George Jacob
How Many of Your Customers Have Suggestions for Improving Customer Experience?
As a customer experience company, we field a lot of questions from prospects about customer feedback. In fact, it’s common for prospects to have a system for collecting feedback—from rudimentary snail-mail surveys to online survey platforms. But it’s uncommon for them to have a system...
Customer Experience Best Practices: Thoughts on Mobile Design
My wife and I recently had a baby, and as a new parent, my smartphone quick-draw has gotten snappier. You see, things come up while you’re holding a newborn—things that must be Googled, ordered, photographed. And time (as they say) is of the essence. In...
An Inside Look at the Customer Experience Strategy of Mercedes-Benz
Joseph A. Michelli’s recent book, Driven to Delight, is centered on the customer-centric transformation and ongoing customer experience strategy at Mercedes-Benz USA. After reading the book, I had a few questions about some of the content and strategies Joseph covered. And here’s what resulted from...
3 Reasons Why Customer Experience Management is So Powerful
The other night, I tried to explain to my wife how the turbochargers in my car work. About two minutes in, her eyes were glazed over so much it looked like she had cataracts. Which brings me to my point: Some things can seem complicated.…
How to Improve the Customer Experience: Closing the Loop on Feedback
Improvement is a relative concept. To improve, a thing must be measurably better than it once was. For example, this morning, I felt fatigued. And a coffee (or seven) improved my energy level so much I can now bench press a Honda Odyssey. It's nice...
How to Best Use Customer Feedback: 3 Ways to Act on Big Data
For all its promise, and all its hype, big data has always had one inherent problem. You see, big data is... well, big. And when you're facing something big, you may find it overwhelming. And when you find something overwhelming, you may find yourself...
3 Thoughts on Improving Online Banking Customer Experience
The vast majority of my banking customer experiences happen outside of a bank. And if I think about it, I would find it rather disconcerting if I found myself in a bank. Why am I here? I would think. Is something wrong with my account?…
Choose a Measurement to Improve Customer Experience
It’s a new year, a time when many start to consider future goals. Time to lose weight. Ditch cable TV. Meditate. But more often than not, these champagne-tinged resolutions tend to fizzle out. So how do your business resolutions stand a chance? How can you…
Customer Experience Best Practices: How to Retrain Your Customers
If you work in a company that takes its longevity seriously, there’s a high likelihood you’ll find yourself face-to-face with the notion of retraining your customers. The notion usually arrives at an interesting transition point. Future business goals are clear, the business is thinking tactically...
REI and Balancing Sales and Customer Experience Improvement
If you’re not a Reddit reader, you may not have heard of their popular “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) threads. The format is simple: a guest—who usually has a deep knowledge in a particular subject—invites questions and answers them. Guests can range from celebrities, to...
How to Improve the Customer Experience: 3 Tech Questions
When thinking about the customer experience, it’s smart to imagine it as a series of interactions. A series of tiptoe steps, taken by an individual customer, through your customer-facing people and technologies. If you think about the many ways a given customer can tiptoe through...
What’s the Difference Between NPS and Customer Engagement?
In our last post, we covered the difference between customer satisfaction and customer effort score. Both of those metrics are good for examining transactional elements of the customer experience. As we discussed, the best customer experience metric for your business is a matter of finding...
What Ants Can Show You About Employee Engagement & Customer Centricity
The other day, I was reading the Internet (as I'm wont to do). So speeding into autumn, full tilt toward the winter—it happened that I found an interesting research study about ants. Do you recall Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper?” Remember the industrious...
A Trip to Staples: Why Employee Experience Matters to Customers
Here's a little story about how I walked out of a Staples for the last time. A Snapshot of My Customer Experience On a Sunday, just before 6:00 p.m., my wife killed our printer's black ink cartridge. This was a minor crisis. She is…
Emotional Intelligence in Customer Experience Leadership
In a past job, my superiors were excited about what they called the “elephant-and-rider metaphor.”It comes from psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2006 book, The Happiness Hypothesis, and it compares your emotional, automatic mental processes to an elephant—lumbering, inflexible, and massive. And your rational mind? That’s a...
Amazon’s Workplace Woes, and Leading Customer-Centric Cultures
In case you missed it, The New York Times recently published a tell-all exposé about Amazon’s corporate culture. The short of it: Amazon is a competitive, punishing, often-cruel workplace. People cry at their desks, sometimes past midnight. And worse things happen too. Jeff Bezos sent...
How to Simplify B2B Customer Experience Improvement
Selling in the business-to-business (B2B) space is complicated. In fact, if you watch a B2B sales manager for any length of time, there’s a 97.4% chance s/he’ll stare longingly out the window, sigh, and dream about selling in a retail setting. OK, I made up...
How to Navigate Toward Customer Centricity
Imagine an ocean scene. Picture your customers, darting across the water on jet skis, able to make quick water-spray turns to their heart's content. And here comes your business, a lumbering cargo ship. With a bum steering wheel. And a broken compass. And a first…
Food for Thought: Three Customer Experience Best Practices
As a teenager, while sweating my way through a series of character-building summer jobs, I did a stint as a waiter in a hotel. Every week, I rotated through three dining areas: a diner, a bar, and a fine-dining room. It was a good scenario...
How to Leverage Employee Feedback on Your Customer Experience
If you can tell, we’re fans of using feedback in your customer experience strategy. It helps you gain perspective. It helps you keep tabs on your experience. It gives you emotional snapshots of your company’s touchpoints. However, when thinking about collecting feedback on the customer...