Books and Articles by Bob Kelleher

Customer experience is a dynamic discipline. It's always evolving, so you have to make an effort to stay on top of things! Here, you find several suggestions for additional customer experience resources.You'll notice that a great many of them are blogs. Fortunately, the community of bloggers who focus on customer experience is extremely open and sharing!

To compete in a world where more and more products and services are commoditized more quickly than ever before, you have to up your game and deliver great customer experiences at every point of interaction in your business. A consistently great customer experience is very difficult to copy and may represent a sustainable competitive differentiator for your company!

Following are tools you can use to gauge your progress on each step of improving customer experience, enabling you to see what you’ve done so far and get a handle on what still needs to be accomplished. Feel free to copy these tools and use them in your efforts to improve customer experience in your own organization!

An EDP (employee development plan) is one good way to encourage engagement in your workforce. So, how do you use an EDP? Here's a breakdown: The manager completes the EDP forms.This step includes providing an assessment of the employee’s past performance, as well as a road map for the future. (The manager can partner with his HR manager as needed for guidance writing effective goals, providing reinforcing and constructive feedback, and so on.

When you’re trying to engage your workforce, it helps to know how engaged they already are, and you can do this by conducting an employee engagement survey and acting on the results. A key way to build momentum following your survey is to draw on your engagement ambassadors — employees who are already fully engaged and committed to your company.

Compensation is one good tool to use to encourage achievement and employee engagement. Here are a few tips that pertain to developing your compensation strategy: Communication about rewards must be frequent and transparent. The distribution of rewards for high performance should not be kept secret. For example, if John is being given a plum assignment to reward him for his high performance, others should be told why John received the assignment.

Corporate social responsibility, or CSR, is a big part of having an engaged workforce. A company whose very mission is CSR will be very attractive to many engaged workers! Many CSR activities are inexpensive or free to launch, and pay significant engagement benefits. If you’re looking to incorporate CSR into your organization, consider these tips: Allow employees to take one paid service day per year with an approved nonprofit or charitable organization.

Sure, exit interviews are helpful. But talking to employees after they've made the decision to leave is of limited use. By the time an exit interview reveals an issue, it's too late to correct it. Have you ever thought to yourself, “If only I had known — I could've done something before it was too late!” Well, smart managers avoid this situation by routinely asking their employees how they're doing, why they're staying, and how they might be further engaged.

What is meant by customer experience advocates? Simple — those employees who lead, direct, and foster change in the area of building and sustaining a customer-centric culture. Following are ten key qualities of awesome customer advocates. They know their corporate culture may be the enemy As you confront the realities of an intransigent corporate culture, an understanding of Newton’s Laws of Motion (albeit slightly modified) will serve you well: A body in motion (your company) tends to stay in motion unless an external force (your efforts) is applied to it.