Management Blog
Hiring a Chief Customer Officer is the key to successful Customer Experience programs.
Forrestor Research Analyst Paul Hagen’s latest research on “The Rise of the Chief Customer Officer” quotes an unnamed senior executive from his report released in January, 2011, saying that the CEO’s commitment to hiring a Chief Customer Officer and providing the resources, authority and leeway to do the job is key to success. At Beyond Philosophy, we are thrilled that there is now research to back up what we’ve been saying for years.
Reducing Costs: The Additional Benefit of Focusing On Customer Experience
Are You Reducing Costs Where it May Matter Most To Your Customer?
What better time to write this article than in the current economic malaise. Companies are cutting costs in response to the continuing economic downturn. It makes sense to tighten the belt when times are tough. And many companies tell us they are measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty as a means to determine when their internal cuts begin affecting their customer. Is this a reasonable approach? Well, in a word ALMOST. Here’s why:
How to Avoid the Customer Transaction Trap
Buy something online or in a store, it’s a transaction. Call a customer support center, it’s a transaction. Companies take orders, deliver, track, evaluate, measure, and react at the transactional level.
How BPR and Six Sigma use the Voice of the Customer
Whilst it is true that the intent to include the customer is well established within process methodologies, the measurable output remains focused on customer satisfaction and traditional research metrics. For instance, companies would qualitatively assess’ where our stakeholders want to be?’ and ‘what our customers needs are against a cost benefit analysis.’
The advantages and disadvantages of BPR and Six Sigma
In the CEM view consumers are not treated just as ‘rational satisfied actors’ but also possessing of emotional responses. Hence the measurement and understanding of emotions is a key area that should be appreciated alongside the usual insight measures of satisfaction. Fortunately, this is a component of CEM easily integrated into BPR / Six Sigma/ Lean’s statistical and methodological orientation
The advantages and disadvantages of BPR and Six Sigma
Small Budget Customer Experience
A common situation for many organisations is that there is a desire to optimise the customer experience or become more customer centric but there is little budget to support the required change.
This usually results from three situations:
1.A small organisation with generally small budgets
2.A customer experience visionary with a relatively small budget at a larger transactional organisation who has not yet convinced key executive stakeholders of the benefit of customer experience.
Happy Staff = Happy Customers? Top 100 Companies to work for
CNN have the full list of the 2010 Top 100 Best Companies to work for. The message here is Happy people give you Happy Customers.
When building a great Customer Experience, focus first on building a great employee experience. From our first book Building Great Customer Experience, we developed the seven Philosophies for building a great Customer Experience.
Philosophy four is:
How to retain customers in a recession.
What is the Customer Experience you are trying to deliver?
What emotions are you trying to evoke? What do your customers really want?
What should you do first?.
These questions were answered in the keynote address given by Colin Shaw at the Call Centre & Customer Management Expo in the Birmingham NEC, Tuesday 22nd of September.
Getting to the heart of the matter
Effective Customer Experience Management is about understanding and measuring how clients and consumers ‘intuitively’ feel as they touch all moments of an experience. Yet in order to understand ‘intuition’ we need to find some measure that does not depend on self-report, surveys and the like.
A guide for CEOs: Their responsibilities in improving the Customer Experience.
Since founding Beyond Philosophy some seven years ago, I have had the pleasure of working with a number of CEO’s across many diffident industry sectors, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Over the years, sadly, I have that only about 20% of CEO’s are really committed to improving their Customer Experience and making their organisations Customer centric. The other 80% break into two groups.
40% say they support a new Customer initiative but they are not really committed. You can see it in their actions. Typical the signs are: