Annette Franz

Founder + CEO at CX Journey Inc.

Management Consulting

Education: California State University
Mission Viejo, CA, USA

Biography

Annette Franz, CCXP, founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc., has spent the last 30 years in the
customer experience profession. She started her career at J.D. Power and Associates in 1992 and
spent much of the next 25 years before founding CX Journey Inc. in 2017 leading consulting
services for the major voice of the customer (VOC) platforms, helping clients in a variety of
industries develop and execute their customer experience strategies. She has also worked on
client-side customer experience strategy for Mattel, Fidelity Investments, and Compellon.

Annette is an internationally recognized customer experience thought leader, coach, keynote
speaker, and author of Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the "Customer" in Customer
Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business). In this book, she outlines the importance of
customer understanding through listening (feedback and data), characterizing (personas), and
empathizing (journey maps) to developing a customer-centric culture. Her second book, Built to
Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture That Drives Value for Your Business
(Advantage|ForbesBooks), which dives into the ten foundational principles of a customer-centric
culture, was released in 2022. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional
(CCXP) and an official member of the Forbes Coaches Council.

For more videos, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/@cxjourney-annettefranz/playlists

Featured Video

I am willing to travel

More than 100 miles

When it comes to payments

I always get paid for speaking

Topics

customer experience employee experience culture corporate culture company culture leadership and company culture voice of the customer employee engagement employee retention and engagement author

Example talks

Improve the Customer Experience... From the Inside Out

Focusing on the employee experience is one of the most critical building blocks of a customer experience transformation strategy. But why haven't companies made this a priority? We know for a fact that the employee experience drives a great customer experience!

In this presentation, Annette not only explains what the employee experience entails and how to improve it but also shares stories from her client work that support the notion that if you fix the employee experience you'll have resolved a huge chunk of issues with your customer experience.

You can't fix what's happening on the outside if you don't fix what's happening inside! What other aspects do you need to think about to fix what's happening on the inside? Annette also shares two other critical foundational elements that need to be in place.

Putting the "Customer" in Customer Experience

Everyone talks about customer experience and customer-centricity, but do they really know what that is, what it means, and what it entails.

So many companies give lip service to customer experience - and there are a ton of examples - which means customers still feel like they aren't really at the center of all that businesses do, whether it's designing a product, a service, or a process.

How do we fix that? Customer understanding is really the cornerstone of customer-centricity. In this keynote, Annette talks about three ways to achieve customer understanding - helping you put the "customer" into "customer experience."

In this presentation, attendees will learn:

* What customer understanding is and how to achieve it
* Why and how customer understanding is the cornerstone of customer-centricity
* What the three ways are to achieve customer understanding
* How to execute and implement those three ways

Fix The Culture, Fix The Outcomes

A customer-centric culture is one that is deliberately designed to be that way. There must be commitment from the top, especially from the CEO, to put customers' best interests at the heart of everything the business does.

There are 10 foundational principles that ensure you get the culture that you design and allow. This presentation, which became the basis for Annette's second book and which has been updated to reflect new thinking in (and since) the book, is a must-see for organizations that want to shift how business is done to not only ensure that the customer is front and center but also that the business thrives.