Customer Experience

Many brands continue to lose relevance, value, and profitability. Much is written about how "marketing" needs to fix this. Talk abounds about consumer experience, purpose driven brands, etc. It's all misdirected. We accept that consumer experience and connection with your company's purpose can create stronger brand loyalty. It's the "icing…

For many years, the adage was “do you want it right, on-time or cheap, pick two”. And then somewhere in the 80’s and 90’s, perhaps associated with the dot.com era, marginal costs moved close to zero in some industries. Because of this, we began to expect all three. In fact, the…

We find ourselves at Customer Manufacturing Group at the intersection of two trends that are finally becoming mainstream conversations: customer experience and process management. As we discuss these topics with people, we notice their concern that the two may be mutually exclusive. That is, a belief that efficient process implementation…

Much has been written about The Ritz Carlton Way. The takeaway I always hear is "empower your front line employees to deliver WOW experiences". Today many other organizations follow this Ritz Carlton Way. The intent of this approach is to allow employees to resolve a customer situation and have the customer…

The Dangers of Outsourcing Customer Ordering We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better. Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com In order to be compatible with Apple's…

Every process is perfectly constructed to produce the results it does. And we saw another example of this recently. The airline industry touts their customer focus, despite most people's experience to the contrary. Many people who work in the industry might like to help, but the process they work in…

"If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete!" Jack Welch Jaynie Smith, author of Creating Competitive Advantage: Give Customers a Reason to Choose You Over Your Competitors and Relevant Selling: Research Proves Customers Value More Than Just Pricerecently spoke to my groups. Here are the highlights of her books…

Andrea Simon recently spoke to my Vistage Peer Advisory Groups. She is a certified Blue Ocean Strategist. A “Blue Ocean” is a new market space with no competition where demand is created rather than fought over. Andrea says that the key to finding our Blue Ocean is “to ‘see with…

This is an expanded blog of my column in Smart Business Magazine. Dilbert says, “Change is good. You go first.” Well, someone has, and now, it is your turn. I’ve just finished a series of blogs about how e-commerce and open availability of information is disrupting businesses. These disruptive forces may…

How To Transition to the New World of Ecommerce? In a previous series of blogs, I reviewed the basic model and concept of the new business world presented by veteran Vistage speaker Sam Bowers. With the advent of this new business world, the big question for you to answer is…