Top 5 ideal online shopping experiences

I shop online a lot. In fact, before I wrote this article, I spent a good hour browsing around some of my favorite online shops. It’s research! Although I seem to have no trouble spending more than enough money on these sites, I started thinking about what my ideal online shopping experience would look like. [...]

read more...

KANA + Trinicom – a personal view…

I’m guessing that many readers of this blog had never heard of Trinicom before. So here’s a small introduction… we are based in a castle somewhere in The Netherlands.   I am sure you know our capital Amsterdam (KANA CMO, James Norwood has written a nice blog about the city) and maybe some stories about wooden shoes, cheese, tulips or windmills. I have to disappoint you; [...]

read more...

KANA and Trinicom – for unbeatable service experience

Readers of this blog will be aware that KANA completed the acquisition of Netherlands-based Trinicom recently. We made this news public last week in Utrecht, Holland, to coincide with Trinicom’s largest trade show of the year, and I was very fortunate to be invited along as the KANA spokesperson to assist with the event, chat [...]

read more...

Your brand is an experience

When I Google “define: brand,” I get the following result: trade name: A type of product manufactured by a company under a particular name Is this definition accurate? Traditional marketers would agree with Google’s definition. These individuals spend lots of time and money developing a name—an image with which to brand their products and services. They [...]

read more...

Front of the house…

I recently struck up a conversation with some folks in the restaurant business. As we talked about the various aspects of running a restaurant, from the long hours to the impossible-to-satisfy patrons, the owner mentioned that one of the most important things he had learned from his years in the business was about the front [...]

read more...

A mind-altering customer experience – in Amsterdam

Drugs? I bet that’s the first thing that came to mind when you read this blog post’s title. Funny that, or perhaps not so funny if you are the City of Amsterdam, which has so much more to offer than ‘coffee shops’. Unfortunately, for many people, particularly (if you excuse the generalization) the young, Amsterdam [...]

read more...

What do customers really think about web Self-Service?

How do I shop, let’s say, for a new digital SLR camera? I go to the internet and search for cameras, read the reviews, do product comparisons and shortlist the brands and models that meet my need (want?). Then I search for the best price. Next maybe I’ll go to a retail store like Best [...]

read more...

Channel exploitation – Part one…

It almost seems wrong…  Whilst the verb ‘exploitation’ has very negative connotations, I’ve chosen it deliberately instead of ‘optimization’ or ‘shift’ to emphasize to our government customers the scale of the opportunity to improve not only citizen satisfaction but also their own service delivery through the exploitation of the myriad of on-line channels available today in [...]

read more...

Why bad customer service is like a shark attack…

Back in the day, I did a little studying with Gary Becker at the University of Chicago, winner of the Nobel Prize for applying micro-economic theory to criminal behavior. My use of the phrase ‘a little studying’ is precise, because my main lesson learned from this brilliant man was that ultimately economics is advanced math, and [...]

read more...

An unexpected observation of customer service…

For the past five years, during the first weekend in August, I have participated in a fund raiser (the Pan Mass Challenge) where approximately 5,000 cyclists pedal a 192 miles over two days and raise $34M for cancer research. As a resident of New England, USA, August is the perfect time for long bike rides [...]

read more...