Michael Hinshaw
Shouldn’t it be able to sense when you’ve gone to sleep?
About a week ago I was reading David Pogue's NY Times review of Jawbone's Up wristband, a $100 health monitor you wear on your wrist – 24/7 – to track things such as sleep patterns, exercise habits, calories burned, and more. While the device...
Did You Know You’re Competing With Apple?
At MCorp, we've conducted customer experience research with thousands of customers for dozens of companies. Across the range of business buyers and retail consumers, we've heard from high net-worth investors, Gen-Y shoppers, baby boomers and small company CEO's, and everyone in between. And in the...
The Growing Company Advantage: Smarter Customer Experience
It's surprising how many large companies seem to get further and further away from the things that made them successful in the first place as they grow – like their customers. In the environment of "enterprise," systems, cultures, metrics and rewards tend...
Why Understanding Your Customers is the First Step to Delivering a Better Customer Experience
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 themselves. This gets at the core of two basic business questions that many companies either don't ask...
Differentiating on Customer Experience: Steps to Take Today
Picking up on my last post of 2010, customer experience isn't defined by your company, but by how your organization is perceived by your customers when they do business with your company. Today, many companies don't really understand how they're perceived by their...
Customer Experience in 2011: The Penalties and the Payoffs
As the end of 2010 approaches, we've been thinking about the year ahead and – unsurprisingly – where and how we see customer experience fitting into the strategies and activities of companies as we move into 2011. With seedlings of hope sprouting on the...
Connected Devices Wreak Havoc on Retailers, Foreshadowing a New Era in Customer Experience (and...
'Tis the season…to get the best freakin' deal you can. If Christmas 2010 is any indicator, the average customer will have a great deal more to say about what they pay, who they pay it to, as well as where and when they pay it,...
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 You Must Do Now to Prepare." The impetus for this webinar was a series of ever more engaging conversations Bruce...
Bridging the Brand and Customer Experience Gap
A couple months ago, Megan Burns of Forrester interviewed me for MCorp's inclusion in her recent research report titled "Market Overview: Enterprise Customer Experience Transformation Consultants." In our conversation, she mentioned that MCorp was one of – if not the only – customer...
When it’s time to transform customer experience, who needs to be “on board”?
When it comes to redesigning customer experience, the critical nature of "C-suite sponsorship" is beginning to sound like table stakes for starting the process. Across a handful of "customer experience readiness assessments", leadership's commitment to, understanding of and support for customer experience are usually...
Brand Strategy Gaps? Just Turn on CSPAN
What is a “brand gap”? Simply stated, it’s when – as a corporation – who you say you are doesn’t connect with the reality of who you actually are. Most commonly, these brand gaps exist between an organization’s “vision” or “brand values” as articulated...
A Brand Experience Primer: Everything Matters
Organizations touch their audiences in many ways, with multiple interactions across multiple brand touchpoints. These touchpoints are all of the interactive, static and human interactions that your company’s customers experience over the life of their relationship with your company. In short, the heart of...
Humility: A New Brand Attribute?
Last Friday, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda apologized. To everyone. And he did it again on Tuesday, in the Washington Post. And again and again in a subtler way on national TV, with the currently ubiquitous “commitment” TV commercial. There’s something refreshing about a (seemingly) heartfelt...
More on Differentiation: Building an Aspirational Brand on Today’s Brand Experience
The more similar competing organizations are, the more important any difference becomes. And when meaningful differences are difficult (or impossible) to find in a product or service, the market will find differences outside of them. Your customers will define you, if you don’t define yourself.…
Touchpoints are powerful drivers of brand experiences and storytelling.
To understand the kinds of stories that are being told about your brand, start by examining the experiences your customers have each time they come into contact with you. What is it like to do business with you? How do the touchpoints your customers...
The New Language of Brand Experience: Can we (Pillow) Talk?
As the importance and power of brands – and the customer experiences they drive – continues to creep up the scale of corporate awareness and priority, brand consultants are scrambling to find ever more evocative (scratch that: make it “provocative”) ways to describe the...