Michael Hinshaw
Five Questions Customer Experience Professionals Are Asking Today
Everyone is talking about customer experience. What it is, why it’s important, how to deliver and how to improve it. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion. Which is why I thought you’d be interested in hearing what the experts are wondering about. These are the...
What Customer Experience Does–And Doesn’t–Mean
Given the prevalence of “customer experience” as a desired competitive differentiator, business discipline, and value driver, you’d think it would be easy to define–and that a common understanding of what it means would be immediately at hand. Think again. Today, customer experience is used with...
The Joys of Customer Journey Mapping
I’ve been doing this work for over 15 years and still — the excitement, insights, and team-building that a typical customer journey mapping workshop delivers continues to amaze me. They are a typically rare opportunity to bring a cross-functional team of Subject Matter Experts (“SME’s”)...
What Customers Want from Loyalty Programs
We know that customers are more demanding and have higher expectations than ever. And since most corporations are working hard to better serve these smart customers, it’s no surprise that many are zeroing in on loyalty programs as a way to create stronger relationships,...
Bad B2B Experience? The “Anti-Customer” Model
We spend a lot of time talking about the value of things like customer centricity, transparency and the importance of designing and consistently delivering great customer experiences. Why? Yes, because it’s what we love and are great at… but it’s also that it helps...
Implications of a Customer-Centric Strategy: 7 Takeaways
In this fast-changing world of smart, increasingly demanding and dis-loyal customers and the ubiquitous digital devices they and we all enjoy, one thing is clear – the entire relationship between customers and the companies that wish to serve them has changed. It used to be...
Avoiding the Omnichannel Gap
“Omnichannel” is quickly catching up to “customer experience” (CX) when it comes to being widely accepted as a strategic Holy Grail in the era of smart customers. Just as with CX however, there’s lack of clarity about what this actually means, and even greater...
Patient Experience Innovation: 5 Disruptive Examples
According to PwC, more than half of consumers want to shop for healthcare…but their preferred method of doing so doesn’t exist yet. In an age where most people have “always on, wherever, whenever and however” access to information, products and services across industries, when...
Should Your CIO Drive CX?
What every CIO must know to bridge the customer experience technology gap… A couple of weeks ago, we published a white paper titled “What Every CIO Must Know to Bridge the Customer Experience Technology Gap.” Unsurprisingly, we reached out to our database and others to...
The Real Value in Voice-of-the-Customer? The Customer Experience.
Customer experience: powered by Voice-of-the-Customer Most executives recognize that customer experience is important to their business. In fact, Gartner Group says that 89 percent of companies expect to be competing primarily on customer experience… as of now (better hurry). To compete on customer experience, companies…
Better CX: Understanding (and Breaking Down) Cross-Org Silos.
Why marketing (and Sales, Operations and Support…) can have a hard time seeing the “big picture.” Managing the customer experience is often thought of as the domain of those parts of the business that deliver the experience. Those with the greatest intimacy or connection with...
Customer Experience Improvement: 7 Best Practices
With much of the online conversation taking place around customer experience innovation, it almost feels like everyone is focused on customer experience as way to ‘make a dent in the universe’ as Steve Jobs so eloquently put it. Unsurprising, as Forrester Research Inc. reports...
Defining Customer Experience
Given the prevalence of “customer experience” as a desired competitive differentiator, business discipline and value driver, you’d think it would be easy to define – and that a common understanding of what it means would be immediately at hand. Think again. Today, customer experience is...
Insurance Customer Experience Innovation: 5 Disruptive Examples
Today, virtually every industry is ripe for disruption. The $3.7 trillion insurance industry is no exception. In many ways a perceptually commoditized business, those companies that win – like the famously customer centric USAA – are those that create differentiation through the experiences they...
The three things you can do to deliver a better customer experience.
Every journey begins with a single step. When it comes to improving customer experience, the first step in your journey can be a simple one. Just ask yourself: “How can we make this experience better?” There’s little doubt that the broader discipline of customer experience...
Customer Experience Requires Commitment, Not Compliance
Are your people truly committed to customer experience? Or just following orders? As organizations prioritize customer experience, they recognize the need to drive a shift from, for example, sales or product focused to customer-focused throughout their company. What this means varies of course by business,...
5 Customer Data Lessons You Can’t Ignore
Anyone who serves customers recognizes that a key to getting closer to them is to improve the customer experience you offer them. And that doing so requires a true understanding of what customers want and need, what they do, and how they do it. In...
The Future of Customer Experience: 10 Predictions for 2016 and Beyond
It’s always interesting to hear predictions and trends for the coming year. For 2016, I’ve elected to share my views on the (fast approaching) future of customer experience through the lens of other experts as well. As usual, this list isn’t comprehensive. Given the speed...
Millennial CX Gone Wild: The Marriot Room Design Edition
Millennials don’t work at desks? Really? Here’s the premise. It appears that Marriot is in the process of redesigning their hotel rooms for a millennial business traveler that doesn’t actually do much work. And/or, if they do, that they’re much more comfortable working from their...
The False Tradeoff Between Customer Experience and Customer Privacy
How would you answer if every company you dealt with asked you this question: “Which is more important to you? Customer experience, or your privacy?” If you’re a Millennial, you may not recognize the implied tradeoff. According to a recent Gallup poll, “44% of...