Do Reward Programs Produce Loyalty? – Tips for Creating Incentives That Drive Business
In prehistoric days – before Starbucks had a loyalty program – I asked, then CEO Howard Schultz, why Starbucks didn’t incentivize repeat business. Essentially, he answered, “why would we decrease organic loyalty when high volume customers return 28 times a month and, in the process, diminish perceived product value.” Fast forward to the 2008 recession, and Starbucks…
Return on Experience – The Pot of Gold at the End of the CX Rainbow
Allow me to launch this new year with the Customer Experience (CX) wisdom of Harry Hynekamp. While working with Harry in his role as Director of Customer Experience for Mercedes-Benz USA, he noted: “If you think customer experience is a destination, you don’t understand the journey.” Since customer experience elevation (for internal and external customers)…
Imagine it is 2025 – How’s Your Customer Experience?
What will customers expect and encounter when they interact with you and your business in 2025? I know that the question is asking about a distant horizon line, but it wasn’t long ago that 2020 seemed like it was forever far away. As a consultant to Fortune 500 companies, I have had the privilege of…
Everyone Has a Platform: Are You Training For that Reality? | Service Excellence
As many of you know, Snapchat’s new design has sparked considerable criticism, but a simple tweet by celebrity Kylie Jenner purportedly contributed to a freefall for Snapchat’s stock. Here’s how social media reporter Megan Hills tells it in a Fortune article titled Snapchat’s $1.3 Billion Drop in Value Is Linked to A Kardashian: The entrepreneur and Kardashian half-sister…
Customer Centricity is MORE than Customer Experience
Recently, I’ve been talking with clients about a critical, albeit subtle distinction – so I thought I would share it with you. Frequently, you’ll hear these two phrases used rather interchangeably. The first is customer-centricity, and the other is customer experience. From my vantage point, the latter phrase (customer experience) is a subset of the…
The Robots are Here and There is Fear
I thought I would conjure up the spirit of the US patriot Paul Revere who (during my school years) was credited as shouting, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” With solid scholarship, it appears Paul Revere likely never shouted those words at all. In fact, the words he did say – apparently something more…
Customer Experience Lessons from Television Advertising’s Biggest Day In America
First, notice the title of this blog! You will see that I didn’t mention the name by which people typically refer to the season-ending major sporting event where commercials play a central role. Therein is my first lesson: Trademarks matter. Virtually every phrase used to describe that event has been trademarked and the equity created around it…
Retail Armageddon, Chupacabra, and Other Myths
A simple Google search for the phrase “retail Armageddon” produces 413,000 results. Many of those references are very recent. Here are just a few of the search findings from this year: May 5th, Retail Armageddon: More bankruptcies in four months than all of 2016 June 3rd, It’s a retail Armageddon as over 1,000 stores close in one…
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