Are You Up for the Human/Tech Challenge?
I’m convinced that the new customer experience leadership challenge will be … (drum roll please) … integrating human and technology based service. I refer to this opportunity as the human/tech challenge. That challenge involves leveraging technology for efficiency while integrating it with the warmth of human service delivery. In my opinion, your future success will hinge,…
Lessons for How to Swim in a Blue Ocean from the Girls Auto Clinic
Often entrepreneurs reach out to me to discuss “customer-centricity” and the likely viability of their innovative products or services. To give you a sense of some of the key filters I use to evaluate the probable success of various ideas presented to me, let me offer an example of a small business that I think…
Is Business a Game? Customer Experience Lessons from Gaming
Over the years, as a customer experience consultant, I’ve increasingly become a student of “game theory” and of the “gaming industry.” I sense I am not the only one. For example, Thomas J. Watson the founder of IBM is quoted as once saying that “business is a game.” As you likely know “game theory” is a branch of mathematics that postulates…
Fine-tuning Your Service Expectations and Your Consistent Delivery of Service Behaviors
We’ve all had it happen. As customers, we’ve encountered a service provider who unfortunately chose to attend to something of interest to them instead of attending to our needs. As a result of their self-preoccupation, we were left to feel like we were intruding on their text messaging session, their online purchase, or interrupting their…
Customer Experience Excellence – The Science and the Craft
Every time I develop a customized customer service training tool for a client of mine, I caution that the tool is a “guidebook” for customer service behavior and that no tool can fit every application. As such, a customer service toolkit is only as good as the judgment and skill of the person using it. Additionally, tools…