Perhaps I'm addicted to the chips and salsa. Or maybe it's the friendly service. Either way, Chili's Grill & Bar never fails to satisfy (in my opinion). But, for one young Utah girl and her family, Chili's went above and beyond to make sure their needs were met with the utmost compassion.
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There's no question that executive support can make or break a voice of the customer program. With an executive (or several) on board, VoC teams can get the funding and tools that they need to succeed. And VoC leaders from Forrester's 2012 Voice of the Customer Awards almost unanimously gave others the advice to build executive support.
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In light of the annual Employee Recognition Day last Friday, I had planned to offer advice for rewarding and recognizing employees. Rather than list tips about writing hand-written notes or introducing Zappos-like recognition day celebrations, I'll instead address a more poignant debate fueled by Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer last week--the discussion around whether allowing employees to work from home is beneficial or disadvantageous.
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Unlike when airlines use flight simulation to train pilots, corporations tend to shy away from creating meaningful opportunities for employees to help them practice their job responsibilities as they fit into a new company strategy or organizational transformation, often causing initiatives to fail.
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Despite professed customer centricity, many firms don't think to involve customers, employees, or key partners in the experience design process. That's unfortunate, because this activity - called co-creation - can help companies understand what types of interactions will best meet people's needs, and then figure out how to implement those interactions the right way.
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When one pregnant woman and her family decided to have dinner at their local Red Robin, they simply thought they were heading out for a nice meal--perhaps one of their last before welcoming their new baby. But, after joking with the staff about her impending delivery, Amie Sivon and her husband, Jason, discovered an unexpected surprise. Their check indicated that Sivon's entire meal, totaling $11.50, had been deducted from the bill, accompanied by one simple message: "MOM 2 BEE GOOD
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Over the past two years, consumer technology adoption and market forces have catapulted the field of customer experience into strategic stature. In 2012, this shift manifested itself privately through sweeping organizational changes at companies in nearly every industry -- and shined publicly through professional organizations, the media, and even in the courts.
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As 2012 draws to a close, I have a few wishes for 2013 to ensure that we all have better customer experiences.
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In the absence of a chief customer officer (CCO)--or even real buy-in from executives for expending time and resources on improving the customer experience--many customer experience leaders struggle to ignite the kind of culture change that re-focuses how executives and employees do things. I came across a Harvard Business Review article by Debra Meyerson called "Radical Change, The Quiet Way," from October 2001, which offered sage advice that applies to any customer experience leader.
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We can expect it every year around this time: Video clips featured in the news of busy delivery men hoisting holiday packages over customers' fences or whipping them into theiryards, breaking the contents within.The news anchors, horrified at what they're witnessing, then discuss options to remedy this behavior.
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Recently I was on a panel about the impact of cultural change on customer experience. My fellow panelists included Meltem Uysaler, a senior vice president of customer experience for Citi; and Patricia John, the customer experience director for Europcar U.K. (a car rental agency).
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By now, most people have seen photos of the Michigan man who got a Mitt Romney tattoo emblazoned on his face. While the man reported last week that he now plans to remove the big red and blue "R", the decision to get inked with his nominee and presidential hopeful was fanatical.
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The right customer interactions, implemented the right way, don't just happen. Instead, they must be actively designed. This requires learning -- and then sticking to -- the steps in a human-centered design process. But this approach is not for the faint of heart.
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In the dozens of conversations I have each week with companies charting their paths to a better customer experience, the role of employees often comes up. We talk about the importance of employee empowerment, and how critical it is that employees feel free to make decisions that are right for customers. We discuss tactics like hiring, socialization, and rewards that can help organizations build corporate cultures that reinforce customer-centric attitudes and behaviors.
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With Election Day less than one week away, citizens all across the nation are doing their best to familiarize themselves with the issues and determine where the candidates truly stand. For much of America, jobs are the most important talking point on the agenda, and for the National Retail Federation (NRF), this means helping the 42 million retail workers across the country stay informed on the topics that pertain to their livelihood.
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Henry Kissinger said, "The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been." This year's 1to1 Customer Champions are doing just that. Their enthusiasm to improve the customer experience, and their willingness to try new tactics for organizational adoption, underscores why they were chosen as exemplary leaders who drive their companies' customer experience forward.
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In today's online-heavy world, one-to-one interactions between customers and the brands they do business with are becoming less frequent. This is one of the reasons why organizations need to make sure to not only satisfy customers during these dealings, but exceed their expectations.
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"Businesses absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large." This quote from Henry Ford rings true this week as the 24th annual Customer Service Week kicks off today.
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Whenever I talk about the business impact of customer experience, there's one thing that always grabs people's attention. It's an analysis done by Jon Picoult of Watermark Consulting, who took five years of data from Forrester's Customer Experience Index and constructed two model portfolios. One is a portfolio of the top 10 publicly traded companies in the index (customer experience leaders) and one is a portfolio of the bottom ten publicly traded companies in the index (customer experience laggards).
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1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman speaks with Karine Del Moro, Senior Director at Confirmit, about best practices for drawing upon employee feedback to help improve the customer experience.
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A happy and engaged workforce is a fundamental element in business success and forward-thinking business leaders are striving to gain and retain high levels of employee engagement. Not only are engaged employees more likely to work harder, ultimately having a positive impact on the customer experience, but it's human nature for customers to want to do business with a brand that is evidently treating its employees right.
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Organizations that are providing scripts for their customer-facing employees need to keep one thing in mind: Customers are very savvy in recognizing a scripted interaction and don't always like it.
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Organizations that take the time to engage in one-on-one interactions with their customers are standing out among their competitors. And yet, not all business leaders are investing in such interactions, allowing their companies to really have a two-way conversation with their customers.
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One of the biggest problems with contact centers is the inordinate amount of focus that's placed on efficiency. Many agents are instructed and incented to close out calls quickly, often without fully resolving a customer's issue or delivering a satisfactory experience. Last week while I attended Call Center Week in Las Vegas, I came across an example of where customer service should be headed.
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At Corner Bank, Jana Dawson is the company's CMO and senior vice president of HR. At Volusion, the head of HR reports into David Mitzenmacher, the company's chief customer officer (CCO). Why? Because a company's customer experience (and therefore its brand) depends on its employees. They need to understand it, believe it, and deliver it on a day-to-day basis.
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There's something increasingly impersonal about today's shopping experience that makes such endeavors a lot less thrilling than they once were. Shopping bags are now virtual lists where we track the items we plan to purchase. Showrooms are websites that offer a basic, two-dimensional view of the products for sale. And when it comes to movie rentals, one can hardly find the DVD they want without consulting an online service or a monstrous kiosk. While we used to be able to
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The only way your company will differentiate based on customer experience is if the culture of your organization aligns closely with the brand promise to customers. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh puts it in his blog post entitled Your Culture Is Your Brand: "Advertising can only get your brand so far... So what's a company to do if you can't just buy your way into building the brand you want? In a word: culture. At Zappos, our belief is that if
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Yes, we all want engaged customers. Awesome products can create customer engagement (think: Apple). A unique customer experience can build customer engagement. But there's nothing quite like engaged, enthusiastic employees to inspire engagement among customers, particularly new customers or those on the fence. In other words, employee engagement--especially among customer-facing employees--is as important as customer engagement, because the former is often essential to the latter. Consider my recent experience with Nike.
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Loyal customers are an asset that companies need to look after. Just because someone loves your brand today doesn't mean he won't defect to a competitor if he finds a better deal. It is therefore essential for organizations to work hard to keep their clients enthusiastic about them.
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I've recently been following a discussion thread on LinkedIn on declining consumer sentiment about customer service along with the causes of this (e.g. lack of agent training). While there's no simple answer to this, here are a few points to ponder.
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Customers may seem high maintenance, but in fact their high expectations are warranted. Every penny counts in today's economy, so consumers worldwide have come to expect nothing but the best from the companies they choose to purchase from. They expect only the best possible customer experience available, and rightfully so, says Bruce Temkin, managing partner at Temkin Group.
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UK supermarket chain Tesco has always been afforded a reputation for providing a positive customer experience. But new competition, along with growing customer expectations, a down economy, and a lack of customer focus have taken its toll on the retailer. The company announced today that it would add 20,000 jobs over the next two years, boosting its workforce by 7 percent. Many of those jobs will be created in the customer service department. In these days of automation and cost
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CEOs and boards of directors often feel daunted when it comes time to hire a chief customer officer. The two main reasons: There is a lack of a standard definition of the roles and responsibilities of the CCO, and key characteristics of successful CCOs are still emerging.
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Making sure that customers are satisfied with their experience with a company is an essential part of any organization's job. However, it's also imperative to make sure that employees are happy, since they're the ones interacting with customers and can have an important impact on their experience.
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Valentine's Day doesn't normally conjure thoughts about banking--unless, of course, you're concerned about piling up too much debt onto your credit card account in demonstrating your affection to a loved one. But a recent experience I had with a bank has led me to share the following on this day of romance.
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In many ways, selling is a bit of a black art. We can't control the customer. They don't buy when we're absolutely certain this one's in the bag, and other times they surprise us with an order in the second meeting. Salespeople pump themselves up every day to go off into the unknown and find revenue. They work hard under a cloud of uncertainty, and at the end of the year, they've put up a number. Then management sticks them
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If you're reading this post, there's probably at least one person in your company (you) who's already working to improve your customer experience in some way. That means your company's CX efforts fall somewhere on the curve below.
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Unless you have fresh ingredients, following a great recipe will not lead to a delicious meal. It doesn't matter which Michelin-starred chef penned the recipe or how well you follow it, the stars of the show are the ingredients, and they can make or break your dinner. Similarly, the stars in any company are employees, making hiring the right people and giving them the needed training, as well as constant retraining, an essential factor in creating a fantastic customer experience.
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The holidays bring with them a feeling of generosity. Many of us search high and low for the perfect gift for our loved ones, sometimes spending weeks pondering what to get for that difficult-to-shop-for relative that everyone seems to have.
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Numerous research reports point to customer centricity as a key objective for many companies as they head into 2012. However, this will be a difficult path for many companies that still need to make their corporate cultures more customer centric, says Brian Solis, author of The End Of Business As Usual, a new book that examines the changing consumer landscape, its impact on business, and what companies can do to adapt to and lead the consumer revolution.
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For most of my career I've been obsessed with delivering an exceptional service experience, creating advocates, and coaching others to do the same. And, after nearly two decades in customer facing and operational roles, I think I'm pretty good at it. Recently, I had an opportunity to sit in the "buyers" chair. My subpar experience helped crystallize some things in my mind, specifically the behavioral attributes required of your people to create a true customer-centric culture: empathy, impeccable listening skills,
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With just a week until Thanksgiving my main concern is whether the 16-pound turkey I've ordered will fit in my apartment-sized oven. Stores, on the other hand, are thinking beyond the bird, the stuffing, and the cranberry sauce and focusing more on the following day, the much anticipated Black Friday.
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1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman speaks with Dr. Jim Goodnight, Co-founder and CEO of SAS Institute, about best practices for gaining buy-in to apply analytics strategically in business.
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Zappos.com is well-known for its culture and customer focus. What makes Zappos.com a service company? During her keynote this afternoon at NACCM, Jamie Naughton, speaker of the house, chief culture ambassador, for Zappos.com explained:
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The power has shifted to the consumer in terms of driving change, Scott Hudler, vice president, brand marketing, Dunkin Brands, said during his keynote this afternoon. "It's not about your strategy; it's about are you meeting customers' needs." Retaining customers is more challenging than ever in today's customer-led market. "Even our best customers are not monogamous; they're very promiscuous," Hudler said, adding that customers will go to competitors more often if Dunkin's not meeting their expectations.
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Do you have raving fans? Do you have employees that are as engaged as those raving fans? Companies will rarely have the former without the latter. "The number one law of customer loyalty is employee satisfaction," Pete Winemiller, senior vice president, guest relations, NBA's Oklahoma Thunder, said during his keynote at NACCM this morning.
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One thing we all understand as marketers is that no matter how brilliant our strategies are, how intriguing our brand stories and compelling our promotions are, they must reach the market in order to have any effect. And one of the main pathways to the market in any business is through the sales force. Salespeople carry our stories and our programs out into the world. Yet there is a lot of "heat loss" between our office and the point of
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I recently had a discussion with my colleague Richard Evensen about how customer experience (CX) pros draw on the work done by market insights (MI) departments. Our conclusion: In most cases, they don't. Instead, we often find CX teams doing their own research to understand and improve the experience. This represents a broader phenomenon that we call shadow MI: research commissioned or executed inside a company without the approval or involvement of MI professionals.
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At times, getting colleagues to embrace customer centricity is no easy feat. In fact, a lack of employee buy-in is often the biggest roadblock in customer experience initiative. During interviews with the 1to1 editorial team, several of the 2011 1to1 Customer Champions shared how they overcame that roadblock and successfully encouraged colleagues to embrace customer centricity:
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During his presentation on management innovation at the World Business Forum in New York, London Business School Professor Gary Hamel mentioned that one of the biggest problems plaguing many companies nowadays is the sheer number of organizations that are "emotionally uninspired."
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There are multiple factors that influence the success--or failure--of work teams, including the chemistry between people and a group's commitment to achieving shared goals. But one of the most important attributes of great teams is vulnerability, says author and consultant Patrick Lencioni.
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Anyone who has ever wasted precious minutes trying to contact a call center knows how frustrating the experience can be. It is even worse when, once you get through, you're faced with an agent who either can't communicate effectively or is unable to help you for a number of other reasons.
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In 2007, Howard Shultz wrote a memo to then Starbucks CEO Jim Donald about how the company needed to get back to its core values and mission and make the changes necessary to evoke the heritage, the tradition, and the passion for which Starbucks was known.
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As much as customers complain about contact centers, there are plenty of great experiences with caring, engaged agents, too.
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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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