Amanda Forshew
If You Think and Act as a Start Up, You’ll End Up Doing Things...
“Everything started as nothing” Ben Weissenstein Often, I discover a new company or experience that truly stands out. They naturally lead me to compare the new experience with ‘older’, long-standing organisations that I have been more regularly dealing with. New brands are often free from…
Why Every Business Leader Needs to Experience How a Customer Feels
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion”— Dale Carnegie. When was the last time, as a business leader, you stepped into your own customers’ shoes? Have you attended a focus group or met personally...
Three Attributes of Best-in-Class Customer Listening
Do you have a ‘listening’ culture that’s prevalent across your business not just in a research, marketing or sales functions? According to Confirmit, less than half of companies are happy with the level of insight they have on the customer experience. Challenges to Effective Customer…
Don’t Let Obsession with Process Cut the Soul Out of Customer Experience
Where Is the ‘Emotion’? Over the last few years, fixing, streamlining, rationalising, the CX journey has been the focus of activity for many organisations. Investment emphasis has been functional in nature with activities aimed at removing customer frustration and streamlining processes. Quite rightly organisations...
Combating the ‘Amazon Effect’ to Close the Gap Between Customer Experiences and Expectations
The AMAZING is now the EXPECTED The age of the ‘expectation economy’ has turned what was once the amazing or unusual, into the expected. Can we remember a time when there was no iPhone, Google or Amazon; how did we get by? The likes of…
John Lewis ‘& Partners’ rebranding – making a difference to customers or not?
Rebranding during difficult times For the first time in John Lewis’ history, the 83,000 partners who work for the company have been incorporated into the company’s two retail fascia’s brand names (John Lewis and Waitrose). According to the press reports, the rebrand aims to ‘highlight...
How to Sustain Customer Experience Improvements: Removing Pain or Reducing Effort is Not Enough
In a number of studies, we regularly see customer experience improvements made by brands in an individual year. Sometimes these improvements are made from an initial low starting point and are not sustained and the gap in customer expectations and delivery then actually widens...
What is Your Organisation’s Customer Cause?
What’s a customer cause? And should organisations have a stated one for their customers? According to Oxford Dictionaries, a Cause is defined as a ‘principle, aim, or movement that, because of a deep commitment, one is prepared to defend or advocate’. To be truly customer...
The Customers’ Experience now defines the Brand
Customers can engage with brands in more ways and places than ever before. As a result, customer expectations are higher than ever. We expect consistent and continuous products and services with instant access, always, on any device. If the 1990’s and 2000’s were about...
Is “Agile” the Key to Customer Experience Success?
Agile entails frequent interventions and collaboration between business and IT groups and requires company-wide acceptance of a test-and-learn approach. Agile’ as a methodology with its processes and practice has been around since 2001. It has been hugely influential and instrumental in software and technology...
When sub-contracted Customer Experience goes wrong
Source: Pixabay An Insurance policy should give us confidence that we and our possessions are taken care of, at a time of need. If something does go wrong, and customers make a claim, our chosen insurance company be helping to get life back on track...
Making an impact on the customer experience in the first 90 days
In the U.K, the number of Chief Customer Officers across all industries increased from 14 in 2014 to 90 in 2017; half of those roles were created in the last 15 months. The average tenure also lengthened from 23 months in 2009 to 34.5 months...
What HR could learn from Customer Experience – a people insight and analytics approach
Source: Adobe Stock 87% of organisations cite employee engagement as being one of their top priorities. However, in Gallup’s 2017 global study, they found that only 15% of employees are engaged at work and this figure is believed to be on the decline. One of the most tried...
Is “Dark Data” the Key to Closing Your Customer Experience Gap?
We start 2018 facing an experience gap – that’s to say a gap between what customers need from their experiences with brands and organisations and the quality of the experience that they actually receive. Improvement of customer experiences stalled from 2016 to 2017 in...
2018 – The year of The 6 E’s
2018 – The year of The 6 E’s We have all seen a range of articles talking about predictions for Customer Experience in 2018. I have waited until the dust has settled from 2017 before giving my views on what might lie ahead this year.…
2017 the Year of Undelivered Promise
This year, customer experience has broadly been recognised by the business community as a key imperative and growth driver. The ‘Experience Economy’ first conceptualised by Pine & Gilmore back in 1998, is here. Their article in the Harvard Business Review was the first time...
Recent reports confirm the UK is slipping into customer experience mediocrity
Customer Experience improvements have stalled. This was confirmed by recent study findings issued by both KPMG Nunwood and Forrester. The Forrester report confirms that not only has there been 0 improvement to overall customer experience in the UK but the number of brands...
Big Brands are Getting Physical
Why is it then that seemingly every week there is news about another brand that is opening a physical brand experience space for its customers when many agree with Gartner’s belief that “By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the...
Black Friday – one-off retail frenzy or memorable customer experience?
Is Black Friday a wise and significant event for retailers? Are consumers still buying into it now that it has become a weekend-long event? Even though 21% of shoppers say they have never missed participating in Black Friday shopping, some retailers in the UK...
Taking control of Uber’s customer story
I read a quote somewhere from Skip Prichard (CEO & Leadership speaker): “Clarity is the beginning of a good experience.” We see time and time again where a lack of clarity or expectation management, has led to pain points in the customer journey. One case…
