VoC to the Rescue One of our clients does a fantastic job supporting a critical and complex hardware, software, and wireless networking solution. But, they faced a familiar challenge: since customer satisfaction was so high, the C-suite wondered aloud if they were overinvesting in Support. Support budgets came under increasing scrutiny. Fortunately, this company has […]
Voice of the Customer
Customer Effort Score (CES): The One Best Question for Transactional Surveys
We recommend replacing your CSAT question with a Customer Effort Score (CES) question. Unlike CSAT, CES measures things that are largely in your control.
Creating Customer Empathy in Executives
An executive at a software company was talking with me recently about the challenge of creating a customer-centric culture. His company, like many, was built on a foundation of technical excellence. Its leaders climbed the ladder based on their programming prowess and reputation. Of course, they wanted to do the right thing by their customers—but the […]
Map your Customer Experience…and Surprise Yourself!
“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!” Robert Burns Seeing ourselves as others see us is a gift. And Customer Experience Mapping gives us all the power to do it! All it takes it stepping away from your desks for a while—and some empathetic imagination. Our workdays […]
Metrics Myth Nine: NPS is Whatever I Say It Is
I’ll just say it right now: I love the Net Promoter Score. It may not be perfect, but in my experience, it’s the most powerful tool that Service and Support executives have to demonstrate their value to the entire enterprise, become more strategic in how they think about their organization’s mission, and focus the entire […]
Little Data
You can’t escape hearing about Big Data right now—it has replaced “cloud” as the current hot buzzword in tech. The idea is pretty simple: it’s easy to gather huge volumes of data from Internet clickstreams, scientific instruments, roadway sensors, and all the other collectors of digital information in the world…but it’s not always easy to […]
Summer Reading! The Intention Economy
This blog has no mandatory terms of service, installs no beacons or cookies (that I know about), and vends no third party ads (I hope—let me know if you see one.) That’s just fine with our second Cluetrain Manifesto co-author of the summer reading list, Doc Searls. (I do plug our workshops, but I think […]
Just A Little About Surveys
Surveys are top of mind for me right now. We’re in the middle of a couple of survey projects, and surveys inevitably come up whenever we talk about loyalty, satisfaction, and self-service effectiveness. Doing customer service and support surveys is a topic that deserves its own book—as a matter of fact, it already has its own […]