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 [...]

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? [...]

At one point in time, the Singer Corporation had more than 12,000 people working in a single plant. They were selling more than a million sewing machines a year and had hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. They were one of the most important manufacturers in America. It was fun …while it lasted! When [...]

The new voice of the customer is putting a huge burden on the old ear of business. With the advent of social media, telling ten friends can now mean influencing ten million friends. The resulting tidal shift in the business-to-customer relationship has businesses scrambling to adjust: B2C companies are now employing new listening technologies, appointing [...]

Do you find that you frequently make important business decisions without taking your customer’s point of view into account? And that as a good business leader, you want to factor in your customer’s voice, but don’t know where or how to start? Well, you could try an experiment. Next time you are in an internal meeting, [...]

I’m a frequent business traveler who’s likely to rack up $30,000 in airline, car rental and hotel expenses every year. I also vacation with my family twice a year, which offers a potential value of $15,000 annually. That means that over the next three years my value as a customer is approximately $150,000. I’d say [...]

On April 27th 2011 US President Obama issued an executive order to heads of federal departments and agencies to streamline service delivery and improve customer service. The agencies were given 180 days to develop their plans and publish them on their Open Government webpage. Learning from industry In the order, the President exhorts government managers [...]