Amanda Davis: The Aligned Experience
5 Organisations that Design Solutions with Customers, for Customers
A new product, process, service or experience improvement should always start and finish with the intended end user or customer in mind, shouldn’t it? Why is it that we still see market launches that are developed by extremely clever people in product planning, product...
How to Connect with Your Customers Using Story Telling
Airbnb loves to share their host’s and guest’s stories. Airbnb is a digital platform designed to facilitate bookings between guests and hosts. They connect people. If you enter this online world of Airbnb, you can easily come across the stories of guests, hosts, and people...
Worrier or Warrior: Which Style Makes the Best Leader for the Customer Job?
My final article for the year was due to address ‘Aligned Leadership’ - that’s to say what does it take for you to be a great leader in a customer-centric organisation. Then came along the US election. For the first time, our (British) family has...
Be Consumer Fit. Insights-Driven Organisations Grow 8 Times Faster than Global GDP
What’s your customer ‘normal’ and how can you stay on top of it? I read a headline the other day saying that we have “normalised lockdown”. Normal must be one of the most used terms in 2020. I hadn’t thought about lockdown as being my...
Are You Prepared for the Great B2B Customer Experience Reset?
There’s much talk online and in the press about how people’s experience during this COVID-19 era will impact a new ‘normal’ customer experience when we finally settle into some stability. It is looking increasingly like life is going to be in this current holding...
Customers Will Remember Who Was There for Them, Long After COVID-19
Overnight, we lost our regular routines – our daily coffees, date night out, weekly shops, Fridays at the pub with friends and our Sunday at the gym. Lockdown has forced us to change our habits, but is the change temporary or will it be...
8 Simple Ways to Inspire and Enable Employees to Deliver a Superior Customer Experience
If employees feel they have genuine ownership of customer problems, can address them as they arise and are given the knowledge and tools to take action, they’re more likely to make customer focus fundamental to their day to day working routine. They will probably...
Is Insight the Superfood for Customer-Driven Business Growth?
According to a new study from Harvard Business Review and FocusVision, leading global organisations see customer insight as key to business success. Other organisations, however, are missing out on the opportunity to turn widely available (big) data into insight , which in turn can...
Company Values Are the “North Star” for Your Customer Experiences
Most companies have a set of ‘values’. These are intended to be the ‘essence’ of the organisation, the ‘DNA’ or its ‘manifesto’. For some companies, their values are merely a set of words on a wall, for others, they come to life in what...
If You Think and Act as a Start Up, You’ll End Up Doing Things...
“Everything started as nothing” Ben Weissenstein Often, I discover a new company or experience that truly stands out. They naturally lead me to compare the new experience with ‘older’, long-standing organisations that I have been more regularly dealing with. New brands are often free from…
Why Every Business Leader Needs to Experience How a Customer Feels
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion”— Dale Carnegie. When was the last time, as a business leader, you stepped into your own customers’ shoes? Have you attended a focus group or met personally...
Three Attributes of Best-in-Class Customer Listening
Do you have a ‘listening’ culture that’s prevalent across your business not just in a research, marketing or sales functions? According to Confirmit, less than half of companies are happy with the level of insight they have on the customer experience. Challenges to Effective Customer…
Don’t Let Obsession with Process Cut the Soul Out of Customer Experience
Where Is the ‘Emotion’? Over the last few years, fixing, streamlining, rationalising, the CX journey has been the focus of activity for many organisations. Investment emphasis has been functional in nature with activities aimed at removing customer frustration and streamlining processes. Quite rightly organisations...
Combating the ‘Amazon Effect’ to Close the Gap Between Customer Experiences and Expectations
The AMAZING is now the EXPECTED The age of the ‘expectation economy’ has turned what was once the amazing or unusual, into the expected. Can we remember a time when there was no iPhone, Google or Amazon; how did we get by? The likes of…
How to Sustain Customer Experience Improvements: Removing Pain or Reducing Effort is Not Enough
In a number of studies, we regularly see customer experience improvements made by brands in an individual year. Sometimes these improvements are made from an initial low starting point and are not sustained and the gap in customer expectations and delivery then actually widens...
What is Your Organisation’s Customer Cause?
What’s a customer cause? And should organisations have a stated one for their customers? According to Oxford Dictionaries, a Cause is defined as a ‘principle, aim, or movement that, because of a deep commitment, one is prepared to defend or advocate’. To be truly customer...
Is “Agile” the Key to Customer Experience Success?
Agile entails frequent interventions and collaboration between business and IT groups and requires company-wide acceptance of a test-and-learn approach. Agile’ as a methodology with its processes and practice has been around since 2001. It has been hugely influential and instrumental in software and technology...
Is “Dark Data” the Key to Closing Your Customer Experience Gap?
We start 2018 facing an experience gap – that’s to say a gap between what customers need from their experiences with brands and organisations and the quality of the experience that they actually receive. Improvement of customer experiences stalled from 2016 to 2017 in...