You'll notice that a great many of them are blogs. Fortunately, the community of bloggers who focus on customer experience is extremely open and sharing! Reading these blogs on a regular basis enables you to stay abreast of the latest thinking in the customer experience field. Even better, why not participate? By providing comments and questions, you can become a part of the evolution of customer experience. You're likely to receive unbiased and helpful feedback that can help you move the needle on your customer experience efforts!
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Advanced Customer Experience Strategy (ACES): This group is designed for seasoned customer experience experts who want to engage in a stimulating, rigorous study of customer experience strategy.
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Building the Customer-Centric Organization: This group focuses on the migration to customer centricity by focusing on customer experience management, customer-centric process design, and organizational design.
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Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management: A wide-ranging forum that looks at customer experience from a B2B perspective. This forum discusses everything from buying decisions to cross-process coordination and alignment.
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Chief Customer Officer Group: This group focuses on advocacy for the chief customer officer function while including broad discussion on customer experience topics.
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Customer Experience Leaders: Look here for advice and counsel from practitioners in the field. There's nothing like hearing from the people who are executing customer experience on a daily basis.
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Customer Experience Professionals: This group offers lots of case studies and varying points of view from a large group of customer experience experts.
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CXPA: This is a group run by the Customer Experience Professionals Association, which is a global nonprofit focused on the advancement of customer experience management practices. In addition to its LinkedIn group, the organization runs CX certification classes.
Customer Experience Summits and Conferences
A number of excellent customer experience summits and conferences are held worldwide. These conferences typically come in a couple variations. One variation features presentations from field experts, vendors, suppliers, consultants, and other interested parties. Often, at these conferences, there's a heavy emphasis on selling you different products and services. The other variation is also likely to have vendors and sponsors, but the agenda typically involves dozens of presentations from people (like you) who are in the process of trying to improve customer experience in their organizations. At these conferences, you see lots of "this is how we're doing it" discussions. Although the quality of the presentations can vary, if you're in the process of implementing a customer experience program, talking to people who are making it happen can be extremely helpful.One of the best things about these conferences is the networking opportunities. You can use these conferences to find and develop your own network of customer experience experts, peers, and friends who may just lend a supportive ear or idea sometime down the line.
Although the names of specific conferences can and do change, the following conferences and sponsors provide valuable learning sessions and productive networking opportunities:
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- The Conference Board: The Customer Experience Conference
- Forrester's Forum for Customer Experience Professionals
- Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit
- Gartner Customer 360 Summit
InMoment (formerly Mindshare)
InMoment is a favorite customer research, customer survey, and customer experience analytics organization. The InMoment blog talks about the data analytics side of worldwide customer experience.Customer Experience Matters
Bruce Temkin and his team are "market makers." Their research, perspective, and insights are discussed by customer experience experts worldwide. Their Customer Experience Matters blog contains everything from recent research to deep insight on customer experience execution.CX Journey
Annette Franz's CX Journey blog is a broad sweep of the customer experience landscape. Look to Annette's blog for insight and resources on execution of both customer experience and employee experience.Beyond Philosophy
Colin Shaw, who has written extensively on customer experience, is one of the thought leaders on that topic. His thinking and his words have not only made him a LinkedIn Influencer, but a source of inspiration for elevating the discipline of customer experience. His blog, found at www.beyondphilosophy.com/blog, is required reading.Roy's Blue Blog
Roy's Blue Blog and the next one are maintained by the authors of Customer Experience for Dummies (published by Wiley) — Roy Barnes and Bob Kelleher, respectively. Barnes' blog, Roy's Blue Blog, goes into detail about executing customer experience and includes observations from the day-to-day world of customer experience. Want to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of customer experience? This is the place.The Employee Engagement Group Blog
The Employee Engagement Group blog is the online home of Bob Kelleher. The blog's focus is on employee engagement, but you'll quickly discover the degree to which an engaged workforce can improve customer experience! The two go hand in hand.