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What Are You Complaining About? by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceIt’s snowing again! I live just south of Boston, and, guess what, it’s snowing…again. I’m sick of it! Just look at the view from the front door of my new house in suburbia! Did I move here for this? For weeks, now, it seems that practically everyone in the Boston ...
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Bank of America Prepares Customers for an Outage in Service by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceTwo days ago, I received a message from Bank of America (where I am a customer). The email subject was, “We are making updates to better serve you.” Rather than a marketing piece touting their latest and greatest, the email, reprinted below, was simply a notification that, which the bank ...
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Comcast Continues to Insult Customers by Patricia Seybold in Customer ExperienceThe most recent Comcast customer experience debacle—changing a customer’s name to A**hole on their bill—has been widely tweeted and commented upon. Ronni Marshak digs deeper. What’s wrong with the culture that engenders these customer insults? What business processes has Comcast established that leads its customer service reps to the kind ...
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3 Mistakes to Avoid in Working with Customers by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceAs you gear up to launch any customer co-design activities this year—whether these are VOC checkpoints for new product development, Customer Advisory Councils, customer experience improvement projects, product and service improvements, business process transformation, mobile app design, ERP initiatives, or incubated innovation projects—there are three common pitfalls you’ll want to ...
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CVS’s Loyalty Program Excels, but An Unexpected Glitch Impacts Customer Service by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceThis week, I look at some of the excellent practices that CVS follows in its ExtraCare Rewards Program. As a long-time customer, I find that this is a loyalty program that I am happy and excited to use. The company makes it very easy for me to take full advantage ...
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Avoiding Holiday Shopping Stress by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceIt is officially holiday shopping season (although retailers and etailers have been promoting seasonal spending since Labor Day—or so it seems). But now, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday are over, and those of us who avoided the lines and slow sites are doing our shopping in earnest. ...
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Do Your Policies Make Your Existing Customers Angry? by Patricia Seybold in Customer ExperienceOften in a large company, the proverbial right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Each department creates policies to streamline business processes, improve consistency and quality, and preserve margins. The sales organization is anxious to drum up new business, so they want to court new homeowners, and ...
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Importance of Identifying Customer Scenario Patterns by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceWe talk a lot about customer scenarios. That’s because customers always come to your business for a purpose, even if that purpose is just to pass some time looking at cool stuff. The customer scenario for what my mother used to call “shmai-ing” (to window shop with a vengeance) has ...
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Use Customers’ Success Metrics for Your Execs’ Scorecards by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceThe most customer-centric companies substitute their customers’ success metrics for their own internally-driven management objectives. Schwab measures how much the value of their clients’ portfolios has increased. Agilent monitors customers’ downtime (not just mean time before failure or how quickly they answer the phone). Delta measures how many passengers were ...
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Don’t Use “Security” to Cover Up Your Bad CX by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceHow do you deliver a great experience to your customers? Provide them with a 360-degree view of their information Make it easy for customers (and your staff) to get things done This is not rocket science. We’ve been preaching this gospel since 1998. So, we were shocked to discover that ...
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A Couple of Short Takes on Customer Experience by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceAntiquated Telephone Company Practice I am moving for the first time in 25 years. And the quarter-century-ago move was within the same city. So my landline telephone number (yes, I still have one of those) hasn’t changed in well over 30 years! But I am now moving about 30 miles ...
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Why Does Good Service from Contractors Surprise Us? by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceEven in this era of customer-centricity, when everyone and their brother espouses the importance of customer experience, we are often still surprised when we have a great experience! Recently, I was describing my experience with a local painting contractor (who patched and painted some small cracks in the walls of ...
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Are You Measuring and Improving What Matters to Customers? by Ronni Marshak in Customer Experience“Moments of Truth” in Customer Scenarios A “moment of truth” in a Customer Scenario is the point at which the customer will give up, walk away, or be very disappointed and frustrated. We also refer to these points in a Customer Scenario as “showstoppers.” Different types of customers in different ...
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How Customer-Centric Are You, Really? by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceCustomer-centric executives often have an uphill battle to instill customer-centricity into their corporate cultures and to nurture and maintain that culture. In working with customer-centric execs and wannabes over 30 years, we’ve found that the ones who succeed in maintaining a customer-centric culture exhibit 10 distinctive behaviors. Can you guess ...
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Don’t Take Customers’ Most Valuable Asset: Their Time! by Patricia Seybold in Customer ExperienceWe predict that within 24 months there will be no more waiting on hold. No more phone queues. No more music or annoying ads. No more lectures about why we should have tried self-help via the Web (If I could have done it myself, I would have! That’s why I’m ...
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Why I Love Apple’s Customer Service by Patricia Seybold in Customer ExperienceI live an hour and a half away from the nearest Apple Store, so I really value the ability to solve most problems that arise with my Apple products using Apple’s great phone support. Apple was the first company in my experience to offer immediate “call back” for product support. ...
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How to Use Customer Scenarios as a Sales Tool by Patricia Seybold in Customer ExperienceWe, and our clients, typically use Customer Scenario Mapping (and Customer Journey Mapping) as a technique to design improved customer experiences and to invent new products and services based on the “jobs” that customers need to do. However, it’s also a great sales tool. When a group of sales people ...
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Customer Journey Mapping—Seybold Style by Patricia Seybold in Customer ExperienceWe’ve had a lot of demand for Customer Journey Mapping recently. Perhaps it’s the customer experience flavor du jour. But we’re happy that so many companies are paying renewed attention to the quality of the end-to-end customer experience they deliver. We’ve been mapping customer experiences for over 25 years with ...
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When Online Chat Is an Effective Support Channel by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceIn this week’s article, I write about best practices in telephone support. As Patty Seybold and I discussed the article, she pointed out that, on occasion, she simultaneously called the customer support phone number and launched an online chat session. And, often, the agent chatting with her solved her problem ...
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Amazon Prime by Ronni Marshak in Customer ExperienceWith the $20 price increase that Amazon recently made on Amazon Prime membership (from $79 to $99 per year), the company needs to justify the increase by offering more member benefits. Amazon has been touting the free monthly streaming videos and other Prime features. In addition, on April 24, 2014, ...
