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Ready to make your customers your priority? Here are five things to know, to build a company they’ll love. It takes effort to...
Welcome to TalkingCX, as we bring ChatGPT from OpenAI and Graham Clark, VP Market Development for McorpCX, together to discuss...
Companies are investing heavily in digital transformation, with a Research and Markets report projecting the global market to be...
The business world has aligned on the fact that customer experience improvement is one of the most important things any...
The digital transformation trends that could make all the difference in how your customers experience you. You’re almost...
Why resiliency, responsiveness and agility are more important than ever for leaders and the companies they work for
Customer feedback is essential for making informed decisions Customers are your best source of business and market insights. By...
Align and educate your people around a digital-first, customer-centric approach Whether it’s new technology, geopolitical unrest,...
Fixing CX Potholes and Using Roadmaps for Your CX Program: Insights from Forrester CX North America 2022 The presentations at...
Validations from the Field: “Smart Customers” are radically changing the game for the businesses that wish to serve them At...
Radically boost brand relevance while improving experience for your customers According to Salesforce’s 2020 State of the...
If your journey mapping efforts are falling short, odds are that one of these 4 gaps are to blame. Journey mapping is one of the...
Proactive customer engagement isn’t a one-time event Done right, Proactive Customer Engagement makes it easy for customers to...
Entrepreneurs and startups intuitively understand the need to connect their products and services to the needs of the...
In a post-COVID world, the future is full of obvious challenges and less obvious opportunities. In this fast-changing...
There’s not a lot of upbeat coverage in the media today. Business closures, social distancing woes, stock market gyrations — it...
Employee and workforce experience (EX for short) matters just as much as customer experience (CX). Unsurprisingly, the two are...
Things got really strange really fast, didn’t they? I’m sure that like me, most of you are still processing what all this means –...
Customer experience leaders are documented to have greater top- and bottom-line growth than those who haven’t made customer...
It’s not possible to sustain a disciplined CX mindset without clear guidelines Humans like rules — when they apply to someone...
Yup. It’s that “New Year’s Resolutions” time of year again. If this reminder makes your eyes roll, then my apologies – I get it....
Everybody needs a role model, right? Individuals succeed primarily because they pick someone they admire, follow their example,...
What exactly is a customer experience strategy? Spend any time online trying to answer this question and you’ll see how easy it...
In today’s digital-first-but-not-digital-only, customer-centric world, customer experience (CX) has quickly emerged as a critical...
The Eight Best Practices of Customer Experience Management Leaders As ever-greater numbers of organizations embrace the age of...
Customer experience design professionals have recognized the power of customer persona for years. Unlike customer or audience...
It’s human nature to fall in love with your solutions... it’s also one a common pitfall for business leaders, entrepreneurs and...
When we look at customer experience leaders today, it’s unsurprising there are a number of things they have in common. When...
Once you define your customer experience strategy and begin the journey down it, you'll likely find a tipping point where people,...
Hey, we get it – nobody wants to fail. But the hard truth is that failure is a fact of life. We try, get knocked down, and pick...
Customer journey mapping continues to gain both traction and increased relevance as organizations around the globe orient towards...
For any organization striving to significantly improve customer experience, they need a plan to do so. That’s because the ability...
There are myriad reasons why companies treat customers poorly. One of the most common, costly – and most easily resolvable – is a...
The New York Times ran a piece recently on the ways that CVS drugstores are using big data to revolutionize their business. The...
Yesterday’s customers were future-oriented. “When can you get this to me?” they asked. Prices were fixed, customers came to you,...
Most large companies (and many that are mid-size or even small) have been struggling to overcome customer service and data silos...
In last week's post, “How Customer Experience ‘Top Performers’ Get There: Outside Expertise,” we talked about the reasons why...
Do you think it’s possible for a company to do a good job meeting customer needs if they don’t try to understand what those needs...
For your customers and prospects, your customer relationship lifecycle is the basis for their experiential “journey” with your...
Understanding your customers and your costs at a granular level is key to better and more profitably serving them.
We know that customers are more demanding and have higher expectations than ever. And since most corporations are working hard to...
If you haven’t read the 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, I’d suggest you do. Author and 2002 Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman...
Customer journey mapping is, understandably, a pretty hot topic. Not just for customer experience professionals, but for all...
Customer experience pioneer and retail giant, Nordstrom, recently found itself in hot water over customer privacy. They’d been...
Every journey begins with a single step. When it comes to improving customer experience, the first step in your journey can be a...
In a company of scale, it’s easy to allow a discussion of touchpoints to descend into paralyzing complexity; we regularly work...
Knowing how to understand customers is key to creating a successful customer experience program. This lack of understanding is...
No matter what business you’re in, a growing percentage of your customers are nearly always connected, with instant access to...
How would you answer if every company you dealt with asked you this question: “Which is more important to you? A Personalized...
A few weeks back, CBS wrapped up another season of the show Undercover Boss. If you’re not familiar, the premise is that CEOs and...
Mind the Gap A customer experience “gap” occurs when the experience a customer has doesn’t align with the experience they...
Why strategic plan before you dive in to do the work? Strategic Planning brings multiple perspectives into focus with an eye on...
The rise of smart customers has influenced the very nature of the relationship between customers and the companies that wish to...
Make A ‘Simplification Promise’ Simple customer experiences are better customer experiences. Sounds logical, doesn’t it? After...
C-Suite execs share concerns across sectors, size and geographies. In the CX business, we talk to key executives literally every...
What every CIO must know to bridge the customer experience technology gap… A couple of weeks ago, we published a white paper...
What’s your strategy for business success? If, like Southwest and Costco, you're competing primarily on price—and have aligned...
The changing role of rebates in the era of the smart customer
Your customers crave relevancy. Business or consumer buyers, your customers are overloaded with messages on a daily (as well as...
Last Thursday morning, Bruce Kasanoff and I did a webinar for CustomerThink’s Thought Leadership Webinar series titled...
In an industry that’s growing as quickly and expanding in as many directions as customer experience (CX) is, it’s not at all...
Customer Experience Mapping – A first step to creating more positive customer experiences. In Proving ROI on Customer Experience...
Four “experience investment” lenses to help you plan, measure and improve interactions with your customers, and prove significant...
Customer Experience: The perfect framework to begin thinking about ways to plan, measure and improve customer interactions with...
I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast recently, titled “In Praise of Incrementalism.” It struck a chord with me on several...
There are many ways you can improve the customer experience, and drive value from it. But your people need to be moving in the...
According to PwC, more than half of consumers want to shop for healthcare...but their preferred method of doing so doesn’t exist...
In today’s “experience-based” market space, organizations should leverage research programs to move beyond data and information...
There’s little argument that customer experience is a pretty high priority for just about everyone. The reasons are myriad –...
Common advice for starting a customer experience transformation journey suggests executive support for the entire program must be...
Why you should care about Millennials (Hint: They’re not just consumers…) Generation Y. Digital Natives. The Net Generation....
Millennials don’t work at desks? Really? Here’s the premise. It appears that Marriott is in the process of redesigning their...
There’s little argument that customer experience is a pretty high priority for just about everyone. The reasons are myriad –...
Have you ever had a dismal customer experience and thought, "This Company has no clue what they're doing, do they?" Sadly, you’re...
Seven years ago, Domino’s Pizza was in the pits. Tasteless, unexciting food and an all-time low in its share price, the company...
Lego, maker of those beloved bricks, sent an unintended message to an important customer (and customer segment) this week: “Go...
Is your organization trying to improve the experience for all customers at all touchpoints? Though this is going to sound like a...
As executives, we all want to deliver the best experiences to our customers. While this is an intuitive response because we want...
Listening to your customers can (and should) inform the ways you design interactions with them. My son – a 23 year-old...
No pain, no gain. We’ve all heard this gem. Typically linked to the concept of working out ‘till it hurts before you get any...
Car dealerships have long had a reputation for anticompetitive tactics and influential lobbyists. So it’s no surprise that Dealer...
Today, virtually every industry is ripe for disruption. The $3.7 trillion insurance industry is no exception. In many ways a...
When a pre-revenue company with about a dozen employees gets a $1 billion Silicon Valley payday, tongues wag. Did Facebook pay...
A Month of Tweets You May Have Missed What is innovative customer experience? Experiences that make every interaction totally...
What do your customers want to know? What products, services or experiences will entrance them? What services might our...
Earning customer trust is a business imperative It’s pretty much settled science that consistently great customer experiences...
I don’t know what Albert Einstein was thinking of when he said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything...
What happens when you make the shift to become truly customer-centric? We’ve identified seven implications you can expect during...
Touchpoints are increasingly interactive (and smarter). As with the many disruptive technological innovations that came before,...
If you aren’t a gamer, then there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Razer. Until last weekend, the company was mostly known...
When it comes to customer experience insights, the phrase “outside-in” – in reference to getting the customers’ view of the...
The 2013 holiday season sported some nasty surprises for package delivery and logistics leader UPS. Summarized neatly in a Forbes...
Why is customer experience improvement such a hot topic? Because it significantly drives revenue. Directly tied to increased...
While there are still some B2B executives who dismiss social media as an effective tool for engaging key audiences, the truth is...
I recently watched a pretty remarkable video on Al Jazeera about Otis Johnson, a 69-year-old man released from prison in August...
The role of emotions will become clearer as brands recognize the importance of how customers “feel” about customer experience. We...
Three ways companies with best customer experience got there—and how they stay ahead of the pack. Sometimes, the ability to...
Recognizing that your customer experience is an integral aspect of brand isn’t a new notion. For years, companies ranging from...
Revolutionary at the time, late 2011 saw Apple’s Siri personal assistant introduced as an integral part of the iPhone 4s. I...
Key to the successful delivery of brand experience is your ability to drive ownership and delivery of your brand from the inside...
Earn Customer Trust It’s difficult enough that companies are losing influence with their digitally-enabled smart customers. Even...
Everyone is talking about customer experience. What it is, why it’s important, how to deliver and how to improve it. Everyone, it...
Oh, the irony - I love it when material for a speech just lands in my lap. I was at NextBank USA in New York this week,...
Most companies we work with have some sort of performance gap. Some are known and easier to see, others less obvious. Some big,...
Mobile-led, digitally-driven disruption creates massive opportunity to raise the bar on customer experience – and service. We’re...
Remember “The Dress that broke the internet”? Back when my son was 23, he showed me a picture on his phone and asked me what I...
Strolling through the ever-expanding body of published work on customer experience, I’ve recently come across a few articles that...
Do you ‘listen’ to what your customers want or need? Sorry. But it’s gotta be said. Customer success journey maps require that...
If delight doesn’t lead to loyalty, what does?
Today, even the youngest, most modest consumers have broadband Internet access, carrying powerful, interconnected mobile devices...
Conventional wisdom says not just “yeah” but “hell, yeah.” That said, an issue with the “conventional wisdom” is that people...
A Very Tasty Focus Group This week, I – along with another 100 or so people – paid Dinner Lab $70 each to be part of a focus...
With Thanksgiving turkey a distant memory - replaced by omnipresent holiday Muzak, elves and the tinsel-laden decorations in...
We all know (don’t we?) that digital customer experience is being driven by the many disruptive forces changing the face of the...
Last week, SEC filings revealed that Ron Johnson, chief executive officer of JC Penney, saw his 2012 compensation fall 97...
The first step in improving customer understanding is listening – to their opinions, concerns, perceptions, objectives and...
When “customer experience” can mean just about anything...how do you define it for your needs? Given the prevalence of “customer...
Using (and protecting) Data for Good On the drive to work yesterday, I heard a now-familiar story on the news: Home Depot, it...
When it comes to customer experience, my personal mission has always been crystal clear: help companies act more intelligently....
Whatcha gonna do when the flu comes for you? You’re sick in bed, feeling like crap (headache, aches and pains). You lack the...
For the last several years, improving customer experience has been rightfully viewed as one of the most important things any...
Customer Experience Journey Mapping Many of us are familiar with Gartner’s “hypecycle,” representing the maturity, adoption and...
Most executives know the importance of becoming more customer-centric. They’re also aware of the increased significance of...
For many organizations, an understanding of where customer interactions occur is stuck inside functional or organizational silos....
Let’s get right to it. For most companies, delivering a poor customer experience translates directly to lost customers and lost...
Are your people truly committed to customer experience? Or just following orders? As organizations prioritize customer...
Meet Sasha “New MBA” Cruz. She’s 26 years old, a recent graduate from a top MBA program and about to move across the country for...
The majority of us (I hope) understand the importance of improving customer experience. Without our customers, we couldn’t even...
The competitive landscape is changing dramatically, as companies realize that customers really are the center of their universe....
Don’t (just) listen to us on this; listen to your customers. As customer experience experts, we look at our client organizations...
Customer Experience Innovation? (You Keep Using That Word…) While the word “Innovation” is thrown around an awful lot in the...
Where friction in your customer experience occurs (and why you should care)
With much of the online conversation taking place around customer experience innovation, it almost feels like everyone is focused...
This is a short tale of two recent service experiences with wildly differing results. So you know, my goal isn’t to bash Comcast...
A few years ago, Bain and Company published the results of a survey in conducted across a variety of industries. Their report...
“So tell us, how did that make you feel? We care. Really, we do.” While rarely asked quite that way, virtually all customer...
Given the prevalence of “customer experience” as a desired competitive differentiator, business discipline, and value driver,...
What if you were able to know, with near certainty, that your customer would prefer one specific product over another – and that...
If CRM is your company’s “solution” for improving customer experience, you’re making a big (and shockingly common) mistake. Why?...
Do you want to be the kind of company that customers love? The truth is, for many companies the answer is “no.” If you work for...
Today, there are three basic ways to get food prepared by others. One, go to a restaurant. Sit, order and eat. Two, call ahead...
Listen, Act, Co-Create, Repeat In a classic article from 1986 entitled “What Gets Measured Gets Done,” Tom Peters says: “In the...
There’s little debate on the critical nature of getting digital customer experience right. There isn’t a customer experience...
Over the last few years, the case for improving customer experience has been gaining significant traction in executive suites...
Customer experience is the result of a series of interactions between your company and those you serve. These interactions–the...
As you’re likely aware, the discipline of customer experience requires that organizations look at what it’s like to do business...
Why marketing (and Sales, Operations and Support…) can have a hard time seeing the “big picture.” Managing the customer...
At heart, customer experience improvement is all about finding those places in the experience where pain exists, and where...
We made our case for benchmarking and covered the different things that your organization can benchmark against in Part 1 of this...
Why benchmark? And what should you benchmark against? We were asked an interesting question during a new business pitch the other...
We spend a lot of time talking about the value of things like customer centricity, transparency and the importance of designing...
Customer Experience Omnichannel: Offering customers seamless, consistent, omnichannel experiences at all customer journey stages...
From dorm room start-ups to the Fortune 500, there’s a common thread among the most successful businesses: give your customers...
Every time your company or your brand interacts with a customer—online and off, in-person or not, between or about your...
For anyone who’s involved in customer experience management, brand research and consulting projects and/or other complex, cross...
Any technology consumer (actually, businesses too) knows the answer to this question: Who delivers a better customer...
Either Mr. Bezos and his team of strategists read our book (did you get the copy we sent you, Jeff?) and/or Bruce Kasanoff and I...
Email messages, social media, targeted ads, mobile apps, and SMS all make it possible for companies to stay in contact with...
Every company is a software company. Customer experience is a well-recognized pivot point that more and more organizations rely...
The dark is not a comfortable place for a customer to be. It’s been a stressful week. We’re selling a vacation house on one lake,...
A few years ago, I wrote Digital Experience: The New Heart Of Customer Engagement that makes the point that digital experience...
Designing Your World Around Your Customers’ Experiences Learning how to be more customer-centric sure sounds good. But if you’re...
It’s a given that customer expectations have never been greater. Increasing recognition of this reality is a major driver of the...
Books Were Never the Endgame Since its founding 28 years ago, Amazon has reached near mythic status for its superior service and...
If your organization has done any thinking about customer centricity, you’ve likely read buckets about the importance of enabling...
A couple of years ago I wrote an article titled “The Role Of Brand In Customer Experience.” In it, I repeat something that’s been...
What do we want? Sugar! When do we want it? Now! Earlier this year, Los Angeles-based cupcake bakery Sprinkles launched the...
Where might you end up if you set out to deliver an immersive, in-store shopping experience for cross-channel, fashion-obsessed...
Anyone who serves customers recognizes that improving their experience with you is the key to drawing them closer. That can’t be...
Most companies at least try to serve customers well, even if some don’t succeed. But even the best-intentioned organizations can...
Great customer experience doesn’t just happen. It is planned, designed and mindfully delivered. That’s because there is no ‘one...
Ten Steps In Increase Marketing Effectiveness (Whether it's an Economic Downturn Or Not!)
