Category: When Customers Rule!

Customer Experience – what lies ahead?

In his article The Future of CE: Post Purchase Experience Creation, Mark Binns brings out an important point –

The future of CE should be in experience creation. As an industry, we will continue to manage customer service and existing experiences, but never get them perfect. I expect the law of diminishing returns will eventually set in on managing existing experiences. So, creation of new experiences will be the true CE differentiator of the future. When something positive and unexpected happens to a customer, it creates instant word of mouth value. People talk about new experiences – they rarely talk about expected experiences unless they were bad ones.

He also goes on explain his theory on opportunities for experience management & creation through the life cycle of the customer interaction. 
On similar lines is this posting by Eric Fraterman. 
True loyalty happens when there is an emotional engagement with the organization or product. This engagement comes from experiencing the brand or organization in a unique way that creates true value for the customer.
How does this apply to an IT product company (esp an enterprise applications vendor) & its customer life cycle?
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Customer perspective during the downturn

The Think Customers 1to1 Blog is carrying a nice post by Brent Leary – So YOU Want to Improve MY Customer Experience?

During the downturn in economy (and always ..but especially so now), all businesses ought to be thinking about what works for their customers. 
  • How have the macroeconomic factors affected our customers business & life?
  • Should we be offering a different value proposition to customers now?
  • What is it that we can do for our customers that no one else will possibly do? 
  • Everyone’s expenditure has come down …so has our customers’. How can we ensure that whatever little they spend is spent on our products / services?
  • Is there a way we can make our customers feel special ..w/o spending too much?
All valid questions even during normal times. But businesses do have extra time now ..so might as well think about customers!

The Ultimate Question – NPS

A few months ago I started off on a NPS adoption journey. All though I have gone through some of the continual negative press on the topic, I have not heard or read anything compelling enough to drag me away from the simplicity & basic idea of NP. 

We have started really small & getting together the mechanism to capture responses to the NPS query. 
Some questions that I am searching answers for are :
  • What does one do with the NPS score?
  • How can NPS help develop & sustain a customer centric culture?
  • What have been the past experiences (anything specific?) of NPS implementations in B2B situations?
  • What have been the main grouses against NPS?
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From the Blogosphere

Today, hundreds of companies around the world have subscribed to the Net Promoter philosophy. But many of them still don’t understand the true meaning of NPS and what Reichheld meant the question to become: an organizational discipline that transforms your business around the customers.
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Reicheld admitted that companies cannot be driven by scores; it’s what they do with the scores that matter most and getting the people in the organization to treat customers the way they’d want to be treated.
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Until companies can move beyond getting their organizations to reach high Net Promoter scores, and help their CFOs to understand how to quantify and increase the number of promoters, then they won’t find success with NPS.

Read the complete article at Think Customers: 1to1 Blog. 

Training – Customer Service Excellence

One of the objectives of this blog is to share with all any useful new on the subject of customer strategy. Accordingly, am posting this mail I came across of a training being held across multiple cities in India.
I have no idea on how the program is & I am not recommending the same. Anyone who has attended this or know of anyone who has attended these sessions, please share your thoughts on the same.
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