Over the past few years, we undertook rewriting a major part of our customer portal software to make it easier to use. 

It took a lot of time, money, nights and weekends, and we ran into our fair share of bugs and headaches along the way.

After we had launched the update, I thought “rewrites aren’t for the risk averse!”

According to the internet, Jeff Bezos once said: “It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

It’s an incredibly powerful idea for anyone with customers, i.e., every single business!

A couple weekends ago, after many hours of online shopping and discussion, my wife and I were ready to buy a new family sofa.  We embarked on furniture store visits starting at IKEA, where we and our two boys sprawled out on a sectional sofa for some “real world” testing.

I recently toured  a client’s impressive heavy equipment sales, parts and service facility and I had a realization during the tour, "Your employees are the engine of your company."

Spring is in the air.  It’s a great time to do some cleaning and decluttering of your customer program.  Keep it fresh and functioning well.

In the movie Finding Forrester, Sean Connery, playing reclusive writer William Forrester, advises a young friend that “the key to a woman’s heart is an unexpected gift, at an unexpected time”.  Forrester’s friend, Jamal, acts on the advice and it works wonders.

Much has recently been written about the digitization of sales and marketing.  One study by CEB Global found that by the time a customer engages with your sales team after performing initial research, a whopping 57% of the B2B purchase process is already done.

Customer feedback is an essential ingredient for building better customer experiences, which help businesses survive and thrive.

Too often, though, feedback processes contain unnecessary friction, which causes customers to drop out of the process.

This is a lose-lose situation. The company is deprived of customer insights and customers waste their time.

Here’s the good news: By following a few simple steps, you can prevent or solve much of the friction in feedback processes. Before getting to those, though, let me share why I’m writing about this in the first place.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be invaluable in helping companies manage progress towards their goals. A KPI answers the question “Are we on track?” with a single metric. Put enough KPIs on a dashboard, and you’ve struck management gold: a snapshot of your business, distilled to a single page.

Applied to customer experience improvement efforts, KPIs can help businesses put actionable, “hard” metrics around what can otherwise be a “soft” topic. Just the ticket for aligning your efforts to become more customer centric. So, what’s not to love?

For those of us in the US, the Thanksgiving Day holiday is just a couple days away.  Millions are flying, driving, cleaning and cooking, all while trying to keep the wheels turning at work for another day or so.

The run-up to Thanksgiving is often busy, and for some it can feel overwhelming.  The Google search term “holiday stress” is up 60% in the past seven days alone.

With that in mind, why in the world would we want to make Thanksgiving a habit?!