Companies with a customer experience mindset drive a higher revenue than the rest of their industries. Companies known for leadership in customer experience tend to stand out from the competition and to outperform competitors remarkably.
Building an effective customer experience practice requires a holistic approach. To take a holistic approach to customer experience, you must consider the entire customer journey, across all channels and over time.
3 Keys to Improving Customer Experience
Consider the Entire Customer Journey. Empathize with your customers and analyze the experience from their point of view. When and how do they interact with your brand, products, services, or people? Create a separate customer experience practice, a team of independent associates who can view the overall customer experience in a more unbiased manner.
Involve Everyone. Engagement in building an effective customer experience must be an active pursuit at all levels in ways that are relevant for them. The relationship between customer experience and revenue trends can shine a light on the actual customer experience and help executives to develop more effective customer-focused strategies.
Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration. Roll out tools, processes, and programs and processes that facilitate cross-functional collaboration led by CX champions. Play simulation games, like INNOBALL, with most promising ideas.

Customer Experience Journey
Customer experience (CX) is your customers' holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages.
The interactions and experiences your customers have with your business define its success or failure. Great customer experience throughout the entire customer journey, from the first contact through outstanding after-sale service turns a first-time buyer to a happy and loyal customer.
For a brand, it is extremely important to make a great first impression on a customer because this impression lasts and influences all future encounters.
The next step is to win trust of a potential customer. This can be done through visitor tours, testimonials, success stories, empathy and white marketing.
A free trial of a product or service helps to engage a potential customer. It is also a key element of experiential marketing.
The first sale is like a wedding. It is the first step to creating a loyal customer. Find way to make the event enjoyable and memorable for the customer
Today, customer loyalty is driven primarily by a company's interaction with its customers, how well it delivers on their needs and wants, and how often the company exceeds customers’ expectations. A company's ability to deliver a customer experience that sets it apart in the customers’ eyes will increase the amount of consumer spending with the company and inspire loyalty to its brand.
 

Five Components of Customer Experience
Five parts of customer experience include inspirational, aesthetic, pragmatic, educational, and entertainment, components.
1.Inspirational. Create amazing innovative customer value and give your customers that stretches their aspirations and exceeds their expectations. If you create a radically innovative product/service, focus on enthusiast customers and inspire them by radically new opportunities your product creates.
2. Aesthetic. Customer experience should give great aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic means the pleasant, positive or artful appearance of a person or a thing. It is about how something looks and feels, and concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty. You must understand the nature of a beautiful experience as it is perceived by a customer, master the art of creation of that beauty and the art of communication and delivery of a beautiful customer experience so it get appreciated by your customer.
3. Pragmatic. Pragmatic experience is about how a customer feels about the cost/benefits ratio of a product or service.
4. Educational. People love to learn new useful things and grow through learning. Educate your customers, but do it in an easy, eye-opening and joyful way. Education should be fun for your customers.
5. Entertainment. People love to be entertained. Add humor to your customer relationship. Keep engaging customers with various fun activities.
 

Towards Greater Customer Experience
Customer experience management (CXM) is the process that companies use to oversee, track and improve all interactions with a customer during the entire customer journey. This involves co-creation of value innovations in partnership with customers, creation of a powerful first impression, empathetic marketing, selling outstanding benefits and solutions to customer problems, building harmonious customer relationship, win-win approach to resolving conflicts, and exceeding customer expectations.
Although most businesses state that they offer a "great customer experience," this contrasts with most customers expressing dissatisfaction with their experience. To meet the demands of providing an exceptional customer experience, companies must be able understand customers’ perception of value and deliver it consistently.
Holistic Cross-functional Approach
Building great customer experience requires a holistic cross-functional approach, involving CEO commitment, business design, brand appeal, customer-focused value-creation culture, entrepreneurial strategies, integration of technology and continuous company-wide effort. Recognize CXM as the future of marketing, sales and customer service. Use this approach to adopt the mindset of the customer and anticipate customer needs. Play simulations games, like INNOBALL, with emerging challenges and opportunities not just to make a project more successful, but also to turn anticipation of new customer needs and creation customer-focused innovations into a winning habit.
 

Optimizing Customer Experience
The aim of Customer Experience Management (CXM) is to ensure that customers are completely satisfied – or more than satisfied – in order to gain their loyalty and to turn them to repeat customers and brand ambassadors.
The interest in CXM is increasing because businesses are looking for competitive differentiation.[
To ensure CXM accuracy and to make the best use of it, the customer journey must be viewed from the actual perspective of customers, not the seller.
Two CXM Levels: Strategic and Transactional
At the strategic level, CXM depicts a business strategy designed to manage the customer experience, to give strategic benefits to both sellers and customers, and to increase the firm’s brand equity.
At the transactional level, CXM can be monitored through customer feedback, surveys, targeted studies, or observational studies. It captures responses of customers to their encounters with the brand or company that can be used to quantify the cost of inaction on customer experience issues.
Brand Ambassadors
The role of a word of mouth form of marketing grew exponentially due to exponential growth of social media. You must amaze your existing customer and exceed their expectations to turn them to your ‘evangelists’ – people who talk about their customer experience with great enthusiasm.

 

Holistic Approach
The service-profit chain is a powerful phenomenon that stresses the importance of people – both employees and customers – and how linking them can leverage corporate performance.
The service-profit chain is an equation that establishes the relationship between corporate policies, employee satisfaction, value creation, customer loyalty, and profitability. Unleashing the power of the service-profit chain will improve your performance. Moving from a focus on transactions to a focus on customer relationships delivers sustainable financial advantages. Your must look beyond the arithmetic value of individual transactions to all the ways you can serve the customer to capture and develop lasting relationships.
A seamless integration of all components in the service-profit chain – employee satisfaction, value creation, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and profit and growth – links all the critical dynamics of top customer service. The company guides, nurtures, and empowers its employees, and the employees play a vital role in securing customer satisfaction and the benefits that accrue from it.
The Power of Satisfied Employees
Among the factors that motivate employees in the workplace, job satisfaction is at or near the top of the list, far surpassing pay and benefits. Creating a work environment that encourages rapid response to customers' needs and attentive follow-through is the key to leveraging the power of your service-profit chain.
 

Holistic Approach to Customer Relationships: 7 Tips
As opposed to a transactional focus, a holistic approach to customer relationship delivers sustainable financial advantages. To achieve this:
Be passionate about your customers. Treat customer relationships as enjoyable win-win interactions of platonic lovers.
Demonstrate continuously that in your company's order of priorities, customer service comes before all else.
Don't focus solely on transactions. Look beyond the arithmetic value of individual transactions to all the ways you can serve the customer to capture and develop lasting mutually beneficial relationships.
Keep in mind that it is customer, not you, who owns the relationship. Once you have captured customer relationships, service the customer relentlessly and keep creating amazing value innovations.
Understand what motivates your employees in order to develop powerful tool for dealing with them to get them achieve extraordinary results. Satisfied employees make a deeper commitment to the business, make improvement suggestions, and work harder to satisfy the customer.
Develop financial system that truly captures the financial dynamics of customer relationships.
Develop system that rewards people for building and maintaining strong and lasting customer relationships.
 

Brand Equity
Brand equity refers to the customers’ subjective appraisal of the brand. There are many ways to measure your brand appeal and brand equity. You can measure it at the firm level, at the product level, or at the consumer level. The consumer level approach seeks to map the mind of the customers to find out what associations with the brand they have. Brands with higher levels of awareness and strong, favorable and unique associations have higher brand equity.
Customer Value Analysis
Value equity refers to the customers’ perceptions of value. Value and quality are all about customers’ perceptions. Like beauty and truth, quality is in the eye of the beholder. "Perception is all there is..." says Tom Peters. "There is only one perceived reality, the way each of us chooses to perceive a communication, the value of a service, the value of a particular product feature, the quality of a product.“ From the customer’s point of view, your customer relationship management efforts create additional value if they improve your responsiveness, reduce prices, and make customer’s life more enjoyable. To create greater value, Imagine the ideal customer experience and strive to provide it.
Customer Loyalty Analysis
Retention equity refers to the firm building relationships with customers and encouraging repeat-purchasing. Customer loyalty is a major contributor to sustainable profit growth. To win customer loyalty, you must first satisfy your customer repeatedly.
 

Create a Shared Future
Customer satisfaction and retention are critical to success any business. You must partner with your customers and to create a shared future that is more secure than either could have built alone. Ask your major customers what they are planning to achieve, inform them about your strategic intent, formulate a shared vision, and then discuss how you could make the desired future a reality jointly.
Involve Everyone
Create a customer-focused culture, get employees passionate about customer, and make customer partnership everybody’s job. Leaving establishment of customer partnership to isolated departments like sales or customer service is a mistake. Everybody in your company, from front-line employees to top managers, must find ways to connect with customers in a mutually beneficial way. Your business exists to serve its customers, and this recognition should permeate every strategy, process, department, project, and job role.
Partner with all types of customers – not just existing ones, but also potential and lost customers. Existing customers may help you improve your customer services and create innovative customer value. Potential customer may help you understand why they aren't buying your product or services and what could turn them to buyers. Lessons learnt from lost customer can prevent future losses.
Create Enablers
Create platforms and mechanisms that will make it easier for customers to share their ideas, to discuss matters of mutual interest, and to collaborate with you.
 

Customer Loyalty: Benefits for Business
Delighted and loyal customers will return for follow-on business without considering alternatives of comparing the competition. Though, there is a number of factors that influence customers' decisions to remain loyal, true loyalty is based on your company's continuous delivery of superior value. Customer loyalty is a major contributor to sustainable profit growth.
Difference Between Satisfied and Loyal Customers
In highly competitive markets, there is a big difference between satisfied customers and completely satisfied – or loyal – customers. The former, if they have a choice, can easily switch to another supplier, while loyal customer would stay longer with your company and recommend its services to others. Thus you should rather be concerned than pleased if, according to your surveys, majority of your customers fall into the satisfied category.
How To Win Customer Loyalty
To win customer loyalty, you must first satisfy your customer repeatedly. According to 80/20 Principle, loyal customers – the top 20% of total customers – usually account for more than 80% of your sales and profit growth. Turning customers into loyal ones through building customer relationship and delivering superior value should be your prime task. Develop a system for collecting customer loyalty data and relaying this information to those responsible for customer value creation. Develop a reward system that inspires employees to win customer loyalty.
  

Stakeholder-focused Management
A great business inspires employees by amazing opportunities and customers by exciting products. Management is perpetual creation of outstanding value for all stakeholders: customers, employees, investors and the society. Customer value and buying decisions are the starting point for the actual practice of management, its policy and strategy.
Management is more art than science
Managing is working with and through other people to accomplish the objectives of both the organization and its members.
Management consists of:
rational assessment of a situation and the systematic selection of goals and purposes (what is to be done);
systematic development of strategies to achieve these goals;
marshalling of the required resources;
rational design, organization, direction, and control of the activities required to attain the selected purposes;
helping each employee to find the right fit, directing their ambitions, developing and empowering employees, providing situational coaching to help employees to grow, and to enhance their performance and learning ability;
motivating and rewarding of people to do the work.
 

 Managerial Competency
A managerial competency in general is a set of knowledge, skills and behaviors that allows a manager to perform his duties efficiently and effectively.
The seven core competencies necessary to be a good manager are planning and administration competency, managerial leadership competency, self-management competency, strategic action competency, communication competency, teamwork competency, and multicultural competency.
Planning and Administration as well as Motivation and Communication are traditional managerial tasks.
Managerial leadership is a modern managerial task. To maximize long-term business success, an executive should strive to be both a manager and a leader and to synergize their functions.
Strategic action competency includes strategic action planning, strategic leadership by example, and strategic experimentation with opportunities.
In today’s era of empowered employees, manager should be not just a team manager but also a team worker.
Multi-Cultural competence is required to manage cross-cultural differences, to harness cultural diversity and to succeed in the globalized marketplace.
Self-management is a traditional managerial competence. Self-leadership is a new competence necessitated by today’s era characterized by rapid change.
 

Benefits of High IQ Leadership and a High LQ Culture
Love quotient (LQ) is your ability to understand, nurture and express love.
Passion for work, honesty and transparency are the traits of a high LQ leader who sets an example and creates a high LQ culture that encourages loving relationships, supports shared values and inspires positive change. A leader with high LQ has also great capacity to empathize with and to listen to the concerns that employees may raise about uncertainties and risks associated with the changes that are taking place.
The higher the leader’s LQ, the more secure employees feel because they believe that the changes are coming from a place of love. Employees feel loved and trusted. They are empowered and are willing to experiment with new ideas, learn from failures and start again wiser.
Creating a Desired Future State
High LQ managers empathize with their internal and external customers. They are open to understanding new trends and the impact they will have on their markets. Leaders with a high LQ adopt a customer-centric mindset, focus on meeting the needs of future customers and create – actively and systematically – a movement to achieve a future desired state.
High LQ strategists understand the growing role of customer empowerment and ensure that the firm is focused on developing solutions that will appeal to next generation customers.
 

Cross-Cultural Competency as a Key to Leveraging Diversity
A globally connected world is a key driver of structural change for the global workforce. Cross-cultural competency is the key enabling factor of working in diverse teams. The diversity of stakeholders is also an important point to consider. Employee, customers, partners, competitors are all made up of people of different ethnical backgrounds, who have different views, perceptions, beliefs, and values.
Creativity and Innovation
Innovation became a systemic phenomenon. It is achieved through synergizing diversities and is increasingly more dependent on the collaboration between actors from different cultural backgrounds who combine their own perceptions, thinking habits and expertise to create something new. This happens on all levels − individual, team, institutional. Diversity of thought increases creativity and, with it, the innovation potential of individuals, teams, corporations and joint ventures.
International Business
Business activities that take place abroad emphasize the importance of cultural intelligence and effective cross-cultural communication between the business and local people. Unless company representatives have good understanding of the local traditions and values, they might behave in such a way that is considered offensive or inappropriate in another culture and facilitate conflict, putting the whole local business at risk. In order to effectively perform business activities in a different cultural setting, company representatives must possess such soft skills, as sociocultural competence and empathy.
 

Benefits of Employee Empowerment
In losing organizations, people are the most underutilized resource. In winning organizations, thanks to employee empowerment:
The organization harnesses individual talents to the full; employee empowerment changes the managers' mind-set and leaves them with more time to engage in broad-based thinking, visioning, and nurturing;
The department / team becomes more enthusiastic, active, and successful; facilitates teamwork and harnessing of collective power of employees;
Employees are entrusted new responsibilities and are stretched beyond what they previously thought they could achieve; empowerment releases the individual wisdom, creativity and energy of employees.
Empowerment is the oil that lubricates the exercise of learning. Talented and empowered human capital is becoming the prime ingredient of organizational success. A critical feature of successful teams, especially in knowledge-driven enterprises, is that they are invested with a significant degree of empowerment, or decision-making authority. Equally important, employee empowerment leaves managers with more time to work on the business. This intelligent and productive division of duties between entrepreneurial leaders, focusing on emerging opportunities, and empowered employees, running the business unit day to day (with oversight on the leader's part) provides for a well-managed enterprise with strong growth potential.
 

Definition and Importance of Soft Skills
Soft skills are a synergistic combination of common sense, creativity, decision making skills, problem solving skills, empowering attitudes, the ability to make a desired first impression and to be charismatic, people skills, social skills, communication skills, the ability to build rapport, the ability to lead, social intelligence, emotional intelligence, and cultural intelligence, among others, that enable people to navigate their environment, work well with others, perform efficiently, and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills.
Soft skills are just as important as hard skills because they are the foundation of planning, cooperation, management, innovation, marketing, etc. The influence of soft skills on the outcome of business activities depends on the circumstances in which the business activity takes place.
In the digital economy where the large majority of the work can be done by computers, the primary role of human beings is to use their imagination and creativity to invent new things and to solve problems in outside-the-box ways.
Soft skills form the basis of successful leadership and are, therefore, highly important for those in leading positions.
Effective communication inside the company is the foundation of successful business activities. Communication allows employees at all levels to coordinate their actions to achieve a common objective.
Due to the scope and complexity of business operations, top managers have to rely on their staff to assist them in the decision-making process.
 

 Breakthrough Soft Skills
Breakthrough soft skills help you to create breakthroughs: stretch yourself, be aa thought leader, initiate radical value innovations and excite and enthuse others to join your crusade, create disruptive innovations jointly with others, lead transformational change and radical projects.
Examples of breakthrough soft skills include awakening the inner genius, disruptive thinking, strategic creativity, subconscious ideation, serendipity, venturepreneurial inspirational leadership, intrapreneurship, spotting and pursuing opportunities, venturepreneurial simulation, risk taking, anticipation, intuition, synergistic teamwork, creative marketing and selling of radically new ideas and solutions, and creating new customers desires.
Advanced Soft Skills
Advanced soft skills help you achieve above average results and create evolutionary innovations.
Examples of advanced soft skills include creative dissatisfaction, self-leadership and self-coaching, lateral leadership and leading-up, love quotient, spoken innovation, attitude motivation, being a creative team worker, intellectual cross-pollination, mutual creativity, making presentations that inspire change, knowing how to win wisely, and how to conquer a stronger opponent.
Lifestyle Soft Skills
Lifestyle soft skills are general thinking, social and people skills