Customer service is dying a painful death. My friend and industry analyst Esteban Kolsky predicts extinction by 2025 while Salesforce has already called it. Regardless of the exact end date, only the vendors who successfully transition to a model of customer empowerment and independence will survive.

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.

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…

“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…

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…

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.…

“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…

“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…