Let me start this important topic with a few points that should be intuitively obvious: The benefits associated with delivering an outstanding customer experience accrue from influencing customer behavior Customers either deliberately or incidentally change what they do when they experience something that makes them feel or think differently In most competitive markets, there are straightforward financial benefits associated with changing customer behavior. These positive changes in customer behavior lead ... read more

I’d like to emphasize a point I’ve made in earlier posts. Your company does not have a customer experience… only your customers do. Although it might seem like this is splitting hairs, we’ve come to realize that the distinction is critical. The moment you start talking about “our company’s customer experience” attention gets focused on what we do rather than how customers experience things. Our working definition of experience is: ... read more

Would you decide to just go out and spend $15,000 on tools to do a little work around the house? Are the improvements to your backyard worth the $12,000 you ended up spending? Would you decide to invest $3,000 on repairs to your old, unreliable car, even though it was only worth about $4,000 in the first place? Or, is your prize collection of beanie babies, figurines, watches, or ___________ ( ... read more

Customer Experience Concours is a unique research and development program dedicated to enabling major corporations to improve business performance by delivering a differentiated customer experience. The program will allow a select group of corporations to collaborate with the award winning BSG Concours research team (a division of BSG Alliance) along with: Lou Carbone, a pioneer in leveraging customer experience as a differentiated business strategy ... read more

How do you get your customers to talk about the experiences they’ve had with you? Over the past week, I’ve had a few conversations with executives about improving their organization’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). While there are certainly differences of opinion on the importance of NPS as a central metric for an organization’s performance with customers (see Randy Brandt’s Core ... read more

If you’re looking for a good introduction to behavioral economics leading up to the emerging field of neuroeconomics, check out Michael Shermer’s The Mind of the Market. The Mind of the Market isan easy to read summary of some of the work of many of the brilliant contributors to this field including: Daniel Kahneman and < ... read more

I’ve gotten accustomed to taking my car to the Jiffy Lube near my house. Over the 30 years that I’ve been driving, I’ve had the full range of good and bad experiences with auto service shops. However, this Jiffy Lube has a distinctive and effective way of interacting with me regarding the cost of my service. At the end of each visit, they bring me over ... read more

Years ago, P&G ran a promotional campaign in which customers could win prizes for writing the best essay about why they loved one of P&G’s products. In response to this promotion, tens of thousands of customers voluntarily submitted short essays for the chance of winning. This brilliantly influential campaign leveraged one of the same techniques used by the North Korean military to influence (a.k.a. brainwash) prisoners of ... read more

Last month, I had the opportunity to do a keynote speech at a Maritz Customer Experience Conference. One of the highlights of this event was a behind the scenes tour of the beautiful Four Seasons Aviara Resort. I took copious notes and wanted to share a few of the salient elements that contribute to the world-class hospitality experience delivered by this resort. Across the clients we’ve worked with, ... read more

I’m so tired… tired of waiting… tired of waiting for you… Oh… sorry… I’m just sitting here singing to myself as I wait on hold for the reservation agent to pick up. I might as well do something productive… like write a post about waiting. I know, we all have to wait. Every day we wait for the next available agent; we wait in traffic; we wait at the ... read more

I’ve spent a lot of time working with a handful of leading financial services organizations on the design of their customer experience. One of the biggest challenges is that executives at these organizations have a natural tendency to think about the business in terms of the traditional industry boundaries. In a recent post, I talked about a customer-personae driven experience design approach that starts by considering the broader ... read more

I’ve received several requests to put together a “roadmap” to the Customer Innovations blog posts I’ve done. Here is an organized path through the material I’ve posted so far. I haven’t tried to be all inclusive but have just the most substantial posts. Grab a venti dark roast and enjoy! Customer Experience 101: Customer Experience and Why It’s Important? Characteristics of an Outstanding Customer Experience read more

I just came across a wonderful article in the NY Times, titled: Put Buyers First? What a Concept. The author had ordered a Playstation from Amazon for his son for Christmas. On December 21st, he realized he had not received this $500 item. Apparently, it disappeared after the package had been signed for by a neighbor. The author called Amazon to report ... read more

Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with several leading retail financial institutions on a personae-driven approach to customer experience design. The challenge is that most banks, insurance companies, and investment advisory businesses have a long legacy of product-centric, “everything for everybody” ways of thinking. This leads to decision-making and resource commitments that reinforce “better sameness” rather than true differentiation. Financial personae are used to describe a holistic ... read more

For the past several years, we’ve followed a personae-driven approach to customer experience design. This approach has been critically important as we work with our clients to design experiences that naturally fit with… and influence… the “mental model of the customer.” (See: Personae-Driven Customer ExperienceDesign) With virtually every client, weget questions about how personae (plural of persona) compares to segmentation. In short, the development of ... read more

I’ve heard many executives and consultants talk about the importance of training and motivating front-line employees in order to improve the customer experience. While I agree that having highly engaged, well-trained, and motivated front-line employees is important, it is very far from sufficient. In this post, I will make the case that focusing on front-line employees is generally NOT the most important place to start if ... read more

From a business perspective, the most critical elements of the customer experience involve the choices that customers make: the choice to buy; the choice to recommend; the choice to continue as a customer. In practice, most organizations have insufficient insight into how customers consider their alternatives and make choices. Even worse, many organizations do things that complicate customers’ decisions and create barriers to profitable customer behavior. In this post, I ... read more

My colleagues and I have been lucky enough to have the chance to help a wide range of companies improve their customers’ experiences. As we’ve done this work, we’ve always started with the customer. Who are the customers? What are their priorities and underlying needs? What are they trying to accomplish? What is the natural path they follow to accomplish those things? ... read more