customer experience articles

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 [...]

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, [...]

Whole Foods nurtures democracy, putting their health plan to a company-wide vote. The outcome: satisfied workers and ultimately happy customers. On Whole Foods’ heavy roster of employee-friendly policies–for instance, no executive at Whole Foods makes more than 14 times the average hourly employee’s pay–nothing stands out as much as the company’s employee-designed benefits plan. [...]

The starring role in Netflix’s customer experience strategy goes to its top-secret, highly customized technology, which offers its more than 3 million customers their own personal box office. We peek behind the scenes at our Oscar-worthy Customers First Award winner.

According to the annual customer experience management (CEM) report from the Strativity Group Inc., the situation in customer support is bad and getting worse. What's most striking about the report is that many executives surveyed acknowledged their inability to serve customers. In many cases they even showed a lack of interest in doing so.

Dwayne Clark, who cofounded AegisLiving in 1997, was dissatisfied with an assisted-living industry that gave more care to real estate than to people. Now Redmond, Washington-based Aegis is applying service lessons from Starbucks and other consumer giants to its growing 36-location chain.

What happens when employees punch their own clock? They're happier - and more productive. An inside look at Best Buy's bold experiment.

Moving the cheese: Wegmans relies on smart, deeply trained employees to create a “theater of food.” Although the stores range from 85,000 to 135,000 square feet, shopping feels snug, as if you're tucked in by the attention - and deep knowledge - of the employees.

We all know that an effective advertising campaign will drive consumers to your door. Once there, all future purchase behavior is based solely on the efficacy of that experience. It's easy to make promises. It's much harder to deliver on them.