Solving EX & CX problems before they happen

Taking a more proactive approach to solving customer and employee experience challenges.

Today, the key to good business is empathy.

Whether they’re customers or employees, understanding what people want at every stage of their journey is how leading brands take a more proactive and human-centric approach to what they do.

They listen, understand and act on feedback at scale, all while analyzing trends to uncover what they need to do next to keep delivering amazing experiences.

And in these organizations, problem solving is almost a thing of the past.

Instead of reacting to changes, they seek out improvements and anticipate bottlenecks throughout their processes, allowing them to build more resilient and customer and employee-centric habits. Ultimately, they avoid problems long before they exist.

Examples of proactive thinking in businesses

Here’s an example: one of the biggest gripes we all have with grocery shopping online is that even with repeat orders, we have to refill our baskets every time.

The best brands, on the other hand, know it’s you, and they know it’s a repeat order. So instead of having to add that soy sauce you like or those authentic noodles you can’t get enough of, the moment you arrive, your basket is pre-filled. Better yet, you’re actually presented with other similar items that might suit your tastes.

You don’t have to click anything other than ‘add to cart’, and you only have to do it once for the back-end system to know what you want.

Think about how organizations handle employee engagement and retention. Typically, measures are only ever improved or put in place after employees express disapproval or worse still, leave.

The best places to work, however, can identify the key drivers of attrition and retention in the moment, and use that information to quickly create new processes that empower employees and keep them engaged.

This isn’t the future, it’s happening right now. And it’s these kinds of practices that help brands turn customers and employees into awesome fans.

This is upstream thinking — moving away from the day-to-day issues that keep us downstream so that we can focus on removing obstacles, eliminating problems and adding value to the experiences we deliver.

But how can you move upstream?

To talk about upstream thinking and developing more proactive business habits, we’re excited to announce that we’ll be joined by bestselling author and speaker, Dan Heath for our Moving your CX/EX program upstream event.

Dan, along with his brother Chip, has co-authored four books: Made to Stick, Decisive, Switch, The Power of Moments and most recently, Upstream.

Upstream explores the psychological forces that push us downstream — including “problem blindness,” which can leave us oblivious to serious issues in our midst. In his keynote speech, Dan will share with us his advice and insight, gathered from over 300 interviews, on how you can develop and implement a more proactive approach to problem solving and move upstream.

But that’s not all. Following Dan you’ll hear from some of the biggest brands around the world on how they’re utilising proactive strategies and upstream thinking to prevent problems and improve experiences for their customers and employees. This includes Chipotle, Lumen, National Grid, TUI, and Flight Centre Travel Group.

Finally, you’ll also get a chance to see the latest innovations from Qualtrics and learn how you can use them to close gaps, delight customers and empower employees.

It’s a jam-packed agenda full of content you cannot afford to miss if you want to enhance the experiences you deliver at every stage of the customer or employee journey.

And because there’s so much to cover — and great stories to tell for both CX and EX — we’ve split the event over two days, covering customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX).

If you’re interested, you can tune in wherever you are using the links below.