Category: Customer Experience

The winners in CX innovation across the Middle East have been announced at the annual Gulf Customer Experience Awards in Dubai. Following a fantastic day of presentations by finalists, and hybrid live and online awards ceremony, the big winners have been announced on the stage at Jumeirah Creekside Hotel. HSBC, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Experience…
The post 2021 Gulf Customer Experience Awards: Meet The Winners appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

The headlines are glowing:
“Texans Needed Food and Comfort After a Brutal Storm. As Usual, They Found It at H-E-B.” –The New York Times
“Opinion: Why H-E-B comes through in a crisis when Texas government doesn’t.” –The Houston Chronicle
“Texans are raving about H-E-B as the beloved grocery chain provides food and comfort amid a nightmarish storm.” –Business Insider
What I wrote on LinkedIn was, “In H-E-B we trust. Here’s how admirable acts of leadership earn an army of people whose lives would be empty without you. Bravo #HEB”
As I’ve shared before,  H-E-B is a fantastic example of a business that understands that in certain moments, we as businesspeople have unique opportunities to embed goodwill and good acts into them, to become memorable, to become unforgettable for how we responded in this moment, and for how we helped our people and our customers.
Memory is a powerful thing. As leaders, we must ask: How will you be remembered? What do your behaviors say about you?

Take the Quiz!
I’ve put together a short quiz as a self-evaluation tool to help leaders define where they are now and identify their opportunities to become memorable and earn customer-driven growth. Click here to get started.

The post In H-E-B We Trust: How Admirable Acts of Leadership Earn an Army of Loyal Fans appeared first on Customer Bliss.

For most products and services, we rate them on a curve.

Of course the seat on the discount airline was cramped, but that’s okay because it was cheap.

Of course this Camry doesn’t look or ride like a Porsche, don’t be stupid…

But, the opposite is true in the high end. When luxury goods are compared to luxury goods, the narrative is, “this one must be better, in absolute and relative terms, precisely because it’s more expensive.”

And so hiring McKinsey costs 10x more than hiring a former McKinsey consultant. And so it’s worth more.

And so $150,000 elephant-sized stereo speakers (yes, they exist) are far better than $5,000 speakers (can’t you see?)

This goes beyond the standard understanding of a Veblen good. Because in addition to being more expensive, these super-luxury goods are less effective, harder to use and generally a pain in the neck. That’s part of their appeal.

(And yes, the same is true for corporate luxury goods, like software and IT consulting…)

Price accordingly. And listen to the reviews with a careful skepticism.

Keeping pace with technology and the operational challenges of growth and customer demands continues to create a paradigm shift in our thought processes in how we adapt to our customer’s needs, and this almost always impacts the technology we must use to maintain an edge over our competition. While technology provides great opportunities to advance our operation, the underlying influence upon people and how we adapt to these changes should be considered as well. My list of Contact Center trends will address technology and the shifts in the operational mindset of the contact center, hopefully offering insight into topics not usually addressed in a year-end, forward-looking summary.
Bots, Artificial Intelligence/Automation & Self-Service Voice Analytics Data & Business Intelligence Cloud Migration Agent Expertise/Brand Consistency Social Media
I break each of these down here: https://www.inflowcomm.com/2021/01/contact-center-trends-for-2021/
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“Where do you get your ideas?”

The thing is, everyone has ideas. All the time, every day. Having ideas is part of the human condition.

The right questions might be:

Are you exposing yourself to new inputs and new situations, and challenging yourself to find more interesting ideas?

Are you pushing the ideas you have further, making them more complete, turning them from hunches to notions to ideas to theories?

Are you publishing your theories, sharing your reasoning and having your ideas collide with the real world in service of making things better?

Hi guys, It would interest me what’s your opinion on customer experience in B2B, in particular in industries with specialized products. I guess the product itself is the most valuable factor / differentiator in such businesses. So are big investments in CX worth it? What are chances and risks to your mind? Thanks in advance.
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Because wishes don’t always come true, but wishing takes a lot of time and energy and focus.

What you wish for determines how you’re spending a juicy part of your day. If you wish for something you can’t control, that might fill you with frustration or distract you from wishing that could lead to productive work.

Better to wish for something where the wishing itself is a useful act, one that shifts your attitude and focus.

The phone company didn’t care what sort of conversation you were having. The call was the call. Same is true for cable–what you watched didn’t matter to them.

The reason retail banks are so frustrating to many customers is that because they began with a geographic focus, they’re dumb about who their customers are. They underserve or overserve in random ways. And in trying to serve everyone, they end up doing a lousy job of serving anyone.

But there’s no longer a reason for a provider to be dumb. They can optimize for you and your needs. They know what you’ve done and they should be able to guess what you might want next. Not to do this to you, but with you and for you.

“You can pick anyone and we’re anyone” is a lousy slogan.

How do you make your pipe smarter than that?

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If there’s scarcity, we need to make choices.

Who gets hired, what website shows up at the top of the search results, who gets a loan.

And while we can make those choices on a case by case basis, at scale, we rely on algorithms instead. A series of coded steps, inferences and decision-making heuristics that ostensibly get better as they gather more data.

At this point, it’s clear that algorithms are remaking our culture. They drive how social media networks surface content, how search engines highlight websites, how AI makes decisions about who flies or doesn’t, who gets a loan or doesn’t, it’s everywhere, all the time.

And algorithms are not neutral. They can’t be. Every decision has consequences, and unlike the pythagorean theorem, there isn’t a right answer, simply a choice about now or later, all along a spectrum.

An algorithm takes when it finds a selfish or defective element of society and magnifies it for short-term profit. It finds habits or instincts that individuals might have and exploits them to do something that benefits the algorithm-maker without leaving the culture or the user better off in the long run.

And an algorithm gives when it amplifies the better angels of our nature, when it helps us do the things we’d like to do in the long run, for us and the people we care about.

A challenge for anyone programming at a monopoly, a public company, a well-funded startup or even a non-profit in search of donors is this: Do you have the guts to build an algorithm you can be proud of even if it doesn’t pay off as well in the short run?

Because if the answer is no, blaming the system isn’t going to help anyone. You are the system, we all are, and given the power of invisible and leveraged algorithms, it’s essential that they be created and maintained by people who understand that they’re responsible for the impact they make.

More on this here and here.