629 Posts Found

Not all customers are “created equal” and should not be treated the same. The key is to focus a company’s service efforts on the customers who add the most long-term value to the business. To identify who those customers are, you need to evaluate their value in seven key areas:

Content: Article | Author: Barry Moltz | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subject: Customer Related

Trust—defined as expectations set plus expectations met—is critical to customer satisfaction and engagement. Unless expectations are explicitly set customers will come up with their own, based on a collective history of best and worst experiences. And this presents companies with an impossible dilemma: Failed execution against unknown expectations.

Content: Quotation | Source: Accenture | Subjects: Customer Related, Trust

To reach it’s full impact, customer experience needs to be thought of as a strategic agenda item on par with and actually integrated with corporate strategy, managing the brand, and new product development. Customer experience should not be confused with existing efforts to focus on customer service or touch-point management. These efforts are focused more on delivering tactical reengineering of customer-facing processes.

As a customer experience … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael T. Kanazawa | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

In the past, CRM has followed a basic balanced scorecard technique involving four categories: customer, financial, operations, and people. From an inside-out perspective, organizations first analyzed the needs and capabilities of operations and their people to determine what could be delivered to the customer. From that, they drew conclusions and predictions to determine the impact on the financial category. As this has changed, so have … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: David R. Laube, Raymond F. Zammuto | Source: Darwin Magazine | Subject: Customer Related

Only if managers define market segments that correspond to the circumstances in which customers find themselves when making purchasing decisions can they accurately theorize which products will connect with their customers. We believe that customer segmentation (or categorization) should be based on the notion that customers “hire” products to do specific “jobs.” Doing so will help managers segment their markets to mirror the way their … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor | Source: CIO Magazine | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation, Marketing / Sales

We design service jobs for superheroes. No wonder service is terrible.

Content: Article | Authors: Anne Morriss, Frances Frei | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Management, Organizational Behavior

Respect is a fundamental value underlying human relationships. It is important in families, in education, in ethics and religion, in governing, in the military, and in the justice system. Businesses incorporate respect into their corporate codes of conduct and invoke respect in the context of human resources and diversity programs. Respect for customers is an essential ingredient of long-term performance in both the private and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: John A. Quelch, Katherine E. Jocz | Source: Leader to Leader | Subject: Customer Related

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The concept behind any dialogue has to be focused on increasing the consumer’s sense of comfort or value. If you offer incentives on brands people don’t accept or know, you aren’t offering anything. But if your offer underscores a key value of your proposed relationship, an incentive can work wonders.

Content: Quotation | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subjects: Brand, Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

In a multi-polar world—a volatile, interdependent, globalized marketplace where upstart rivals can emerge quickly from any corner—competitiveness at speed remains imperative. But many of the previous bases for competition are no longer viable. Companies offer mostly similar products and use comparable technology. Proprietary technologies can be copied quickly. Physical location matters less when customers use the Internet to search and transact.

What’s left as a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Accenture | Subjects: Customer Related, Market Research, Marketing / Sales

How conjoint analysis, a tried-and-true market research tool, can be used to support organic growth.

Content: Article | Author: David Meer | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Customer Related, Market Research, Marketing / Sales

Excellent customer service is a critical success factor for businesses across all industries. But how many organizations can really claim to be giving fantastic, WOW factor customer service across all customer touch points?

Content: Article | Source: Arthur D. Little | Subject: Customer Related

Mounting competition and ever-more demanding customers mean that companies must deliver exceptional service. While no service model is a guarantee of success, companies need to align strategic and operational issues with customer and employee needs. In their latest research, IESE professors Philip Moscoso and Alejandro Lago offer a clear model for turning service offerings into profit and growth.

Content: Article | Source: IESE Insight | Subject: Customer Related

Effectively managing service operations is crucial to controlling labor costs and improving customer satisfaction. By addressing six drivers of performance, executives can go a step further — turning their service operations into a key source of competitive advantage.

Content: Article | Authors: Curt Bailey, Harry Hawkes, Patricia Riedl | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Customer Related, Operations

Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Bezos | Source: Wired | Subject: Customer Related

There is a better way to determine how many—what portion—of your customers were satisfied. Time and again studies have shown that customer loyalty is fleeting for all but the most satisfied of customers, because any customer who is not “completely satisfied,” is dissatisfied to some degree, and/or with “something.” That “something” is the “crack in the door” through which competitors can sneak and steal your … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: John Mariotti | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subjects: Customer Related, Market Research, Marketing / Sales

Here renowned entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk reveals how companies big and small can scale that kind of personal, one-on-one attention to their entire customer base, no matter how large, using the same social media platforms that carry consumer word of mouth. The Thank You Economy offers compelling, data-driven evidence that we have entered into an entirely new business era, one in which the companies that see … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Gary Vaynerchuk | Subject: Customer Related

People don’t judge you on the basis of your mistakes—they judge you on the manner in which you own up to them. In my experience, most companies do a terrible job of taking blame. They lob press releases. Or they apologize for the inconvenience. Resist that temptation and say you’re sorry like you’re apologizing to a friend. Be good—and your customers will be good right … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jason Fried | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subject: Customer Related

In March 2010, Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, published a book titled, The Art of Choosing. Iyengar, who is blind, says the book reflects her interest in how people make choices, including how they are able to navigate both the opportunities and responsibilities that an abundance of choice can bring. In a video presentation, Iyengar offers Knowledge@Wharton viewers her perspectives on the … [ Read more ]

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Sheena Iyengar | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales, Organizational Behavior

The cliché goes: “We can learn from our mistakes.” And it is true, especially as it applies to customer service. No matter how good we are, nobody can be perfect, although it is a lofty goal. At anytime there can be issues, problems and complaints. I call these negative customer service issues Moments of Misery™. Whenever something goes wrong, this is the opportunity for your … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Shep Hyken | Subject: Customer Related