Industry website Retail Customer Experience recently wrote an article about how poor customer service impacts the retail customer experience, and extensively quoted Brian Solis’s report with Altimeter on the subject.
For Decades, Technology Scaled Businesses Away from People; It’s Time To Bring Customers Closer
For decades, businesses used technology to distance themselves from customers. Systems and processes helped companes automate, grow and scale transactions and service. Moving forward, we have to explore technology and service innovation to deliver against the experiences customers value versus building updated solutions on top of existing paradigms. Innovation is all the work you do to conform to expectations and aspirations of people as they evolve instead of making them conform to your legacy perspectives, assumptions, processes and metrics of…
How to Transform Digital Customer Experiences for the Connected Customer
Digital transformation is only becoming more prominent in driving business modernization. Yet today, it is rarely designed, led and managed as one, sweeping, coordinated effort across the enterprise. Eventually companies get there as outlined in “The 6 Stages of Digital Transformation.” But, most of the time it starts disparately in pockets across the organization. Many business units learn and progress independently before regrouping with the rest of the organization to then move in unison and with purpose. This is why the…
How to Know if You Care About Your Customers Enough
Guest post by Jay Baer (@jaybaer), author of the new book, Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers, Let‘s face it: choosing whether or not you hug your haters isn‘t about you knowing how to do so, it‘s about whether doing so aligns with the values of your business. The great paradox Every company says that customer satisfaction is their most important objective, yet their actions demonstrate otherwise. It‘s a paradox, but I find companies that…
The 80s Called, They Want Their Contact Center Back
Customer experience is meant to be evocative not reactive… We are entering an era of customer-centricity, mostly because we have to. But also, because employing a customer focus is the right thing to do. I guess businesses lost their way at some point. Blame quarterly earnings. Blame technology. Blame politics. But over the years, we overlooked the importance of the “C” and “R” and instead scaled the “M” in CRM. It didn’t hurt that we found ways to save time…
Only companies with impeccable customer service will survive the Zombie Apocalypse
Guest Post by Peter Shankman, Author of Zombie Loyalists: Using Great Service to Create Rabid Fans Imagine a world where decisions aren’t made based on anonymous reviews with no validation on sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor, but rather, through trusted sources in your own network. Imagine that world is automatic – If you want to take a vacation in Fiji, you don’t have to ask which of your friends have gone, you simply start searching for Fiji – on any…
Part 2: The Broken Link of Social Customer Service
Part Two. An edited excerpt of What’s the Future of Business, Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences In Part 1 of this series, The First Mile: The Broken Link of Social Media Customer Service, we reviewed the opportunities and challenges that face any business seeking to engage customers in social networks. To become customer-centric requires a culture that supports customer-centricity and an active investment in defining the first mile experience. The first mile of customer engagement is a post-commerce or…
The First Mile: The Broken Link of Social Media Customer Service
Part One. An edited excerpt of What’s the Future of Business, Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences For all that social media is doing to change business for the better, it’s not yet enough. Interview any executive and ask them what their priority business goals are for 2013 and I’m sure you’ll see some element of customer-centricity on the list. Yet the challenge that exists for any organization trying to get closer to customers lies in the definition of…
L.L. Bean: The importance of relationships in CRM and social in CSR
This is a story about the bond between a brand and a customer and the importance of relationships to do good things together… Guest post by Steven Gadecki, Director of Digital Marketing at SONY Pictures Television – Follow him on Twitter My story begins when my mother bought me an L.L.Bean backpack when I first started attending Broome Community College (BCC) in Binghamton, NY. Little did I know at the time that this backpack would become the catalyst for the…
Businesses not Making the Pivot from Lip Service to Social Customer Service [infographic]
Social media changes everything. Marketing, sales, customer service, they’re no longer departments, engagement is now a way of business. As the impact of social spreads through organizations, questions arise about the role social ultimately plays in customer service and overall customer experiences. For the past three years, good friend Brent Leary and the folks at Social Media Today have produced The Social Customer Engagement Index. It examines how companies are using social tools for customer service and, more importantly, how…
