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 Truth About Creating Customer Experiences
Bryan Kramer is just one of those people with whom you instantly bond. For those who don’t know him, he shot onto the social, digital, content marketing scene with fun and fervor. He’s highly regarded as a strategist, speaker and author. He’s also someone I think of as a good friend. Recently, I had the honor, and enjoyment, of shooting an episode of H2HChat (Human to Human) with Bryan and his super smart co-host Suzi McCarthy. The conversation was both…
The Embrace: Creating Experiences that Nurture Attention into Engagement
Attention is a currency. We spend it. We earn it. And, sometimes we waste it. Experience is something special. It’s all the rage at the moment, yet, we often talk about it as is if it’s a thing. But, as we know, deep down, the best things in life aren’t things, they’re experiences. One of things that makes it so hard to make experience a strategic and actionable part of our work is that the word “experience” means so many…
Customer Experience is the Sum of Emotional Reactions
As 2015 drew to a close, I flew to Düsseldorf from London to close out NEOCOM, an annual event for multichannel retail and commerce. There I spoke about “retail re-imagined,” redesigning the online and offline shopping experience based on the incredible technology and behavioral trends playing out now and over the next few years. Following the event, I met with the NEOCOM team to shoot a short three-minute video that I would love for you to see. Video Topics/Questions: –…
Here’s a Marketing Prediction That Serves More as a Clarion Call
Each year, my good friend Bryan Kramer assembles an incredible group of experts across several sectors to share their marketing predictions for the next year. The diversity of forecasts and observations is really worth exploring. I’ll share mine with you here… Quite honestly, we’ll see more of the same patterns we’ve seen in previous predictions…new platforms, new ways to engage, new data sources and tools to improve accuracy, metrics, frequency and reach. My prediction is more of a clarion call…
True Customer Centricity Requires the Merging of Marketing and IT
Guest post by Robert Tas (@TasRobert), SVP and CMO of Pegasystems. You see the headlines everywhere – 2016 will be the year of customer experience; marketers need to make customer experience count; millennials demand an authentic customer experience. The bottom line is the stakes have never been higher in today’s modern, connected world. Every second of the business-to-customer interaction represents a key moment of opportunity and truth, each step carrying the potential to make or break that relationship, and…
Marketing to Marketing to Reimagine Marketing
Guest post by Fred Studer (@fredstuder), Chief Marketing Officer at NetSuite Sometimes, in fact oftentimes, the most important audience for your message are the people who are already working for you. In an age of online surveys and instant feedback across social channels, articulating your message to the people who work in your company can often be neglected. In fact, if you haven’t convinced and energized your own people, you’re going to be hard pressed to convince the market. My…
Why Customer Experience is The Catalyst for Digital Transformation
As a digital analyst, I spend a lot of his time thinking about the future of customer experience. So much so that my next book attempts to rethink the term “experience,” X:The Experience of Business Meets Design. “X” explores experience architecture the various ways companies can design meaningful and shareable experiences in every moment of truth. I recently spent time with the team at VisionCritical as part of the prep for its their upcoming conference in Chicago, 2015 Vision Critical…
It’s About the Customer Experience; So, Why Is Your Brand Ignoring Customers?
Humans are emotional creatures and they want experiences that engage them as humans. They’re not eyeballs, impressions, views, likes, shares, clickthroughs, or conversions. A few weeks ago, I visited New York on a beautiful summer day to participate in an event that I would love to repeat everywhere around the world. Prophet, a global brand strategy firm that recently acquired Altimeter Group, hosted an intimate event to explore the new horizons of digital customer experience (DCX). I was invited…
When You Share Experiences You Help Strangers Make Decisions
Whether you realize it or not, when you share an experience you have, whether it’s through a post, review, video, image, rant, praise, etc., it helps a stranger make a decision about what to do next. Customers aren’t following the customer journey you designed because they’re too busy hacking it. No matter how much journey work you do, no matter how creative your marketing, no matter how responsive your website is, no matter how much technology you invest in, customers…
