- Sutori: The voice of today’s customer —
I got an email about this site which allows people to share their customer experiences and have others add their own thoughts. It seems Sutori’s goal is to aggregate the opinions of many and then push for change at the poor performing companies. A worthy goal that hopefully comes to fruition. - Are You Managing Metrics or Serving Customers? —
Numbers don’t always tell the truth. The real reasons customers have trouble may be masked from upper management simply because of the way these issues are classified and aggregated.
Weekend Reading – March 16th
- Convince me in Five Words or Less! —
Steps on how you can create a catchy, memorable, and effective tag line or slogan for your business. - The Difference Between Usability and User Experience —
Creating a great user experience means coordinating efforts across your entire organization. If customers hit snags as they move between your internal department boundaries, you’re missing the holistic picture! - More Design Lessons from the Tooth Fairy —
Wonderful account of business lessons learned from a Dad’s interactions with his daughter when the Tooth Fairy forgot to visit. Your customers, like the little girl in this story, have preset expectations and need to be cared for when things go awry.
Weekend Reading – March 10th
- In-N-Out Burger: No Buns about Good Business —
Some observations about how this fast food chain has distinguished itself from the competition and managed to grow a loyal fan base. - T-Mobile Suddenly Gets Online Customer Service —
Wonderful examples of personally crafted customer service emails. The author concedes "it’s amazing these messages must be mostly pre-written and yet they are so custom focused to just my problem they are perfect."
Weekend Reading – March 2nd
- Why Customer Service Rocks —
Research showing companies with high customer satisfaction outperform the S&P 500 significantly. While it may seem fine to ignore customer service in the short term, your long term horizon is directly impacted by how you treat customers. - Stock Images = False Advertising? —
Entertaining post about those standard photography shots you see of customer service representatives. Why not just show your real employees? Are they as scary in real life as they are on the phone? If so, you’ve got bigger problems. - Genchi Genbutsu & Ethnography —
Have you ever walked a mile in your customer’s shoes? How about driven in your customer’s car? A Toyota chief engineer did just that and gained priceless insight into how to design the Sienna minivan.
Weekend Reading – February 24th
- JetBlue’s Video Apology – Church of the Customer Blog —
JetBlue’s CEO addresses their recent flight cancellation nightmare. He follows Washington’s advice about handling mistakes. Lesson #1: Learn from your mistakes! - Seven steps to remarkable customer service —
Have your customer service handled by those who can solve the problem. The more disjoint your front line support is from those that can actually fix the problem, the more likely things will never get fixed. You’ll end up supporting the same issues over and over again. - Creating Passionate Users: What tail is wagging the "user happiness" dog? —
Don’t let your company policies or infrastructure problems dictate the customer experience. The customer’s experience, not your internal shenanigans, should drive your products and services.