customer experience articles

Who hasn’t gotten lost on an automated phone line, wandered aimlessly around a store trying to find a sales clerk or waited hours for the repair technician who never comes? MSN Money asked readers to rate their worst customer service experiences, and more than 3,000 responded within 24 hours. With the help of pollster Zogby [...]

The customer experience doesn’t happen neatly down each individual silo. The customer experiences a company horizontally - across the silos. This creates the breeding ground for the lack of respect customers feel and the discontent they have with us. The typical silo structure bumps the customer disjointedly along to deliver the outcome of its experience. [...]

While considered among the best Houston health care providers, Memorial Hermann's previous customer-focused organizational efforts were perceived as flavor of the month by employees, resulting in temporary buy-in and unsustainable customer satisfaction improvements, making new changes a challenge.

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.

Reward CSRs based on customer satisfaction, rather than on “productivity.” This may take some creativity in developing your bonus and motivational programs- you may need to monitor calls, use customer satisfaction surveys, or employ “mystery shoppers” or use other means besides call volume and sales volume statistics, but this is well worth the time and [...]

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 [...]

Power to the employee. At Zappos, workers are given power to improve the company. Zappos’s three-week training course for call-center reps starts with telling employees to forget everything they’ve learned. Chairman and founder Nick Swinmurn, who calls Zappos “a service company that happens to sell shoes,” believes empowerment means more than giving employees free rein [...]

Happy employees mean happy customers - a lesson learned from USAA’s generous perks and receptive atmosphere. USAA’s 13,000 customer service agents give new meaning to the phrase “frontline employees.” “[We have] a dedication to keeping the decision making at the lowest level of the company,” says David Travers of USAA’s approach to answering customer calls.Employees [...]

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 [...]