CX Trailblazers: The Role of CX in building lasting customer relationships

As a passionate Pan-Africanist, CX Expert, Change manager and customer evangelist, Jordan Seke is no stranger to understanding that what makes South Africa unique in the Customer Experience space, is nothing short of… Normal.

Smoke Customer Intelligence was proud to welcome Jordan as a guest speaker to our April Customer Event, CX Trailblazers. Speaking after COO Cheslyn Jacobs, Jordan helped drive home points from Cheslyn's presentation and illustrated a few nuances through his vivid storytelling.

We are not customer success managers.

Straight out of the gate, Jordan hooked his audience by challenging their understanding of what it means to be a “customer success manager”. We should understand first and foremost that those of us who work in CX are marketers – trying to leverage off of the feelings our customers have about our brand while trying to create positive sentiments, and just like marketers, we have our own 3 P’s of CX, namely People, Product and Process.

The overlap is where CX Happens, and without one key cornerstone, people, great CX is not achievable.

Jordan went on to elaborate that if your team are not engaged, do not have shared values and don’t want to help the company fulfil the company vision we will never close the gap between CX and loyal customers.

Further, the gap is widened when we consider the word “value” – what is valuable to one group of individuals, is not valuable to another.

Considering a digital brand like TymeBank and its recent journey to break even, we can break consumers into innovators (2.5% of the market), early adopters (13.5%), Early majority (34%), Late Majority (34%) and laggards.

When one seeks growth, we focus our efforts on the first two, creating the CX gap between those brave enough to change, and the remaining market who shift if and when a brand offers features and benefits that are attractive (valuable) enough, or they have had an experience bad enough to force them to change.

It comes back to marketing, and how we attract these groups of people.

Stay relevant, or fade away.

Jordan also touched on various topics around leveraging technology, AI, CRM and personalisation for customer experiences.

“If you do not learn something, anything about AI in the next few months,

you will no longer be able to compete,” he said, reiterating the importance of understanding how to use the tools available to us as marketers and CX managers in this space.

Finally, Jordan shook the room on last time. Metrics, he said are meaningless if you are not leveraging them for improvement. Find the points of friction for your client, ease their pain and most importantly, win their trust.

Jordans talk was animated, insightful and the perfect balance of storytelling as means to teach, and gave all delegates something to think about for a long time to come.

Again, we thank Jordan and our guests for making CX Trailblazers a lively and enjoyable event and we look forward to hosting the next one!