We’ve published a lot of interesting, innovative, and inspiring
blog posts about customer experience this year, so we wanted to take a moment to
look back on the most popular posts of 2014. Here are the topics our readers
enjoyed the most this year:
Marketers
Adapt to Digital Customer Trends for Holiday Shopping Season: Over the
last few years, technology has truly revolutionized retail - Black Friday and
the holiday season exemplify that change better than any other time of year.
Now, marketers must reassess their strategies as consumers spend increasing
amounts online ahead of the shopping weekend in order to capture the online
shopping trend. As of late, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have
experienced a change in spending patterns, with the Adobe Digital Index
predicting that $2.6bn – an increase of 15 percent – will be spent on Cyber
Monday alone, with Black Friday growth up by 28 percent to $2.48bn. The
holiday season in the U.S. will aim to break online records for e-commerce
spend at $72.41bn, a growth of 16.6 percent in the last year, according to
eMarketer. To read the full post, click
here.
The
Customer Experience: A Journey Best Understood in Reverse?: Even after
decades of study, the “Customer Experience” remains a top focus for
large and small companies alike. Work from McKinsey about the consumer decision
journey (references below) is just one of many recent examples. Millions of
dollars and labor hours, and prodigious efforts, are spent on the subject. From
time to time, clients ask—usually around the annual budget-setting cycle—“What
should our priorities be in evaluating customers’ experiences? What’s the
first, most important thing we need to understand?” To read the full post, click
here.
Using
Consumer Insights to Make Smarter Business Decisions: We sat down with
Kelly Harper, Director of Customer Experience Learning at BMO INSTITUTE FOR
LEARNING, to discuss how the power of consumer insights help to make smarter
decisions in business. Harper goes into how important customer experience is
when it comes using customer insights to make the best business decisions
possible. You need to think about what type of experiences your organization is
giving your customers. Your consumer insights allows you to understand
what is broken in your current experience you are delivering and what is really
important to the customer – what are those elements that you have to get right
each and every single day. Consumer insights will help you identify and keep
track of what is most important to the customer. To read the full post, click
here.
Why
Your Brand Needs Social Customer Service: These days, customers aren’t
calling your 800 number. Instead, they are getting on Facebook and complaining
about you or sending a Tweet about your lousy service. Social customer
service is a very different ball game with unique practices, plans and a
different timeline. You’d better be listening for online complaints and be
ready to respond in real-time or face potentially negative profits. Social
customer service emerged because organic online conversations require an
immediate response. When a customer complains about you on Facebook or Twitter,
you’d better be listening and respond within a short window or poor attitudes
about your brand escalate. Social customer service connects your customers with
people, both inside and outside of your organization, and with the information
they need to solve problems and make better decisions. Not to mention, your
customers expect it. To read the full post, click
here.
Creating
a Positive Customer Experience: When it comes to obtaining and
retaining customers, remembering what you learned in kindergarten really isn't
enough anymore. Now, it hinges on the effective use of social media and other
Internet-based resources, according to a new study from Consero Group. Chief Customer Experience Officers will
continue to need a variety of new tools and processes to manage the smart
consumer effectively and retain customers in a competitive marketplace. More
companies recognize the importance of positive customer experience to overall
success. But even though budgets and staff sizes are increasing in many firms,
many CX executives still lack sufficient resources to run their departments
well. To read the full post, click
here.
The
Power of Personality at Work: We caught up with John Mayer, renowned
Professor of Psychology, the University of New Hampshire and Author
of Personal Intelligence. We express our personalities in almost
everything that we do – in both our personal and professional lives. So, every
single day we exhibit some patterns of behavior that are consistent and
sometimes respond to particular context. According to Mayer, personal
intelligence is the intelligence we use to understand these personalities –
whether they in other people or in ourselves. Virtually any organization today
is made up of people, so you can think of the organization as an organizational
chart, including Presidents, CEOs, managers, etc. “Personal intelligence
deals with information at a different level than that,” explained Mayer.
“Instead, on top of that organizational chart are real people.” To read the
full post, click
here.
Customer
Experience Conversations: Crystal Collier: we sat down with Crystal
Collier, CEO of CX Act, formerly TARP Worldwide. CX Act has pioneered the
science of quantifying, managing and optimizing the customer experience and has
remained a leader in the CX market since 1971. Today, through its innovative
research, technology and customer interaction programs, it continues to set the
standard to improve clients' customer service performance, customer value and
"The Profit of Interaction.” According to Collier, without considering
empathy—from the C-suite to the frontline employee—delivering a superior CX is
nearly impossible. Customers are driven largely by emotions, and their
behaviors result from feelings. To read
the full post, click here.
Customer
Experience Innovation: Treat Your Customers Like People: We caught up with
Len Ferman, managing director of Ferman Innovation, and former Senior Vice
President of Innovation and Ideation at Bank of America. Today, corporate
leaders often lose sight of customer needs in the constant quest toward next
quarter’s earnings. But, what is positive for stock prices tends to conflict
with long term customer satisfaction and shareholder value. You simply can’t
understand the customer experience if don’t empathize with your customers,
Ferman told me. “You have to be able to see them face-to-face and listen to
them talk about their pain points and challenges,” he said. To read the full
post, click
here
Customer
Experience Conversations: Nestor Portillo: Nestor Portillo, Director,
Social Communities and Customer Experience at Microsoft shared his best
customer experience, the importance of empathy, and how social media has
affected customer experience today. According to Portillo, customer experience
is a combination of emotions, memories, expectations, needs fulfillment, timing
and effort. All of these are important add-ons to your product or service. So,
in order to deliver a great customer experience, it needs to have a high degree
of empathy and emotion because the interaction goes beyond product
functionality or a feature explanation. To read the full post, click
here.
Customer
Experience Conversations: Janet LeBlanc: Janet LeBlanc, President of Janet LeBlanc
+ Associates Inc. LeBlanc discussed how empathy and emotion has a critical
impact on customer experience today. According to LeBlanc, the best customer
experiences are those that elicit the strong positive feelings and emotions
that strengthening the relationship and loyalty a customer has with a company.
Statements such as: “I felt like she understood what I wanted or they treated
me with respect” are the best examples of a great customer experience. To read
the full post, click
here.
About the Author:
Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and
print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing,
and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs
including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, Digital Impact, STEAM Accelerator and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business
Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,.
She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where
she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She
can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc.
