Study Books by Customer Experience Thought Leaders
The bible of Customer Experience is Outside In. The only regret we had was that I did not have enough time to read this book twice. Pay special attention to Chapter 6, and to the early chapters.
Following Outside In, is Chief Customer Officer 2.0 by Jeanne Bliss, another must-read for CX test prep,. She goes deeper into measurements and how to think about customer growth as a result of CX. We recommend you read this book after you have read Outside In.
The next two books to cover are Uncommon Service and The Effortless Experience. Although this list may feel like a lot, it is totally worth it. These are foundational materials and essential concepts that all CX professionals know about and use daily.
Regardless of your interest in the CCXP certification, we recommend you use these books to get acquainted with the foundations of customer experience.
Get more CX book recommendations in our CX Library.
#CXTHUS Exchange Insights – winners and losers?
Attending a customer experience conference is a significant investment of time and money. Even if you are speaker at the conference, like I was last week, the time away from…
Customer Experience Audit: Mobile Provider Eliminates Remote Workforce
How to balance the efficiency call center metric FCR (first call resolution) with wait and talk time? JetBlue promotes human interactions as a brand promise.
Customer Experience ROI. Is It Worth Doing?
The business case for Customer Service is complex. Gone are the days when we bought a piece of hardware that depreciates over 5 or 10 year on the balance sheet. CX does not even show up on our assets list. At least not with that name.
How to Be an Entrepreneur: 5 Things I Learned in 5 Months as an Entrepreneur
The life of an entrepreneur is different every day, but the one thing that remains the same is that we are always learning. These are my lessons in how to…
Customer Experience Best Practices for 2018?
The JetBlue blog features Liliana Petrova in a new four-part series. The series is on Customer Experience and Customer Experience Innovation. 2017 Lessons Liliana gathers insight from 2017 customer experience…
The ROI of Investing in Organizational Culture
Investing in organizational culture is a strategic and operational imperative for employee retention, scalable growth, and successful mergers and acquisitions. Organizational culture is not what you do as a leader…
Hotel Service Recovery Strategies in Action: Real-World Example and Lessons Learned
From both a revenue and service delivery point of view, a hotel stay equals more than providing a place to stay. Done well, it creates an experience that makes guests…
What is Wayfinding?
I did not always know what wayfinding means. But ever since I left Bulgaria to come to America I have been looking to find my way. The first time I…
The One CX Goal You Need to Set for 2019
For 2019, I urge you to make only one CX goal – bring about business success with your customer experience work. Don’t just do work in the general sense. Rather, set a CX goal that has a real impact on your customers and their experiences with your brand.
Digital Customer Experience Strategy – Top Three Mistakes
How many of you have interacted with financial and insurance institutions who seem to have forgotten the invention of the world wide web and applications design? In 2021, Major players…
How to approach Return-to-Office Resistance
There is a general resistance to return to office. People do not want to go back to the pre-pandemic office routine, particularly to a 5-day-a-week, in-office schedule. Out of ten…
3 Ways to Create a Better Employee Experience Strategy
Guest Post by Gabe Smith, CCXP for The Petrova Experience The relationship between employee experience strategy and customer experience has long been discussed. Without engaged employees, we’re told, it’s difficult…
Eliminate Customer Stress with Good CX
Good customer experiences design either gives back customer time or alleviates customer anxiety. If a brand’s CX isn’t achieving one of those goals, the customer isn’t getting any real or…
Why You Need Culture Not Call Center Training for Customer-Centric CX
If the organization does not understand what customer experience is, you will not get the funding or organizational support you need to build customer-centric experiences.
3 Cost Conscious Mistakes in Hospitality Implementation that Lose Money
Hospitality is a cornerstone of customer experience in travel, healthcare, and across industries. There is no question that hospitality is essential for creating world class, seamless experiences and driving customer…
The Great Re-onboading: How to Bring Back Your Employees
Re-onboarding is the next employee experience organizations need to tackle. Since March 2020, leaders have encountered pandemic shutdowns, remote workforce transitions, and the Great Resignation. As restrictions lift and we…
How a Personal Interaction builds Repeat Customers
A customer-centric methodology is key to the successful outcome of my interaction with Hello Spud. It is the reason this story appears here, and not among the CX Big Fails! The company did not send an automated response. It did not deliver a message stating “sorry we couldn’t help you, would you like something else.” Instead, the company co-founder reached out to me personally across multiple channels (a handwritten note, followed by personal emails).
A Customer Experience Strategy will Define Your Success in 2021
While there may not be a magic pill to guarantee the perfect customer experience, there is one thing that every organization needs to transform into a customer-centric business. And that…
Customer Experience Tips and Best Practices In 2017?
This is Post 2 of Liliana Petrova’s series on customer experience. She shares customer experience tips, lessons learned, and best practices for the new year. And dives into organizational culture…
What is the best question for your CX Survey?
As customer experience professionals, we need to factor in this disconnect when we design surveys. And when we react to survey results. Customers have an image of who they want to be. However, their behaviors do not always reflect that image.
The seamless travel experience we deserve
This week on the CES 2020 main stage Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian presented a vision about the future of seamless travel experience that “might happen in just a few years.”…
CX Skills Builders: You May Have a CX Job and Not Know It
Last week we talked about the identity crisis of CX professionals and we urged you to fix any small problem or seam on the customer journey in order to build internal brand equity and buy in.
How to Get Enough Funding for CX Initiatives
Delivering impactful customer experience programming starts with making the business case for customer experience to executive leadership. This is a straightforward objective. However, it requires strategy, clarity, education, and communication…
When Not To Invest In Self-Service Technology?
What is self-service? It is something every progressive brand aspires to have more of. Few implement it successfully. Self-service is a new tool to optimize a company’s workforce by removing…
What is Taxing Your Customer Experience?
In our customer experience consulting engagements with organizations from travel and transportation to corporate environments, we see the same six challenges to delivering seamless customer experiences. The struggle to deliver…
Why Customer Retention is the True Measure of SaaS Success
Guest Post by Callie Reynolds for The Petrova Experience In SaaS (Software as a Service), like in most businesses, sales is king. Sales gets the glory, and while I’d like…
End to End Customer Experience – How to Get it Right
When we think of travel, we often think of the flight experience. But the end to end customer experience is complex, and includes all modes of transportation that get you…
3 Customer Experience Strategy Lessons for 2023
Customer experience strategy guides exceptional experience and bolsters growth. When executed well, it impacts not only your market share, but the entire industry in which you operate. In fact, a…
Guest Experience: Fusion of Hospitality and Brand Connection through Design
For a customer experience consultant who designs guest experience, and a lover of the customer experience discipline, visiting a new-to-me hotel can go one of two ways. Sometimes, I am…
5 Ways to Leverage OpenAI for Customer Experience
Back in 2017 when we served on the AI Advisory Committee for Execs In the Know, we wrote an article about the role of artificial intelligence in the future of…
Are You Thinking Strategically?
Today, we are elevating our conversation to thinking strategically. The Petrova Experience is in the strategy creation business. So, we frequently encounter the difficulty businesses have anticipating, let alone defining,…
Customer Experience Plan is More Important than Ever
Last week we published eight Customer Experience Trends to look out for in 2021. Today we are diving deeper into the first one: Customer Experience is more important than ever…
What You Need To Do To Start 2018 Right
It is the end of December and we are all in reflective moods. Did I do enough for my customer experience career this year? Did I build the right team…
How to Build a Customer-Centric Culture for Highly Effective Teams
When we look at how to build a customer-centric culture, we must look inside the organization first. True customer centricity happens when an organization masters group dynamics to harnesses the…
How Seamless Customer Journeys Drive Revenue
Many travel and transportation executives identify revenue sources narrowly. Think ticket sales, ancillary fees like baggage and amenities fees or premium upgrades. Many customer experience practitioners limit their scope to…
Liliana Petrova Talks Patient Experience in Healthcare Podcast
Recently, we recorded a podcast on patient experience in healthcare with Stacey Richter. Today, we are excited to share it with you. On the episode, we discuss travel and healthcare…
Customer Experience Audit: Domino’s Making the Right CX Choices
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of Customer Experience Audit – as series of articles featuring examples of good customer experience and bad customer experience in practice….
Journey Mapping to Avoid Travel Horror Stories
Welcome to the busiest week of US summer travel. AAA predicts travel this week across airports, train stations, and roads, will reach higher than pre-pandemic levels for the first time….
Why you need a defined culture for customer experience?
When designed and built correctly, customer experience expresses an organization’s brand. Your brand and marketing promises serve as a guiding light to your experience team. Similarly, organizational culture serves as a goalpost for the service side of customer experience.
The Wholehearted Traveler and Other 2024 Travel Trends
Back in 2020, we predicted the rise of the Revenge Traveler and the impact it would have on travel and hospitality experience providers. As we approach 2024, we are spotting…
5 Ways Customer Experience Consultants Keep Customer Promises
Customer experience is the follow-through on brand promises across every interaction. Some organizations assume the importance of customer experience is limited to commercial brands. This is far from true. In…
How to Solve the 2025 Customer Retention Problem
It’s 2025, and businesses across sectors have a customer retention problem. U.S. companies alone lose an estimated $168 billion annually due to customer attrition, as revealed in a CallMiner whitepaper….
Customer Experience Audit: New York Times Beats Google
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of Customer Experience Audits. In this series we walk you through customer experience examples across industries. We feature brands that made…
2021 Customer Loyalty Strategy – Relationships over Transactions
According to the Salesforce Connected Customer Report, 90% of consumers expect companies to clearly demonstrate their values and 66% expect brands to demonstrate empathy. In other words, when thinking about…
Top 5 Customer Experience Design Principles in 2021
Customer experience design principles are difficult for organizations to understand and apply. Time and again, we see this in organizations, even though we encounter customer experience design principles in our…
Let’s Get You Certified as a Customer Experience Professional!
Like all mature professions, customer experience has a certification that is internationally recognized. Adding it to your resume will signal to the business community that you are serious about customer experience and your aspiration to be part of its leadership ranks…
Autonomous Customers, Traveler Privacy and More Questions for CX Professionals in a Changing World
“As we move toward a more automated culture, most travelers will adapt to a Jetsonian, automated lifestyle. Every industry we know will be disrupted. For those of us in aviation,…
Do You Know Why The Iconic Brand Toys ‘R’ Us Closed Doors Despite All Our Memories? #RetailBlues
The year is 2016. You are the CEO of Toys ‘R’ Us. Your brand still controls 13.6% of the toy market although the company is highly leveraged, a strategy of…
How @T4 makes real customer experience impact
Today we share our impressions from visiting our welcoming host Chad at JFK Terminal 4 in NYC. We also celebrate Chad as an effective Customer Experience professional/practitioner. His work is…
What is Telemedicine? Keeping Medicine at the Heart
Guest Post by Dr. Melynda Barnes for The Petrova Experience. In this post Dr. Barnes answers the question “what is telemedicine,” and reminds us to keep medicine at the heart…
What Flight Delays Teach about Customer Recovery
One of the things we enjoy most about customer experience design for the aviation industry is tackling its unique complexities. And there are many complexities! With more than 4.17 million…
3 Challenges of Hybrid Working and How to Overcome Them
According to a Gallup study, 53% of Americans expect to work in a hybrid arrangement in 2022 and beyond. This number is significant enough for corporate America to get hybrid…
Brand and Customer Experience – Make the Customer Know Who You Are
Now that we have helped you become experts in the design of space and function and the design of feelings, it is time to turn our attention to aesthetics, and to connect customer experience…
Why Your Employee Experience Journey Matters
This week, Andy Newman wrote a great article in The New York Times about the life of a retail sales agent. He used the example of an Old Navy sales…
What is Human-Centered Design and how to Leverage it in 2021?
At its core, design is about value creation. In the world of Customer Experience, value-driven design requires CX professionals to use empathy to imagine a future customer experience that is…
Grateful for Customer Experience Heroes
When we launched The Petrova Experience, we did so with the words “in pursuit of customer happiness.” Pursuit of happiness is part of every interaction we have with our clients,…
Why No One is Collecting Authentic Customer Feedback
Businesses need customer feedback collection to thrive in a competitive market. Everyone thinks they are collecting and acting on customer feedback, yet 80% of US companies failed to increase customer…
How to Prepare for AI: Dispatches from CR Summit, Charleston
On the eve of the #CRSummit in Charleston, customer experience leaders from various industries held the first AI Committee meeting. AI is a challenging topic to cover because it has…
How a Failed Bus Experience becomes a Rally Cry for Passengers
A single experience can shed light on major vulnerabilities in transportation experience. A bus trip we took from Atlantic City reveals the danger of breaking promises to customers, the importance…
3 Call Center Mistakes You Are Making
No matter how often my peers and I say that technology is not the answer, call center managers still ask…
Healthcare Experience Horror Story
We talk about good vs bad customer experiences. And we give examples of organizations that do things well or poorly. But we rarely are able to shine the light on…
Extend the Customer Journey with AI
Superior customer experience hinges on seamless customer journeys. We build strategies around this, design CX programs, and map the journeys of customer personas, all with the aim to meet customer…
Diversity is more than difference of color
Yesterday I had the privilege to join a panel on how to develop diversity and inclusion on your teams at Developer Week in Brooklyn. I was really excited to learn…
How to Overcome Hospitality Industry Challenges by Empowering Employees
If you are a hospitality industry leader, or a leader in another business sector who has been reading about the industry, you have encountered some grim statistics. It is true….
What is Customer Experience Transformation?
To meet the needs of the empowered 21st Century consumer, most companies, especially larger enterprises, need to embark on a customer experience transformation. Imagine a car manufacturer that does not…
Keep The Customer Focus in 2018
In her latest post for JetBlue’s Into the Blue blog series on customer experience design, Liliana Petrova talks customer experience innovation. She explores how to combine innovation and human behavior…
The ROI of Customer Experience
Knowing the ROI of customer experience helps to fund CX projects and make intelligent investments in customer experience. But a deeper examination into the question about CX return on investment…
How Smart Do Humans Want AI To Get?
Earlier, we covered the basics of AI and what it is in theory. Today, we talk more about existing practical applications of AI and more examples of artificial intelligence. And…
5 Tips to Create Great Customer Experience Design Strategy
A customer experience design strategy that is sustainable and successful starts by having a vision and knowing who your customer is. This launching point enables you to design customer experiences…
Do You Know Where Your Inventory Is?
When I worked in the airline business our most embarrassing incident was “losing a minor”. We never lost a child, of course. But we might not have known where a…
Hiring Tips: Who Should I Hire First on My CX Team
The pressure to demonstrate business impact and ROI on your Customer Experience initiatives quickly makes your first hire even more important. As usual, there is no answer that fits all scenarios perfectly. We have some helpful strategies to consider based on the structure of your organization and your goals.
Customer Experience Design – How Do You Want Customers To Feel?
Last week, we talked about CX Design in terms of space and function. Today, we continue our customer experience design journey to talk about the design of emotions and feelings. All…
Customer Loyalty Begins In-House
Ten years ago, creating customer loyalty meant assigning a membership number customers fed back to brands at the time of purchase. Customers went through the trouble of keeping track of loyalty numbers, hoping to collect enough points along the
New Frontiers in Passenger Experience: Where is the Passenger in the Urban Air Mobility Ecosystem?
Two years ago, I stood on stage at the Aviation Americas Festival in Miami and asked a provocative question: What if the future of aviation isn’t just about aircraft, but…
Contactless and Self-Service are Here to Stay
Our 5th 2021 customer experience trend highlights contactless and self-service experiences across industries. Before we dive into this topic, let’s take a moment to define what contactless and self-service mean…
NPS Best Practices
Last week I spoke at the Corinium CCO Fall Conference. One of the discussions we had was on the very popular topic of Net Promoter Score best practices and its…
Web Experience is Having a Comeback
In the third quarter of 2020 US e-commerce sales went up 36.7% compared with the same period in 2019. Websites have come back to center stage. However, we are not seeing…
NYC Subway CX Kills Chivalry in the City
Brands have the power to make customers feel ignored, and even angry. The CX Pyramid crumbles and customer-to-customer behavior, in addition to individual experiences, suffer. Case in point, the New York MTA System.
How AI and the Future of Humanity will co-exist?
I was born in 1980 and grew up with Terminator. Skynet, the AI with a consciousness that refused to shut itself for self-preservation, was my biggest fear. When I was…
Organizational Culture and Access to Information
By and large, people perceive culture as an HR discipline. The most common perception is that culture covers the soft side of performance. Culture is about how you do things, not so much about what you do. This approach to culture could not be more wrong. In fact, organizational culture is about so much more than a few words in a performance review sheet. It is about leaders expressing values, and the action guidance their cultural behaviors provide.
Bad Customer Experience
Doing the right thing when things go wrong is not exactly a good business case. But many do it anyway. Why? Because brands want to protect (and grow) their brand…
Web Experience is Having a Comeback
In the third quarter of 2020 US e-commerce sales went up 36.7% compared with the same period in 2019. Websites have come back to center stage. However, we are not seeing…