Consumers are creatures of habit, often seeking out their favorite restaurant, hotel or store, because they know they’ll have a positive experience. These positive experiences make them loyal — whether it’s a perfectly grilled steak, a service associate who helps you find that perfect gift, or the ease of pre-selecting your hotel room in advance […]
Net Promoter Score
Customer Experience Is Not Our Responsibility
Recently a client asked me how to engage Human Resources, Legal/Risk and Finance in their customer experience journey. When my client had approached these groups about their contributions to the customer experience, the response was essentially: “We are very in favor of focusing on the customer experience and are glad that our sales and customer […]
2 Steps to Create Customer Service Heroes
Customer service. Customer experience. Focus on the customer. The customer is at the centre of everything we do. Why do we hear this so much? Because time and again we see that selling something of value at a fair price is not enough. The customer must find the seller easy to do business with at every […]
You may not know your customers as well as you think
I’ve been married for a long time, certainly long enough to know my wife Alicia pretty well. Or so I thought. But last week while dining out, I learned something new. At the end of our meal, the server ran my credit card and returned it to me, saying “Here you go, Jon. Have a […]
The profitable customer is always right
“The customer is always right.” Although this saying has been around for more than 100 years, pretty much everyone who works in customer service knows that while most customers are always right, certain customers are often wrong. Consider the customers who return tools, jewellery or clothing after they’ve been used. The resulting costs will either […]
Which “Silent Experiences” Are Killing Your Customer Loyalty?
Which Experiences Are Your “Silent Killers”? In my last post, ‘The Complexity of Customer Simplicity‘, I pointed out that one of the chief obstacles for companies that seek to “simplify” the customer experience is the difficulty in knowing what customers want. Customer simplification efforts need to address the issues that aggrieve customers the most. These […]
An Obsession with Success Metrics Won’t Create More Success – Find Out What Will
I understand why companies like to focus on positive measurements — be they sales, profits or stock price. We all want to feel good. But if you want to improve, you also have to identify what you need to do differently or stop doing. In my last post, NPS: the danger of its singularity, I examined […]
NPS: The Danger of its Singularity
After Fred Reichheld published The One Number You Need to Grow in the Harvard Business Review, many customer experience professionals thought they had to ask only a single question: “How likely is it that you would recommend company [x] to your friends and colleagues?” Gone were the “overall” questions that had dominated customer surveys, as […]