customer experience articles

The co-founders of Rite-Solutions focus on an internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the [...]

At W.L. Gore, innovation is more than skin deep: The culture is as imaginative as the products and is what really distinguishes Gore. “Communication really happens in the car pool.” At a hierarchical company, the car pool is the only place where people talk to one another freely without regard for the chain of [...]

Frederick Reichheld, in The Loyalty Effect, pointed out that many, if not most, customers are loyal not to the brand or the firm, but to the people who serve them at the firm. When you lose employees, you often lose customers as well. Any marketing program aimed at customer retention must begin with looking at [...]

HR can - and should - help align employees to deliver the desired customer experience - and ultimately, better business outcomes. Delivering a Branded Customer Experience.

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 [...]

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. [...]

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.