I heard this at a recent event: “I got feedback after my last presentation … so I am going to spend more time on slide 3.” My issues with the evils of PowerPoint notwithstanding, the presenter should probably have ignored that advice. Slide 3 was probably fascinating for someone with a deep interest in...
Do you think about your customers as consumers, users or purchasers? According to a recent article in Harvard Business Review, the underlying mindset marks you as either a “legacy” or a “newcomer” brand. With apologies for the quotation marks, let’s just say older or newer organisations. In the article is a sentence tying itself...
An event I attended this past weekend reminded me how easy it is to misunderstand what it means to be “customer-centric”. In general I hate jargon, and in particular, I dislike the way “centricity” is bandied about without a thought to what the term means. Not the dictionary definition, the ‘around...
If you’re like the person I was talking to last week, you spend many hours speculating things that can go wrong. Okay well, maybe not hours, but at least somewhere throughout the planning process, the thorny question of ‘what if X bad thing happens?’ will pop above the parapets. Lots of...
As more of our interactions become digital, the desire to translate them into a relationship is creating a faux familiarity that bugs me. Acknowledge me, yes, but too often it slips over the line into something less appropriate. Tone is a tricky thing, and the gap between formal and familiar can...
I’m a fan of businesses; they mostly do a good job. However, sometimes the stuff they do makes me sit back and say, “what are they thinking?”. I know customers are often maddening and capricious beings who also do stuff, but the reaction should not punish everyone. Yet that’s what happens....
The dance of promises made by an organisation and the experience it delivers can be everything from the smooth glide of Fred and Ginger circling the floor to the awkward missteps and sore toes of a first waltz. Experience and promises circle each other in continual motion. Where one begins and...
The experience employees have becomes the experience customers have, which circles back around to employees in a loop. It can be a doom loop or a boon loop, and the identity of the organisation provides the energy.If the employees of your organisation feel caught in a mire of draconian decisions, disconnected...
I love a good customer experience story. I’ve even peddled them myself a time or two on these pages. However, I’ve come to see they have a dark side. You know the kind of story. Where Jenny buys something, but wait, there’s a problem. Enter the story of Company X going above...
“You get what you incentivise”Peter Diamandis Building a brand, engaging team members, delivering a consistently good customer experience, and ensuring the back office and front lines work in sync. These things have much in common, yet one important element they share is often ignored or given short shift—incentives. Today it seems like...