The online ACX Masters program gives Customer Experience and Business Transformation leaders the opportunity to go beyond surface-level presentation and get hands-on, practical takeaways to enable their own successful, business-wide transformations.
Attracting 100,000+ global professionals for those handling seismic business change, this Masterclass provides a Fast track look into customer experience management, change, leadership, BPM and CX space, and the challenges that leading industry professionals are overcoming, both on a macro and micro level.
Gain the insights from the 2020 Amazon Number One bestseller, ‘Dare! Behind The Scenes Of The Best Business Transformation Project In The World.’ And how large and small organizations can transform their people, processes and performance rapidly with an inclusive approach that delivers successful business and customer outcomes.
Developing the skills to ‘see around corners’ is just one of the factors that separate high performing professionals and companies from the also-rans. That is what this one-day Masterclass, led by Number One Best Selling Author, Global 20 Guru and Consultant to the best, Steve Towers, is all about.
This is an intensive hands-on workshop during which you will gain access to powerful tools that can, with immediate impact, transform your business and customer outcomes forever.
You will leave the workshop equipped with new tools and techniques, access to all the workshop materials plus a signed copy of Steve’s books Outside-In and his 2020 Number One bestseller Dare! Behind The Scenes Of The Best Business Transformation Project In The World.
Space is limited so please book early to avoid disappointment.
Testimonials:
You have impacted the lives of many of us in the Business community, in a big way in our career journey. Our success can be attributed to your insights on Outside-In Thinking and Customer Experience, among others. Mashaba Mulaudzi, Manager Process Innovation, South Africa
This experience has completely transformed how we measure, collaborate, communicate and innovate with the customer in mind. Keen to guide the next willing souls on this journey. Durrel Ramrathan, ACX Master Coach
Brilliant Workshop. The speaker was awesome and gave great guidance on matters I am finding in the workplace. Cindy-Lee Muller, Planning & Roadmap Manager, MTN (Pty) Ltd
The workshop is highly recommended for anyone who wishes to simplify and expedite processes thereby enhancing customer satisfaction. The speaker is immensely knowledgeable and demonstrates vast experience in the subject. David Mulovhedzi, DPSA
Thank you so much for your time, energy, and investment in our growth and success during our Masters course. You shared your wisdom, stories, and made it personalized to us. We are so grateful. SAP Sales Process Optimization Team, USA
Thanks to you for a fantastic mentoring programme … I am an Outside-In fan now! Jimmy Cuadra, Director of Information Management, Akzo Nobel Paints, Singapore
We can learn a lot from Jeff Bezos. 60 seconds may be enough when you understand how he creates success.
I am still perplexed that so many folks seek to justify the failure of once-great companies like Nokia, Motorola, Blockbuster and Circuit City as being complex.
It wasn’t complicated and still isn’t to understand the reasons why they crashed and burned. It is in fact pretty simple. If you lose the connection between yourselves and customer success you will fail fast. All the best leadership, innovation and culture crumbles if you are not delivering #successfulcustomeroutcomes. However, don’t take my word for it – let’s hear it from the maestro himself
I’m a real sucker for great new tips, techniques, tools, shortcuts, “hacks” and other quick ways of getting better results from our processes and customer experiences.
But
the truth is that the big wins don’t come from tips or tricks.
They
come from getting the
fundamentals right. Again and again.
Fundamentals
like really understanding your customers (internal and external) so your
products and services are what they need (not just what you think they want).
Fundamentals like having understanding the successful customer outcomes before you ever meet or work with them, so your processes and experiences build credibility and trust quickly.
Fundamentals like follow-up and nurturing your relationships so they are top of the priorities when your customers need to change things.
Fundamentals like being able to “meet” face to face, on the phone, or via a webinar or web page (and by “meet”, I mean help a customer get the best from their experiences and processes, understand their problems, the potential solutions, and decide how to change things to meet ever-changing needs).
Master the fundamentals and the little tips and tricks will improve your results even further.
Get
the fundamentals wrong and all the tips, tricks or clever techniques in the
world won’t hurt.
–
Steve
PS
If you’d like to get my very best training, insights and personal support to
help you align your processes and experiences for all your customers (internal
and external), why not join me for my new ONLINE training program? Click here for more details.
I am proud to officially announce my participation as one of the judges at the “North American Customer Centricity Awards” organised by Arcet Global.
Hosted in Dallas, Texas, this event showcases the best in
customer experience and leadership across North America. Sharing ‘next’
practice, case studies and learning from each other’s success across a wide
range of sectors.
I will be joining several senior judges and very much excited and looking forward to assessing the submissions from some of the worlds leading customer-centric companies. https://customercentricityawards.com/awards/
What significantly differentiates the top dogs in terms of business results? How can Amazon, Zara, Zappos and Emirates consistently outperform their competitors?
Connecting better
You and I as consumers connect better with those companies who have a focus on delivering Successful Customer Outcomes, however, that doesn’t immediately come about through wishful thinking, re-engineering processes or investing in the latest bright shiny technologies. No, these successful organizations have a different strategy…. And that strategy understands a fundamental truth across every part of the enterprise. Without the employee ‘getting it’ you waste your time banging the drum about improving the Customer Experience and at best you will achieve a Hawthorne effect[1], where results are fleetingly better then reverting back to sometimes even worse than before.
And so, enter stage left the Employee Experience.
Great, got it! We invest in employee’s emotional well-being and we can then deliver great CX. Wrong again. Emotions are an effect created by the circumstances the employee finds themselves in. Imagine a draconian boss, poor lighting and awful colleagues.
Not too much of a surprise that employees will then have low morale, high absence rates, and short tenures before finding something better. Making them feel better by changing the boss, improving work conditions and encouraging teaminess may produce a short-term fleeting benefit however we are soon back to square one. Why is this?
Elegant simplicity
Amazingly the answer to this catch 22 has been there all along. It is so obvious calling it common sense way understates its importance. The elegant simplicity confuses those who believe we should just improve what we already do, or invest heavily in digital, or run team building motivational workshops.
And this isn’t a secret sauce – three simple steps will get you there…
Understand what success looks like for the customer
Create measures of those Needs and Expectations
Align and Reward employees to deliver those Needs and Expectations – without exception
And as if by magic, morale improves, employees become adept at dealing with any situation (without the need to go ‘upstairs’), customers are delighted and results, measured through costs, service and revenue dramatically improve. Sure, you can go measure the emotional employee impact (we are all happier!) but also remember that is a consequence of doing the right things first. And if you have to measure the employee emotions to tell you things aren’t working you are not understanding your customers well enough.
>> Watch Richard Branson, CEO Virgin Group discuss this topic here.
>> Watch Zappos and Disney SVP’s discuss Employee Experience with James Dodkins. Also, access his new book “Put your customers second” – he is offering three free chapters!
>> Join us at an upcoming training to understand and make your own the approaches that work immediately.
Google trends tell the story that Design Thinking (DT) tops many executive’s interests in helping deliver progressive services and products in a volatile 2018.
Consultants, Design studios, and so-called business experts have spawned new revenue streams as other management fads, sorry, approaches have declined in popularity.
Just do the math on google with ‘Design Thinking’ harvesting 15.2 million results in 0.4 seconds and the top ten results including training courses, how-to workshops and top team offsites offered by consulting firms. In fact, Epictions reports typically 10 DT articles a day currently being produced, consumed and naturally circulated around our senior executives.
No doubt you will know of new functions becoming a reality with DT central to their remit, but what exactly does this catchy label represent?
Is Design Thinking a real thing?
Is it different? Can DT be useful in navigating our increasingly volatile world? Are there genuine benefits to adopting DT enterprise-wide?
As an engineer and design thinker (note the lower case) for the best part of the last four decades, this concept is not new. The successful creation of new services and products always relies on the marriage of creative thought processes harnessed to pragmatic objectives to deliver bottom-line success. Sorry if that doesn’t sound as sexy as some of the DT consultants would have you believe.
But wait, there is good news… incorporating DT into industrial age approaches can breathe new life and significant business benefit for not just enterprises and employees, but most importantly customers and shareholders.
So what is this Damn Thing?
A critical element to understanding DT is that, unlike most commonly deployed methods, is not a linear 1-2-3, A-B-C endeavour. It is not a prescription and relies on the ability of organisations and their people to understand, learn, prototype and reinvent simultaneously the processes and customer experiences that deliver success. New services/products must articulate needs of customers (even when potentially the customer doesn’t know them) and move the needle in terms of cost, revenue and service simultaneously (the fabled ‘triple crown’).
So, a significant measure of DT success is winning the triple crown. Anything else that doesn’t convert the creative process into a top and bottom line success is just moving the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. It might look better, give us a different view, but it is still doomed and will ultimately fail to deliver.
To be successful you need to create an organization and individual mindset that understands ever-changing customer needs, expectations and
Is Design Thinking winning the Triple Crown?
fosters an approach of learning, rather than the silo-based, industrial age metrics common to many.
I am going to delve deeper in an upcoming article so if you would like to get the pro’s and con’s, the potential pitfalls and the how-to to ensure success join me again soon. If you register your interest here I will ping you the ‘how to’ piece as soon as it is ready.
[contact-form to=”stevetowers@gmail.com” subject=”Design Thinking – the next steps”][contact-field label=”Name” type=”name” required=”1″][contact-field label=”Email” type=”email” required=”1″][/contact-form]
Outside-In is a regular theme during most of my keynotes, not least this last week here in Florida. A question asked from the floor related to the 30-second elevator test “can you explain to the CEO what this stuff is, why it is different, and how it reframes the work we do?”. I guess I was about to fudge and say this needs more than 30 seconds, and then remembered my two-slide explanation!
So, for those guys looking for a simple explanation, these two slides will do the job. I have put a bit of narrative in there also.
120+ in Florida at the keynote, 16 January 2018
Florida keynote to top team of major global industrial corporation
The old, industrial-age traditional way of doing business. We make products (and services). We look for the market to sell them in. We segment customers by circumstance and pitch our products to those segments. We add variations to the products to better fit certain niche segments. We build back-end systems and digital capabilities in this increasingly complex world. We are rigid, functionally oriented and abhor change.
The new Outside-In customer-centric way. We identify the customers we would like to do business with. We understand their needs (even when they may not know them themselves) and specific Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO’s). We categorise customers by need. We then create the capability to deliver to these categories the SCO’s (both products, people and digital). Progressively we manage new and existing customer expectations to deliver success without exception. We are agile, innovative and attuned to 21st century needs.
Let me know if this works for you.
Ciao, Steve
For the curious, the original slides came from a deck presented as a keynote in Sydney, Australia 3 years ago.
You can access that here: http://bit.ly/SydneyPEX
