When CX teams conduct customer and user research, they use everything in their tool kit to understand customers and this understanding informs on the decisions they make to improve customer experiences. Qualitative and quantitative research make up this understanding. There are two components to this research - desk, or secondary, research and primary research. Desk [...]
Welcome to M4 Communications' Five Customer Experience Trends to Watch for in 2022. As we normally do before we dive into this year's trends, we take a look at the state of Customer Experience last year. EPSON scanner image State of CX in 2021 2021 was about issues in the supply chain. The only thing [...]
The 7th annual CX Day is on Tuesday, October 1, 2019. It's always an exciting time for me because it's when we celebrate customers, the customer experience (CX) profession, and each other. Last week, I was a guest on a twitter chat and I said just that, and we should treat every day as CX Day. [...]
I had a wonderful time in October participating as ICMI's first guest on it's new show, First Friday Fireside Chat. You guessed it - the show is on the first Friday of each month on Facebook. The show covers all things customer service and beyond. We talked about customer experience (CX). I was asked about [...]
Improving your customer experience (CX) requires more than just listening to your customers. You must understand your data and what is behind the numbers before you can take action to optimize the CX. The old management adage, you can't manage what you don't measure, applies very well here. In a 2016 study conducted by Forrester, [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
I have been involved with Win-Loss Analysis from the product and sales sides since the mid–1990’s and have written about the subject since 2009. To this day, I do not understand why more companies aren’t conducting win-loss interviews, analyzing results and implementing lessons learned. When I speak with companies, many think they know the answers [...]
On October 7, 2014, Customer Experience (CX) professionals celebrated #CXDay for the second year in a row. The event, put on by The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), is an all day celebration of Customer Experience around the globe. It brings together companies and people that are creating great experiences for customers. Where Does Customer Experience Fit? [...]
I write a lot about customer experience, and that customers are smarter now and are in control of the conversation. I was happy to read a similar opinion from Brett Adamson, co-author of The Challenger Sale, who gave the opening keynote at Content2Conversion Conference last week. A recap of his talk is nicely presented in [...]
With the availability of data for analytics plus an aggressive push for thought-provoking and relevant content to help buyers, there is a dynamic change going on in marketing organizations causing a shift from a traditional marketing engine to a customer one. There are significant strides being made that sales and marketing lines are blurring for [...]
I recently asked a marketing director about customer testimonials on his company website. He openly said, "The testimonials aren't real, I made them up. Everybody else does it, so why can't we?" My second thought, after "Two wrongs don't make a right," was "Aren't you in the business of building trust? What does that say [...]
I was on Linked In recently reading and responding to an inquiry a nonprofit manager was asking in one of the groups I belong to on how to get the word out about their nonprofit. As you would guess, many gave a laundry list of "do this, do that" answers. While there were some great [...]
What side of content do you prefer to play? Are you a content creator or content curator? Content Curation has become hot lately which is probably due to every Tom, Dick and Harry telling you that "content is king" and you must provide "value-added content" for your website visitors to trust you. They are right. [...]
