CXBuzz Interview with Liliana Petrova
This month CXBuzz featured Liliana Petrova, CCXP in a customer experience interview about the inner workings of customer experience. Read Liliana’s take on the difference between Customer Service and Customer Experience, how companies can increase loyalty and retention, and which firms are walking the talk of customer experience today, leveraging technologies like AI and human-centered design to create new value for customers across industries. The conversation also will give you advice on the difference between NPS and CSAT and how to use social media in customer experience.
Read full interview here.
JetBlue Leading Customer Experience
Since I used to lead the JetBlue customer experience, people often ask what is behind the JetBlue experience magic. Or, as one of our clients refers to it, the “JetBlue Simple.” So the fundamentals that went into creating that signature experience are often on my…
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 a truly horrific experience. We found one in our latest healthcare experience. Complexity is Not…
Customer Facing Experience: Communication and Hospitality
Today, we are talking about communication as part of the customer facing experience. This is one of the most misused and misinterpreted notions both in our professional lives and our personal lives. How many times has your partner, a brand, or your leadership told you…
CX Skills Builder: How to articulate your CX Value and secure your budget
Two weeks ago we urged you to find CX problems and fix them instead of diagnosing and mapping them. That is
The Customer Service Agent is Dead
When we outlined our CX trends for 2026, we talked about how autonomous service is replacing traditional customer service. Yes, our claim that the CSA (customer service agent) role is dead has a dramatic ring to it. But aren’t we in a dramatic time? Things…
United CEO does not care about #customers happiness. Really?
Lately, I have been thinking about United Airlines and its organizational culture. Initially, I thought about United Airlines culture because someone asked whether it is possible to build a customer-centric culture in a company that is NOT founded with the customer at the center. In…
Customer Journey Mapping Tools in 2021
Before we dive into customer journey mapping tools, we must keep in mind that, by itself, journey mapping is not a customer experience product or service. A journey map is a visual representation of your end-to-end customer experience. Think of a journey map as a…
Where Should CX Sit at the Table?
Before we begin talking about where CX should sit in the organization, I want to clarify one thing. Customer Experience is not a single person.
What is Big Data and Why Should I Care?
Big data has become part of our daily language. We read about it. We see companies that are “experts in big data.” LinkedIn is filled with engineers and analysts who are specialists in this area. But what is big data, where did it come from,…
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 worth sharing on several levels. For those who are given the role of Customer Experience…
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 your private equity investors. Amazon has its best ever holiday season. And digital commerce is…
Healthcare Whitepaper: Impact of Patient ‘I Wants’ in Healthcare
Rachel Dreyfus joins The Petrova Experience with a guest blog about patient experience. Background A culture of positive patient experience is increasingly important in Healthcare, affecting patient outcomes and satisfaction. Yet in America, this industry is challenged with time-consuming processes and requirements coupled with high…
Customer Experience Technology View of your Call Center
By 2022 the global cloud based contact center market is growing from USD 6.8Bn in 2017 to 20.93Bn in 2022. This makes for CAGR of 25.2%. If you do not get on this journey, you risk falling behind and becoming irrelevant in less than five…
Autonomous Service Starts at the Top: A CEO To Do List
In a recent article, we explored the controversial news that the customer service agent role as we know it is dead. The AI service agent is taking its place. Granted, this solves multiple problems relating to cost, efficiency, and consistency of customer experience, as we…
A Lot of Data, Not Enough Insight
A month ago I saw a Forrester presentation on Customer Experience measurement that began with a great quote from the Global Bank: “We are drowning in data and starving for insight.” In other words, they do not have data management strategy. Aren’t we all? Most…
The in-person work office design that will bring your employees back
According to PwC 95% of company executives still believe employees need to be in the office to maintain strong company culture. Like we have said before, the return to office and in-person work office design is not only about communications, processes and technology. The future…
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 customer loyalty strategy, you need to understand that customers want you to CARE. Why do…
Customer Experience Survey: Why Customers Are Not Responding
When you solicit customer feedback sometimes matters more than how you ask the questions. In the case of a survey about new biometrics boarding initiatives my team and I created for JetBlue, we had a list of feedback that was most important for us.
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 heard the term “wayfinding” was in JetBlue Airways when I worked on the fusion design…
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.
For Complex Infrastructure Projects, Teaming is All About Timing
According to a 2025 Design-Build Utilization Study, design-build is projected to represent over 47% of US construction spending by 2028, to total more than $1.1 trillion. With projects of this scale and complexity it is critical to identify the sequencing and skills that determine success…
What is Customer Experience Day?
Although I opened my consulting practice this year, I have been working on customer experience for much longer. The first time I celebrated CXDay officially was only two years ago. Until recently, in fact, the Customer Experience field has been growing at a rather slow…
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 to keep the customer in focus. Additionally, Liliana looks at the new strategies customer experience…
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
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 power of strong teams that collaborate on the common goal of meeting and exceeding customer…
Customer Experience Audit: Uber Bets On Self-Driving Cars With Big Volvo Purchase
The question that remains unanswered is who will be part of the future of transportation. Uber is going for the vertical integration – the whole pie. The future industry of urban transportation will be made of players in three different categories: cars, self-driving software, and ride-sharing network. In contrast, Lyft approaches the future through partnerships.
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.
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.
Even the US Government is Jumping on the Customer Experience Train
As we get ready for 2021, we have been diving in to the top customer experience trends we see on the horizon. So far, we have looked at why customer experience is more important even though customer experience programs demonstrate how CX is still a…
Why Millennial Investors are Abandoning You
It’s time to talk about the Millennial investor, a critical market for financial services firms in the next five years. For the past decade, the media talked about the impact of Millennials in the workforce, changing purchasing behaviors, and culture shifts. What we don’t see…
Poor Integration is Bad for Customer Journey and Worse for Brands
Although we all have bad customer experiences, there is still a big debate about “the CX field” and whether it will survive the test of time. There is no doubt in my mind that customer experience is here to stay. The brands that catch on…
When to Involve Operations in Design-Build Projects: 10 Questions with Theresa Ward
We sat down with Theresa Ward, who brings decades of experience in public and private commercial real estate development, to talk about when and how to leverage operations as a strategic value in design-build projects. And the role of customer experience in cost savings and…
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 to and from your destination. Because of this complexity, customers rarely enjoy great end to…
Freelance Customer Experience Lessons for Freelancers
For small businesses and freelancers alike, it’s important to recognize that your business is as strong as the relationships you build with your customers. That’s just one of the key freelance customer experience lessons we’re sharing today. We can learn a lot about creating those…
Can One Email Build Loyalty? #MYWESTELM
This is exemplary management of the post-purchase journey touch-point. For years, this level of management has been non-existent. At best, it tends to come in the form of an email confirmation that purchased items have been delivered.
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 gets to the heart of what customer experience means for your business, your customers, and…
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 business. Our article called out, rather presciently, the need for governance, standards, and the human…
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, the tangible outcomes of a strategy engagement. Before the start of the engagement stakeholders want…
Fan Experience: CX Lessons for Hosting Major Events
With the World Cup coming to New Jersey and the greater New York area in 2026, the time is now to create positive fan experience moments. The 2026 Soccer World Cup final promises historic attendance. And the recent Paris Olympic Games and Paralympic Games inspire…
What Can Casino Consulting Firms Learn from Airlines?
Today we’re talking about casino experience. Casinos and airlines are similar in their operational complexity and sense of wonder. They also are similar in the way they can implement technology to improve their guest experience design. For some reason though, Las Vegas still has not…
5 Things You Can Do to Provide Excellent Passenger Experience in 2022
The Wall Street Journal predicts this Thanksgiving will be among the busiest travel days in decades, with 55 million travelers anticipated to be moving through US airports and other transportation hubs and highways. In fact, “2022 is expected to be the third-busiest year for Thanksgiving…
How Does Social Media Affect Customer Experience?
Social Media is the only real-time channel for successful brands to manage customer experience and brand management.
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.
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 move toward more predictable office scenarios, the new management priority should be to navigate the…
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 Do You Know You Are Making The Right Big Bet?
The future of customer experience is full of opportunities. However, the technologies of the future are not enough. Adaptive, memorable customer experiences require empathy and innovation. Liliana tackles this in an installment of JetBlue Into the Blue blog series. Along with her guests, Liliana explores…
Customer Experience, Self Service, and the Gift of Time
Time is the most precious gift in life. If you think about it, time is the one thing we all want more of. As we get older and busier, time gets even more valuable to us.
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. The hospitality industry faces real challenges. By extension, guests face potentially fractured experiences that contradict…
It’s Time to Meet The Petrova Experience!
Today marks one of the big milestones in my life. This is the day I am officially choosing to live my dream. We are launching The Petrova Experience, a customer experience consulting, coaching and membership organization. I remember the day I fell in love with…
Employee Centric Culture – Culture is King
In 2017 we introduced our ROI series recognizing the challenges all customer experience professionals have to obtain funding for CX initiatives and to prove their positive returns. Our second ROI post covered how a well built customer experience can increase revenue and customer growth of…
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 loyalty. However, when it comes time to cut costs, it is often where businesses start….
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.
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.
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 efficacy to gauge customer satisfaction. We had such great engagement that I want to share…
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 expectations and provide wow moments along that journey. But what happens when the customer journey…
Coronavirus Travel: What Does Hospitality Mean Now?
I want to tell you about my recent passenger experience. Earlier this week, I traveled to New Orleans from JFK Terminal 5 in New York. I had planned an airport conference a few months ago. Although many colleagues chose not to travel, I decided to…
How Customer Experience Promises Threaten Manufacturer Growth
Rarely, does a business lose major accounts due to dramatic or public failure. They lose major accounts due to mismanaged relationships, a loss that is all-too common in a manufacturing setting due to the tension between the customer experience promise and the complexity of delivery….
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 of telemedicine. For years, I trained and worked as an ENT and surgeon at institutions…
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, partners and colleagues. And it is embedded in our organizational culture. For this reason and…
Would You Pitch In To Save Toys “R” Us For Your Children To Experience? #ToysRUsGoFundMe
Last week we laid out the big moves that the leadership of Toys ‘R’ Us failed to take to evolve with customer needs and thus joins other brands as examples of bad customer experience. This week, billionaire Isaac Larian set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise…
How to Scale a High Trust Health Service Without Breaking Patient Confidence
When a healthcare technology company begins to scale, the pressure can feel punishing. The patient can get lost in the momentum of growth. And quickly, profit projections can stumble into loss. From a leadership and operations point of view, your plate is full during the…
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 experiences that meet and exceed customer expectations across these six fronts threaten the CX-ROI connection…
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 well-crafted, consistently deployed CX strategy built to address customer personas, needs, and wants, and to…
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 perceived value. So, how can brands manage stress? Better yet, how can brands build experiences…
How Well Do You Understand AI Applications?
In the last week I spoke about AI at the Argyle Forum webinar and at the ConnectID Conference in Washington, DC. Technology is emerging
The Invisible Friction Points Weakening Manufacturer Customer Experience
For years, manufacturers have competed on product quality, operational efficiency, and price. Our current environment of supply chain volatility, talent shortages, and the elevated customer expectations in the “experience economy” means CX is, in many ways, the new QC. Why is customer experience the new…
Human Experience: Do You Really Know Your Customers?
Steve Jobs said: “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need before they realize it themselves.” He did not just say that. He did it! He created beauty and convenience that transformed the human experience. We EVOLVED….
Customer Experience Audit: eBay’s Vibrant Marketplace of the Future
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of Customer Experience Audits. They highlight advances in artificial intelligence in retail and other technologies. See all audit stories. Two years ago RJ Pittman and eBay made a big bet by making AI (specifically artificial intelligence…
Customer Experience Trends – 8 Actionable Tactics in 2021
As we begin Q4 of an eventful 2020, it’s time to look out for the 2021 customer experience trends and tactics for creating exceptional experiences in increasingly complex environments. We rounded up Eight 2021 Customer Experience Trends and Tactics to be aware of as we…
How to Build Customer-Centric Culture
Before we address how to build customer-centric culture, let’s examine the terminology: what culture is and what it is not. Culture is not executives talking about high level strategy. Equally, it is not your Brand Book. The language surrounding business strategy and brand management assumes…
Beyond the Arena: Transform Local Experience for World Class Events
Let’s get honest about local experience around major events. While it is exciting for the world to show up in your hometown for a major event like the World Cup or the Olympics, it often feels inconvenient and even burdensome to local residents. Visitors take…
Get Customer Experience Basics Right and You Don’t Need to Invest in Wow Moments
Wow Moments are a Customer Experience hot topic. Customer experience professionals ideate how to build, prioritize, finance, and measure these Wow Moments. Chip and Dan Heath wrote a whole book on the topic: The Power of Moments. No Wow Moment saves you from negative word of mouth if your brand fails to get the customer experience basics right or to deliver the expected brand experience consistently.
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 with complementary skilled, engaged members? Did I do enough to build/maintain/scale the customer experience culture…
Hospitality Experience and Why We lack Seamless Travel Experiences
Hospitality is taken for granted across government agencies, airlines and hotels. In my line of work, I often hear “I want to have the JetBlue customer experience.” Although many claim this, few truly understand the complicated steps, processes, and investments required to create the hospitality…
Aviation Industry, Coronavirus Isn’t the Only Thing Killing Us
Eighteen years ago, September 11th caused a three-day halt of the US commercial airlines and resulted in a 31.6% reduction in travel in September 2001 compared to the previous year. Think about it. Three days. On March 11th this year, President Trump issued a 30…
How ChatGPT Can Help with the Healthcare Quadruple Aim
How ChatGPT can help healthcare and other industries is consuming conversations far beyond patient and customer experience. As much as we are leading the charge about AI regulation, best practices, and guardrails, we are also seeing the opportunities to implement ChatGPT and other AI tools…
Paperless Customer Journey – JetBlue Deviceless Boarding
JetBlue Biometrics – Innovation and Disruption This year, JetBlue entered the ranks of the innovators who disrupt industries by applying customer experience technology. They not only imagine the future. They build it. With award winning facial recognition boarding technology JetBlue previews the future of travel….
What is the Real Cost of Employee Experience?
There are two types of leaders (and organizational cultures) that stand to benefit most from improving employee experience. The first kind have 40% or higher turnover and think their frontline employees have a culture problem. The second have 40% or higher growth rate and think…
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 is a customer experience strategy. Customer experience strategy in 2021 is not something you save…
Bad Travel Experience
As we come to the end of the summer season, it is time to talk about travel – good and bad travel experience. And how the sharing economy has both democratized the act of travel and elevated customer expectations. Today, a host in Pereira, Colombia,…
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 thousand Goldman Sachs employees, only half showed up to the office when CEO Solomon called…
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 transactions from the system. All industries are looking at it as a strategy of the…