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Ideas, news & analysis
Q&A About Brand, Marketing, & Customer Experience
Last week I did a webinar with the fine folks at the Society of Digital Agencies about the disconnect among brand, marketing, and customer experience (CX) that exists in many organizations. My advice to the attendees, who were (unsurprisingly) mostly from digital agencies, was to strive to connect the marketing
Experiences That Matter: A Focus on Usefulness
In 1995, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (DoT) commissioned a Penn State professor to understand how the state’s residents perceived the organization and to identify the drivers of residents’ satisfaction. The results were interesting, if not terribly surprising. It didn’t matter how friendly the state’s workers were or how easy
Ignite A Customer-Centric Culture With Customer Insights
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
