Blog Posts: Our Latest Thinking

Articles

Journey Orchestration Demystified: An interview with Graham Clark and ChatGPT

Welcome to TalkingCX, as we bring ChatGPT from OpenAI and Graham Clark, VP Market Development for McorpCX, together to discuss the exciting world of experience management... Read More

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The Importance of Human-Centric Design in Digital Transformation

Companies are investing heavily in digital transformation, with a Research and Markets report projecting the global market to be just over $1 trillion USD by 2025. Why? The... Read More

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6 Ways Business and IT Can Partner to Drive Next-Level Experiences

The business world has aligned on the fact that customer experience improvement is one of the most important things any organization can do to better compete today and... Read More

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Seven Top Digital Customer Experience Trends for the Next Five Years

The digital transformation trends that could make all the difference in how your customers experience you. You’re almost certainly hearing about digital transformation and... Read More

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5 Ways To Build A Company Your Customers Love

Ready to make your customers your priority? Here are five things to know, to build a company they’ll love. It takes effort to build a company that customers will love. But... Read More

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Managing Customer Experience Means Managing for Change

Why resiliency, responsiveness and agility are more important than ever for leaders and the companies they work for   Read More

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Listening to Customers is Your Best Long-Term CX Strategy

Customer feedback is essential for making informed decisions Customers are your best source of business and market insights. By listening to them, you can learn what they... Read More

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Re-skill, Up-Skill and Transform Your Workforce

Align and educate your people around a digital-first, customer-centric approach Whether it’s new technology, geopolitical unrest, a competitive threat or, oh, let’s say… a... Read More

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6 Insights and 2 Themes to Help You on Your Customer Experience Journey

Fixing CX Potholes and Using Roadmaps for Your CX Program: Insights from Forrester CX North America 2022 The presentations at Forrester CX North America 2022, which took... Read More

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How Digital Experience Practitioners Increase ROI through Customer Insights

Validations from the Field: “Smart Customers” are radically changing the game for the businesses that wish to serve them At DigitalWorld 22 in Boston, McorpCX ran an... Read More

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Hyper-Personalization: The Future of Customer Experience?

Radically boost brand relevance while improving experience for your customers According to Salesforce’s 2020 State of the Connected Customer report, nearly 70 percent of... Read More

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The 4 Most Common Journey Mapping Activation Gaps

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 core tools in the customer experience... Read More

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6 Ways You Can Drive Proactive Customer Engagement—And Why You Should

Proactive customer engagement isn’t a one-time event Done right, Proactive Customer Engagement makes it easy for customers to engage with your brand, and it improves customer... Read More

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Entrepreneurship 101 for Customer-Centric Leaders and Those Who Want to Be

Entrepreneurs and startups intuitively understand the need to connect their products and services to the needs of the market—because if you haven't identified a specific need... Read More

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The Upside Of Customer Experience Improvement In A Down Economy

  There’s not a lot of upbeat coverage in the media today. Business closures, social distancing woes, stock market gyrations — it feels like so much is out of our control.... Read More

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5 Customer Experience Trends That Won’t Change (And Will Likely Accelerate…)

  In a post-COVID world, the future is full of obvious challenges and less obvious opportunities. In this fast-changing environment, most business executives recognize the... Read More

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Why Invest In Employee Experience? Six (Proven) Reasons

Employee and workforce experience (EX for short) matters just as much as customer experience (CX). Unsurprisingly, the two are inextricably linked: Good EX consistently leads... Read More

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Show, Know, and Grow: 3 Things to Do Now in the COVID-19 Era

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 – and how COVID-19 may affect you, your... Read More

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14 Ways To Enable Digital Customer Experience Transformation

Customer experience leaders are documented to have greater top- and bottom-line growth than those who haven’t made customer experience transformation a priority. For those... Read More

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The 6 CX Rules Banking Leaders Follow That Any Business Can Learn From

No matter who you are or what your financial needs are—consumers and businesses alike—you need an institution to help you manage your money. From national, regional, and... Read More

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Proper CX Governance: Eating Your Customer Experience Vegetables

It’s not possible to sustain a disciplined CX mindset without clear guidelines Humans like rules — when they apply to someone else. But sometimes they’re necessary for us... Read More

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Why Employees Love (And Even Beg) to Work for These 4 CX Leaders

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. Too many choices, not enough time. Read More

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The CX Innovator’s Honor Roll: The Companies That Inspire CX Pros

Everybody needs a role model, right? Individuals succeed primarily because they pick someone they admire, follow their example, and eventually become role models themselves. Read More

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How to Define Your CX Strategy and Link it to Execution

What exactly is a customer experience strategy? Spend any time online trying to answer this question and you’ll see how easy it can be to become overwhelmed with well-meaning... Read More

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Customer Experience Analytics and Tracking: CX Metrics 101

In today’s digital-first-but-not-digital-only, customer-centric world, customer experience (CX) has quickly emerged as a critical differentiator for 9 out of 10 executives.... Read More

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Customer Experience Management: 8 Best Practices of CXM Leaders

The Eight Best Practices of Customer Experience Management Leaders As ever-greater numbers of organizations embrace the age of the smart customer, you might expect Customer... Read More

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How “3-Dimensional” Customer Personas Radically Improve CX Design

Customer experience design professionals have recognized the power of customer persona for years. Unlike customer or audience segments—used primarily for marketing, sales... Read More

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Fall in Love With Your Customers’ Pain Points - Not With Your Solutions

It’s human nature to fall in love with your solutions... it’s also one a common pitfall for business leaders, entrepreneurs and those responsible for improving customer... Read More

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Successful Customer Experience: 3 Critical Things CX Leaders Get Right

When we look at customer experience leaders today, it’s unsurprising there are a number of things they have in common. When looked at from a macro level, we see that many of... Read More

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4 Ways CX Leaders Can Improve Their Customer Experience Strategy

Once you define your customer experience strategy and begin the journey down it, you'll likely find a tipping point where people, data, technology and processes start to... Read More

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Failing Your Customers Can Help You Serve Them Better

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 ourselves up to try again. We hold the ‘dust... Read More

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The Eye-Popping ROI Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping continues to gain both traction and increased relevance as organizations around the globe orient towards a more customer-centric way of doing... Read More

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6 Common Customer Experience Strategy Pitfalls

For any organization striving to significantly improve customer experience, they need a plan to do so. That’s because the ability to design and deliver great customer... Read More

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How Best-In-Class CX Leaders Use the Customer Experience Value Chain

For the last several years, improving customer experience has been rightfully viewed as one of the most important things any organization can do to drive value. In fact, the... Read More

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How Domino’s Disrupted the Delivery Game to Lead in Customer Delight

Seven years ago, Domino’s Pizza was in the pits. Tasteless, unexciting food and an all-time low in its share price, the company also ranked last in a 2009 survey of consumer... Read More

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Where a Digital Customer Experience Fails: When It’s Not Designed…

With Thanksgiving turkey a distant memory - replaced by omnipresent holiday Muzak, elves and the tinsel-laden decorations in nearly every retail storefront – the holiday... Read More

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Customer Experience Tips: Learn to Praise Incrementalism

I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast recently, titled “In Praise of Incrementalism.” It struck a chord with me on several different levels, not least of which is the... Read More

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3 Ways Your Customers Might Hate You (and You May Not Know It)

Most companies at least try to serve customers well, even if some don’t succeed. But even the best-intentioned organizations can create problems for their customers, often... Read More

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8 Customer Service Strategies You Can Steal from Amazon

Books Were Never the Endgame Since its founding 28 years ago, Amazon has reached near mythic status for its superior service and customer service strategy. Read More

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Understanding the ROI of Customer Experience Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is, understandably, a pretty hot topic. Not just for customer experience professionals, but for all businesses. It’s easy to see why. As a proven... Read More

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Customer Experience Journey Mapping Hypecycle

Customer Experience Journey MappingMany of us are familiar with Gartner’s “hypecycle,” representing the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies. At... Read More

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Six Ways to Drive a Radically Better Customer Experience

At heart, customer experience improvement is all about finding those places in the experience where pain exists, and where customers feel that their expectations aren’t met.... Read More

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Case Study: Delta Airlines – When Digital Customer Experience Goes Bad

There’s little debate on the critical nature of getting digital customer experience right. There isn’t a customer experience professional, IT leader or shareholder-focused... Read More

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Five Questions Customer Experience Professionals Are Asking Today

Everyone is talking about customer experience. What it is, why it’s important, how to deliver and how to improve it. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion. Which is why I... Read More

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What You Should Include In Your Customer Loyalty and Retention Program

We know that customers are more demanding and have higher expectations than ever. And since most corporations are working hard to better serve these smart customers, it’s no... Read More

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Bad B2B Experience? The “Anti-Customer” Model

We spend a lot of time talking about the value of things like customer centricity, transparency and the importance of designing and consistently delivering great customer... Read More

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Implications of a Customer-Centric Strategy: 7 Takeaways

What happens when you make the shift to become truly customer-centric? We’ve identified seven implications you can expect during the transition. Read More

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Avoiding the Omnichannel Gap

Customer Experience Omnichannel: Offering customers seamless, consistent, omnichannel experiences at all customer journey stages is essentially table stakes. “Omnichannel” is... Read More

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Improving Patient Experience: 5 Disruptive CX Examples

According to PwC, more than half of consumers want to shop for healthcare...but their preferred method of doing so doesn’t exist yet. In an age where most people have “always... Read More

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Should Your CIO Drive CX?

What every CIO must know to bridge the customer experience technology gap… A couple of weeks ago, we published a white paper titled "What Every CIO Must Know to Bridge the... Read More

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Great Customer Experience? Good. Now, Keep It That Way.

Three ways companies with best customer experience got there—and how they stay ahead of the pack. Sometimes, the ability to deliver a great customer experience (CX) happens... Read More

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How Understanding Cross-Org Silos Leads to Better Customer Experiences

Why marketing (and Sales, Operations and Support…) can have a hard time seeing the “big picture.” Managing the customer experience is often thought of as the domain of those... Read More

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Customer Experience Improvement: 7 Best Practices

With much of the online conversation taking place around customer experience innovation, it almost feels like everyone is focused on customer experience as a way to 'make a... Read More

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Defining Customer Experience

When “customer experience” can mean just about anything...how do you define it for your needs? Given the prevalence of “customer experience” as a desired competitive... Read More

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What Customer Experience Does – And Doesn’t – Mean

Given the prevalence of “customer experience” as a desired competitive differentiator, business discipline, and value driver, you’d think it would be easy to define – and... Read More

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Insurance Customer Experience Innovation: 5 Disruptive Examples

Today, virtually every industry is ripe for disruption. The $3.7 trillion insurance industry is no exception. In many ways a perceptually commoditized business, those... Read More

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3 Things You Must Do in Order to Deliver a Better Customer Experience

Every journey begins with a single step. When it comes to improving customer experience, the first step in your journey can be a simple one. Just ask yourself: “How can we... Read More

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Your CX Management Model Requires Commitment, Not Compliance

Are your people truly committed to customer experience? Or just following orders? As organizations prioritize customer experience, they recognize the need to drive a shift... Read More

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5 Customer Data Lessons You Can’t Ignore

Anyone who serves customers recognizes that improving their experience with you is the key to drawing them closer. That can’t be done in a vacuum; it requires a true... Read More

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Millennial CX Gone Wild: The Marriott Room Design Edition

Millennials don’t work at desks? Really? Here’s the premise. It appears that Marriott is in the process of redesigning their hotel rooms for a millennial business traveler... Read More

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The False Tradeoff: Personalized Customer Experience vs. Privacy

How would you answer if every company you dealt with asked you this question: “Which is more important to you? A Personalized customer experience, or your privacy?” If you’re... Read More

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How 44 Years in Prison Can Influence Customer Experience Design

I recently watched a pretty remarkable video on Al Jazeera about Otis Johnson, a 69-year-old man released from prison in August 2014. Having served 44 years behind bars for... Read More

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9 Customer Experience Best Practices From Leading Champions

It’s a given that customer expectations have never been greater. Increasing recognition of this reality is a major driver of the increasing importance of customer experience... Read More

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Bringing Customer Insights Into Customer Journey Maps and Personas

As you’re likely aware, the discipline of customer experience requires that organizations look at what it’s like to do business with themselves from “the outside in.” In... Read More

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Customer Experience Tips and Hacks: Thanks for the call, Kyle…

This is a short tale of two recent service experiences with wildly differing results. So you know, my goal isn’t to bash Comcast – it’s just that they continue to provide... Read More

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Customer Experience Persona Power + 5 Success Factors

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 a new position in her high-tech company. And... Read More

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Don’t Forget the Customer in Customer Success Journey Map

Do you ‘listen’ to what your customers want or need? Sorry. But it’s gotta be said. Customer success journey maps require that you actually bring the customer perspective... Read More

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Improving Customer Experience in Healthcare: What CX Leaders Can Learn

Understanding your customers and your costs at a granular level is key to better and more profitably serving them. Read More

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Mobile Customer Experience Is a Must. Make Sure You Plan Accordingly

Don’t (just) listen to us on this; listen to your customers. As customer experience experts, we look at our client organizations from the outside in, through the eyes of... Read More

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A Reflection on Fear in the Customer Experience Roadmap

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, in hopes of buying one on another lake. A... Read More

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Align Business and IT to Create a Better Customer Experience

Every company is a software company. Customer experience is a well-recognized pivot point that more and more organizations rely on as a competitive differentiator and... Read More

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Subway Clocks and Customer Experience

Mind the Gap A customer experience “gap” occurs when the experience a customer has doesn’t align with the experience they expected to have. We call the space between... Read More

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Hard Facts: Understanding the Impact of Emotion on Customer Experience

The role of emotions will become clearer as brands recognize the importance of how customers “feel” about customer experience. We humans are not nearly as rational as we’d... Read More

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It Hurts So Good: Embrace Customer Pain Points to Improve Experience

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 benefit, there is some truth to this. At least I... Read More

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Innovate by Understanding Customer Needs

What do your customers want to know? What products, services or experiences will entrance them? What services might our competitors bring to our industry - and can we get... Read More

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Embracing Crowd-Powered Customer Service

Mobile-led, digitally-driven disruption creates massive opportunity to raise the bar on customer experience – and service. We’re all aware of the increasing influence of... Read More

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Five Lessons for CX Execs From The Port Authority of NY&NJ and Uber.

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, delivering a Thursday morning keynote on removing... Read More

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Don’t Delight Your Customers. (?!)

If delight doesn’t lead to loyalty, what does? Read More

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In Customer Experience We Trust

Earning customer trust is a business imperative It’s pretty much settled science that consistently great customer experiences drive greater customer loyalty. It’s why... Read More

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Millennials, Myths, the Digital Experience Divide

Why you should care about Millennials (Hint: They’re not just consumers…) Generation Y. Digital Natives. The Net Generation. Whatever you call the generation that follows Gen... Read More

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It’s Called CUSTOMER Experience Design for a Reason

Listening to your customers can (and should) inform the ways you design interactions with them. My son – a 23 year-old Millennial, budding commercial real estate broker and... Read More

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Walgreens Engages TaskRabbit to Deliver Innovative Customer Service

Whatcha gonna do when the flu comes for you? You’re sick in bed, feeling like crap (headache, aches and pains). You lack the energy to get up and make yourself a cup of... Read More

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Rebates and Their Impact on the Retail Customer Experience

The changing role of rebates in the era of the smart customer Read More

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The Politics of Customer Experience Management

There are many ways you can improve the customer experience, and drive value from it. But your people need to be moving in the same direction to do so. Customer experience is... Read More

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Improve Customer Experience and Satisfaction by Reducing Friction

Where friction in your customer experience occurs (and why you should care) Read More

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“The Dress” and Customer Experience: Perception = Reality.

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 thought was an odd question: “Dad, what color... Read More

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Is Apple Losing Its Luster? Microsoft CX Comes from Behind to Delight

Any technology consumer (actually, businesses too) knows the answer to this question: Who delivers a better customer experience–Apple or Microsoft? Read More

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Creating a Customer-Centric Culture: A Model Employee Handbook

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 one of these companies (you know if you do…)... Read More

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Need a Customer Experience Coach?

There’s little argument that customer experience is a pretty high priority for just about everyone. The reasons are myriad – competitive differentiation, increased customer... Read More

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How Delivering an Excellent Customer Experience Led UPS Stock to Crash

The 2013 holiday season sported some nasty surprises for package delivery and logistics leader UPS. Summarized neatly in a Forbes article by contributor David Shaywitz and... Read More

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5 Best Practices for Building an Effective Customer Experience Program

In an industry that’s growing as quickly and expanding in as many directions as customer experience (CX) is, it’s not at all surprising to see a significant amount of... Read More

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The Future of Customer Experience Is Now: Teach Your Company to Talk

Revolutionary at the time, late 2011 saw Apple’s Siri personal assistant introduced as an integral part of the iPhone 4s. I (along with many, many others) was thrilled with... Read More

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What Is Innovative Customer Experience?

A Month of Tweets You May Have Missed What is innovative customer experience? Experiences that make every interaction totally natural, useful, easy and seamless. Experiences... Read More

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The Customer Experience Gap—Are You Clueless, or Clued In?

A few years ago, Bain and Company published the results of a survey in conducted across a variety of industries. Their report illustrates a classic (and massive) customer... Read More

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CX Innovation? I do not think it means what you think it means…

Customer Experience Innovation? (You Keep Using That Word…) While the word “Innovation” is thrown around an awful lot in the business world, I do wonder how often it’s used... Read More

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Designing a Voice-of-the-Customer Program: Understanding Your Customer

The first step in improving customer understanding is listening – to their opinions, concerns, perceptions, objectives and expectations. Yet while most organizations... Read More

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How Dinner Lab Brings Customers Into the Experience Design Process

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 group. And we enjoyed it. If you’ve not heard of... Read More

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Dear Home Depot (and Target and eBay and…): Can You Please Protect Our Data?

Using (and protecting) Data for Good On the drive to work yesterday, I heard a now-familiar story on the news: Home Depot, it seems, it has been the subject of a “massive”... Read More

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Getting Your CX to Deliver on Your Brand Promise: An Action List

Recognizing that your customer experience is an integral aspect of brand isn’t a new notion. For years, companies ranging from Ritz Carlton and Starbucks to USAA and Costco... Read More

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Customer Experience and Big Data (5 Ways to Leverage Your Information)

What if you were able to know, with near certainty, that your customer would prefer one specific product over another – and that her chances of purchasing it are 84% higher... Read More

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Anticipating Your Customers' Needs, Amazon (and Smart Customers) Style

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 were looking around the same corners Amazon... Read More

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23 Ways to Amaze and Delight Your Customers

Great customer experience doesn’t just happen. It is planned, designed and mindfully delivered. That’s because there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to customer... Read More

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Why Silos Suck: Break Down Organizational Barriers for Better CX

Most large companies (and many that are mid-size or even small) have been struggling to overcome customer service and data silos for decades. Read More

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8 Ways Customer-Centric Organizations Get Closer to Their Customers

If your organization has done any thinking about customer centricity, you’ve likely read buckets about the importance of enabling strategies and tactics based on a deep... Read More

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Customer Insights in a Day: ‘Voice of the Business’ Journey Mapping

For many organizations, an understanding of where customer interactions occur is stuck inside functional or organizational silos. As a result, it's difficult to see how... Read More

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How to Find—and Close—Vision, Culture, and Experience Gaps

Most companies we work with have some sort of performance gap. Some are known and easier to see, others less obvious. Some big, some small. All–when identified and... Read More

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How Do You Ask Your Customer’s Opinion in a Way They’ll Give It?

When it comes to customer experience insights, the phrase “outside-in” – in reference to getting the customers’ view of the experience they’re having (or wish they were... Read More

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Customer Experience Is Emotional? Oh, Yes. Always Has Been, Always Will Be.

“So tell us, how did that make you feel? We care. Really, we do.” While rarely asked quite that way, virtually all customer experience research boils down to a need to... Read More

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5 Things You Need to Know If You Want to Deliver on Your Brand Promise

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 at the core of our customer experience... Read More

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Focus on Your Touchpoints, But Don't Miss the Whole Customer Journey

Strolling through the ever-expanding body of published work on customer experience, I’ve recently come across a few articles that appear to be making a case for not measuring... Read More

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The Case for Improving Employee Experience: Love and Money

Over the last few years, the case for improving customer experience has been gaining significant traction in executive suites around the world. After all, companies that... Read More

Articles

Simplicity-Minded Customer Experience

Make A ‘Simplification Promise’ Simple customer experiences are better customer experiences. Sounds logical, doesn’t it? After all, what company would set out to purposefully... Read More

Articles

Might You Need a Customer Experience Coach?

There’s little argument that customer experience is a pretty high priority for just about everyone. The reasons are myriad – competitive differentiation, increased customer... Read More

Articles

To Improve Customer Experience, Measure What Matters

I don’t know what Albert Einstein was thinking of when he said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” But one of the... Read More

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5 Customer Experience Lessons from the Interactive Mirror

Where might you end up if you set out to deliver an immersive, in-store shopping experience for cross-channel, fashion-obsessed and casual shoppers? By crossing the... Read More

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Smart Customers Demand Smart Customer Service

The rise of smart customers has influenced the very nature of the relationship between customers and the companies that wish to serve them. From customer experience and... Read More

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Understanding The Role of Empathy in Customer Experience

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 is known worldwide for his work on the... Read More

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Just How High Is the Price for Delivering a Poor Customer Experience?

As executives, we all want to deliver the best experiences to our customers. While this is an intuitive response because we want customers to feel good about interacting with... Read More

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Relevance (Not Just Orange) Is the New Black

Your customers crave relevancy. Business or consumer buyers, your customers are overloaded with messages on a daily (as well as an hourly, even minute-by-minute) basis. The... Read More

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In a Connected World, Touchpoints Need More than a Fresh Coat of Paint

Email messages, social media, targeted ads, mobile apps, and SMS all make it possible for companies to stay in contact with customers at any time, in any place. But it’s all... Read More

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CX: Why Driving Authentic Connections Is Now Part of the Marketing Mix

The majority of us (I hope) understand the importance of improving customer experience. Without our customers, we couldn’t even be in business. They’re central to everything... Read More

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Making Lemonade: Learning From Sour Customer Experiences

Have you ever had a dismal customer experience and thought, "This Company has no clue what they're doing, do they?" Sadly, you’re not alone—as a customer, or (if the shoe... Read More

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Confessions of a Former Pizza Boy: Sometimes, Experiences Don't Need to Be “Improved”

Today, there are three basic ways to get food prepared by others. One, go to a restaurant. Sit, order and eat. Two, call ahead for takeout. Three, call and have it delivered.... Read More

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For Data-Driven Insights, Marketers Flunk the Customer-Centricity Test

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 are? Of course not. Yet marketers at the... Read More

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Lego Missteps, Leaving Adult Fan’s Experience Out In The Cold

Lego, maker of those beloved bricks, sent an unintended message to an important customer (and customer segment) this week: “Go away.” Read More

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Understanding Your Customers Is Key: 5 Segmentation Lessons from CVS

The New York Times ran a piece recently on the ways that CVS drugstores are using big data to revolutionize their business. The context of big data is an interesting read in... Read More

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Is Tesla’s Customer Experience Driving Car Dealers Over the Edge?

Car dealerships have long had a reputation for anticompetitive tactics and influential lobbyists. So it’s no surprise that Dealer Associations nationwide have taken up arms... Read More

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CRM Systems Don’t Capture Customer Experience: Just Ask Oracle

If CRM is your company’s “solution” for improving customer experience, you’re making a big (and shockingly common) mistake. Why? Because CRM systems look at the world from... Read More

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The Dogfood Diet: Three Easy Steps to a Leaner Customer Experience

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 other leaders of large corporations—e.g.,... Read More

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Secrets of Providing Kick-Ass Customer Experience for Low-Cost Leaders

What’s your strategy for business success? If, like Southwest and Costco, you're competing primarily on price—and have aligned this with your customer experience... Read More

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A Digital Customer Experience Case Study: Sephora’s Supremacy

A few years ago, I wrote Digital Experience: The New Heart Of Customer Engagement that makes the point that digital experience strategy isn’t an IT-driven initiative...it’s a... Read More

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Dark Patterns: the Dark Side of the Digital Customer Experience

When it comes to customer experience, my personal mission has always been crystal clear: help companies act more intelligently. Smart companies leverage disruptive... Read More

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Big Retailer Plays with Big Data and Narrowly Avoids Getting Bit

Customer experience pioneer and retail giant, Nordstrom, recently found itself in hot water over customer privacy. They’d been operating a pilot program in the Dallas-Fort... Read More

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Do Happier Employees Really Mean Happier Customers?

Conventional wisdom says not just “yeah” but “hell, yeah.” That said, an issue with the “conventional wisdom” is that people rarely question it. And since this is a question... Read More

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The Secrets To Amazon’s Wall St.-Defying Customer Experience Strategy

Earlier this month, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos delivered his annual letter to shareholders. And what a letter it was. Read More

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How One Growing Company Impressed 559,861 People Last Weekend

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 for making high-performance peripherals for... Read More

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Did Poor Customer Experience Get Ron Johnson Fired?

Last week, SEC filings revealed that Ron Johnson, chief executive officer of JC Penney, saw his 2012 compensation fall 97 percent—from $53.3 million in 2011 to $1.89 million... Read More

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Ask, Listen, and Act: New Rules for Voice-of-the-Customer Research

From dorm room start-ups to the Fortune 500, there’s a common thread among the most successful businesses: give your customers what they want, when and how they want it. In... Read More

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Five Ways to Earn Customer Trust

Earn Customer Trust It’s difficult enough that companies are losing influence with their digitally-enabled smart customers. Even worse, they’re losing their customers’ trust.... Read More

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What Is Your Customer Relationship Lifecycle?

For your customers and prospects, your customer relationship lifecycle is the basis for their experiential “journey” with your brand–from awareness of your company or product... Read More

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Must You Have “Executive Support” to Begin CX Improvements?

Common advice for starting a customer experience transformation journey suggests executive support for the entire program must be secured before you begin. In reality, this... Read More

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Can You Measure The Value Of A Single Touchpoint?

Customer experience is the result of a series of interactions between your company and those you serve. These interactions–the places where your brand interacts with or... Read More

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Digital Experience: The New Heart of Customer Engagement

We all know (don’t we?) that digital customer experience is being driven by the many disruptive forces changing the face of the world around us. We also know that a... Read More

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5 Lessons Your Company Can Learn From the Cupcake ATM

What do we want? Sugar! When do we want it? Now! Earlier this year, Los Angeles-based cupcake bakery Sprinkles launched the cupcake ATM in its Beverly Hills location. The... Read More

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Why 'Sorry, We're Closed' May Close You Forever

Yesterday’s customers were future-oriented. “When can you get this to me?” they asked. Prices were fixed, customers came to you, and you had plenty of time to get an order... Read More

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Customer Journey Mapping: 10 Tips for Beginners

Most executives know the importance of becoming more customer-centric. They’re also aware of the increased significance of differentiating on customer experience as... Read More

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Where Customer Experience ‘Top Performers’ Turn For Outside Expertise

In last week's post, “How Customer Experience ‘Top Performers’ Get There: Outside Expertise,” we talked about the reasons why more than 75 percent of customer experience “top... Read More

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How Customer Experience Top Performers Get There: Outside Expertise

Why is customer experience improvement such a hot topic? Because it significantly drives revenue. Directly tied to increased customer loyalty and a proven driver of top- and... Read More

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The Future Of Customer Experience? It’s Getting Personal

No matter what business you’re in, a growing percentage of your customers are nearly always connected, with instant access to more advanced tools and detailed information... Read More

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The Key to Customer Experience Is Knowing How to Understand Customers

Knowing how to understand customers is key to creating a successful customer experience program.  This lack of understanding is one of the most common barriers to being... Read More

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How Smart Are Your Touchpoints?

Touchpoints are increasingly interactive (and smarter). As with the many disruptive technological innovations that came before, the mobile Web and ever-connected “smart... Read More

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9 Ways To Be More Customer-Centric

Designing Your World Around Your Customers’ Experiences Learning how to be more customer-centric sure sounds good. But if you’re an established company with siloed data, lack... Read More

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Are Your Touchpoints Pushing Customers Out the Door?

Every time your company or your brand interacts with a customer—online and off, in-person or not, between or about your organization and any member of your audience... Read More

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The Secret to Improving Your Touchpoints? Journey Mapping.

In a company of scale, it’s easy to allow a discussion of touchpoints to descend into paralyzing complexity; we regularly work with companies whose touchpoint inventories... Read More

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Three Ways to Act Smart, Beat Your Competitors, and Win More Customers

Today, even the youngest, most modest consumers have broadband Internet access, carrying powerful, interconnected mobile devices everywhere they go. This gives them access to... Read More

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Smart Customers Abandon Stupid Companies

Take a critical look in the mirror, and answer this simple question: Does your company behave stupidly? Read More

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Customer Experience: Why Now?

Let’s get right to it. For most companies, delivering a poor customer experience translates directly to lost customers and lost profits. Do not pass go. Do not collect the... Read More

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Instagram vs. Kodak: Smart Customers Sidestep Stupid Companies

When a pre-revenue company with about a dozen employees gets a $1 billion Silicon Valley payday, tongues wag. Did Facebook pay too much for Instagram—the popular... Read More

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Understanding Your Customers Is the First Step to Delivering Better CX

There are myriad reasons why companies treat customers poorly. One of the most common, costly – and most easily resolvable – is a lack of understanding around customers... Read More

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Redefining Customer Experience: CRM, VRM and “Disruptive Technologies”

Last Thursday morning, Bruce Kasanoff and I did a webinar for CustomerThink’s Thought Leadership Webinar series titled “Disruptive Technologies vs. Customer Experience: What... Read More

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CX Isn’t a Function or a Department — It's the Center of All You Do

The competitive landscape is changing dramatically, as companies realize that customers really are the center of their universe. With the days of M&A and massive cost-cutting... Read More

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Are Customer Experience and Brand Research Problems Wicked?

For anyone who’s involved in customer experience management, brand research and consulting projects and/or other complex, cross silo and segment business issues, the concept... Read More

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Benchmarking for Brand Performance, Marketing and Touchpoints (Part 2)

We made our case for benchmarking and covered the different things that your organization can benchmark against in Part 1 of this series. Now, we’ll start looking at what... Read More

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Know Which Customer Touchpoints Drive Customer Satisfaction

Is your organization trying to improve the experience for all customers at all touchpoints?  Though this is going to sound like a self-evident truth, the implications will... Read More

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Benchmarking for Brand Performance, Marketing and Touchpoints (Part 1)

Why benchmark? And what should you benchmark against? We were asked an interesting question during a new business pitch the other day. In the middle of our discussion of the... Read More

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Strategic Planning for Brand, Marketing and Customer Experience

Why strategic plan before you dive in to do the work? Strategic Planning brings multiple perspectives into focus with an eye on defined objectives, by taking your... Read More

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Proving ROI on Customer Experience (Part 3)

Customer Experience Mapping – A first step to creating more positive customer experiences. In Proving ROI on Customer Experience Part 2, we presented four “experience... Read More

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Proving ROI on Customer Experience (Part 2)

Four “experience investment” lenses to help you plan, measure and improve interactions with your customers, and prove significant ROI – before you invest. In Proving ROI on... Read More

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Proving ROI on Customer Experience (Part 1)

Customer Experience: The perfect framework to begin thinking about ways to plan, measure and improve customer interactions with your organization. Even before the “Four Ps”... Read More

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Significant Benefits of Measuring Brand and Marketing Performance

C-Suite execs share concerns across sectors, size and geographies. In the CX business, we talk to key executives literally every time we’re engaged to help address an issue.... Read More

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10 Steps to Increase Marketing Effectiveness in an Economic Downturn

Ten Steps In Increase Marketing Effectiveness (Whether it's an Economic Downturn Or Not!) Read More

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How B2Bs Are Leveraging Social Media Touchpoints

While there are still some B2B executives who dismiss social media as an effective tool for engaging key audiences, the truth is that many B2B companies have successfully... Read More

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Four Steps to Delivering a Branded Customer Experience

Key to the successful delivery of brand experience is your ability to drive ownership and delivery of your brand from the inside out, top down and bottom up, throughout your... Read More

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New Rules for Actionable Voice-of-the-Customer (VOC) Research

In today’s “experience-based” market space, organizations should leverage research programs to move beyond data and information to drive actionable customer insights. There’s... Read More

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Co-Create a Better Customer Experience… With Your Customers

Listen, Act, Co-Create, Repeat In a classic article from 1986 entitled “What Gets Measured Gets Done,” Tom Peters says: “In the customer arena, we believe that regular,... Read More