When Customers Rule!

25 Ways to Show Loyalty to Your Customers

2011-10-11T09:33:00.001+05:30

(Photo courtesy flickr | woodleywonderworks) A business that values its focus on its customers, regularly find ways to show their loyalty to their customers. It is a good practice for your & your customer facing teams to regularly find novel & memorable ways of doing this. Chip Bell & John Patterson have listed 25 ways of doing this in their Wired & Dangerous blog: Invite a customer to an

Suddenlink | Customer Experience Lessons

2011-05-24T18:00:00.000+05:30

(Photo courtesy flickr | Dex Encarta) In his post FastCompany | 7 Timeless Ways To Improve Customer Satisfaction, author Drew Neisser filters out the following success factors for customer (satisfaction or experience – call it what you may) initiatives based on Suddenlink’s success. In a struggling economy & in an industry with a questionable reputation for bad customer experiences, Suddenlink

Customer Experience Resolutions

2011-01-06T09:43:00.001+05:30

“Many companies have customer experience efforts underway and it’s time for them to embed customer experience management into the rhythm of their business — making it a fundamental part of how their organizations operate. Here are my 2011 resolutions for companies that have the courage and resolve to get to that next level.” - Bruce Temkin Read the full post here.

Reinforce The Positives

2010-10-25T21:44:00.001+05:30

(Photo courtesy Express Photorail) India is gaining in reputation for being the services & hospitality capital of the world. But, instances of bad experiences introduces doubt if the country & its professionals have what it takes to deliver on this promise. I came across a Vir Sanghvi article today that deals with the issue of service attitude (or the lack of it) amongst professionals in this

Customer Needs As Innovation Source

2010-09-30T22:49:00.001+05:30

Starting with a specific customer need leads to an innovative new product for senior citizens in India. Also another example for a developing nation innovation finding a market in the developed world.http://s.hbr.org/9XtZY3

Amazon – World’s Most Customer Centric Company

2010-08-30T21:06:00.001+05:30

Want to know why the Kindle is more differentiated? What does Jeff Bezos think about his competition? What does the “world’s most customer centric company” mean to Amazon? Do you think Walmart has a chance against Amazon? Watch Jeff Bezos discuss all the above & more with Charlie Rose in this interview.

Tony Hsieh – Delivering Happiness

2010-06-08T17:35:00.002+05:30

With Tony Hsieh’s new book Delivering Happiness hitting the stores today, there is a buzz around about Zappos, Tony & his book. One of the first write-ups I have read about the book is a Fast Company blog post. The Happiness Culture: Zappos Isn't a Company -- It's a Mission Some quotes I like from the write-up are as follows: But today Zappos has an employee culture that seems

Volvo’s Quest For Customer Centricity

2010-05-19T18:43:00.001+05:30

Here is an interview of Volvo’s Stuart Lennie where he shares some of the thought processes behind Volvo’s quest to become customer centric. Customer Centricity: It's Not Easy, But Worth It In this interview with Stuart Lennie, President, Volvo IT, North America and VP, Volvo's Global Sales to Order Solutions Unit, we get the opportunity to learn from another company that is not just

Pay For Customer Service

2010-05-11T22:08:00.001+05:30

Airtel - a leading Indian cellular service provider has (supposedly) announced that it will start charging customers for service calls to its call centers. Though a nominal amount, the first reaction to the news has been indignation. Here below is my take on Airtel's move. (Image referenced from Livin’ On Tulsa Time) From being one of the most expensive countries to make cellular calls in (

Customer Service Champs

2010-02-25T22:03:00.001+05:30

I finally got up to reading the BusinessWeek 2010 listing of customer service champs. LLBean (retailer), USAA (financial services & insurance), Apple (cool gadgets), Four Seasons (hotels) & Publix (retailer) share the spoils at the top of the table. Some snippets that caught my fancy amongst the leading customer service champs are : Four Seasons Hotel – to beat the recession blues,

Social Media Lessons From FedEx

2010-02-16T21:38:00.001+05:30

-------------------- Over the last few weeks, at least a dozen friends have commented on the lack of activity on this blog. This was inspiration enough. -------------------- I came across this interesting post by Matt Ceniceros about how FedEx is using social media to connect with its customers. In the post, Matt explains 5 lessons : Social media expedites your ability to

Amazon & Zappos on the same tree!

2009-07-23T08:42:00.011+05:30

Jeff Bezos mentions in his video that he "gets all weak kneed" with customer obsessed company. Well, I am a sucker too for businesses & business cultures that make customer the focus of their existence. And its great to hear that two of these exemplary companies - Amazon & Zappos - are coming together (link to the news).In announcing the coming together of these brands, Bezos mentions a short but

Tony Hseih on Zappos Culture

2009-05-06T22:55:00.002+05:30

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2009-03-23T20:00:00.002+05:30

I read this good post on Peter Bregman's How We Work HBP blog that made a lot of sense to me on multiple dimensions. Some of my take aways :More often than not, the secret to customer loyalty lies in the little wows that you can generate across the customers' experience of your product or service. The web of little wows across the experience life cycle involves contribution from across your

Customer Experience - what lies ahead?

2009-02-24T23:24:00.004+05:30

In his article The Future of CE: Post Purchase Experience Creation, Mark Binns brings out an important point -The future of CE should be in experience creation. As an industry, we will continue to manage customer service and existing experiences, but never get them perfect. I expect the law of diminishing returns will eventually set in on managing existing experiences. So, creation of new

Customer perspective during the downturn

2009-02-03T22:59:00.003+05:30

The Think Customers 1to1 Blog is carrying a nice post by Brent Leary - So YOU Want to Improve MY Customer Experience?During the downturn in economy (and always ..but especially so now), all businesses ought to be thinking about what works for their customers. How have the macroeconomic factors affected our customers business & life?Should we be offering a different value proposition to customers

The Ultimate Question - NPS

2009-01-29T16:55:00.004+05:30

A few months ago I started off on a NPS adoption journey. All though I have gone through some of the continual negative press on the topic, I have not heard or read anything compelling enough to drag me away from the simplicity & basic idea of NP. We have started really small & getting together the mechanism to capture responses to the NPS query. Some questions that I am searching answers for are

Training - Customer Service Excellence

2008-11-10T18:49:00.005+05:30

One of the objectives of this blog is to share with all any useful new on the subject of customer strategy. Accordingly, am posting this mail I came across of a training being held across multiple cities in India.I have no idea on how the program is & I am not recommending the same. Anyone who has attended this or know of anyone who has attended these sessions, please share your thoughts on the

Product centricity to customer centricity

2008-11-04T22:10:00.000+05:30

(Photo Courtesy: Purdue University)In her blog today, Patty Seybold shares a commentary about where organizations go wrong in the journey from product centricity to customer centricity. In Graham Hill's own words -"The stages start with pure product-centricity. This typically evolves through the development of internal networks of colleagues who need to work together to deliver the value

Custommerce - Customer Centric Initiative in India

2008-11-03T18:47:00.001+05:30

=============================================UPDATE (as on 6th Nov 2008)The folks from custommerce mailed me soon after this blog posting. They have indicated that ways of engaging a wider community for this movement has been discussed in the Kovalam conclave. And they will have some concrete steps soon. =============================================custommerce - Strategies for a Customer-Driven

Quality - The Customer Centric Type

2008-10-23T23:35:00.000+05:30

Intangible Quality: Engage in the Third Quality Revolution(Courtesy: www.istockphoto.com)Found this interesting article on Intangible Quality on RocketPosts - nice read. Some of my take aways -Want to create products that meet the subconscious wants and needs of our customers. We want the customer, upon experiencing our products, to say, “This is exactly what I always wanted. This is what I have

#1 Novartis initiates customer centricity initiative

2008-10-23T23:07:00.000+05:30

Bloggers & pundits alike are saying that the tough economic situation would prompt many companies to get onto the customer focus bandwagon. True to their words, Novartis has announced its restructuring plan to implement many initiatives - Customer Centricity being one of them. http://www.novartis.com/newsroom/media-releases/en/2008/1260877.shtmlto implement a new regional US business model that

Gandhi on Customers

2008-10-06T20:05:00.001+05:30

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Intended for this to be a Oct 2 (Gandhi's birthday) post. Better late than never. I also know that I have mentioned this before. But then, there are still many who haven't learnt from this.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ A customer is the most important visitor

Amazon executives on same page wrt Customer Centricity

2008-09-30T22:44:00.002+05:30

While talking about corporate creativity, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels mentions about Amazon wanting to be the world's most customer centric company. The same theme can be read & heard in quite a few of Bezos' interviews as well.Note that the Amazon executive team seems to be on the same page wrt their overarching goal. Once this is clear, as Vogels mentions, all other decisions become more abvious &

Recognize the unmeasurables

2008-09-26T22:44:00.000+05:30

Check out this article by Jim Barnes on CustomerThink. I would guess that the article will strike a chord in most customer focus practitioners. My takeaways from the article -We need some way to measure, capture and observe the softer elements of performance, those that involve how well employees interact with customers and how they influence the quality of the customer experience.Organizations