All Blog Posts (19)

The Art of Listening: A Key to Customer-Centricity

Curiosity is the key to great listening skills that improve customer experience. When you're truly curious about your customer's opinions, expectations and requests, you'll find the customer to be more pleasant, interesting and fulfilling to you as well.… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on October 22, 2009 at 2:20pm — No Comments

Customer-Focused Culture by Living With Your Customers: A Lesson From Amazon

You never know someone so well as when they live with you! What better way to transform your culture to truly customer-centric ways of thinking and doing, than to invite your customer to attend all your discussions? This has long been a practice at Amazon, since founder… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on September 1, 2009 at 9:56am — No Comments

Interaction Bridges for Customer Commitments

CLICK HERE FOR TRAINING PODCAST SAMPLE CLICK HERE FOR WEBCAST VERSION For customer experience management (CEM), it’s natural to focus on smoothing interaction difficulties between paying customers and sales and service representatives. Additionally, innumerable interactions for CEM occur inside the company, causing da… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on May 23, 2009 at 12:45pm — No Comments

What IS Customer Experience?!

You probably hear lots of "customer ..." phrases that seem interchangeable. In reality, there are big differences in these terms, although they are related. Customer Experience: customer's journey from realization of a need until the need no longer exists.

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Added by Lynn Hunsaker on May 8, 2009 at 3:23pm — No Comments

5 Keys to Employee Engagement for Customer Experience

CLICK HERE FOR PODCAST VERSION (4:48)

Lack of cooperation across organizations is a momentum inhibitor for customer experience management (CEM). Among best-in-class CEM practitioners, top cha… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on April 23, 2009 at 12:00pm — No Comments

Improve Customer Experience: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Actions speak louder than words when it comes to most things in life. Michael Phelps, Britney Spears, Barry Bonds, Martha Stewart and plenty of others learned that the hard way. Customers feel the same. They hear plenty of promises in ads, on signs, and from sales and service people. Ye… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on March 28, 2009 at 10:55am — No Comments

Missing! Systems Thinking for Customer Experience Business Results

"Do the whole job" is a mantra needed by our companies and society at large. Piecemeal efforts and short-term strategies ultimately lead to finger-in-the-dike management that is rampant today. All of the recent customer experience studies indicate that vital linkages are broken between: - survey results and business results - data and actions - goals across functions and business units - incentives and desired behaviors - multiple voice of customer sources - views of what customers want - brand… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on March 20, 2009 at 11:30am — No Comments

Measure Customer Value the Customer's Way

Customers automatically use 50 or more metrics for any customer experience, according to author Anthony Ulwick, in his book "What Customers Want". We may be re-inventing the wheel as we strive to come up with customer metrics that spell success. Looking at things from the customer viewpoint we've got to admit that customers really do know what outcomes they want. "It's easy to portray customers as emotional, illogical indiv… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on February 18, 2009 at 12:18am — No Comments

4 Tips for Keeping Goals & Initiatives on Track: Part 1

Goals are essential for taking your personal life and business prosperity to higher levels of performance, satisfaction and success. All too often, best intentions can get derailed over time. Here are 4 basic principles that apply to any resolution, initiative, program, dashboard, or MBO (management by objectives; incentives or stretch goals): 1. Connected - make sure you’re focusing on things with strong co… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on January 17, 2009 at 11:27am — No Comments

Customer Experience Improvement on a Tight Budget

Great strides in customer experience improvement are attainable with minimal out-of-pocket investment. Most companies have a wealth of untapped resources within. Proven winners both during and after a down cycle are those that embrace a slowdown as an opportunity to strengthen innovation and business processes. This strengthening better aligns offerings and ways-of-doing-business in ways that matter to customers and are… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on January 2, 2009 at 1:00pm — No Comments

Customer Service: 'Wow' Versus 'Ow'

What's the difference between 'wow' and 'ow' (as in 'ouch') service? Willingness to check for understanding. It's doing the whole job, with the customer sensing your overriding wish for his or her well-being. When you check for understanding, the customer’s woes dissolve, they appreciate your wisdom, and they deem your company worthy of wonderful word-of-mouth. Check Your Understanding of the Customer's Plight By the time customers contact a service professional, they've typica… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on December 2, 2008 at 11:28am — No Comments

Customer Experience in a Down Economy

As economic cycles change, customer experience strategies must adapt to evolving customer expectations, competitive forces and financial realities. To offer timely advice on customer experience strategies, a group of 18 experts contributed to a free public… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on November 26, 2008 at 7:08pm — No Comments

Customer Satisfaction Cliffhangers

Customers are typically motivated to give companies feedback by hopes that their opinions will be valued, make a difference in their near-future experiences, or spare others any grief they've endured. Anytime customers share feedback -- whether solicited via survey or unsolicited via complaint or casual comments to front-line employees -- it's important to acknowledge the customers' view and thank them, with assurance you're working on solutions. Don't let them feel like they're hanging on a cli… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on October 23, 2008 at 2:04pm — No Comments

Stepping Into Your Customers' Shoes

If we could 'be a fly on the wall' observing customers' experiences what a treasure trove of wisdom we'd have! Surveys, user groups and advisory boards are common tools for understanding customers -- but what is their scope? Do we have a comprehensive suite of tools for stepping into our customers' shoes? Customer Experience Scope We often short-change our perspective of the customer experience. A panoramic view of the customer's pressures, delights, wishes, and circumstances e… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on October 16, 2008 at 11:30am — No Comments

CEM's Weakest Link: 3 Tips for Managing Brand Value

You’re only as strong as your weakest link. You may be gambling your brand equity if the weakest links leading to the end-customer’s experience aren’t managed. Have you analyzed your business processes in terms of customer touchpoint value chains, to identify reliability risks and strengthen your weakest links? Here are three tips for managing your brand value: 1) What is Your Brand Value Chain? It’s common to think of customer touchpoints as finite contacts between front-line employees and cus… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on September 25, 2008 at 8:30pm — No Comments

Innovating the Customer Experience

What's the difference between user experience design and customer experience design? Although the phrasing is similar, there's a real gap between the two concepts. User experience typically focuses on product-specific ease-of-use, ergonomics, and ethnography -- participative observation of the product-in-use. Customer experience design is broader. It encompasses the full customer experience spectrum. Just think of your own experience in buying something recently. First, you must have concluded… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on August 26, 2008 at 2:31am — No Comments

Love Those Lemons

Negative customer feedback is a lot like biting into a lemon — the bitterness is hard to love — unless you give the lemon a good squeeze and some sugar, and transform it into refreshing and healthy lemonade. You’re only as strong as your weakest link, so those lemons — complaints and low survey ratings — are indeed essential ingredients to improving customer experiences. To squeeze your voice of the customer lemons into useful juice, you’ll want to (1) make it easy for customers to give you ear… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on August 23, 2008 at 6:50pm — No Comments

It's Like Let Me Use Metaphors to Totally Get My Point Across

Like radical, man, but everyone tends to talk in metaphors. A picture tells a thousand words, they say. And we all use 5-6 metaphors a minute, according to author Gerald Zeitman in his book "How Customers Think". So how much do you know about your customers' metaphors? The ones they use to describe your brand. The analogies they use to explain the customer experience. And different similes used by various market segments. Lots of companies are now exploring the customer experience through metaph… Continue

Added by Lynn Hunsaker on July 31, 2008 at 2:28am — No Comments