This Week In Customer Experience: 'Grats and Gripes

As we quickly gain on the next Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit in June, we'd like to occasionally share with you some of our favorite links of the week on customer experience, customer experience design, and overall customer-centricity.

This week on the blog, we introduced our new guest blogger Flavio Martins, who shared his excitement for the upcoming Total Customer Experience Leader's Summit.

Elsewhere, 1to1media  taught us that "Customer Experience Isn't the Only Thing; It's Everything" when discussing the winners of the Gartner & 1to1 Media CRM Excellence Awards. One of the companies honored was The Oklahoma City Thunder:

"By building a customer-centric organization from the ground up, The Oklahoma City Thunder, has been able to build one-to-one relationships with each of its season ticketholders and elevate the fan experience at every game. The organization continuously educates, evaluates, and congratulates its employees on proactively enhancing the overall customer experience."

We spoke with Pete Winemiller, Senior Vice President, Guest Relations of the Oklahoma City Thunder for our Storyteller Spotlight podcast series, check out some of his thoughts on customer experience in the podcast here.

It must be awards season, as this week also saw The Stevie Awards honoring various achievements in customer experience, browse the winners here.

Meanwhile, The Huffington Post has opened a "Gripe Line" to gather customer experience complaints. It will be interesting to see what stories, good and bad, follow.

What customer experience news did you notice this week? Share with us in the comments. 

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Dish Network Disses Own Service; Stock Soars

Ideally, companies should tout how much better their customer service is over the competition; however, that wasn't the case with The Dish Network. According to TheStreet.com, here's what Dish had to say in its self-evaluation: "We have not always met our own standards for performing high-quality installations, effectively resolving customer issues when they arise, answering customer calls in an acceptable timeframe, effectively communicating with our subscriber base, reducing calls driven by the complexity of our business, improving the reliability of certain systems and subscriber equipment and aligning the interests of certain third-party retailers and installers to provide high quality service."

With the news of The Dish Network's self depreciation, their stocks soared.

What theories do you have on how this may affect their customer service moving forward?

Why Customer Communities Work

The 1to1 Blog welcomes guest blogger, Natalie Petouhoff, Ph.D. do discuss why customer communities work and how to make them work for your company. Here are a few snippets that we saw of interest to our community:

Customer service communities are being deployed differently than most technology applications. How?

1. The focus is on the customer
2. Executives are talking directly to the customers
3. The focus is more on strategy and management (people part of business) than technology
4. The customer experienced is mapped before designing and deploying the community
5. Voice of the customer is honest, transparent, and direct

Dr. Petouhoff discusses other ways in which customer service communities are being deployed, check them out on her original post here.