Feedback from customers and employees is like oxygen. Your organization must have it to survive and thrive. Whether you’re a print shop with three employees, a government agency with 3,000, or a multinational company with 300,000, you need a strategy to fully leverage feedback. Voice of the customer, or VOC, is the term often used to describe this process. In …
“75% of customer experience initiatives fail!” That’s a sensational headline. And one, even with a modest search of cases and literature, you’ll see often (in fact, estimates go as high as 93 percent). My question is, if your focus on customer experience fails, what’s the alternative? Not focusing on customer experience? That just doesn’t make sense. Really, your organization has …
Recently, I gave a presentation at the Tugboat Institute Gathering of Teams. The talk focused on common missed opportunities in customer service as well as steps that leaders and teams can take to make a difference for their customers. It concluded with several questions that teams can ask to help shape service that is best for their customers and their …
Apple, the trillion-dollar tech giant, is also a giant in customer service. When my iPhone battery life began to diminish, I found myself on Apple’s online support pages, where I was quickly offered four options: bring the product into a store, send it in for repair (which I could schedule online), start a chat, or set up a call. With …
It could be that you have just a few people in a small department or company, handling interactions with customers. On the other hand, you might have thousands of agents working across multiple sites. In either case, or any point in between, you need a Customer Access Strategy. Just think about the inter-related decisions related to rolling out a new …
You’ve likely seen the signs posted in retail and restaurants: “Please be patient with our team.” You’ve probably heard similar delay announcements when contacting organizations: “Due to unusually heavy demand… “ Supply and production issues are, as Carrington York put it in a recent LinkedIn News story, “flipping the U.S. economy on its head.” And customer service operations are in …
An important part of customer service leadership is understanding what customers want, and ensuring your delivery and experiences meet their expectations. But what do customers expect? How are those expectations changing? This video from my LinkedIn Learning course “Customer Service Leadership” explores customer expectations and how you can shape services that truly meet the needs of your customers. Understanding customer …
Quantifying customer lifetime value, or CLV, provides powerful insight into the impact of customer experience initiatives. Put simply, CLV measures how valuable a customer is to your organization over time, rather than just one purchase. You can learn more about a basic approach for calculating CLV in this LinkedIn video from my course “Calculating the Value and ROI of Customer …
When you think about customer experience, what comes to mind? For most people, the answer is likely that it’s an organization’s responsibility to provide customers with a great experience. This isn’t wrong, but there’s more to it. Your best-laid plans for customer experience go nowhere without invested and dedicated employees. To build a strong culture of employee engagement at your …
The world is changing, and customer expectations are evolving. So, innovation is the heartbeat of customer experience. But how do you innovate? Innovation, the late Peter Drucker points out in his landmark book, The Discipline of Innovation, is the “effort to create purposeful, focused change in an enterprise’s economic or social potential.” He adds that it’s different than other disciplines. …
