Guest Service

You’ve heard the heady numbers.

For example, a 2014 NewVoiceMedia study revealed that U.S. businesses lose $41 billion per year due to poor customer service. You see that number and think, “Wow! Let’s get on this customer service thing!”

Your executives aren’t as excited. 

The Interactive Intelligence Group has shared its predictions for the five trends that will disrupt customer service in 2016. The Interactive Intelligence

Customer experience is the key to winning customers’ hearts. The quality of the product, the fun website, the friendly customer service – all of these pieces come together to create an experience…

Customer engagement has become just as complicated as the customer journey itself, for there are many moving parts contained within every interaction.

At either the beginning or the end of every year, I am usually asked a couple of standard questions. Question 1 is typically ‘what are the key learnings of the year just gone?’ Question 2 tends to focus on what the Customer Experience theme for the following year will need to be. In my last column for CustomerThink in 2015, I am going to look at answering the first question by sharing my 5 key learnings for the year.

Great service is like a precious, rare, exotic species that is close to becoming extinct. But it’s not too late to rescue once great service from the brink of extinction. Here are 10 golden rules that you can follow right away..

Let’s start with that last clause: “… show that each and every experience counts”. When we boil down anything to averages we miss rich data that can help interpret everything from customer retention to likely complaints to State Attorneys General.

The winners at ingenious customer service go one step further–they introduce a wild card catalyst. You learned in high school chemistry that a catalyst was some substance that increased the rate of a chemical reaction. A catalyst stimulates, sparks, incites and spurs. Here are three catalysts to propel you on your path to inventiveness.

In an increasingly competitive business world, many organizations state loud and proud that customer experience is a key strategic initiative that promises great things for their customers.

For financial services brands, navigating the modern customer experience means retracing the consumer's footprints to fully understand where they've been and where they're going.  But when it comes to forging their own strategic paths, banks often encounter numerous roadblocks on their journeys toward customer experience optimization.

But in my view, such trend articles miss the bigger picture, which is that the important facts of the Customer Experience profession will be pretty much the same in 2016 as they were in 2015 and earlier years. These are the non-trends, the things that don’t change, and most of them are more important than the trends.

So here I present my Customer Experience Non-Trends for 2016. Not only are most of these non-trends more important to the average CX professional than the Trends, you can read these safe in the knowledge that in January 2017 I can just republish the same article with a different date.

Commerce is changing rapidly, and it’s unlikely to slow down in 2016.

Foresee’s recent “FXI: 2015 Retail Edition” report explores how consumers interact with their favorite retailers to determine where these leaders lag and where they excel.

A snapshot look at technology that’s disrupting customer experiences and how companies can leverage these trends.

In today’s competitive retail market, customer experience never sleeps, requiring constant attention and reinvention to maintain the advantage.