At excap, they make an impact for customers every day when it comes to demonstrably improving customer experience. They do this, under the leadership of general director Arjen van Hijum, by providing insights into customer experience, implementing actions based on it and inspiring organizations, creating motivation to initiate new actions. When multiple actions arise from a single initiative, something magical can occur that they sometimes refer to in trade term as momentum. Van Hijum: ‘I prefer to stick to the sports term flow: you can only make an impact when flow is created. Flow is something magical but it is definitely “makeable” as far as I am concerned. And see there the link to the master class we gave June 22 at the AFAS Theater on the optimal customer journey, digital focus and how convenience and emotion influence each other. After this session, I sent an email about Mark Manson’s “Do Something” principle, a simple but powerful idea – by simply taking action, even if it’s just a small step, we can motivate and inspire ourselves to move forward. In other words: 
In this email I asked to take the first step (‘do something’), such as:
- Scheduling an appointment with one colleague to discuss the customer journey;
- Identifying one opportunity for optimization in the customer journey;
- Working out the customer journey and sharing it with three colleagues for inspiration;
- Figuring out which channel performs best for the benefit of your customers’ experience;
- Asking one customer to share his or her experiences with you;
- Send me one email with one question I can help you with.
Did you all succeed? Were you able to initiate anything? (I have already received several emails asking me to start a good campaign, for which I am grateful!) 3 Tips To help you as travel companies and agents even more on your way, I share my 3 tips to get into the flow around the subject of customer experience: 1. Involve your customers’ emotions in your actions 2. Involve that one nice colleague (from that other department) who is always open to new things 3. Make your customer journey visual! Stick it on the door and write the customer satisfaction rating at each step. Adjust this regularly. Wait for responses! 
IKEA, Arriva and Beter Bed Van Hijum: ‘For example, we always process real customer emotions in our Experience Capture workshops. As presented by Gerard Datema, manager consultancy, we did this very recently for IKEA to develop a closed online feedback loop. In addition, we build customer journeys for several companies, including Arriva and Beter Bed, where we map customer satisfaction (and much more relevant data) so that much more targeted improvements can be made.’ ‘Do you have more help to get into the flow?
Send me an email and I’ll come by and we’ll find out what is needed to get your organisation moving.’
