Customer experience is the new battleground for brands. How company’s deliver CX is either a competitive advantage or disadvantage. But, CX is so much more than how we think and talk about it, how we plan for and imagine its future, and how we invest in and support it. Perhaps it’s in how we frame it. We tend to observe it as mission critical, but we organize around it through distributed strategies across the organization. We enable disparate versions of…
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…
Companies Profit When Customers Suffer
You’ve heard it a million times, a happy customer tells a couple of people and an unhappy customer tells everyone. Yet to this day, executives tend to run business strategy with an emphasis on transactions over experiences. More so, business value is expressed in short-term performance metrics and reports to an audience of shareholders and stakeholders over the very people who keep them in business…your customers. It’s all a bit absurd when you think about it. I know, I know…it’s…
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…
Season 2 Finale: How Yamaha invests in new customer experiences
This is it…the Season Finale! And, what a way to end Season 2 of (R)evolution…. In this episode, Yamaha shares what is by far the most expansive view of disruptive technology’s impact on business infrastructure and culture on the show to date. What you’ll see is a genuine discussion with Jeff Hawley and Rick Williams of Yamaha explore how an already successful business is exploring new opportunities to better define the customer experience before, during and after transactions. It comes down…
Facebook and the Future of User Generated Governance
Shot at Web 2.0 Summit 2008 Facebook is learning to listen. In the middle of February 2009, the company was yet again a “Beacon” for bad PR as it introduced an updated Terms of Service (Tos) for its entire community of users. We the people responded with defiance and vigor and the company retracted its new language, reverted to the previous ToS, and listened to the valuable feedback that poured in from the community. By all accounts, this was the…