Chief Customer Officers CXPA Webinar
Tune in to listen to Liliana Petrova and other certified customer experience thought leaders during Customer Experience week. Learn what is cognitive empathy and how to empower your middle management both to ask the right questions and to have honest conversations with the front line.
For the Chief Customer Officers – learn how to design employee facing technology that will have high adoption rate and employee engagement.
The leaders who understand and prioritize employee experience will be the winners in the next decade! Tune in to join them!
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 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 to consumers. What does that mean to you? It is time to design your customer experience…
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 of disruption management, clear communication, and reliable technology, and the fundamental human need for hospitality….
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…
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…
No Pass During Construction: Why Airports Must Rethink Customer Experience in the Era of Capital Programs
Throughout the US, airports are entering one of the most consequential decades of infrastructure development in the history of modern aviation. According to Airports Council International–North America (ACI‑NA), US airports are facing more than $151 billion in necessary infrastructure projects between 2023 and 2027. That…
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…
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 be an entrepreneur that I have learned in the last five months of my entrepreneur…
The Risk No Insurer Prices: Why Customer Experience is Costing Insurance Companies Renewals
Insurers are experts in pricing physical and actuarial risk. What too few have learned to price effectively is the slow, compounding erosion that comes from fragmented customer service. What is the real cost of the customer who receives different answers from different channels? Or agents…
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, this signals the shift from aviation as a service industry to a transactional one that…
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…
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 daily interactions with the environment. Take these pictures of one of the more crowded places…
Employee Engagement and Wellness In The Workplace: Guest Post
Today, The Petrova Experience brings you a guest article about employee engagement and organizational culture. This piece is by Natalie DeVito, of Commonwealth Joe. Commonwealth Joe is an innovative company, new to the New York City market. It offers boutique coffee and beverage services to…
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.
Culture Starts at the Top
Without a leader who believes that today’s business success is about acquiring and retaining customers, you cannot even begin the process of building a culture. Leaders who are passionate about the customer are also passionate about creating culture and employee engagement.
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…
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 equity through human-centered customer experience design of their products and services. In that sense, the…
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…
When There is No Chat in Chat Support
Today we talk about chat support best practices, the customer experience VALUE that it creates, and the ROI of the business case to implement it. Although we are skeptical about the value of chatbots, we are big believers in the value of online chat support…
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…
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 allow any vehicle customization, or a retail bank with no app-based self-service. Customer experience transformation…
Lessons Learned at the Forrester Conference: “Data is the New Sexy”
Once a year I look for an event to attend where I can learn something new and get better at what I do. This year, I attended an event hosted by customer experience research organization Forrester – the Forrester Global Council Meeting and the CXNYC2018…
Trust Is the Treatment: How to Achieve ROI on Patient Experience through CX Strategy
Patient experience is not a soft metric. It is an engine for financial performance, improved clinical outcomes, and sustained patient loyalty. For hospital executives and family medical practitioners alike, investing in experience is ethically responsible, certainly. It is also fiscally imperative. Patient Experience ROI is…
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…
Retail Experience Design of the Future
In preparation for this article about omni-channel retail experience of the future, I thought first about the definition of omni-channel customer experience. I wanted to share with you a simple, easy-to-understand definition. All definitions require you to know other business concepts in order to understand…
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…
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 an equivalent shift in web experience that matches the shift in today’s consumer behavior. Retailers…
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…
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…
How to Sell the C-Suite on Customer Experience
You finally got your big career break. You are leading a project that requires executive approval. So, now what? Intuitively, you know that this is a chance to make a first impression on the right people. But you have no idea how to approach this…
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…
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 we reflect on what that means to the customer experience field. We also share some…
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…
How To Define Your Purpose And Have Unique Culture
If you Google the word “purpose” you get the definition “the reason for which something exists.” This is a challenge if you think about it in the context of organizational culture. And it is for this reason that so few brands have organizational cultures based…
CX Skills Builder: Own the Customer Experience
Often, Customer Experience professionals do not believe that they can improve customer experience by impacting the experience design for their customers. Why? What causes this disconnect? I once got a call from an acquaintance saying that her mom got the loyalty points for flying to…
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…
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.
Holiday Wishes for Great CX: Career Advice Edition
Every successful customer experience initiative starts with a skilled CX team. Brush up on your CX skills to strengthen the business case for CX; to develop relationships within your organization; and to deliver standout customer experiences in the new year.
What Holiday Parties Teach about Hospitality
Last week The Petrova Experience, like many companies, hosted our holiday party. In good customer experience fashion, we put significant effort into finding the perfect location. We agonized over the details of choosing the perfect food. And we made it an imperative to find a…
What is Revenge Travel and Why People Do It
LinkedIn is overflowing with articles and company news in response to COVID-19. We are starting to see renderings of future casino experiences that are anything but human-centric. People are beginning to ideate publicly about what would happen if the middle seat on an airplane 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…
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….
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 working right today. Unfortunately, early indicators show we are on the wrong path. Here are…
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…
Interoperability is a Business Risk for Medtech and a Healthcare Risk for Patients
Looking at patient experience and healthcare interoperability in the medtech environment, any observer (customer experience expert or not) recognizes something is broken. A thorough exploration of what is broken exposes fundamental gaps the average observer (including patients) might miss. We know providers face high levels…
Extend Your Travel Experience Value Proposition
Last December the Ladders published a piece that discusses business travelers who extend travel beyond the timeline of the business trip. The article says, “[a]ccording to a new study by La Quinta by Wyndham, nearly two-thirds (64%) of business travelers who have extended a trip have…
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.
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….
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 lessons learned. Then charts the course for customer experience that delivers technology solutions in new…
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…
Customer Experience for Vertical Takeoff
VTOLs (vertical take-off and landing vehicles) are projected to hit mature industry status in 2035 (Aviation International News). In just over ten years, the entire aviation ecosystem will be radically different than it is today in terms of utilization, opportunity, and customer expectations. We are…
What the United JetBlue Partnership Signals for Passenger Experience and Airline Revenue Optimization
Last week I had the pleasure of seeing United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby at the WSJ Future of Everything Festival. And to hear from him about the just-announced United JetBlue partnership that will bring United back to JFK in 2027. First, and most importantly, don’t…
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 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 varied customer experience applications, depending on a brand’s growth cycle, customer base and business challenges….
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 a new type of traveler on the horizon. And a set of trends that will…
Customer Understanding for Airport Customer Experience: Theory vs Practice
One of the (many!) interesting things about working in airport customer experience for as long as our team has, is watching how the language around customer experience changes as ideas about how to centralize passenger needs and expectations evolve. Trade association Airports Council International (ACI),…
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 growing up in Eastern Europe, I used to joke that the only reason I would…
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 associate’s employee experience in Manhattan. And he walked the reader through the retail worker’s use…
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…
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…
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…
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 or what employees do in their day-to-day. It is about how leadership and employees work…
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…
Customer Engagement ROI
We have discussed the power of employee engagement for your brand. And we have explained the true meaning and ROI of a working organizational culture (a culture that starts at the top). Now, it’s time to examine the business case of customer engagement. This includes…
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 Americans planning to fly for the Fourth of July holiday, and weather events predicted throughout…
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.
Airports of the Future: Trends and Innovations
Every year since we founded The Petrova Experience, we write about travel around the holiday season. It has become something of a tradition for us. This year, I will not start by updating you on 2024 holiday season travel numbers. Or how current volume stacks…
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….
Airport Experience – Are You Letting Down Your Precious 2021 Travelers?
A month and a half ago, as part of our ongoing conversation about airport experience, we introduced the concept of revenge travel. We pleaded with the public to trust us aviation professionals and airport experience designers and fly again… SOON. Now is the Time…
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 that diversity made it onto the event agenda. The panel was made of 5 women…
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 satisfaction since 2010. And customer retention rates are plunging. So, despite what many companies think,…
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…
Is Covid19 What We Needed to Build Seamless End-to-End Travel Experience?
On January 10th, we published an article called The Future of Travel We Deserve. In it, we laid out the foundation necessary to implement innovation at scale. Four months later, in the face of Covid19, the urgency to apply technology at scale has grown exponentially….
Patient Experience Trends in 2021 – Telehealth is Here to Stay
Today, we continue our series about 2021 Customer Experience trends and tactics. We take a closer look at patient experience and what telehealth means for the future. Both for patients and providers. As we look at lessons learned last year, one thing is abundantly clear….
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…
Why CX Design Needs to be in Your Transportation Project RFP
Ever heard this line while working on an RFP? “I know your value, but I don’t know where to put you.” We hear it all the time. Why? Because, historically, customer experience design has been looked at as the last step, nice-to-have for transportation design-build…
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 to accomplish successfully. It sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? The main driver for all…
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…
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…
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…
#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 your non-stop email flow can bring more stress than pleasure to your days. Once we…
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.