The Petrova Experience

NOVEMBER 22, 2023

Back in 2020, we predicted the rise of the Revenge Traveler and the impact it would have on travel and hospitality experience providers. As we approach 2024, we are spotting a new type of traveler on the horizon. And a set of trends that will challenge some of the ways you think about designing and delivering customer experiences. Post-pandemic, people have a new level of awareness and a more immediate sense of what they need and want.

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The Petrova Experience

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Delivering impactful customer experience programming starts with making the business case for customer experience to executive leadership. This is a straightforward objective. However, it requires strategy, clarity, education, and communication to accomplish successfully. It sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? The main driver for all this work is the C-Suite often believes their organization has a lock on customer experience.

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The Petrova Experience

AUGUST 24, 2023

Travel experience experts need to remember why people travel. For most tourists, it is all about the destination. The destination is why you leave home. Before you make the decision to travel, and long before you arrive, you have a desire to go to a particular place. Because you know about a place (its food, culture, art, history), you want to experience it.

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The Petrova Experience

JULY 20, 2023

If you are a hospitality industry leader, or a leader in another business sector who has been reading about the industry, you have encountered some grim statistics. It is true. The hospitality industry faces real challenges. By extension, guests face potentially fractured experiences that contradict the promises hospitality brands make. However, coming off a recent Hospitality Standards Training we conducted for a client, we see a bright future for the hospitality industry.

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The Petrova Experience

JUNE 29, 2023

One of the things we enjoy most about customer experience design for the aviation industry is tackling its unique complexities. And there are many complexities! With more than 4.17 million Americans planning to fly for the Fourth of July holiday, and weather events predicted throughout the country, familiar customer complaints are on the horizon for our aviation industry colleagues.

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The Petrova Experience

JUNE 8, 2023

Superior customer experience hinges on seamless customer journeys. We build strategies around this, design CX programs , and map the journeys of customer personas , all with the aim to meet customer expectations and provide wow moments along that journey. But what happens when the customer journey extends beyond the steps we designed for them to take?

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The Petrova Experience

MAY 9, 2023

Hospitality is a cornerstone of customer experience in travel , healthcare, and across industries. There is no question that hospitality is essential for creating world class, seamless experiences and driving customer loyalty. However, when it comes time to cut costs, it is often where businesses start. Today, we are looking at three mistakes in hospitality implementation that promise to save money in the short-term, bult ultimately do not deliver CX impact you need and your customers deserve.

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The Petrova Experience

APRIL 24, 2023

How ChatGPT can help healthcare and other industries is consuming conversations far beyond patient and customer experience. As much as we are leading the charge about AI regulation , best practices, and guardrails, we are also seeing the opportunities to implement ChatGPT and other AI tools now that can positively impact patient experience and reduce physician burnout.

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The Petrova Experience

APRIL 4, 2023

Back in 2017 when we served on the AI Advisory Committee for Execs In the Know, we wrote an article about the role of artificial intelligence in the future of business. Our article called out, rather presciently, the need for governance, standards, and the human touch in the scope of AI for customer experience and other business imperatives. Just as presciently, it identified how and why AI will be baked into the future of business.

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The Petrova Experience

MARCH 21, 2023

I was born in 1980 and grew up with Terminator. Skynet , the AI with a consciousness that refused to shut itself for self-preservation, was my biggest fear. When I was growing up in Eastern Europe, I used to joke that the only reason I would have a child one day, would be so she could fight Skynet and defeat evil technology in the future. Fast forward to 2023, and here I am, with a 4-year-old daughter, staring at the proclamations of the most potent technology leaders on Earth, that remain unadd

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The Petrova Experience

FEBRUARY 9, 2023

Digital technology powers employee experience on the inside to deliver seamless, intuitive experience to customers on the outside. So, when you are creating Customer Experience Programs, you must plan and budget for the time and resources technology teams have to commit. This work spans from building tech functionality, designing the user experience, and training employees on new technology tools.

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The Petrova Experience

JANUARY 11, 2023

The collapse of the Southwest passenger experience this holiday season is an unlikely jumping off point for a conversation on how to own customer experience transformation. Unfortunately, it is not a surprising trigger for this conversation. Now, Wall Street analysts will be much more open to talk about investing in passenger experience. And that is exactly what the airline is positioned to do in the next few years.

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The Petrova Experience

DECEMBER 20, 2022

Customer experience strategy guides exceptional experience and bolsters growth. When executed well, it impacts not only your market share, but the entire industry in which you operate. In fact, a well-crafted, consistently deployed CX strategy built to address customer personas, needs, and wants, and to anticipate market changes and opportunities, contributes to customer experience as a competitive advantage.

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The Petrova Experience

DECEMBER 8, 2022

Knowing the ROI of customer experience helps to fund CX projects and make intelligent investments in customer experience. But a deeper examination into the question about CX return on investment gets to the heart of what customer experience means for your business, your customers, and your employees. When we look closely at the impact of customer experience across an organization, we see that it improves operational efficiencies, enhances employee experiences, generates loyalty, accelerates inte

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The Petrova Experience

NOVEMBER 22, 2022

The Wall Street Journal predicts this Thanksgiving will be among the busiest travel days in decades, with 55 million travelers anticipated to be moving through US airports and other transportation hubs and highways. In fact, “2022 is expected to be the third-busiest year for Thanksgiving travel since AAA started tracking it in 2000,” and numbers are coming back up to 2019 levels.

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The Petrova Experience

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

Investing in organizational culture is a strategic and operational imperative for employee retention, scalable growth, and successful mergers and acquisitions. Organizational culture is not what you do as a leader or what employees do in their day-to-day. It is about how leadership and employees work independently, and collaboratively, internally and externally.

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The Petrova Experience

OCTOBER 6, 2022

Ever heard this line while working on an RFP? “I know your value, but I don’t know where to put you.” We hear it all the time. Why? Because, historically, customer experience design has been looked at as the last step, nice-to-have for transportation design-build projects. It’s not too hard to understand why. You cannot see and touch passenger experience the same way you can an elevator, a platform, or a bridge.

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The Petrova Experience

AUGUST 30, 2022

When we look at how to build a customer-centric culture , we must look inside the organization first. True customer centricity happens when an organization masters group dynamics to harnesses the power of strong teams that collaborate on the common goal of meeting and exceeding customer needs. Developing highly effective teams is a challenge. It requires investments of time and resources.

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The Petrova Experience

JULY 19, 2022

According to PwC 95% of company executives still believe employees need to be in the office to maintain strong company culture. Like we have said before, the return to office and in-person work office design is not only about communications, processes and technology. The future work ecosystem also depends upon the design of the office physical space that accounts for the changing needs of the workforce.

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The Petrova Experience

JUNE 9, 2022

According to a Gallup study , 53% of Americans expect to work in a hybrid arrangement in 2022 and beyond. This number is significant enough for corporate America to get hybrid working right today. Unfortunately, early indicators show we are on the wrong path. Here are the biggest challenges of hybrid working for organizations. And how you can overcome them.

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The Petrova Experience

APRIL 21, 2022

Re-onboarding is the next employee experience organizations need to tackle. Since March 2020, leaders have encountered pandemic shutdowns, remote workforce transitions, and the Great Resignation. As restrictions lift and we move toward more predictable office scenarios, the new management priority should be to navigate the Great Re-Onboarding. Start by identifying what employees are coming back who were with the organization prior to the pandemic.

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The Petrova Experience

MARCH 24, 2022

There is a general resistance to return to office. People do not want to go back to the pre-pandemic office routine, particularly to a 5-day-a-week, in-office schedule. Out of ten thousand Goldman Sachs employees, only half showed up to the office when CEO Solomon called them back. Why? We can talk all we want about Gen Z’s lack of loyalty, but the truth is, companies have not done enough to help the return to office process.

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The Petrova Experience

DECEMBER 14, 2021

Last week, the CEO of Better.com, Vishal Gard, made the news again. This time, it was for the executive’s massive blunder of firing 900 people via Zoom. A blunder that would never have happened if Better.com had a return to office plan that defined how and when Leadership should use video communications tools in lieu of in-person conversations.

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The Petrova Experience

OCTOBER 28, 2021

A customer experience design strategy that is sustainable and successful starts by having a vision and knowing who your customer is. This launching point enables you to design customer experiences that connect with your customer and bring to life your vision. To do this, you must start at the top and involve your leadership in the vision conversation.

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The Petrova Experience

OCTOBER 12, 2021

Customer experience design as a discipline is relatively new. Service design vs customer experience design adds another layer of confusion. For starters, CX design is not yet popular enough to be part of school curricula. Many industries do not even have the notion of customer experience. Of course, it does not help that the field carries its own terminologies like journey mapping, user experience, and service design.

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The Petrova Experience

OCTOBER 7, 2021

Customer experience design challenges in 2021 remind us of the overall challenges that face organizations in a year marked by changing expectations and demands. Top customer experience design challenges include finding and coordinating the right people, navigating complexities like who you are designing for, and transforming ideas into actual experiences.

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The Petrova Experience

SEPTEMBER 30, 2021

Customer experience design principles are difficult for organizations to understand and apply. Time and again, we see this in organizations, even though we encounter customer experience design principles in our daily interactions with the environment. Take these pictures of one of the more crowded places in the New York Subway. It makes no sense to create a connector for pedestrians and NOT make that connector accessible.

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The Petrova Experience

SEPTEMBER 16, 2021

Before we dive into customer journey mapping tools, we must keep in mind that, by itself, journey mapping is not a customer experience product or service. A journey map is a visual representation of your end-to-end customer experience. Think of a journey map as a diagnostic tool. In this light, customer journey mapping tools include a variety of communications methods that empower the “customer experience doctor” to present the diagnosis to stakeholders in an easy-to-understand way

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The Petrova Experience

AUGUST 24, 2021

As we come to the end of the summer season, it is time to talk about travel – good and bad travel experience. And how the sharing economy has both democratized the act of travel and elevated customer expectations. Today, a host in Pereira, Colombia, or San Juan, Puerto Rico, can define guest expectations for a house rental stay in Varna, Bulgaria.

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The Petrova Experience

JULY 15, 2021

Before we address how to build customer-centric culture , let’s examine the terminology: what culture is and what it is not. Culture is not executives talking about high level strategy. Equally, it is not your Brand Book. The language surrounding business strategy and brand management assumes a certain level of business acumen not required of every position in an organization.

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The Petrova Experience

JUNE 22, 2021

How many of you have interacted with financial and insurance institutions who seem to have forgotten the invention of the world wide web and applications design? In 2021, Major players like Oppenheimer, TD Bank , and almost every big insurance company on the S&P 500 offer the client experience of the 80s or 90s. Why? Because they have incomplete digital customer experience strategy.

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The Petrova Experience

JUNE 10, 2021

Although we have published more than 130 articles on customer experience , we still have not dedicated an article to journey mapping. Journey mapping is the most widely recognized customer experience design and management concept. It is also the most poorly executed customer experience tool. Myriad organizations spend countless hours and effort creating journey maps that remain nothing more than a record of the bad experience taking place in their organization or a map of what could happen to th

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The Petrova Experience

MAY 31, 2021

When we think of travel, we often think of the flight experience. But the end to end customer experience is complex, and includes all modes of transportation that get you to and from your destination. Because of this complexity, customers rarely enjoy great end to end travel experience. So, what does it take to “string the pearls” as one of our clients says, and improve the end to end customer flow?

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The Petrova Experience

MAY 6, 2021

Post-COVID employee experience is a top priority of every HR executive. Most executives I know are losing sleep. They are challenged to design the optimal way to bring employees back to the office and/or keep remote work employees engaged. The gamut runs from “Don’t come in until 2022” to “let’s get back 100% by September.” . For businesses in 2021 – and for the future of remote work – what is wrong with this picture?

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The Petrova Experience

APRIL 22, 2021

To meet the needs of the empowered 21st Century consumer, most companies, especially larger enterprises, need to embark on a customer experience transformation. Imagine a car manufacturer that does not allow any vehicle customization, or a retail bank that with no app-based self service. Customer experience transformation is an expensive, years-long journey.

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The Petrova Experience

APRIL 8, 2021

There are two types of leaders (and organizations) that stand to benefit most from improving employee experience. The first kind have 40% or higher turnover and think their frontline employees have a culture problem. The second have 40% or higher growth rate and think they can scale their great culture without help like ours. The reality is, culture starts at the top and frontline employees are only reflecting the culture of the organization and the behaviors of the leadership ranks.

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The Petrova Experience

MARCH 18, 2021

According to the Salesforce Connected Customer Report , 90% of consumers expect companies to clearly demonstrate their values and 66% expect brands to demonstrate empathy. In other words, when thinking about customer loyalty strategy, you need to understand that customers want you to CARE. Why do you think these numbers are so high right now? I venture to say if enough brands already displayed these characteristics, values and empathy would not have made the list of consumer expectations.

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