Are you thinking customer experience?

Passion for our customers is what it is all about. Here are some recent articles focused on the customer experience.

Protecting Our Data-Driven Efforts In a world that's ever-more reliable on data, some proposed policies in front of Congress threaten to hamper companies' customer-experience efforts. If Congress passes some of the proposed data privacy bills, personalization in marketing and one-to-one communications will deteriorate.

Data, Data Everywhere The new reality of marketing is one in which consumers expect a sophisticated level of personalization in their communications, offers, and interactions with companies. At DMA2012 in Las Vegas, thought leaders from all aspects of the direct marketing industry will converge to discuss and share best practices about how to help organizations move forward on the path toward integrated, one-to-one communications.

Why Some Companies Succeed--For Now--Despite Their Poor Customer Experiences Recently there was a question via email from one of Forrester's clients, who asked: "How do you explain the success of companies that consistently provide a poor experience but perform well financially?"

Delivering Customer Service That Makes an Emotional Connection Many companies strive to provide great customer service. However, few companies deliver the kind of customer service that makes an emotional connection with customers - the kind of connection that fosters loyalty and willingness if not an eagerness among customers to recommend a company to a friend.

Related articles

• Moving from Customer Service to Customer Experience (customerthink.com)


• Customer Service Drives Sales (customerthink.com)


• Reverse Customer Service Strategy (smallbiztrends.com)

What should you obsess over?

In this day and age, we all should obsess over the customer experience. That is the focus that brings us great joy in our work.

Some questions to think about. How enjoyable are we to do business with? Was the experience fun? Did my needs get met? Would I recommend this company to a friend? There are several approaches we can take with these type of questions but just asking "real customers" what they think gives feedback for a business obsessed with the customer and their experience with us.

They use stopwatches at McDonald's. They know, to the second, how long it should take to make a batch of fries. And they use spreadsheets, too, to whittle the price of each fry down by a hundredth of a cent if they can. They're big and it matters.

Small businesspeople often act like direct marketers. They pick a number and they obsess over it. In direct mail, of course, it's the open rate or the conversion rate. For a freelancer or small business person, it might be your bank balance or the growth in weekly sales.

I think for most businesses that want to grow, it's way too soon to act like a direct marketer and pick a single number to obsess about.

The reason is that these numbers demand that you start tweaking. You can tweak a website or tweak an accounts payable policy and make numbers go up, which is great, but it's not going to fundamentally change your business.

I'd have you obsess about things that are a lot more difficult to measure. Things like the level of joy or relief or gratitude your best customers feel. How much risk your team is willing to take with new product launches. How many people recommended you to a friend today...

What are you tracking? If you track concepts, your concepts are going to get better. If you track open rates or clickthrough, then your subject lines are going to get better. Up to you.

via Seth's Blog: What to obsess over.

Related articles

• Seth's Blog: Corporations are not people (sethgodin.typepad.com)


• Less is Really More, and Beware the Hunt for the Masses (gensheer.wordpress.com)


• Seth's Blog: Improving your condiments (sethgodin.typepad.com)