It’s Friday afternoon as I type this, and I’m shaking my head
that I have been away from my blog for a while. I've had some
great adventure of late. Right now I’m thinking about the 3 days
I was in Washington, D.C. with 175 other women health care
executives at one of my favorite events of the year: The Women
Business Leaders Summit. We collaborated on business challenges. We
laughed. We learned. I flew back to the Twin Cities inspired,
filled with great ideas and more than a few new business
connections.
Late last year, I shared the story of one of our key partners, Arik
Hanson, and his family’s experience at Children’s Hospitals and
Clinics of Minnesota. As I recently revisited the post with Arik, I
couldn’t help but wonder what was behind some of the great work
the folks at Children’s were doing.
Last week I shared the first part of my Q&A with Ingrid
Lindberg, CIGNA's Customer Experience Officer.
I'm back in the office, after two weeks of sun, fun and Kiwi
culture in New Zealand. On the plane on my way down, my seat mate
and I got to chatting about our work. She heard about my book
Domino, and then asked in a heartbeat, "Can a country have a
customer experience?"
Ingrid Lindberg is CIGNA's Customer Experience Officer, where she spearheads the organization's cultural and customer experience evolution.
Perhaps revolution is more accurate. For years, health care insurance providers like CIGNA have considered their customers to be employers who purchase insurance for employees. It's only been in the past few years that these organizations have started to realize that the individual consumers they insure are customers too.
Over in Hamburg on the Seigle + Gale blog, Ulf-Bruen Drechsel paid
homage to the passing of the Sony Walkman.
Arik Hanson is a hugely talented social media and PR mind. He’s
also a great dad. Last month, Arik discovered that his
three-year-old daughter had a gigantic hole in her back molar. Big
problem. The larger problem: His daughter is terrified of the
dentist. Won’t even open her mouth. He was left wondering,
“What should I do?” Arik shared his dilemma with me as we were
walking out of a meeting last month.
As someone who gets excited when leaders successfully use customer experience as an operating strategy to drive performance, I had pure fun reading Fortune's recent article "Inside Trader Joe's."
Trader Joe's seems well on its way to the top tier of organizations who consistently demonstrate the link between the right target customer experience and financial performance. (Who's in the top tier? I watch Disney, Southwest Airlines, Zappos, and Cleveland Clinic to name a few.)
Clients often tell me that my firm Aveus excels at finding money
trapped in the performance chain* while strengthening customer
experiences. We love the kudos for delivering on both halves of the
sentence, but what’s most important here is the word while. We
know a company can do both at the same time. In fact, from our
experience and research, we know that addressing one without the
other leaks both money and customers from a business.
We often talk about customer experience and how it pertains to our
customers, the people (or businesses) who will use our goods and
services. But you can also use a well-defined experience as an
operating guide when making decisions about any of the stakeholder
groups your organizations serves. Really!
