Customers are looking for service and information online, that's a given. Companies' response plans...that's often unknown. Organizations are responding to customers' complaints and inquiries in myriad ways, including hiring interns or agencies, creating a social taskforce, or taking an ad hoc approach where they may have marketing or customer service staffers track online interactions as their schedules allow.
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According to a new Forrester Research report, "The Customer Experience Ecosystem," customer experiences currently range from OK to bad. The report's author Kerry Bodine gathered the data from Forrester's Customer Experience Index, which includes scores for 153 brands in 13 industries based on ratings from more than 7,700 U.S. consumers. The results were surprising. Only 7 percent of the brands in the study earned "excellent" customer experience scores. Thirty-five percent of the brands received scores of "OK," 18 percent received
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1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman talks with Jeff Pedowitz, Founder of The Pedowitz Group, about the key trends in the marketing automation software arena and steps that decision-makers can take to use these platforms effectively.
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Does hiring right matter? You bet. Yesterday I went to Starbucks for a lemonade iced tea. Not surprisingly, the store was busy. The barista was pouring, mixing, and blending with expert proficiency. Until my drink.
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A new global contact center benchmarking report reveals some positive trends toward improving the customer experience.
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1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman speaks with Steve Kraus, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Pegasystems, about opportunities for using business process management tools to enhance the measurement of customer-related metrics.
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Would you wait more than eight minutes to speak to a customer service representative on the phone? How good would you feel about a retailer if it took almost four days for the company to answer your email? If you are a customer of Barnes & Noble or Crate & Barrel, you will likely find out. Companies are always discussing the importance of customer service across channels, but how well do they deliver? A new study of the top 100
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"Like little kids begging mom for a treat after a skinned knee, the newly empowered consumer feels compelled to share every slight, no matter how small or how imagined," Seth Godin wrote in his blog post "Giving umbrage" earlier this week. That got me thinking about the challenges companies face in their attempts to consistently deliver a satisfactory customer experience--and that customers should give credit to companies for the good stuff when it happens. Take Time Warner Cable as an
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In my eBook, The 6 Laws of Customer Experience, the 5th law states "employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated." So if you are measuring the wrong things or looking at the metrics in the wrong way, then it will be nearly impossible to build alignment around the right customer-centric activities and behaviors. Based on conversations I've had with customer experience professionals over the past several months, it seems like there's an epidemic of poor metrics. What's going on
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My local news yesterday reported a story about an employee in a barber shop who stabbed his boss with his scissors because he didn't want to wait on the next customer. The employer is fine and recovering, but the story is an extreme example of lackadaisical service.
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1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman speaks with Pegasystems Founder and CEO Alan Trefler about the barriers and opportunities to becoming a customer-centric organization.
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Teams perform better when they have more positive interactions than negative interactions. Why? Some might assume that teams that perform well have more to be positive about, so they end up having more positive interactions. But psychologists find that it's actually the other way around: positivity drives performance.
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Companies build trust and goodwill through positive customer experiences and delivering on their promises. They build something else, too: the likelihood that customers will forgive their mistakes and stick with them.
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1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman speaks with Mogreet CEO James Citron about the opportunities companies have to connect with customers using mobile video marketing and advertising campaigns.
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Last week the coupon site Groupon announced it plans to raise $750 million to go public--six months after refusing Google's colossal $ 6 billion offer to buy the daily deals site.
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Lifestyle brands today need all of their marketing components in real time: insights, response to those insights, content creation, customer co-creation, distribution, and customer engagement, according to Shiv Singh, head of digital at PepsiCo Beverages.
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At today's World Innovation Forum presentation, Harvard Business Professor and author Clayton Christensen discussed his perspective on disruptive innovation. He defines disruptive innovation as "a driver of leadership failure and the source of new growth opportunities."
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There are a lot of vendors pitching their social media listening capabilities. And, the more that I hear these pitches, the more it has made me think that a bunch of companies jumping on the social media bandwagon are going down a dangerous road of using it as an customer service escalation strategy-- which is a horrible idea.
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"Companies are poor at listening," Frank Eliason, senior vice president of social media at Citibank, told the audience at RealtimeNY11 this morning. "People will disagree with me because [statistics say that] 90 percent of companies are listening...but only 17 percent do anything with the information. So they're not listening."
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Customer experience management is gaining traction. The impact of the economy, uncompromising customer expectations, and social media as a megaphone of customer experiences good and bad has organizations shifting from talking about customer centricity to acting on it. "Over the past 18 months companies have started to focus on getting [customer experience] right again," Enkata Founder Ron Hildebrandt told me earlier this week. "I hate to say that social media has companies concerned about getting customer experience wrong; that they're
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Many executives will say they believe that having loyal customers is critical to business success. But what are they really doing about it? Most will point to their customer care training or CRM system and say, "That's how we take care of loyalty here." Some will point to their monthly newsletter or discount program to demonstrate their efforts. All of these are good attempts. However, they are not enough. Companies need to take a more holistic approach to creating greater
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In light of companies' recent cost-cutting efforts, today's employees have been tasked with working the equivalent of three, four, or five employees. Add to that long commutes and no raises and you have a recipe for an uninspired and unhappy workforce.
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