Welcome to the Experience Strategy Podcast Newsletter! Like our popular and long-running Experience Strategy Podcast, this newsletter is dedicated to those who design, manage, and lead experience strategies for companies large and small. Our big purpose is to catalyze the growth of experience strategy by sharing the tools, techniques, and ideas that are used by the most impactful teams and companies.

In each newsletter you’ll find practical, actionable concepts, drawn from our most popular podcast episodes, that you can use to serve your customers, employees, and company.

Are you an experience strategist looking to reduce silos and elevate your organization’s performance through collaboration? In this episode, we sit down with Rich Sheridan, the visionary CEO and co-founder of Menlo Innovations, a tech company that has been setting new standards for innovation and productivity and author of Joy, Inc. - How We Built a Workplace People Love and Chief Joy Officer. Explore the strategies, practices, and culture that have made Menlo Innovations a beacon of success in the tech industry and follow his journey as he strives to continue creating a workplace filled with camaraderie, human energy, creativity and authentic productivity.

Are you ready to elevate your business success by harnessing the power of collaboration?

In this episode, we sat down with Rich Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations to understand how he has driven Menlo Innovations to success through teamwork and innovation. Tune in to this episode to discover:

Actionable strategies to transform your workplace into a hub of teamwork and innovation.

Insight into Menlo Innovations’ collaborative approach and how you can apply similar principles to boost efficiency, quality, and innovation within your workplace.

Real-world examples of successful collaboration across various industries.

Welcome to the Experience Strategy Podcast Newsletter! Like our popular and long-running Experience Strategy Podcast, this newsletter is dedicated to those who design, manage, and lead experience strategies for companies large and small. Our big purpose is to catalyze the growth of experience strategy by sharing the tools, techniques, and ideas that are used by the most impactful teams and companies.

In each newsletter you’ll find practical, actionable concepts, drawn from our most popular podcast episodes, that you can use to serve your customers, employees, and company.

In this episode, we have a captivating conversation with our special guest, Satyam Kantamneni, the Chief Experience Officer of UXReactor, one of the fastest-growing specialized experience design firms in the United States. Satyam’s extensive background includes roles at PayPal and Citrix, and he’s also the author of the highly acclaimed book, User Experience Design: A Practical Playbook to Fuel Business Growth. Join us as we talk with Satyam, about the evolving landscape of digital experiences, the role of systems in this evolution, and the hot topic on everyone’s minds - how to harness the power of AI to delight customers and add genuine value to your business.

So this new company wants to interview you for a role with their very successful organization. And you, being who you are, want to ensure this company will be a great fit. You want opportunities to grow—doesn’t everyone? You want real benefits if you can get them. Sure, you do. And of course you want to ensure that your experience working for the company is impactful.

Satyam Kantamneni is Managing Partner and Chief Experience Officer of UXReactor, former Managing Director of Product Design at Citrix and PayPal. He is the author of “User Experience Design: A Practical Playbook to Fuel Business Growth.” In this conversation, we talk to Satyam about AI as a force multiplier for companies who understand their customers’ needs.

Welcome to the Experience Strategy Podcast Newsletter! Like our popular and long-running Experience Strategy Podcast, this newsletter is dedicated to those who design, manage, and lead experience strategies for companies large and small. Our big purpose is to catalyze the growth of experience strategy by sharing the tools, techniques, and ideas that are used by the most impactful teams and companies.

In each newsletter you’ll find practical, actionable concepts, drawn from our most popular podcast episodes, that you can use to serve your customers, employees, and company.

In this week’s episode, we’re joined by Kellie Glueck, the driving force behind North America’s Customer Experience and Marketing team at Kimberly Clark Professional, a subsidiary of Kimberly-Clark that uses a direct distributor model to serve end users in professional segments with brands like Kleenex or Scott or Cottonelle. Tune in as we explore the strategies behind transforming a B2B organization into a customer-centric powerhouse.

Companies with large sales forces are now building CX in an increasingly digital world: B-B selling today is less about personal relationships and more about value creation. As buyers evolve towards more digital interchanges they still want knowledgeable customer support to create the most value at each stage of the buyers’ journey. In this episode, we are joined by Kellie Glueck to hear how Kimberly-Clark Professional has adapted to customer and market changes to make CX a central aspect of its business-to-business model with customers.

The consumerization of healthcare has driven healthcare leaders to adopt measurement tools that most consumer-facing companies employ.

Unfortunately, not all of those tools worked as well as was advertised. For experience strategists in healthcare, the least effective tool today is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Net Promoter Score is the most widely used consumer experience assessment metric. And some people absolutely swear by it.

Welcome to the Experience Strategy Podcast Newsletter! Like our popular and long-running Experience Strategy Podcast, this newsletter is dedicated to those who design, manage, and lead experience strategies for companies large and small. Our big purpose is to catalyze the growth of experience strategy by sharing the tools, techniques, and ideas that are used by the most impactful teams and companies.

In each newsletter you’ll find practical, actionable concepts, drawn from our most popular podcast episodes, that you can use to serve your customers, employees, and company.

In this week’s episode, we’re diving deep into a timeless storytelling framework that can help elevate your communication game. Join us as we explore the And, But, Therefore (ABT) framework with the renowned storyteller and expert, Park Howell, host of the acclaimed The Business of Story Training, Coaching & Keynotes, a published author of “Brand Bewitchery”, and co-author of “The Narrative Gym for Business”.

Do you want to excel through the stories you tell, but find yourself struggling to clarify your message and impact? Our guest today is Park Howell, known as The World’s Most Industrious Storyteller for his track record of growing purpose-driven brands by using the power of story.

Welcome to the Experience Strategy Newsletter! Like our popular and long-running Experience Strategy Podcast, this newsletter is dedicated to those who design, manage, and lead experience strategies for companies large and small. Our big purpose is to lead the growth of experience strategy by sharing the tools, techniques, and ideas that are used by the most impactful teams and companies.

In each newsletter you’ll find practical, actionable concepts, drawn from our most popular podcast episodes, that you can use to serve your customers, employees, and company.

For our first issue, check out this deep-dive into creating patient seamless experiences, then listen to our latest podcast with Tiffany Mura for more!

Persona development has been a part of design thinking methodologies since the beginning. Originally, they were built by design researchers for designers to ensure that, as decisions were made about the solution, the ‘customer’ remained in the room. Those in charge of inventing new solutions had a tendency to design those solutions for themselves, often inadvertently. By telling a story based on the lived experiences of real people, design teams could stay focused on supporting the customer rather than the company or their own personal needs.

Want to deliver a more seamless patient experience but are challenged by organizational silos? In this episode you’ll learn how to get the research, partnerships, and innovation processes you need, so you can compete more effectively.

We are joined by Tiffany Mura, the Strategic Lead, Healthcare for Stone Mantel where she focuses on growing the practice and helping healthcare clients create transformational experiences for patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals. With almost 20 years’ experience across all key healthcare sectors - from life sciences to health insurance to digital/non-traditional - Tiffany brings a cross-industry perspective and deep knowledge of the space to help clients tackle the most challenging problems facing healthcare today. She has worked on both the agency and the client side, giving her a first-hand understanding of the internal corporate challenges clients face when trying to drive innovation and effect transformative change.

Tiffany shares emerging trends, resources, and game-changing frameworks for succeeding in the competitive Healthcare industry.

Next year, it will be 30 years since Joe Pine wrote the book Mass Customization, in which he coined the term personalization. So much has happened in the restaurant industry over the last 30 years that it’s almost impossible to remember back to a time when companies didn’t understand what personalization was. Pine’s premise, that customers would no longer value mass produced goods and services, has borne out. Today, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, people want their food “their way.” From Subway to Papa Murphy’s, a wide range of quick-service restaurant brands have been built around personal customization. The value that customization brings to restaurant goers is profound, the financial benefit to quick-service brands is gigantic.

Want to deliver a more seamless patient experience but are challenged by organizational silos? With the Collaboratives, you can bring together up to 7 members of the various teams working on patient experience. You will learn common frameworks and approaches to patient experience; get access to the latest cross-industry trends informing customer’s expectations for experiences; and apply these frameworks and learnings to solving one of your key business challenges so that you can have a shared playbook and way of working on future initiatives that will help enable a more integrated approach.

Each year we partner with the world’s leading consumer brands to survey thousands of customers to understand how customer needs and attitudes are evolving. This year our research focused on identifying the best practices for delivering meaningful and transformative customer and employee experiences.

We’ve talked to thousands of customers over the past year about how they define and think about transformational experiences across all their life domains. Their responses can be distilled into this deliberately simplified, but far from simplistic, process: Catalyst > See Different + Do Different = Be Different.

It’s the same model we use to create a truly transformative experience for every member of our hallmark program: The Collaboratives.

Join our 2023 Experience Strategy Roundtables and unlock the secrets to driving value for your customers and company. Don't miss out on live Zoom sessions with thought leaders, cutting-edge research on experience strategy challenges, and networking opportunities with fellow CX leaders.

In a recent blog post, I argued that there is a distinction between journey mapping, as most people use the term today, and experience mapping. I also shared four different types of journey maps and made the case for mapping exercises that focus on the job the customer is trying to get done, not the process the company is trying to impose on the customer. Most experience strategists today would contend that they don’t want to impose their company’s processes on their customers and that journey mapping is an exercise in understanding the customer’s pain points, needs, and decision-making process.

It’s no secret that there is a continually-worsening clinician shortage in the US and that burnout is a leading cause driving highly qualified, experienced physicians from the profession at a time when the healthcare system needs them the most. Although the physician exodus is just one of the many serious problems fueling the US Healthcare system crisis, it is the most critical to address. Without a sufficient number of physicians, the infinite loop of increased patient acuity driving up the cost of care will spiral out of control, threatening the precariously fragile state of these institutions.