One of the biggest challenges in many organizations is that the work arrives randomly from moment to moment. That’s true in a restaurant, a retail store, a contact center, a hospital’s emergency department, and many other environments. Those delivering services don’t control customer arrival rate, or the issues they need help with. I once worked with a healthcare system that …
Customers who are referred to a business tend to spend more than customers who come in from marketing. As one marketing professional put it to me, “Referred customers come in hot. They trust their peers and they spend more out of the gate than do other new customers.” Good service gets referrals and those referrals are valuable. Here’s how you …
Customer experience has taken the world by storm. And with it, hundreds of consultants and researchers have flooded the market with books, interviews, training programs, and various methodologies. The problem? This noisy, cluttered space has led to confusing, conflicting, and fragmented customer experience initiatives, even within the same organization. Despite their best efforts and intentions, leaders and teams end up …
Customer service should work so well that it enables you to focus on what really matters: delivering on your organization’s mission and promises, and engaging with your customers. The right service strategy will enable you to do just that. This video, from my LinkedIn Learning course “Customer Service Strategy,” discusses three key reasons why a customer service strategy is so …
Why is it that professional sports teams put so much focus on tracking statistics? They want to get better. They want to see trends and identify areas where they can make improvements. The same thing goes for quality standards. You will want to measure how things are going so that you can identify areas where your employees and your team …
The term “governance” might feel out of place in the context of customer experience innovation. In fact, to some, creating a governance process might sound limiting or even stifling. But as a customer experience consultant, I’ve found the opposite to be true. It’s the department-spanning nature of customer experience that is precisely why governance is so important to innovation. Opportunities …
Have you ever had a metric that drives the wrong behavior? A bus company in a city with a well established international and cosmopolitan flair, had a reputation for too often running late. Leaders decided to give drivers incentives for ending their routes on time. Several months later, passenger satisfaction scores were even worse, and they quickly learned why. When …
Many contact centers are grappling with labor shortages, surging workloads, or a brutal combination of both. The resource mismatches have resulted in long wait times and frustration for customers, and high occupancy and burnout for agents. More serious implications can include employee turnover, lost customers, and a hit to your organization’s reputation and results. We’ve been getting lots and lots …
Customer advocacy is most effective when the entire organization works together to do what’s best for customers. That’s great for customers, of course, and the organization benefits from their loyalty. But departments across the organization benefit as well. That’s a point that’s sometimes missed. When you harness customer advocacy to help identify and further improvements across functions, you have a …
With a clear vision and sound processes, the right technology solutions for your customer experience efforts tend to come into focus. Some improvements will be incremental — small wins here and there — and others will be more sweeping. In some cases, you might even use technology to create new markets. As you look for ways to leverage technology — …
