Category: Customer Experience

If I was admitted to a prestigious business school and scheduled to begin in January or even September, I’m pretty sure I’d defer.
Take a gap year, take two.
For many students, the two most important parts of the top-tier MBA are getting in and getting out. It’s about selection and certification.
For the last seventy years, the most famous graduate schools in business have been honing a particular model of teaching and value creation. They excel at a sometimes-magical sort of classroom experience, one that uses exclusivity and status and real-time high-stakes interaction to create an esprit de corps as well as occasional moments of real growth. And when the programs work, the $350,000 in tuition and opportunity cost for two years can be repaid with a fancy job that brings leverage and impact to the certified graduate.
The scarce degree is a signaling mechanism for a certain group of consultants and investment banks eager to hire people who have been filtered out and paid their dues as a way of showing commitment to a specific career.
It’s predicted that more people will apply this year than ever before. In uncertain times, the process feels reassuring. For most students, the elite MBA is about the prize at the end, not the learning or the experience.
Due to the pandemic, many of those in-person interactions moved online. And if the schools are honest about it, the interactions they offered online aren’t very good. Instead of the result of nearly a century of improvement, they’re often slapped together, and they’re filled with compromise. The people who built them weren’t charged with improving what was on offer on campus, they were supposed to come up with something that would either augment it or be a less-expensive and less-prestigious alternative for people who couldn’t participate in the ‘real’ program.
My alma mater was proud to have shifted online in a matter of weeks, but they certainly realize that if it didn’t have the fancy name on it, it wouldn’t have been worth much.
After a semester or even a full year of this, it’s quite possible you won’t have really gotten to know your peers, nor will you have learned much more than you could have from a close reading of twenty books.
And for many, that’s okay, because they’re paying for the certificate, not the learning. I wrote about this twenty years ago…
When I taught at the NYU graduate school of business, I was amazed. Not by the caliber of students, which was very high, but at how little emotional enrollment and intellectual curiosity many of them had in learning what was on offer. A few realized how much they could learn, but many of the students were simply concerned with what was on the test.
When I started the altMBA five years ago, I probably chose the wrong name for it. Because I didn’t set out to replace the business school. Instead, the goal has always been to use a new medium in a new way, to create a thirty-day experience that does what it does better than it could be done any other way.
As a filtering/certifying/sorting mechanism, the elite MBA remains a profitable path for the few people who end up at McKinsey and similar institutions. But most of us don’t have those jobs and don’t want to do that work. Instead, we have the opportunity to level up and figure out how to find more relevance and impact in the work we choose to do. We don’t need a certificate–instead, it’s about learning to see and exploring how to make an impact.
The altMBA and its parent, Akimbo, are now independently owned and run, a B Corp. committed to doing work that matters. But the mission hasn’t changed–to use this new medium in a productive way to help people level up. If you’ve been wondering, “is this all there is to work,” it might be a good time to check out the altMBA. If you’re ready to lean into the process and the learning, without giving up your day job or focusing on scarcity, the altMBA could be a good fit.
No teachers, no gurus, no tests, no accreditation. Simply community in service of finding a better way forward.
The Early Decision admission deadline is tomorrow, Tuesday.
If you know someone in traditional education who is eager to push their medium forward, I hope you’ll point them to what they’re building at Akimbo. At 2% of the cost, it shouldn’t be better than what the famous schools are offering online, but I’m pretty certain that it is.
Education and learning are often very different. And online is not simply the same as sitting in a very big classroom but with a keyboard. It’s an entirely new form of pedagogy, one that’s about doing, not complying, about possibility, not coercion.
We have the chance to make things better. To learn and to lead. Together.

Throughout this pandemic, businesses have been trying to get a handle on what the “new normal” needs to be for their customers’ experience today as well as tomorrow. Add to this challenge the clear and present need for businesses to keep their customers and employees safe and healthy, while providing experiences which are in tune…
The post The Importance of Real-Time Customer Feedback to Deliver on the Promise of CX in Our “New Normal” appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

The old adage was always wrong. “Say whatever you like, but spell my name right.”

And now it’s even more of a trap.

The temptation to get the word out is overwhelming. There’s so much noise and so much hustle going on that we might believe that it’s okay to trade our standards and principles and position for some attention. At least for a minute or two.

The latest viral video is for an online dating site, and it features Satan as one of their customers. Nicely shot, sort of funny, with just the right amount of inside humor, there’s no arguing that it got attention.

But it burned trust. It established an image that contradicts the position they worked hard to earn for more than a decade.

There have always been shortcuts to attention. But the only purpose of advertising of any kind is to cause action, and action only happens when there’s trust involved.

The only way to train a group of sea monkeys is by triggering an instinctual reaction.
The best way to train a dog is with tiny tasty treats, combined with calm and consistent feedback. Some dog owners resist this approach, because it doesn’t seem like the dog is really engaged or paying attention or learning anything if there’s too direct a connection between the actual treat and the action of the dog.
It’s tempting to resort to punishment instead, because it’s not only immediate, but for some trainers, it can relieve frustration and requires less patience. But punishment creates trauma.
Humans make up a lot of stories about what motivates us, but sooner or later, many of our stories involve feedback. We’re not sea monkeys, but we’re well aware of how the world around us treats us.
The most persistent changes in behavior happen when the story is so ingrained, we forget all about the feedback that reinforced it in the first place.
But it still started with the desire to be seen, to be treated with respect, to receive the dignity we each deserve. Ring a bell?

The global pandemic has rapidly altered the way in which customers interact with brands. In-person interactions have been largely replaced by digital, telephone, and other contactless interactions. Significantly, instead of being able to choose how to interact, these changes have been forced upon customers, who have had to adapt. As customers make the transition to…
The post How to Drive Rich Customer Insight and Rapid Innovation in Turbulent Times appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Anita Siassions, Founding & Managing Director at ManagingCX carefully analyses the state of CX in Australia in 2020, as well as the importance of CX leader’s peripheral vision. See the whole presentation and Q&A session below:
The post iCXTrendTalks: Anita Siassions, Founding & Managing Director, ManagingCX appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

As part of CXTrendTalks at the 2020 International Customer Experience Awards, Yusdi Santoso, Head of Customer CX, EMEA at Qualtrics focusses on three ways of finding ROI on CX in times of crisis and the transformative power of CX. See the whole presentation and Q&A session below:
The post iCXTrendTalks: Yusdi Santoso, Head of Customer XM, EMEA, Qualtrics appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

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Amanda Riches, Senior Director Professional Services EMEA at Medallia discusses driving rich understanding and rapid innovation in context of today’s experience landscape. See the whole presentation and Q&A session below:
The post CXTrendTalks: Amanda Riches, Senior Director Professional Services EMEA, Medallia appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Andreas Constantinides, Head of Messaging & Marketing at MoreThan160 talks about unique CX tools for exceptional CX, six categories of positive experiences and finally, explores three new “wow experience” contributors. See the whole presentation and Q&A session below:
The post CXTrendTalks: Andreas Constantinides, Head of Messaging & Marketing, MoreThan160 appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.