All businesses sell products. Whatever they might be—a laptop, a phone, groceries, a trip to the Bahamas, dinner in a restaurant—anything that someone pays money for is a product. Or so we all thought. I am about to argue that your product is not a product. Your product is, in fact, an experience. Think about [...]

Recently I was at a conference  where former New Labour spin-doctor Alistair Campbell was speaking. He stated that the “citizen and the consumer had merged” and that people want “private sector standards and public sector values”.  I pondered on this and decided it meant that people want the efficiency of the private sector and the [...]

‘I don’t remember forgetting I don’t seem to recall If I neglected to show you I love you I don’t remember at all.’ Ricky Skaggs Anyone who’s been in a relationship for more than, oh, a fortnight has learned the link between memory and caring. Forget to call: you clearly don’t care. Don’t remember that [...]

Over the last few weeks, a screenshot of an iPhone Siri conversation has been circulating the internet: This scenario has definitely been worth a few laughs online, but it also highlights how we still have a long way to go in the field of natural language processing. Decades of work have produced numerous highly touted [...]

“I wish they would only take me as I am” – Vincent Van Gogh Personas are essential to Customer Experience Management. It’s a given that good design begins with understanding the design target. A Persona nets-out as a “word portrait” of a customer type, distilling the essential elements of a market segment. The richer and more [...]

There’s a term trending on Twitter at the moment that makes me shake my head and smile a little. Why didn’t I see that coming? It’s ‘Big Process’  (#bigprocess) and I find the tweets by Clay Richardson really interesting. Now, I had no clue what this could mean, so my mind was running in all [...]

Hi James, thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for our blog readers. Q.1 Running Marketing for a company like KANA must be a diverse job and I’m sure many people would love to know what it involves. What does a typical day consist of? Answer: There are no typical days! The [...]

Confession: I believe in superstar Engineers. Nowadays, given the Agile emphasis on Team, reliance on Superstars seems to be roughly as fashionable as fat ties. Embracing inequality of production can also be perceived as naïve by the folks paying their salaries (why pay the big dollars in the Silicon Valley when engineers can be had [...]

Some questions for customer service and customer experience managers to think about… What if: your agents could follow the right process, just as you had designed it? your agents didn’t have to ALT_TAB through 15 applications on their desktop? your agents didn’t have to use Post-it notes or index cards or refer to training manuals? [...]

I may very possibly be the last to blog on the theme of technology trends and predictions for 2012 with every blogger worthy of a following already having done so (and before 2012 actually arrived). But in my role at KANA, this is not something I think about only at New Year. On the contrary, [...]