
Customers experience a company across the operation, not down the silos. So doling out the issues down the silo has to
change if you want to move to customer experience accountability.
Customer listening in most organizations is about surveys. Surveys are important, but there are many opportunities to
get close to customers and really listen in on what they have to say about the experience you are delivering to them that is
driving them to buy more or driving them away. If we wait for the survey results, or rely only on the data within them, we
miss the simplest, most easily understood and passionate feedback that can help us understand the customer experience
real time everyday. Some sources for expanding your customer listening are:

Feedback customers provide during call center calls

Customer input provided when they return something to you
Internet feedback
Feedback customers give your frontline folks

In this deliverable, we get an understanding how you are gathering all of the customer feedback coming in your doors today,
both aided (such as surveys) and unaided such as the complaints and feedback into the call centers. We work together to
determine how you can connect all of these listening pipes to take advantage of this information and trend and track it.

Collecting and organizing this information is important to prevent the one off fixes on things and to attach the issues where
they connect along the customer experience. By having this type of everyday feedback, we loosen our reliance on surveys
to take real-time action and also get better focus on the things that really matter. Included here is discussing the IT
implications of buy vs. build of a listening system, and helping you to get to a path of building what you need for your
company. The work here requires committing to three alignment action items:
Agree on the categories of customer issues that you will collect in a unified manner across the operation, so that you can
consistently collect and trend listening feedback.
Agree to start reporting customer listening feedback by customer experience stage
Agree to stop handing off the experience issues to one department identify the multiple silos that impact the experience
and from there drive accountability
As part of this deliverable we evaluate how you survey customers and what you are getting from the survey(s) you are using
today. The work here is to determine how you can connect all of these listening pipes to take advantage of this information
and trend and track it.

a.
b.
c.
d.

How do you report feedback?

What do people do with it?
Is it driving action?
Are you score chasers

To summarize, in this part of the coaching process, we understand how and where you are listening today, how to optimize
within your current system and how to evaluate what you need to build your comprehensive voice of the customer listening
system. This is includes discussing vendor partners with systems and assistance in finding the right partner for you in the
different elements of this work.

There is a complete methodology that has been built (again complete with slides, tools, templates, decks) that we customize
for you to create your plan and process. Accelerating this listening engine creates the platform for creating the initial phase
of customer experience improvements. As part of this listening review, we discuss and understand your current survey
systems and metrics for managing performance. Again, as needed, we bring in partners to help with this stage. This may
include survey vendor assistance, and research resources.

Deliverable 5:
Drive the process for organizational engagement and accountability.
Once you have done the foundational work of identifying your stages of the experience and have identified the key 10-15
moments of truth or customer touchpoints, you can start to build experience reliability in a focused manner that wont feel like
you are trying to change the world overnight.
Many companies collect enormous amounts of customer feedback and data but dont have a rigorous process to drive real
and relevant operational change to customer experiences. The survey results are sent out into the company, where each part
of the organization or silo interprets the results then decides what they will or will not do.

This part of the work is about reliability in your experience, by not only waiting for survey resultsbut proactively managing the
key touchpoints with shared accountability across the silos. Do this by:
a.

Identifying and establishing KPIs (key operational performance indicators) for your top 10-15 touchpoints.

b.

Bringing cross functional teams of people together to take experiences from broken to reliable to ultimately a
differentiating moment. Once youve got this process down, you can move past the top 10-15 touchpoints. But start with
just these few otherwise it will become too overwhelming.

c.

Establishing what the forums should be for driving accountability. Something I recommend is a Customer Room a
practice that has had high impact with my clients organizations.

This idea comes from something we did at Lands End long ago to get us out of our day to day tasks and experiencing the world
as we were delivering it to our customers doors. We stock-transferred in every outwear product in the catalog to see how the
products were packaged and what the hang tags and communication and outer packaging appeared. What a mess! But what an
impact those exercise had.

We have now implemented this Customer Room with clients such as TD Ameritrade, St. Judes Childrens Hospitals, Bombardier
Aircraft and many others driving the operations to come together, drop their silo operations and think experience.

In a customer room, we depict the stages of the customer experience across the walls. Beneath each stage we show the artifacts
of the experience that customers physically receive; the packing slip, hang tags, materials, overstock notices, etc. We also list
beneath each stage, the complaints weve received, the KPIs for the key touchpoints and the survey results that are impacted by
it. This brings the organization together to think experience rather than my silo. We also play customer calls so the folks in
the room can hear the voice of the customer talking about how the experience was delivered.

On a quarterly or monthly basis, we convene the customer experience room with leadership in the room, getting passionate
about the places where we are letting customers down sending teams off to determine cross functional fixes. As these teams
work on improving customer experiences, they present their findings back and recommendations and ultimately results
making this room also a place of celebration. It takes the customer work off spreadsheets and puts the customer square in the
middle of the business with passion, fun and a great amount of collaboration and innovation.

To summarize, this part of the work is about reliability, learning from three things:
d. Identifying and establishing key KPIs for the key customer experience touchpoints, and creating an engaging and fun
way to be passionate about delivering reliability to customers
e. Tracking and trending customer issues and then bringing cross functional teams of people together to take
experiences from broken to reliable to ultimately a differentiating moment
f. Establishing what the forums should be for driving accountability.

This deliverable includes transferring the skills to the client so that these processes and approaches can be wired into the DNA
of your business. As with all the deliverables, my templates and processes are transferred, so you can take ownership and
make it your own. And as with the other processes, I am always available if desired to be on site to do the first one so that the
client can model the behavior and lead the work personally.

This is frequently the hardest part of the work. And that is managing all the moving parts and the many people who signed up
for the work enthusiastically in the beginning of the journey. How do you keep the momentum going? How do you give it all
contexts to the overall customer experience?

This stage often includes assistance with customer experience mapping tools and processes. Most of the improvement efforts
people have signed up for require process mapping and customer experience design work, but this is rarely a core competency
of most organizations. This is when we give you tools to facilitate sessions yourself to begin to give the teams some basic
skills. Here we will also determine the level of additional outside resources you might need to get the process mapping, metrics
and improvements going to improve the key brokens of the experience. And then we will also assess and bring resources to
assist you in completely recreating key experiences if there is the commitment and bandwidth of people and resources.

Deliverable 6:
Managing Customers, Partners as Assets

I call this customer math. And this is about building passion across the organization and establishing a simple rallying cry for
leaders. It goes like this:
Rather than talking about customer retention, lets begin each meeting saying the raw numbers of:
Incoming customers outgoing customers = net growth (or loss) of customer asset in that period
Customers who recommended us
Top five reasons why customers left
For many companies, just putting together these simple articulations of incoming customer requires an alignment in definition
and certainly an alignment in data and databases as every part; every silo frequently has varying definitions. This is essentially
the outcome of the experience you are delivering to customers I call it customers vote with their feet on whether they stay or
leave. And I have found it very powerful to always begin meetings with this simple report card of earning the right to customer
growth.
At one company I worked with, we wanted a visual to depict the outcome of the customer math each month or quarter --- so
we came up with a pretty unique idea with marbles. We determined the mathematical equation for the number of customers
one marble would represent, and we began to begin every meeting with two bowls of marbles: one with a bowl filled with
marbles representing the lost customers and one bowl filled with marbles representing the new customers. It really got
peoples attention at this company when the bowls were even, or when the lost marbles exceed the new customer
marbles. In this deliverable we determine your version of this simple metricand we determine how to translate and
communicate it across your organization in your own unique style.

Deliverable 7:
United Leadership Engagement Delivering a One-Company Experience:
Walking the Talk Past Lip Service to Deliberate Decisions and Actions

This part of the work is about leadership and organizational dynamics and about communication. The companies that are
most successful at the customer experience work address the work across the silos as well as how leaders enable the
organization to work together. And they address other systemic issues driving customer experience, such as understanding
how employees are hired and developed and engaged, and how they are motivated and rewarded. This is where we connect
where training is required, where reward and recognition, compensation and how employees need to be engaged so that all
of the pieces connect to give you long lasting and sustainable change and customer culture.

In this deliverable, we address the human issues that are so critical to continuing to hold a place in customers hearts. How are
leaders enabling the organization to work? How are decisions made? What are people rewarded and recognized for?

This begins with creating simple and clear actions for Leaders, the middle and the frontline for working together. For
Leaders: how do they get rid of the roadblocks? For the Middle, how do they work together across the silos and get rid of
some of their own policies and procedures that they own but that get in the way of a united experience. And how do they
make decisions as they do their work? For the front: how do we hire folks congruent with our core values, how do we enable
and train them to bring the best version of themselves to work. And how do we involve them in the customer experience
work?

Theres a lot here and this part of the work is frequently the heavy lifting of getting traction. Often I lead workshops for the
organization to help them get on the same page. Then as usual, pass on the materials and slides so that these conversations
can be continued throughout the organization. As part of the coaching, we roadmap the action items to take, such as the
example Leadership actions as noted below which were developed for a client:

Leadership Accountability

Behaviors

CE Leadership Council

Weekly Actions
Value and Honor Agents and
Policyholders
- Know them
- Listen and understand their
lives

- Review latest feedback

on Policyholder and
Agent-related surveys

Obsess about Experience

Experience Storytelling
- Drive focus on impact on
Agents and Policyholders
- KPI and performance
reliability
- Focus on priority experiences
Enable Change to Occur
- Agent and Policyholder
focused decisions
- Align reward with
Agent/Policyholder focus
- Drive accountability
- Connect the silos

- Require Policyholder
and Agent impact criteria
for all decisions lens for
decision making
-As Agent and
Policyholder focused
decisions are made,
communicate to teams

Honor Employees
-Listen to employees
-Remove barriers
-Recognize and reward
employees

Personally Commit
-Clarify the roadmap
-Walk the talk

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Give Permission - Challenge Legacy Practices

- Commit to actions

Monthly Actions

Quarterly Actions

- Review lost Policyholders

-
-
-
-
-

Call four lost Agents and Policyholders

Respond to three letters
Lead a Quarterly Loss Review
Take first 15 minutes in every meeting to discuss
Be a Policyholder or Agent experience one process
as they would

- Review the monthly KPI insights and discuss

- Focus on one of the Brand promises and
explore: How are we living up to this promise?
(Behavior of the Month)
- Individually, incorporate this information into
your all-hands meetings

- Host Council/Function meetings in the Policyholder

Experience room to review experience and drive
action

- Attend CE Leadership Council meetings

review and decision Agent & Policyholder
impacting items
- Commit strategic resources to drive initiatives
against Agent / Policyholder priorities
- Review status of Ops priority fixes and drive
action
- With operational teams, review monthly
Policyholder and Agent-related insights and
discuss transactional results

- Review quarterly summary of all Policyholder and

Agent focused decisions and why they were made
- Drive the Stop-Start-Continue exercise:
prioritization of enterprise initiatives

- Highlight someone youve met in your site

visits who is doing a phenomenal job
- Explore organizational issues and dynamics
impacting the top broken Agent and/or
Policyholder experience issues (employee and
Policyholder/Agent impacts)
- Drive employee engagement activities

- Employee Connect: Visit one Policyholder or Agent

facing location, observe the experience and debrief
with employees. Define employee hurdles
- - Commit to fix one employee hurdle per quarter.
Involve employees in the fixing process.

- Highlight your Member-focused behavior (and

the difference from the past) Heres a
decision we made today and heres why we

- Define and recommit strategic initiatives against

Agent and Policyholder priorities
- Review status of priority fixes and drive action

To get started, I suggest these simple action items you can go do tomorrow without spending much money. All it takes is
passion, commitment and making this a priority:
Call lost customers. Play those calls for everyone.
Have your execs call at least five customers who have left you every month. No script required, just the ability to really listen.
Start the call by telling the customer how sorry they left your company, and then ask if they could explain what happened.
Then, stop talkingjust listen. These calls will get the voice of your customer into the ear of the people who can make change.
And there is nothing like these calls to bust through how we usually think of customers, as survey data or retention rates. Get
customers permission to record those calls and play them and talk about each experience that customers were disappointed
in.

These will get you fast traction and a culture boost as folks in your organization will see that execs are committed and talking
about customers personally and the experiences they are having.

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Be a customer
Commit everyone in your organization to do one thing that you require customers to do once a month. Buy a product on your
site as customers do. File a claim as they do, redeem a coupon, etc. Then talk about the process. Fix what doesnt make sense
and makes you wonder why a company would treat customers in that manner.
Connect with the frontline
At Lands End every few months, we brought in about twenty people from all the frontline operations; the phone folks, pickers
and packers from the warehouse, etc. and had them sit in a circle around our President. They talked, and we listened and took
notes. We believed their version of how they were treated and how customers were treated and we made changes based on
what they said. Try this. You dont have to do exactly this, but make sure that you actively listen to the frontline, and most
importantly believe what they have to say and take action.
Do customer math, and talk about lost and gained customers in every meeting
Initiate your version of the bowl of customer marbles and talk about it at every meeting. Relate that gain or loss of customers
to what has been heard in those lost customer calls, to what the frontline is saying and to what you are experiencing as a
customer of your company. Then talk about it all as experiences and start driving accountability in cross functional teams to
fix experiences not silo problems.

To summarize, the goal of this coaching process is to teach you to fish, and to help you with resources staging the work
and getting the work done in a manner that will help you achieve results. I am behind the scenes, giving you the tools and
support to drive the action forward. You are doing the work inside the organization with your resources to ensure that the
skills and the DNA for doing this work are developed and transferred. This gives you a set of new skills to be able to
continue this work throughout your organization as you progress through the ongoing stages of the roadmap. This very
operational approach resonates with the organization, and immediately takes the work from something that sounds
conceptual to action that people understand and can be held accountable to.

This is how my coaching is different from a regular consulting engagement because we constantly modify and customize
the work you progress and mature in your skills in driving the work ahead. And, because unforeseen changes in your
business, the market and business results can impact the road, this approach always keeps you agile.

About Jeanne Bliss:

Jeanne Bliss began her career at Lands End where she reported to founder Gary Comer and the companys executive
committee, ensuring that in the formative years of the organization, the company stayed focused on its core principles of
customer and employee focus. She was the first leader of the Lands End Customer Experience. In addition to Lands End, she
has served Allstate, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker Corporation and Mazda Corporations as its executive leading customer focus
and customer experience. Jeanne has helped achieve 95% retention rates across 50,000 person organizations, harnessing
businesses to work across their silos to deliver a united and deliberate experience customers (and employees) want to repeat.

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Jeanne now runs CustomerBliss (www.customerbliss.com), an international consulting business where she coaches executive
leadership teams and customer leadership executives on how to put customer profitability at the center of their business, by
getting past lip service; to operationally relevant, operationally executable plans and processes. Her clients include Johnson &
Johnson, TD Ameritrade, St. Judes Childrens Hospitals, Bombardier Aircraft and many others.
Her two best-selling books are Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action and I Love You More than My
Dog: Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad.

Partial Client List Executive Leaders and Teams Jeanne Bliss has Coached:

Zappos

Bombardier Aerospace
Walmart.com

Adobe Software

Safeco Insurance

Ardent Healthcare Systems

Glaxo Smith Kline

Citrix Online

The Irvine Company
Loreal

Brooks Brothers

NCR

BRP- Makers of SeaDoo and Skidoo

Century Furniture
Cardinal Health

St. Judes Childrens Hospitals

BC Hydro

Discover Financial Services

Dean Healthcare Systems

Yahoo!

Ubisoft

TD Ameritrade

Intuit

Safeco Insurance

Kaiser Permanente
Symantec


Johnson & Johnson, Vistakon

AAA

CDC Software

Bank of Montreal

Cox Communications

Air Transat
Canada Post

The Irvine Company

The Smithsonian Institute

Why Jeanne Bliss and Customer Bliss?

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Work directly with Jeanne Bliss, who has 25 years in the field as the Chief Customer Officer for 5 Major US Corporations:
Lands End, Allstate, Mazda, Coldwell Banker and Microsoft Corporations
Process in this proposal consistently validated and improved over the past twelve years with coaching clients.
Worldwide keynote speaker known for ability to connect with audiences, engage executives and employees.
Co-founder, CXPA (www.cxpa.org) the Customer Experience Professionals Association
In demand expert called upon regularly by major media for input on customer experience and culture issues.