Before starting to write about customer experience trends for 2018, I wanted to get a lay of the land. I love when I hear more executives say customer experience is crucial to their company's business strategy. In 2015, Accenture reported that 41% of respondents it interviewed said that customer experience was critically important to its [...]
This week, I read an online comment that Customer Experience is a part of Customer Success. Customer Success professionals believe customer experience is a subset of customer success. Customer Experience professionals believe customer success is a subset of customer experience. Each discipline has its own idea. The Customer Experience vs. Customer Success debate has been an interesting [...]
Thanksgiving is this Thursday in the US and it's a time for reflecting on who and what we are thankful for in our lives, and hopefully expressing that gratitude somehow, in some way. We have similar events to thank our customers such as National Customer Service Week (first full week of October) and [...]
CXDay celebration is on October 3, 2017. It's a time to celebrate customers and a time to reflect over the past year and realize just how far we've come. We've come quite a long way since the first CXDay in 2013: -Customer Experience (CX) is now a top priority for many companies, according to recent [...]
I heard someone say recently that delighting the customer is the same as meeting a customer's needs. That is incorrect. By definition, delighting customers means exceeding their expectations. That's different than meeting customers' needs. I understand why they would think the two are interchangeable. Being able to delight the customer is the holy grail of the [...]
Last month, I had an unpleasant experience with a fairly large brand. I contacted the brand on Twitter. While the brand responded to me in less than an hour, it wanted me to call into customer service. But wait a minute. Didn't I just reach the brand? Didn't I just contact them for help? Why [...]
I've written about how the Customer Experience (CX) responsibility does not lie in one group, rather it is an all-encompassing organizational endeavor. According to Wootric, the best way to ensure a sound CX program is when companies take a cross-functional team approach. Sales is a key part of that cross-functional team approach. Sales contributes to CX in [...]
I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the Growth Marketing Conference in San Francisco last week. If you work in growth marketing, attend the conference at least once. I was happy to hear that the conference was going to be all about engagement and relationships. This makes sense because growth marketing is all about engagement and [...]
By now, you've heard about the popularity of Influencer Marketing. It's so popular that many organizations are including influencer marketing initiatives into their marketing strategies. Linqia, in its The Value of Influencer Content 2017 report, cites that 86% of marketers use influencer marketing to add more power to their content marketing engines. The ROI is [...]
I've been reading posts about how Customer Experience is the new Marketing. Is it? The Difference Between Customer Experience and Marketing The definition of Marketing, per Merriam-Webster, is: "the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service" Dr. Philip Kotler defines Marketing as “the science and art of exploring, creating, and [...]
I cringe when I hear Marketing should own the customer experience. Two recent reports appear to back up this claim though. A report from the Economist Intelligence Unit and Marketo revealed 86% of CMOs and senior marketing executives believe they will own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020. Walker Info released a report that says [...]
Each year when I read an annual Customer Experience report, my wish is that Customer Experience finally makes it into the mainstream. I remember reading the findings from Accenture's 2015 B2B Customer Experience Report. I was encouraged to read that approximately eight in 10 executives believe delivering a differentiated experience links directly to business results [...]
The startup world is very exciting. It is also very challenging. All you have to do is watch a few episodes of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” to see it in action. Similar adjectives can be used to define startup PR. Exhilarating, yet frustrating. You are regularly changing on a dime, which requires you to create a [...]
I have done my share of reading about who owns the customer experience and who should own it. There are two schools of thought on who should own the customer experience. Some think it should be one functional group that owns the customer experience. Which group should it be? Marketing? Customer Success? Sales? Another customer-facing functional group? [...]
As many of you know, I have spent the last two years in a rigorous two-year MBA program at UC Irvine. I graduated with my MBA this past June. While the grand result of my MBA studies was a degree, there was another result, an accumulation of more than 21,000 emails of various content types [...]
Did you know that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator, and Bain & Company says it’s 6 to 7 times more costly to acquire a new customer than it is to retain one? So, if it’s really 6 to 7 times costlier to acquire a new customer [...]
For marketers to be successful, they can’t muddle through with blinders or rose-colored glasses on. They must be informed and know which marketing activities work, and which don’t. That means understanding the mechanics of measurement. Marketing and measurement are like lock and key. You need both to be successful and grow. Unfortunately, some marketers still [...]
Recently I was talking with my pal, Robert Scoble, about startups, content, leaving 2014 and going into 2015, so it got me to thinking, what can startups do now to help them create wins for 2015? This list of 5 Wins for Startups to Achieve Growth in 2015 will get you moving in a direction [...]
I consider myself a student of life. I always want to be in learning-mode so that I can improve and can continuously add value to those I help: clients, potential clients, and colleagues, to name a few. As Carol Dweck notes, in her amazing book, Mindset, that’s the growth mindset—changing, growing, and stretching oneself through [...]
In Part I of "How To Conduct Win-Loss Analysis To Achieve Strategic Growth", I discussed the pre-interview and interview phases of Win-Loss Analysis. The post-interview phase is the most important element of the Win-Loss Analysis process. During this phase, you will gain insights on how to actually improve your processes, and as a result, better [...]
