How to Deliver Service plus Chocolate!
Having recently consulted or spoken in 6 countries in less than 30 days (ranging from Bolivia to Hong Kong), I keep facing questions that center around the distinction between operationally consistent service and emotionally-engaging customer experiences. While I’m not convinced that these two service approaches need to be mutually exclusive, I do know that without…
5 Categories of Customer Preferences You Should Know
While recently consulting with a client about ways to determine customer preferences, I had a random neuronal firing and from the deep recesses of my brain I recalled the work of Professor Noriaki Kano. In the 1980’s Dr. Kano, known for creating the Kano model, differentiated between 5 groups of customer preferences. As best I…
Customer Connections by the Facts Not by Total Nonsense
While researching the book I just completed about elevating the “patient experience” in healthcare, I encountered a powerful quote about the “lemming mentality” of business leadership. In their book entitled “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense,” Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton note, “Business decisions, as many of our colleagues in business and your own…
How to move customers up the loyalty ladder
I think of customer engagement as a ladder. The lowest rung is simple customer satisfaction, with subsequent ascending rungs be things like “repurchase intent”, “perception of a brand’s integrity” and the highest levels being a “customer’s identification” with a brand or a “sense of loss” should the brand not exist. A recent study by Epsilon…
How to assess the Online or User Experience
Having spent a decade of my life conducting a daily radio talk show in a top US market, I know the importance of engaging listeners with provocative and alluring content. Unfortunately, at times most of us who’ve work in the media have painted an overly negative picture of the world around us, as evidenced by…
Are you service-centric?
Previously, I’ve shared 4 customer interaction strategies that businesses either consciously or inadvertently deploy. Those strategies are product-centric, service-centric, customer-centric, and customer-adaptive. I hope I communicated that whichever strategy you choose is less important than how effectively you execute it. I will skip over product-focused business strategies and begin with a service-centric approach. Does your…
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