Blog

Arguably, phone, wireless, and cable providers are simultaneously the most predatory and desperate of all direct-to-consumer businesses. They conspire with each other to set inflated prices for mediocre service and negotiate territories to avoid competition, which, in turn, helps them set inflated prices for mediocre service. They demand your loyalty but only seem to rewardRead more

Earlier this year, along with family and friends, I made my annual pilgrimage to our condo is Orlando, Florida – with fear. It’s not the long lines at Walt Disney World or the hectic Orlando International Airport that I dread; I don’t look forward to flying an American airline with my children who have severeRead more

What is the value of a happy customer? Is it more or less than a dissatisfied customer? Social media has trained customer service teams to be hyper-sensitive to online negativity, possibly alienating and discouraging online positivity. Online monitoring software allows for the identification of both positive and negative sentiment in online conversations, yet negativity isRead more

I’m a bit disturbed by the fact that most customer experience (CX) discussions I’ve had lately with marketers have been about marketing automation and technology. Software firms pitching clients at trade shows, on webinars or at conferences all seem to be leading with the promise that their technology will generate a greater customer experience throughRead more

Has customer service emerged from the call centers and basements of businesses to become the defining business strategy for success? Well, if you’re to believe the results in the newly released 2012 American Express® Global Customer Service Barometer, you’d certainly lean that way. The conclusions drawn from this report suggest that social media has elevatedRead more

You’re not active on Facebook? You may not be qualified to work as an Engineer. Not Tweeting? Sorry, you can’t be hired in the Travel & Tourism industry. No Pinterest board? You’re future as a Chef just hit a major roadblock. To rational people such statements will seem ridiculous but in reality they’re not farRead more

Gone are the days of the stand-alone customer loyalty card (or just plain loyalty for that matter)  – we’re now seeing a range of new data, social media feeds and smart phones that are changing the way organisations engage with their clients. We’re in a generational and philosophical struggle between older, closed systems and theRead more

Each year sees a new trend in the evolution of business communications. Over the past years people have called out Unified Communications, Cloud Computing and more recently Mobility and SIP-Enabled Infrastructure. Most predictions focus on the evolution of the technology rather than the cultural changes that impact how we communicate within our organizations and beyond.Read more

One of the benchmarks many businesses set and measure is the quality of their customer service. No doubt, it’s an important metric to a business but do the results (positive or negative) really enable game changing business strategies? In this series, I’ve been challenging business leaders to compete by changing the rules of the gameRead more