Jon Picoult
The Lost Art of the Handwritten Note
[The following article originally appeared in Carrier Management magazine.] When it comes to crafting more engaging employee communications, one solution is literally in business leaders’ hands. From supervisors of small teams to CEOs of large compan...
Why The “Fine Print” Is Ruining Your Customer Experience
Businesses have a trust problem – and that’s not even the bad news. Consumers’ lack of trust in companies is well documented. According to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, nearly half of all consumers distrust businesses. The problem is ...
CX 101: What is Customer Experience?
What is the “customer experience”? In its simplest terms, the customer experience refers to how customers feel about their interactions with your company. That’s customer experience in less than ten words, but let’s unpack that definition to reveal so...
For Crying Out Loud, JetBlue! How An Airline Turned Tears Into Cheers
A few years ago, in honor of Mother’s Day, JetBlue released a 3-minute YouTube video paying tribute to mothers who fly with young children: [embedded content] The video is sure to make you smile, and there’s no doubt it’s a great marketing instrument...
The Problem With Professional Services
Imagine if what you thought was your company’s greatest strength actually turned out to be its greatest weakness. It’s an unsettling prospect, but also a very real challenge that’s faced everyday by professional services organizations with regard to ...
Olive Garden’s Recipe For Success
Olive Garden keeps serving up good news for its investors. This week, the restaurant chain posted yet another quarter of revenue and earnings growth that outpaced analyst forecasts. It’s been a remarkable turnaround for Olive Garden, perhaps bes...
You Can’t Advertise Your Way to a Great Customer Experience
What would it take to convince people that your business delivers a great customer experience? For tech giant Microsoft, the answer was more than $1 billion. That’s how much the company reportedly spent on its Windows 8 marketing campaign when ...
3 Tips For Aligning Executives Around The Customer Experience
The single most important driver to the success of any customer experience (CX) strategy is executive commitment. However, aligning an executive team around the customer experience imperative is no simple task. C-Suiters often have competing agendas a...
The One Chart Every CEO Should Study
Last month, Watermark Consulting released its latest cross-industry Customer Experience ROI Study. The study, which has become one of the most widely-cited analyses of its kind, was developed, in part, to address lingering skepticism that many busine...
Why Did The Top-Rated Company In Customer Experience Go Bankrupt?
In 2011, bookstore chain Borders filed for bankruptcy. At the time, many brick-and-mortar retailers were succumbing to new competitive pressures. Borders, however, was unique in one important respect: Earlier that same year, it was ...
Lessons From Two Customer Experience Legends
Earlier this month, in the span of just a couple weeks, the business world lost two great customer experience strategists. Jack Bogle was the founder of Vanguard Investments, which is now the second-largest asset manager in the world. He popularized t...
A Bold Customer Experience Prediction
Call me a cynic, but here’s my bold customer experience prediction for most companies in the coming year: Not much will change.
Google Searches For Its Soul
What happens when a company decides to step back from one of the core principles underpinning its customer experience? Google may well find out in the near future. The company is reportedly exploring a return to the Chinese market by deploying a ...
Most of your company’s customer experience is forgettable. Here’s why.
No matter how hard you try to improve your company’s customer experience, the reality is that your customers won’t remember much of it. That’s because our brains aren’t wired like a video camera, recording every second of every experience. Rather...
Insurance Customer Experience Leaders Extend Their Edge Over Laggards
Insurers that earn jeers from their customers are falling further behind those that earn cheers. That’s the key takeaway from Watermark Consulting’s 2018 Insurance Customer Experience ROI Study. The study, which was last conducted two years ago, seeks ...
Two Words That Will Hurt Your Business’ Customer Experience
For all the time and energy that companies invest in improving their customer experience, many are unknowingly sabotaging those efforts. How? Simply by using two words which should be stricken from every business leader’s vocabulary – “back offic...
Is Your “Net Promoter” Really “Not Promoter”?
So, you’ve added the Net Promoter “likely to recommend” question to your customer surveys. You’re tracking the results and reporting a Net Promoter Score (NPS) on your Executive Dashboard. Alas, your company is “doing” Net Promoter – right? Not q...
The Difference Between “Purpose” and “Propaganda”
U.S. pharmacy chain CVS recently announced that it would no longer use “materially altered” imagery to market beauty products in its stores. That means no more perfect, digitally-modified wrinkle and blemish-free photographs to sell everything fro...
Where Business Leaders Should Spend More Of Their Time (But Don’t)
Imagine if there were a place where executives could go to discover striking new ways to improve their business. A place where, just by visiting, the executives come away more energized and their employees become more engaged. This remarkable place exists in every company. Often,...
Stop Wasting Your Money On Customer Experience
Faced with increasingly commoditized markets, more and more companies are launching customer experience improvement programs to differentiate themselves. However, there’s something many of these companies don’t yet realize: the vast majority of their programs will fail. In a survey of over one thousand companies by...
