As a part of CXM campaign for CXDay, we had the opportunity to speak with CX professionals, small and large businesses to share their story and spread the word about their greatest achievements and milestones in CX. In the first of the CXDay interviews, we spoke with Rachel Williams, a CEO of the Experience Corporation, helping businesses jumpstart their CX.
Hi Rachel, thank you for being with us today! Could you tell us something about yourself?
Thank you for the opportunity! I am founder and CEO at the Experience Corporation. In 2018 I left my corporate job in London to start my own training company.
How do you celebrate CX Day at your company?
We are a training company, and we provide customer experience training. This year we are celebrating the CX day by offering free training, that is going to empower businesses to be able to quantify, measure and improve their customer experience. The training is a completely free 60-minute session, and we are doing it to help other companies become their best.
There are two sessions – one on Tuesday 6 October and Thursday 9 October. Register here for free.
What do you do to exceed your customers’ expectations?
That is a great question. I think it’s so important in a time we are living right now to go above and beyond to delight our customers. What we do is we make sure that training we provide is robust and in-depth, and it leaves the participants with the solution that they will be able to apply for the duration of their career, or while they stay in the particular business. For example, if we are teaching communication skills, we’ll teach the delegates the actual practical scientific thing they need to do to be able to communicate in excellence and on every occasion. We want to make sure to give our best to our clients and customers, and we are always thinking of new innovative ways of delivering valuable content such as tips on social media, PDF’s and free training on CX Day.
Here is a link to our Instagram account. We are moving training online because of COVID, and we want to make it all more accessible.
What is your most interesting CX story?
Before starting a company, I had bad customer experiences and it would annoy me. I worked in a UK organisation that deals with financial complaints. I was a mediator between the biggest companies in the world and their consumers. I would get to see what customers like and what they don’t like. At the same time, I had my own personal bad customer experiences. Those frustrations led me to start a company. From then on, I started looking at the whole industry differently and found that if companies do focus on CX they would flourish and grow and outgrow their competitors. To summarise, I was working in CX, I was having frustrations and I decided to start my company to tackle what I thought was the huge problem in the industry.
Inspiring story. You saw a problem and started a company to solve the problems for others as well. I would say the message for companies is in order to grow, they have to focus on CX.
Definitely. I think is important for companies to have a plan and way for measuring CX. Even if they are at the onset, they can use surveys, or as I like to call it a customer feedback funnel, which is opposite of the sales funnel. You serve the customer and you send them a survey to collect quality data. After you’ve collected the data, you start analysing and looking at what the score is. You shouldn’t just leave CX up in the air, assuming that you are delivering the best possible experiences. Companies need to have a plan in place to measures to quantify to make things better. They have to be transparent and honest about themselves. The Institute of Customers Services just reported that UK satisfaction rates have flat-lined and customer expectations have gone up. Customers are expecting more nowadays, but companies are delivering the same.
You mentioned that on the webinar you will teaching delegates why plans are so important in CX. What is the difference between long-term and short-term plans?
Short term plans are doing one survey. Long term plans start with a desire to make CX a part of a business plan and strategy. The second thing is to make a plan for one year, five years, that will continuously monitor and give quality feedback from customers so they can measure how they have been doing and what they can improve. With data, you can make things better. That is important especially now, as we are living in uncertain times, and if companies don’t have a plan in place for CX, their competitors that do have plans will outgrow them.
Great examples are Blockbuster vs Netflix.
Netflix is innovative and provides a great customer experience. Netflix provided an alternative for renting movies. You pay once and you have unlimited streaming. They have original content and they allow us to view older content and our friends’ content.
Netflix has a long-term plan and strategy for making things better, and Blockbuster don’t. That is why they went bankrupt.
That is a simple but powerful example. Are there any CX books you would recommend?
The book I am reading at the moment is not specifically focused on CX, but is focused on business and it is called 101 ways to grow your business. The book talks about the small things you can do to delight your customers and be the best in your industry.
Is there something you would like to add or what do you want to say for the end of our interview?
I would like to say that CX day is a day to promote and to think about customer experience and to celebrate companies and people that are doing a great job. This is just one day, and one day is not enough to change or improve CX. I passionately believe that CX has to be at the front of a company as part of it’s success strategy. A recent study by Walker says that CX will be the number one differentiation between success and failure. Lastly, I think it’s important for companies to understand and appreciate the link between great customer experience and their revenue and profits.
The Institute of Customer Services, they produce a report every couple of months that support this theory that great CX leads to increased revenue and business success.
My new online program – The Customer Experience Masterplan is now open for enrolment. The 6-week online course is perfect for small business owners, CX Managers and corporate team leaders looking to improve, update and transform their CX.