The Starbucks Experience

Can you “Gamify” your Customer Experience? Lessons from the Highway

Have you thought about “gamifying” your customer experience? Over the past number of months, I’ve been spending time with senior leaders on the Starbucks Digital Ventures team.  Given the rise of popularity of mobile technology, Starbucks has “gamified” such things as Foursquare check-ins at Starbucks cafes.  Designers have also developed a customer reward program interface…

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Wow Customer Experiences – Defined and Delivered

In my book, The New Gold Standard, I defined “wow” experiences as “unique, emotionally engaging interactions that go beyond expectations and are readily recounted.”  As a result of that definition, I’m often asked to give examples of how “wow” service is different from good service.  So here is a beyond expectation, emotionally engaging, and easily…

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Customer Experience – Understanding Emotional Economics

While working on the new book I am writing about Starbucks, to be released in 2013, I have been digging deeply into research on emotional economics.  As you are  aware economics is the branch of the social sciences that looks at the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.  Through much of the history…

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You look like a curator…a key to adding customer experience value

Are you are a curator?  In today’s time-pressured, information-laden world you should think about adding “curator” to your title! In my youth, I thought of curators as old sophisticates who went around the world securing art works for museums.  Today, I think of them as smart business leaders who add value for customers by filtering…

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Customer Experience – Art or Science? The answer is YES

Crafting engaging customer experiences requires a blend of art and science.  The science often hinges on effective use of empirical data concerning consumer need states, use patterns, and changing trends. To that end, I offer some recent results from Bitly’s research’s on viral social media content.  As you probably know, Bitly is a service that…

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Customer Experience Limbo – How low can it go?

Dive in – the data is fine!  If you want to get a quick pulse on the state of service experiences globally, look no farther than the recently published American Express Global Customer Service Barometer. Beyond painting a woeful picture of tragically dissatisfying service levels, the American Express study shows that much service deteriorates to…

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Giraffes are ESSENTIAL to your customer experience!

I ran across a very interesting video blog by Chris Hurn, the CEO and co-founder of Mercantile Capital, so I had my Social Media and IT director, Andrew, post it on our Facebook page. Since I wrote a book about service excellence at the Ritz-Carlton, Chris’ blog post,  “Joshie at the Ritz-Carlton: An Extraordinary Customer…

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More to Business than Money!

My mother often exhorted me to appreciate that “if I couldn’t say something nice, I shouldn’t say anything at all.”  I typically adhere to that motherly wisdom and it has served me well.  On this occasion, however, I have to sidestep Mom’s sage input.  Spirit Airlines, a low-fare, no-frills, air carrier based out of Ft…

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A swing and a miss – wait it’s a home run?

Would you believe me if I told you that a company which experienced a data breach affecting  twenty-four million customers was later determined to be one of America’s most highly rated  on-line retailers?  Well consider yourself told! The story is that of Zappos -the albeit unconventional but world class customer experience provider profiled in my…

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Should You Ask for Complaints? Yes, No, Maybe?

During a consulting visit with one of my clients, a senior level leader stated “we don’t hear much negative from our customers.”  He then asked an interestingly odd question, “should we be asking for complaints?”  Like most questions of this nature, there are no easy answers!  However, here were just a few of the highlights…

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