Howard Lax
Motivating Employees To Drive CX: Linkage to VoC Measures
Should you link employee goals, performance reviews and variable compensation to Customer Loyalty/CX measures? A simple question that lends itself to a complex “yes, but . . . “ answer. We know that loyal customers are good for business and that the customer relationship is...
The Ends Justify (Investing in) the Means: The Return on CX (RoCX)
At the end of the day (or fiscal year), investments in enhancing the customer experience and strengthening customer relationships must be justified by business results. It might be more politically correct or genteel to say that the only thing that matters is delighting the...
Customers = Company Value
The value of a company – your company – is best measured in terms of the current and future value of cash flows from customers. This makes customers your most prized asset. This is not to say that you don’t have other assets – products...
Battling for the Hearts and Minds of Customers
How do your customers feel about your brand . . . and why should you care? Most companies think about customer experience and loyalty in rational terms: How do customers rate our performance on these touchpoints? How do customers assess our work on various functional...
The Amnesiac Customer and the Importance of Emotions
Do your customers remember their recent experiences with your firm? Sometimes . . . but not necessarily accurately. Does it matter? Immensely. What makes an experience memorable? It’s complicated. These are not philosophical issues. In the rush to capture customer feedback at the point...
CX Touchpoints as Stepping Stones: Understanding the Customer Mission
Many companies look upon the customer experience in terms of discrete touchpoints or channels. “We want to understand how customers experience the call center” or “What is the customer experience when they go to our website . . . mobile app . ....
New Customer Retention: A Fundamental in Retail Financial Services
New customer churn is endemic to banks. Here’s how to reduce the number of customers who churn within the first two years. Despite a sense of weakening bonds with customers, banking customer attrition rates are at historic lows in the neighborhood of 15 percent....
Millennials and Generation Gaps: Loyalty in Financial Services across the Generations
The issue of generational differences is in the DNA of brand, media and advertising people. You can see it in how, what and where they present and package their messages. Today, it’s all about Millennials (originally dubbed...
The Final Word on the Pros and Cons of NPS
I can’t take seeing yet another article extolling the virtues/lambasting the shortcomings of NPS. So I want to lay it all on the table – the pros and the cons – and try to offer a balanced assessment that neither canonizes nor demonizes Fred...
Voice of Customer Technology: Without the Science, It’s Just Sizzle Without the Steak
From paper feedback cards and interactive voice response tools to social media analysis and enterprise feedback management (EFM) systems, there are a number of alternative technologies currently deployed to capture customer feedback. At our own company, we are big users of a variety of...
A Behavioral Manifesto: Measuring and Managing Customer Experience and Loyalty
Marketers and voice-of-the-customer (VoC) champions of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your shackles of outdated theories and measurements. Despite the stir about behavioral economics turning traditional economics on its head, we all know that the first behavioral economists were marketers—the people...
You Have to Accentuate the Negative
Too often, brands work hard creating positive, sophisticated customer experiences – but leave themselves open to failures on basic interactions. And, as Howard Lax (SVP of GfK's Brand and Customer Experience team) points out in our latest video blog post, negative customer experiences "stick"...
The Oxymoron of the IVR Experience
I know why companies use IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems: They're cheap. And there's a lot to be said for trimming costs and looking for operational efficiencies. But p-l-e-a-s-e don't try to sandbag customers, shareholders or anyone else with claims that IVR provides a...
Segments of One: Measuring the Loyalty of Mega Customers in B2B Markets
Every company in the B2B space, regardless of industry, has its 800-pound gorilla customers. Whether they are called Managed or Key Accounts, Enterprise Clients, Top Tier — or simply referred to as "our biggest customers" — these are the folks who are disproportionately large...
Customer Experiences and the Theory of Relativity
What does Einstein's theory of relativity have to do with customer experience? I don't have a fancy formula, but let's try this: Assessments of customer experiences = Memory of the experience relative to a frame of reference. That formula is based on two key observations...
How Do You Exceed Customer Expectations? Ask Nicole.
Dateline: Flemington, NJ; October 30, 2012; second day without power, heat or running water following the onset of Super Storm Sandy We continue to receive a barrage of email solicitations (readable on BlackBerry and Droid) from retailers of every stripe for books, music, clothing ....
Add 1 Tablespoon Experience, Blend and Serve: The Experience-Loyalty-Value Connection
The buzz in the Customer Sat world is all about Customer Experience. Great customer experiences can help solidify customer relationships — while bad experiences can undermine customer relationships, increase churn and harm brand reputations through negative word of mouth. Despite its importance, however, the customer...
You Gotta Play Defense: Focusing on the Fundamentals of Customer Experience
The verdict from neuroscience is in: While a pound of feathers may weigh the same as a pound of nails, a "pound" of bad experiences and disappointments outweigh a "pound" of good experiences and delight. This "negativity bias" is inherent in people. For anyone charged...
Bad is Stronger than Good: Lessons for Customer Loyalty & Experience
It seems that your mother's admonishment that "if you have nothing good to say, don't say anything at all," may have been counterintuitive and running against the grain of human nature and neuroscience. "Bad is stronger than good" (the phrase is borrowed from an...
Behavioral Economics, Marketing, Loyalty and the Customer Experience
Conversations about consumer buying decisions invariably turn to behavioral economics. Behavioral economics essentially is the study of the impact of non-economic factors on economic decision making. Homo Economicus – consumers as rational, information processors making optimal decisions that maximize their economic well-being – has...