Report: Lessons in CX Excellence, 2016

We just published a Temkin Group report, Lessons in CX Excellence, 2016. The report provides insights from eight finalists in the Temkin Group’s 2015 CX Excellence Awards. The report, which is 100 pages long, includes an appendix with the finalists’ nomination forms. This report has rich insights about both B2B and B2C customer experience.

Here’s the executive summary:

This year, we chose eight organizations as finalists for Temkin Group’s 2015 Customer Experience Excellence Award. The finalists for 2015 are EMC Global Services, Hagerty, InMoment, Safelite AutoGlass, SunPower, The Results Companies, Verint, and Wheaton | Bekins. This report provides specific examples describing how these companies’ CX efforts have created value for both their customers and for their businesses. We also highlight best practices across the four customer experience competencies—purposeful leadership, compelling brand values, employee engagement, and customer connectedness. We have included all of the finalists’ detailed nomination forms at the end of this report to help you compile examples and ideas to apply to your own CX efforts.

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Here are some highlights from the finalists:

• EMC’s commitment to delivering an exceptional customer experience begins at the top and filters down through the rest of the company. For over 10 years, the company’s Total Customer Experience (TCE) program embodied what it meant to be “customer-first” and helped transform the company from a leader in storage to a leader in big data, cloud, and trust technologies. In order to continue improving in the field of CX in 2015, EMC’s senior leadership sponsored the implementation of the Next Generation TCE program, with the mission to “Enhance the total customer/partner experience, leveraging a data-driven approach for continuous improvement throughout the customer/partner journey.” The Next Generation TCE program encompasses all aspects of the company, from brand promises, to engaging and recognizing employees, to providing independent research on customer’s challenges and future needs.
• Hagerty is one of the leading insurance providers for collector vehicles in the entire world, insuring more than one million vehicles in North America and the U.K. and employing over 600 people. Hagerty’s company-wide vision is to impact every collectible vehicle owner in the world in a positive and useful way. Their client experience strategy focuses on creating clients for life who will become partners in growth. This strategy aligns with the company’s aforementioned vision and helps Hagerty maintain a client- and agent-centered culture, and this culture includes a robust voice of the customer (VoC) program, complete with their signature Net Promoter Score^® (NPS) model, a client-centered design process, and touchpoint and engagement programs aimed at celebrating clients using anniversary cards. Hagerty knows that communication is essential for executing its client experience strategy effectively, so it strives to provide effortless service and enhance relationships by doing things like alerting clients to pending storms.
• During its inception in 2014, InMoment—a CX and VoC provider—created its own internal CX program that is built on listening to and engaging customers. Every month, the company administers customer surveys to collect general feedback, see what customers love, and learn what needs to be improved. InMoment distributes this data to client service teams and product teams so they can put it into action and help shape the accessibility and interface of the products. Executive involvement at InMoment is key. The executive team regularly meets with a client advisory board to gain a deeper understanding of its customers’ experiences, amassing recommendations that the company then incorporates into business practices. One such feature created from customer feedback is a customizable client onboarding kit that gives clients an inside look into what to expect from the onboarding process. The most unique aspect of InMoment is its culture, which is centered on a concept called The Red Shoes Experience, which recognizes exceptional individuals. The company preaches about The Red Shoes Experience to both employees and to clients, and the philosophy stands on five pillars: Awareness, Gratitude, Everyone Has a Story, Respect, and Put Yourself Out There.
• To support its corporate vision of becoming the “natural choice for vehicle glass repair and replacement services in the U.S.,” Safelite AutoGlass adopted two strategic principles—People Powered and Customer Driven—which are rooted in the idea that engaged employees create loyal customers who, in turn, help the company grow. Each of these principles is built on four cornerstones, including leadership, caring, focusing, and listening. For example, when customers voiced concerns about Safelite.com, the company entirely overhauled the website, not only making it mobile-friendly, but also including features like a customizable portal where customers could save quotes and return to them at a later time, educational videos meant to walk customers through the process, and faster functionality to reduce steps when obtaining price quotes or scheduling appointments. In 2015, Safelite also expanded its predictive analytics tools to include forecasts of major weather occurrences in order to drive effective catastrophe response team labor management so techs could be available where and when the customers needed them.
• The sustainable energy company SunPower has a corporate-wide CX strategy founded on three core elements: Knowing our Customers, Creating a Branded Experience, and Driving Engagement with Customers and Employees. SunPower used a customer-validated journey map to chart emotional responses at each phase of the lifecycle, making sure to represent the stages with cross-functional stakeholders who then determined the ideal outcomes for the customer throughout the journey. To create a branded experience, the company started a Customer First! initiative and formed teams for each top issue. These teams were responsible for designing improvements with the customers in mind. They worked to align the customer experience with the brand promises and mission, “to make solar the most compelling energy choice, to put customers at the heart of all we do, to inspire our people and communities to thrive, and to build a more sustainable future.” SunPower keeps its employees and customers engaged by connecting them to each other and the company at customer council events, where homeowners can interact with each other and the employees and discuss any shortcomings or successes.
• The Results Companies’ CX functions on an operating model called CX360. This model sets forth a brand promise to continuously innovate and propose customer-centric solutions while providing unique and inspirational experiences. CX360 is founded on three guiding principles – People, Knowledge, and Empowerment. The Results Companies preaches CX360 to its 11,000+ employees who work in 17 locations across the U.S., Philippines, and Latin America. The company attributes its continued success and growth to this distinct operating model.
• Verint’s CX program combines cross-departmental customer feedback with a dedication to minimizing the amount of effort it takes for both customers and employees to achieve changes based on this feedback. Verint’s success stems from the company’s interactions with customers, who provide an outside-in perspective on Verint’s journey map, which is called the Customer Experience Wheel. This wheel—which the company displayed at its 2015 Annual User Conference—maps the emotional component of the experience across every interaction. It has improved the CX program by highlighting “moments of truth” and helping the company adapt how it monitors Verint’s progress towards customer-centricity. In October of 2015, Verint also hosted an Internal Customer Week during which employees could commend colleagues for delivering exceptional performances in the CX field, and they could commit to delivering outstanding customer service for life.
• In 2015, Wheaton | Bekins deployed a group of cross-functional employees to redesign their Customer Experience Report (CXR) by adding NPS questions, including more customer touchpoints, and uncovering more actionable data. Analysis of the CXR revealed that, of all the touchpoints, communication impacts customer perceptions of Wheaton | Bekins at least three times more than any other touchpoint. This analysis also showed that 39% of customers heard about the company through previous interactions or referrals, making this group one of the largest segments that the company serves. Wheaton | Bekins took the information from this analysis and integrated it into their Qualitative Journey Map, adjusting each step to include a communications component. The company also used these insights to create a Quality Assurance Process (QAP) to enhance the written and verbal information provided during each phase of the journey. To recognize and incent over 350 agents and 1,000 drivers, Wheaton | Bekins created a Total Quality Commitment award and a driver rating program, and both these systems operate on customer feedback from the CXR and performance data.

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If you enjoyed this report, check out Lessons in CX Excellence, 2015, Lessons in CX Excellence, 2014, Lessons in CX Excellence, 2013.

The bottom line: There’s a lot to learn from these CX Excellence Finalists.

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