As much as customers complain about contact centers, there are plenty of great experiences with caring, engaged agents, too.
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The proliferation of online stores is giving customers more choices, but at the same time having a negative impact on some brick-and-mortar shops that depend on foot traffic to make their bottom line. Moreover, in their bid to attract more customers to shop with them, an increasing number of online stores are offering free shipping and free returns, making the experience even more pain-free.
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Most every seminar on contact center best practices I've attended in the past few years has preached the gospel of nurturing long-term customer value. The importance of establishing trust, building loyalty, and developing customers for life has been drummed into us like a Sunday school lesson. In theory, at least, businesses are beginning to heed the call.
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Some of you may have heard about or have downloaded the latest app called "Buzzword Bingo." The game allows people to challenge coworkers during conferences or meetings to see who can get five of the latest marketing catchphrases, technical jargon, or corporate buzzwords in a row to get Bingo.
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As I was writing an article for 1to1 Magazine--a piece about sales strategies that make price irrelevant--writer's block struck. The source of my difficulty derived from a nagging customer service issue; nothing major, but one of those sort of surprising service experiences: "Hmmm, I really didn't expect this company to behave that way..." Happily, the moment I eventually got off the phone with the company's customer service representative, one of the most colorful comments from a source I spoke to
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1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman speaks with Carol Kline, CIO at TeleTech, about steps that chief information officers can take to forge tighter relationships with other corporate executives.
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The customer experience for companies doing business with other companies stinks. Three independent studies that Forrester Research has conducted over the past year indicate that the business-to-business (B2B) experience is perceived worse than the bottom-of-the-barrel consumer industries, such as TV service providers and health insurance plans in Forrester's 2011 Customer Experience Index. This is not surprising for several reasons. Many B2B firms believe that customer experience is something that only consumer-focused firms like Disney, Zappos, and Ritz Carlton need to
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Does your frontline staff feel important, respected, valued? If not, your customer experience will suffer--even if those employees are empowered.
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The day Borders announced its liquidation I was distraught. Not because I was ever a regular Borders customer; because, as a book lover I hated seeing yet more stores disappear.
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Steve Jobs has said: "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new." Wow! Apple has an amazingly strong brand, yet the visionary leader of the company seems to say that listening to customers isn't valuable. Should companies eliminate their customer insight groups and abandon their voice of the customer (VoC) programs? You'll have to read a bit more to see my
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The age of customer empowerment has arrived, as evident at IBM's Smarter Commerce Global Summit 2011. The aim of the conference, being held this week in San Diego, is to drive home the importance for companies to successfully optimize their networks, organizations, and strategies on what IBM refers to as the "Buy, Market, Sell, and Service" commerce lifecycle.
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One of the comments that stuck with me after attending Dreamforce '11 in San Francisco last month came from a meeting with Jason Alley, a solutions marketing manager at Interactive Intelligence. During my discussion with Jason and his colleague, Debbie Thornburg, about cloud-based contact services, Jason mentioned how dramatic changes in terms of how companies are reshaping their contact center operations are being driven by customers.
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I'm a Dropbox customer. I originally signed up for the basic plan--2GB for free--but ran out of space quickly and decided to upgrade to 50MB of storage. So I forked over my $99 and got the following confirmation page:
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I got an email today from Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO. He began his message with "I messed up." That's a good place to start. Netflix has been a roller coaster of ups and downs lately. The company, trying to expand its business, acted like a teenager rebelling against his supportive parents, not realizing that its actions hurt the ones it needs the most -- loyal customers. What it does next will be a lesson in trust and customer strategy. As
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Ah, yes, it's that time of year once again: The time when some of my favorite brands send "Happy Birthday" cards and gift certificates. OK, I admit it. I excitedly anticipate this annual stuffing of my mailbox. It's my favorite aspect of my loyalty program memberships. The reason: It's actually personal.
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Recently I gathered four of the most talented new business salespeople I know around a table for a conversation. The main reason for bringing them together was to see if we could help some friends grow their business. But my secret second main reason for the meeting was to learn how to go out and bring in new customers and new revenue. It's one of the hardest and most-feared things to do in business, but it's also a golden ticket
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A few years ago, as I sat at the airport waiting for a plane to London, I received a call from my bank informing me that they needed to cancel my credit card because it had been compromised. Despite the shock, I was glad that the bank had taken preemptive measures to stop me from becoming the victim of fraud.
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Some have compared Target shoppers' rush for its limited Missoni line yesterday to Black Friday.
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While attending the Dreamforce `11 conference in San Francisco late last month, I had an opportunity to speak with a variety of CMOs, CIOs, and other executives about the divide that has historically existed between CMOs and CIOs. And while there are multiple factors that contribute to this rift between the two camps - including ownership battles over digital marketing efforts and a regular misalignment of goals - it seems that trust - or lack thereof - plays a significant
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My colleague Andrew McInnes recently wrote a post about the tunnel vision that results when companies rely solely on analytics for understanding customers. By neglecting qualitative research methods like ethnography and related tools like personas and customer journey maps, firms run the risk of thinking they know what customers want and need but in reality not having a clue. And that's the root cause of some of the worst customer experience problems--issues that can drag down a business. Take the
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"Listening is the infrastructure behind customer centricity," Maribel Sierra said during her keynote at Social Customer 2011. "It can inform and drive every aspect of a business." Sierra, Dell's director of global social media and communities, is a passionate advocate of customer listening and the benefits it provides. "Listening works," she said, adding that even if you can't resolve every issue, customers appreciate that you listen to their ideas and concerns. Listening positively impacts NPS, brand, and more.
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Sometimes you make an investment that turns out to have more value than you expected. You buy a baby monitor and realize it can double as a way to hear family members summon you from the house when you're in the backyard. You purchase a smartphone and discover that it's also a voice recorder, compass, and tool to identify birds or track your daily jogging performance. In a sense, the same thing is happening with home agents. We can all
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Technology has disposed of several links in the chain of communication between the man in the street and some of the world's biggest corporations. Today, anybody with basic computer literacy can let the rest of the world know what he thinks about anything that crosses his mind.
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Earlier this week, I wrote an article "Putting Customer Service in Charge of Social," in which experts agree that marketing-led social initiatives tends to create silos and block visibility into customer concerns by customer service.
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In July, I blogged about how the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was proposing new rules intended to make it tougher for communications carriers and other companies to slip mystery fees onto customers' phone bills. As a Verizon Wireless customer for the past few years, I've encountered what I have perceived as a few instances of this practice of "cramming" first hand, including a particularly aggravating recent occurrence which is leading my wife and I to shop around for a new
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Voice of the customer (VoC) leaders are constantly on the hunt for better analytics to identify what customers are saying and doing and, in turn, where companies should focus their attention. For the most part, the hunt is worthwhile. Just think about the value that text mining has delivered during the past few years. However, this focus becomes a problem when it turns into tunnel vision, leading VoC pros to ignore other research tools that yield deep customer understanding.
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Demanding customers, intense pressure from the CEO, and relentless competition. How can you, as a loyalty executive or chief customer officer (CCO), hope to satisfy the first two and outsmart the third? Cutting through the noise of the C-suite is a challenge for CCOs and it can often be too little too late if steps are not taken quickly. The average tenure of the CCO is only 29.6 months, often falling casualty to the "Results right now!" syndrome that ignores
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Consumers expect consistency from the companies they do business with, and that includes the brand image being reflected in the service they receive. If they are dealing with a luxury brand, for example, they expect the agent who takes their call to spend time understanding their issue and helping them out.
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