customer experience articles

A new study by the University of Michigan examines the relationship between the number of online reviews and sales. Researchers find that the volume of reviews has a significant increase in sales for positive ratings and a significant decrease for negative ratings after a certain threshold number of reviews.
Filed under Customer Feedback System and [...]

BearingPoint Inc. is considering tying bonuses to the scores after it found that clients that give high net promoter scores also show the highest revenue growth. The approach is gathering steam at a time when CEOs are increasingly focused on getting closer to customers. It also plays into the executive lament that loyalty management programs, [...]

Eighty percent of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience, but only 8 percent of their customers agree, says Bain & Company. Here’s how to repair the disconnect. Design the right offers and experiences, deliver these propositions by focusing the entire company, and develop the capabilities to please customers again and again. From Harvard [...]

The answer is easy - so easy in fact that it's almost like cheating. All you have to do is listen to your customers. They will tell you everything you need to do to succeed.

Thomas Hammond, Vice President of Customer Experience Management, describes the carrier's success in switching from a pure cost focus to more of a customer focus. In 2001, they implemented a customer-centric, closed-looped feedback system with the aim of improving the customer experience while coaching, developing, and retaining employees across 8 contact centers.

Eavesdropping is helping W Hotels make good on their marketing. In a new service-training program begun earlier this year, Starwood’s chic hotel brand began teaching its employees to listen for overheard clues that will enable them to help anticipate guests’ needs. For example, complain to your husband on your cell phone about a sore throat [...]

Craig Newmark spends his days fielding hundreds of customer emails from a corner of Reverie, his favorite coffee shop in San Francisco. “Much of what good customer service is made of are things that nobody notices,” he says, “until you stop doing them.”

Intuit has many ears, open to the Voice of the Customer. In 1989, Intuit launched its “follow me home” program, which embedded engineers in customers’ homes, listening to their needs in a natural setting. Last year, the company began having software VPs and product engineers sit at call center employees’ desks to figure out [...]

Travelocity is the customer’s knight in shining armor when it comes to supplier isputes. That kind of customers-first attitude has led Peluso to launch Travelocity’s new “customer championship” initiative, which guarantees that it will step in and advocate for customers when things go wrong with suppliers. In preparation for the initiative’s launch, each business line [...]

Want to find out what drives customers wild about this outdoor retailer? Just ask an employee a question about one of its 245,000 products. Rather than rely on a database of customers’ hasty answers to standardized, tepid questions, Cabela’s turns to its highly engaged employees for feedback on its products. Through an extensive loaner program, [...]