Within the highly competitive travel industry, companies are under immense pressure to differentiate their offerings, solidify their brand in positive customer memories, and generate lasting customer loyalty. But sometimes this exuberance inadvertently leads to communications and interactions that degrade the experience of travel companies’ most loyal customers. Those that want to keep their best customers(Read more…)
How To Guide Your Customers To Mutually Beneficial Choices
After a recent office supply run, I happily provided my email address one letter at a time to the friendly cashier in exchange for the promise of digital receipt. A few days later I received not only my receipt, but also a message thanking me for joining the Office Depot mailing list. Though it was(Read more…)
What Makes For A Good Email Opt-Out/Opt-Down Experience?
In a moment of optimism and good faith, I visited healthcare.gov one time last December and somehow, foolishly, provided my email address. Like millions of Americans, I soon found myself on the receiving end of a deluge of increasingly apocalyptic messages reminding me the deadline for enrollment was nigh. I never finished setting up an(Read more…)
Welcome, Amelia Sizemore!
I’m thrilled to announce that I have a new partner in crime: Amelia Sizemore. Amelia and I worked together for several years on the customer experience team at Forrester Research, where we became close friends and terrific collaborators on both research and consulting projects. Amelia will be working with me to develop several new service(Read more…)
Humanizing Healthcare Through Hands, Heads, and Hearts
The following should not be news to you, but it’s sometimes easy to forget: Patients aren’t just lines in a spreadsheet, records in a CRM system, or the list of ailments in their medical records. They are people. And while lots of healthcare companies are talking about “humanizing the healthcare experience,” I get the feeling that(Read more…)
The Super Bowl’s Biggest Loser? Facebook
The Super Bowl is an annual bellwether for how brands and traditional ad agencies think about digital marketing and multichannel customer experiences. Since 2007, I’ve been watching with one eye on the game and the other on how TV ads promote (or don’t) digital channels. Over the years, we’ve moved from basically zero mentions of(Read more…)
Nationwide’s Super Depressing Super Bowl Ad
Anyone watching Super Bowl XLIX surely experienced what I did. During a commercial break early in the game, a black cloud suddenly appeared, the air rushed out of the room, and everyone feel silent. The reason? Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company decided that this would be the perfect time to remind us that our kids might(Read more…)
It’s 02015: Time to Start Thinking Long Term
When we moved back to San Francisco in 02009, my husband and I joined an organization called The Long Now Foundation. About once a month, we attend Long Now lectures to learn about topics like the world’s oldest living organisms; the coevolution of light, life, and color on earth; how to find dangerous asteroids; and(Read more…)
Do You Think About the End of Your Customer Relationships?
Today’s marketers and customer experience professionals put a tremendous amount of focus on the beginning of the customer relationship. They focus on optimizing the steps that lead up to that all-important point of purchase, and then try to create smooth onboarding experiences. This is essential work. Companies need to make it easy for customers to(Read more…)
eBook: The 2015 Customer Experience Outlook
I’m thrilled to announce an exciting project with my partners at Doberman! We’re always looking for new ideas to inspire our work. So we recently reached out to some of our favorite customer experience authors, designers, and industry leaders to find out what they were thinking about at the beginning of 2015. The result is(Read more…)