It takes courage to tell the other story – the one where things didn’t go as planned – and to share the hard lessons you’ve learned with others. A few months ago I received an email from Luke Taylor with just that kind of story about his company TPC. I...
While plenty of time and attention gets dedicated to trying to find ways to delight customers, a lot less time gets spent on understanding and being consistent with the baseline of experience that all customers get – no matter what. The lack of this basic discipline has been reinforced to me...
It all began standing on the railway station platform helplessly watching the train with my favourite scarf still on board, head down at the tracks. Annoyed with myself for being careless I headed home resigned to a winter without the snuggly warmth I’ve come to love. A call into the lost...
Delight. A noun meaning a high degree of enjoyment or pleasure. Joy. Rapture. If there’s a word that deserves a place on the over-exposed list of business lingo, delight would have to be up there. It is most commonly used in combination with customer, as in ‘customer delight’. A quick Google search...
A fair warning on what follows – I’m feeling a bit grumpy today. In the course of what passes for doing brand work, a lot of organisations take aim at elements of their marketing and identity. Which inevitably results in people getting an announcement from them where they proudly extol their...
“You can’t give people what they want. You can give them something else.” This quote by the late Anthony Martignetti stopped me in my tracks because it perfectly encapsulates what organisations struggle with and provides the answer – all neatly presented in two sentences. The problem isn’t that people can’t tell you...
There’s a lot of ink spilled these days about a thing called customer centricity. All over the place organisations are calling on their employees to be more “customer-centric”. And amidst a whole jargon filled lexicon of customer experience related terms this one puzzles me the most. Stripping back the jargon, a...
The moral of this story is… Over the years that I’ve been writing for SmartCompany there have been plenty of tales of woe. Of organisations that, for any number of reasons, made the news for all the wrong reasons. But as with any tale there is always a moral to the story. So this...
When an entrepreneur is building a brand the focus is often on the ‘doing’ side of things. For too many that starts and stops at the veneer they want (deciding a name, getting a logo, applying it to everything that moves). But more fully it can extend across and align...
I was on the receiving end of a customer experience this week that completely and irrevocably changed the opinion I had of a particular company. And while I’m tempted to name and shame, there’s a bigger lesson to be shared. Without going into specifics of what and who, the crux of...