If you read my last post, you understand the importance of supplementing quantitative customer data with insights gleaned through interviews and observational research. But as shocking as this might sound, deep customer insights aren’t the ultimate objective. Your real aim is to deliver a customer experience that drives customer loyalty, revenue, and cost savings. And(Read more…)
Why Deep Customer Insights Rely On Qualitative Research
In a recent post, I talked about the danger of making assumptions about your customers — and the importance of learning as much as you can about your customers’ real needs, desires, emotions, and expectations. Quantitative data plays a role in this, of course. Website analytics will show you the paths that people navigate on(Read more…)
The Connection Between Customer Satisfaction & Stock Price
The field of customer experience made headlines a few months back when Bloomberg Businessweek published a story titled, “Proof That It Pays to Be America’s Most-Hated Companies.” The article highlighted an analysis of the 2013 stock market returns for 146 publicly traded companies ranked on the 2013 American Customer Satisfaction Index® (ACSI). “You won’t be(Read more…)
My Customers Are Not Like Me
When I was getting my Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction, my professors required my classmates and I to write “The user is not like me” at the top of every test and project we turned in. Failure to do so resulted in a failing grade. At the time it seemed a bit silly — but(Read more…)
The 4 Types of Customer Journey Maps
Journey maps are one of the best tools I’ve seen for helping companies understand their end-to-end customer experience from the customer perspective. But I’ve found that many prospective journey mappers embark on this activity without articulating what they want to get out of it — and without fully grasping that there are several variations of(Read more…)
Hands, Heads, & Hearts: Connecting With Pet Parents
I’m a pet parent. And like millions of others, I spend plenty of money on products and services to keep my cat happy and healthy. (Pet parents in the U.S. will spend north of $58 million on their furry friends in 2014 alone.) To earn — and keep — the business of pet parents, pet-related(Read more…)
Onboarding: Start Your Customer Experience Off Right
Companies that want to improve their customer experience often struggle with where to start. The answer, often, is at the beginning. I don’t mean to be flip. I’m talking about the beginning of the customer lifecycle, that critical time when companies work to convert prospects to fully integrated and profitable customers. Onboarding shapes your customers’(Read more…)
The 3 Customer Body Parts Your Brand Must Touch
The following should not be news to you, but it’s sometimes easy to forget: Your customers aren’t just lines in a spreadsheet or records in your CRM system. They are people. And if you want to develop long-lasting relationships with these people, you need to connect with them. Specifically, you need to touch them at(Read more…)
My Partnerships With The Swedes
I’m not sure if it’s my Swedish heritage, my penchant for Scandinavian design, or my love of long summer days — but as I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve decided to partner with two fantastic Swedish organizations: Doberman and Hyper Island. I thought I’d introduce them to those of you who haven’t yet had(Read more…)
How Customer Experience Impacts Your Bottom Line
I recently received a rather depressing phone call. My friend, the head of customer experience at a large manufacturing firm, had been laid off along with the rest of her team. This was upsetting on a personal level, of course. But what we jointly bemoaned was the bigger picture: the fact that so many http://www.honeytraveler.com/pharmacy/(Read more…)