I recently read that companies want customers to spend the loyalty points they earn. Really? I'm not so sure about that. There are nearly as many ways to earn and spend loyalty points as there are companies that offer them. But some businesses definitely make redemption easier than others do. Many airlines, for example, have a terrible reputation for an overabundance of blackout dates when customers can't use their frequent flyer points to purchase tickets. Conversely, there are companies like
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Fear is that ever-present nagging voice in the back of our minds; it's the one that tells us to stay close to the shore and to avoid risk at a certain cost. Now, more than ever, fear has become a daily constant in our lives -- fear of losing your job, fear of losing a client, or worse, fear of not being "good enough" to offer value. In a constant stream of seemingly petty anxiety and uneasiness, I have to
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A new Accenture survey: "The 7 Things Your Health Insurance Providers are not Telling You," reveals seven surprises about customer service.
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Last week, Verint announced plans to acquire Vovici for about $60 million. I rarely write about industry deals in this space, but this one is worth noting for several reasons.
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The demise of email marketing has been greatly exaggerated. Ever since social media burst onto the scene, experts have predicted email's death on an almost weekly basis. But as we all know from experience, email still plays a vital role for both business and consumer use. But this is no time for email marketing to rest on its laurels. Social media has changed the game, and customer expectations have also changed as a result. Companies need to evolve their email
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To get a grip on your customer experience ecosystem -- the complex set of relationships among your company's employees, partners, and customers that determines the quality of all customer interactions -- you need to map it, co-create it, and socialize it.
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When asking customers what they want, the trick is to ask the right questions. Henry Ford was quoted as saying, "If I had asked customers what they wanted they'd have said, 'A faster horse.'" I'm sure that's the case. I'm also sure that if Apple had asked customers the same, no one would have said, "A wallet-size device to carry around my music."
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Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a polarizing topic; some people love it and some people hate it. So I'll share my thoughts on the topic, which fall somewhere between love and hate. If you're not familiar with NPS, it's based on asking customers a question like this: How likely are you to recommend to a friend or colleague? Respondents are categorized as "Promoters," "Detractors," or "Passives" based on their answers. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is calculated by subtracting the
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Customer service is even more important in a down economy and the new American Express/CFO Research Global Business & Spending Monitor shows that global finance executives are increasingly willing to invest in customer service to support their growth. In fact, nearly half (46 percent) of senior finance executives plan to invest more in customer service over the next year.
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I was disheartened - albeit not altogether surprised - when news reports surfaced last week that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing new rules designed to make it more difficult for telephone carriers and other companies to tack mystery fees onto customers' phone bills.
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Netflix has had a rough July so far. The company, which built up a glowing reputation among customers, took its customers' loyalty for granted and may wind up an example of how not to treat loyal customers.
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I recently had dinner during Forrester's Customer Experience Forum 2011 with two senior executives who work at companies that use Net Promoter Score. Both companies have been recognized as customer experience leaders in their respective industries. When a third guest (Forrester's CEO) asked them why and how they use Net Promoter Score (NPS) they gave remarkably consistent answers. In brief, they use it as a simple, easy to understand metric -- one number -- for aligning the business. Its main
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If you think of customer experience broadly, it encompasses every interaction point a customer has with an organization. That includes far more than customer service. Also in the customer experience ensemble are products, billing, shipping, mobile apps, marketing communications, the website, social interactions, and more. Each of these areas tends to have its own "owner." In fact, if you consider the vast number of disparate customer touchpoints, it seems impossible that any one person could oversee it all in a
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In traditional retailing, customer experiences can become stilted when the frontline staff has a list of do's and don'ts regarding how far they can go to serve their customers. At Wegmans Food Markets there is no rule book. There is simply this: No customer is allowed to leave unhappy. Wegmans is a privately held grocery store chain with 41,000 employees. The company generated an estimated $5.6 billion in revenue in 2010. What fuels Wegmans's growth are passion, training, and trust.
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Love them or loathe them, self-service check-out lanes have become a necessary evil in many grocery chains. This week, Albertson's, LLC, a grocery chain which owns and operates 217 stores in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah, announced that it will remove its self-help devices from all of its stores starting this month.
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As companies find it increasingly difficult to separate themselves by their products, top-notch customer support will help distinguish the leaders and laggards, inContact CMO Mariann McDonagh tells 1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman.
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Google + launched last week to rival Facebook. Its "circles" feature represents a shift toward more relevant, timely, and valuable communications to different segments. What implications will such a shift will have on business use of social media?
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Companies that want to improve their customer experience need to understand the intertwined and ever evolving relationships among their internal employees, external partners, and customers. Forrester calls this complex set of relationships the customer experience ecosystem. As I said in a previous post, to get a grip on your own ecosystem, you need to map it, co-create it, and socialize it. And when I say "map it," I mean that you need to systematically uncover and document the ecosystem's hidden
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"What's in the black box?" Nick Primola asked during his presentation at Forrester's 2011 Customer Experience Forum. "The customer relationship. It's not the next shiny object or product models to sell. It's a relationship founded in mutual trust and mutual value."
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One of the hot debates in the marketing world for the past few years has been how to measure--and demonstrate--return on marketing spending. Part of the urgency to prove payback on marketing spending is healthy, ongoing pressure to improve efficiency across all areas of the business. Another contributing factor is the accelerating shift from traditional mass marketing tactics to personalized, context-sensitive, data-driven marketing. And of course at a primitive, law-of-the-jungle level, marketing people need to justify their existence.
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Many customer experience initiatives don't meet their full potential -- or worse, fail completely -- because companies don't have a comprehensive picture of what the customer experience actually entails or the dynamics that go into creating it. In order to break from their tunnel vision, companies need to understand their customer experience ecosystem: the complex set of relationships among a company's employees, partners, and customers that determines the quality of all customer interactions.
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At 1to1 Media, we've written a sufficient number of articles about the dangers of ignoring what your customers are saying about your brand in social channels. So when my friend, who works at one of the largest global business enterprise management software providers, told me about a meeting that he and his colleagues had last week with a U.S. government-owned transportation company to discuss social sentiment, the outcome was too humorous not to share.
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1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman speaks with Patrick James, Vice President and Global Head of Marketing, Sales, and Service Consulting at Capgemini, about the trends that are shaping CRM and the top challenges facing CRM decision-makers.
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As the saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. But customers shouting for service on social media aren't the only consumers getting a quick response--though it may seem that way. It also happens in brick-and-mortar settings, when a frustrated customer gets loud. For example...
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