customer experience

This post was originally published and shared on CCW Digital on February 19, 2020.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about lessons and takeaways from the current crisis. This week, I’m channeling a post I wrote years ago called Do We Care About Brands?, which I shared again recently on social media. After re-reading that, it had me asking, “What about brands? Do they really care about us?”

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

-Theodore Roosevelt

If you have ever tried to prove that good customer experience equals more money for the company, you will know that this is more than complicated task. The data may not exist or be expensive to obtain. Unfortunately calculating the ROI of your CX efforts is usually one of the ways to get the needed budget for your strategy and bring everybody on board. 

While we are all adapting to the new (hopefully temporary) situation it is more important than ever to keep taking the pulse of your customers.

You are shifting your contact center, your opening hours, your product portfolio and all the other things you need to do to adapt – but do you know how your customers feel about it? Are you focusing your attention where they feel it should be going?

My meetings in Germany got cancelled, so I tried to contact the airline to change my booking. Chat did not work. E-mail was not offered. Call centre kept on cutting me off for hours on end. Finally, someone in their overseas office answered. It took me more than 6 hours to get help.

This is a modified version of a post I originally wrote for Forbes. It appeared on the Forbes site on June 13, 2019.

I originally wrote today’s post for Customer Contact Week (CCW). It appeared on their site on November 8, 2019.

I originally wrote today’s blog post for Intouch Insight. It appeared on their blog on September 5, 2019.

In order to truly establish a foothold in – and to then propel – your customer experience transformation, one of most important things that businesses must have in place is a happy and engaged workforce that is well cared for by business leaders at all levels. In other words, employees and the employee experience must be the first priority of the business.

You keep reading and writing and saying “digital transformation.” Do you know what that means?

In September 2019, I did a keynote titled “Marketing in the Era of Customer Experience” for an American Marketing Association (AMA) event. In that keynote, I talked about the 10 realities of marketing in the era of customer experience. The tenth item I talked about was titled, “Digital Schmigital.” I got a few chuckles and a bunch of “bravos” out of that one.

Boeing’s widening woes are a warning to every communicator tasked with creating or sharing company purpose.

The headline in today’s New York Times says it all: Cascading Crisis Reveals ‘Sick’ Culture at Boeing. Recently revealed internal documents show employees regularly cutting corners, dissing one another and insulting customers, feeling remorse for having deluded regulators and, above all, obsessing about meeting deadlines and budgets.