January 2024, Industry Engagement

Upcoming Projects for Business and Executive Programs

Since early 2022, Director of Business & Executive Programs Greg Zirkle has been building out content in the area of Customer Experience Excellence (CXX). These engagements range from public workshops for small businesses to multi-day consulting arrangements within a company. 

So far, community sessions have been held in Richmond, Tipton, New Castle, Brookville and Kokomo. On February 27, CXX will be held in Fort Wayne. Promoted in conjunction with the Greater Fort Wayne Chamber of Commerce and hosted at the University’s satellite center at Electric Works, up to 50 participants are expected to attend and take part. 

Benefits of a focus on customer experience include increased repeat business, improved upselling, enhanced profit margins, and referral business from loyal advocates.  

The half-day CXX workshop guides participants through the elements that make up a superior experience, along with examples of how each type of business can create a map of their many customer touchpoints. Once the journey is visualized, participants can identify weak spots to fix as well as ways to add “sizzle and wow” to customer interactions. 

The consulting engagements bring together a team – or an entire company, as in the case of a February 19 workshop with Kokomo-based Community First Bank of Indiana – and go much deeper. Real world scenarios are collected in advance, and part of the workshop is devoted to problem solving and innovating through those situations. The end result is packaged into a customer experience guidebook for all employees to use as a reference, and it can also be used as part of the onboarding process for new hires so everyone is on the same page from their very first day with the bank.  

A third avenue may also be developed. Indiana Tourism Association is considering customizing CXX into one or two half-hour online modules for distribution to Visitors Bureaus around the state, and ultimately into the hands of hotels and restaurants in many Indiana communities. The goal is for every visitor’s experience in Indiana to be memorable, unique and worth a return trip – and training tools from Ball State University would be right in the middle of it all. 

Greg Zirkle works for the Office of Lifetime Learning and can be contacted at grzirkle@bsu.edu.