Happy Customer Experience Day!

Did you know that a modest improvement in customer experience over three years for a $1 billion firm can generate more than $380 million in revenue? Or that, after experiencing poor customer service, 64 percent of customers are not likely to repurchase from that company? The customer experience is critical to business success, and today is the first annual Customer Experience Day to celebrate the companies and people creating great experiences for customers.

CX Day includes live chats on Twitter (News - Alert) (#CXDayChat), webinars, Google+ hangouts, and a CX blog carnival, where more than 10 customer experience bloggers come together to post on three specific topics on Lessons Learned: the value of customer experience, building a customer-centric culture and customer experience design and innovation.

One blog focused on the key ingredient for customer experience innovation – love. A great way to uncover different innovation ideas, according to the post, are to look for opportunities to add value around customer lifecycle events, thinking about the customer journey before and after they interact with you, identifying problems related to how customers use your product, using analytics to predict next steps and proactively help customers, soliciting ideas from employees, examining how customers actually behave, looking at experiences through the eyes of specific customers and nurturing your innovation ideas, answering the Who/Want/love/Fit/Test formula.

Temkin Group, a customer experience research and consulting firm, released an infographic on the state of customer experience (CX) that highlights the economics, ambitions, journeys and success of companies that focus on the customer experience. Temkin says that highly engaged employees at 5.8 times more committed to helping their companies succeed and 4.7 times more likely to recommend that someone apply for a job at their company than are disengaged employees.

Enabling a productive, happy and efficient workforce to deliver the best customer experience starts with workforce optimization. Workforce optimization solutions can help with a lot of different aspects of the customer experience, including monitoring interactions to provide real-time feedback, speech analytics to help reduce fraud, proactive compliance for customer protection and interaction analytics to manage multichannel communications.

It’s not just up to the employee to make customers happy – it’s also up to managers to make sure employees are happy and motivated so they can provide optimal service to customers. A great customer experience can mean different things for different people, so the challenge lies in using the right tools to figure out how to deliver the right needs to the right people. When you’re celebrating Customer Experience Day, keep workforce optimization in mind as an optimal tool to improve your customer experiences.