Jason S Bradshaw suggests three steps to carry the excitement of Customer Experience Day into the year-end rush
Three recommendations from Bradshaw, former head of customer experience at Target: ask the people who work directly with customers and fix one problem; go through every step as a real customer would and reduce the friction points; and measure how well promises are kept.
What's happening
According to Bradshaw's article in CX Network, customers never saw companies' Customer Experience Day celebrations; they will judge the brand on the next call, the next delivery and the next complaint. The first step: the biggest problem to fix lies where feedback from the frontline team overlaps with what customers say in transactional surveys. In Bradshaw's example from Target, the team was empowered to take orders by phone; when the website crashed during a launch, the small contact center generated more than US$1 million in sales in a single day.
Whose desk it lands on
The executive in charge of customer experience. During the year-end rush, who will check every day whether delivery promises to customers are being kept?
Our view
The CX Brief's interpretation, not a claim made by the source.
Bradshaw's three steps are familiar; what makes the article valuable is its timing. Customer experience is tested not on a day of celebration but in the weeks when the pressure is highest. Bradshaw's own Target example bears this out: the difference was made by a small team authorized to take phone orders when the site crashed during a major launch. Heading into peak season, the real question is not what was said at the celebration but what the employee facing the customer is authorized to do when the first problem hits.
