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The Black Canyon Water Trail is a 30-mile section of tailwater that extends out of Lake Mead from the Hoover Dam. This rugged and remote portion of the Colorado River offers clear water, sandy beaches, towering cliffs, colorful caves, and active hot springs, all in the middle of the Nevada and Arizona desert.
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Customer experience leaders financially outperform laggards. Forrester Research calculates the advantage at 14%. While almost every company is chasing the CX hype cycle, many forget who creates and manages those experiences: employees. Here’s why you should also invest in the worker experience, including the ROI of doing so. (more…)
Winston Churchill once said that “we make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.” This idea was top of mind as I visited the Gates Foundation and pondered the magnitude of how Bill and Melinda are turning what they “got” into what they now “give.” When I posted this picture to Twitter, I pledged to donate 100% of my income from the project to charities in my local community who have similar missions to that of the Gates Foundation. With the contracts now signed – I am excited to announce where that money is going.
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“Knowledge management isn’t just the know how, but also the know who.” Excellent perspective from a former co-worker of mine. And while most organizations are getting better at surfacing their “know how” content with technologies like enterprise search, many still struggle with how to identify who knows what. In this post, we’ll look at how to automatically identify and leverage expertise within your organization.
Everyone is talking customer experience. McKinsey believes CX programs can substantially grow revenues. Gartner predicts that most companies will soon compete on the basis of customer experience while forecasting that half of this year’s product investments will be redirected toward those initiatives.
But talk is cheap and most companies are seeing only modest impacts from their customer experience efforts if they can even measure them at all.
So how can you go from fluff to tough – driving both customer satisfaction and profits from your CX programs? (more…)
Self-service is more popular than ever before with 81% of customers attempting to self-solve before reaching out to a live representative according to the CEB. With a cost of pennies per transaction instead of hundreds or even thousands of dollars per assisted case, it’s no wonder why more and more companies are investing in this channel. But focusing purely on self-service is a huge mistake because the more successful that initiative is, the more complicated your assisted channel will become.
“1/3 of customers would rather clean the toilet than call customer service.” – 2015 Aspect CX survey
For all the considerable investments vendors have made in self-service, customers report only a 45% success rate according to the latest benchmark from the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). Most vendors make their customer leave the product, login to a support website, and then type in a generic query before becoming frustrated with irrelevant results. A much better method is to keep your customer in the product, pass proper context about who they are and what they are doing to your search engine, and return a list of highly relevant results. And that’s exactly what my client Adobe is now doing.
“The role of customer service is to mitigate disloyalty by reducing customer effort.” – The Effortless Experience
It’s been 3 years since the publishing of “The Effortless Experience,” a book chock-full of research confirming what customers have long found obvious but that too many vendors failed to understand: the path of least resistance is best. Why, then, do so many support organizations continue to make things so difficult on their customer? More importantly, how can your support organization actually deliver a low-effort experience?
Color can sometimes distract from the core theme of a photograph. After getting back from a trip to Ellis Island, I felt like the original image (see below) didn’t place enough emphasis on the view through an immigration building door to the Statue of Liberty. Things like the colored floor tile and exterior fence were too prominent. So I switched to B&W for a less distracting perspective.
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What exactly is deflection, and how do we measure it? This is one of the most frequently asked questions I receive from clients.
There is overwhelming evidence that customers want to resolve their own issues via self-service, and doing so is far cheaper for the vendor than assisted service. This is one instance where customer satisfaction aligns perfectly with cost efficiency, meaning everyone from the CFO to the Chief Customer Officer to your actual customer loves case deflection. If done correctly, that is.
But to measure something, you must first define it. So, let’s look at what constitutes a good deflection event and how success is measured.