customer experience articles

Given the amount of time devoted and content consumed by potential shoppers on social media sites, they are important vehicles for retailers to consider as part of their overall online marketing strategy. These visitors tend to focus on what their friends and colleagues, who are trusted sources, are saying and doing rather than on third-party [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

For most small businesses, competing on the Web is hardly easier than competing offline, where gigantic retailers with huge marketing budgets dominate. But for Amenity Home, a start-up in Los Angeles with three products, four employees and no marketing budget, getting noticed was a simple matter of word-of-mouth advertising, albeit in an unusual way.

Most of us have known word of mouth was a vital channel for building businesses and brands. Now this powerful means of connecting to consumers is an official business discipline. The basic principles of WOM apply to both consumer and B2B challenges.
* A happy customer is the greatest endorsement
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More than 50 percent of Americans report that a negative shopping experience of a friend or colleague will prevent them from setting foot in a store altogether. A recent customer dissatisfaction study finds that as shopping problems get repeated, they often get embellished and actually become up to five times more damaging to customer retention [...]

The hotel won the Customer Strategy award, presented for an initiative that effectively identifies customers, differentiates them by their needs or value, and reengineers interaction processes according to those values or needs.
Filed under Improving Customer Experience, Improving Customer Satisfaction, and Word of Mouth Marketing.

If you have a great product, then pro-act: find the thunderlizards and ask them to build a community. (Indeed, if you cannot find self-appointed evangelists for your product, you may not have created a great product.) If it is a great product, however, just the act of asking these customers to help you is so [...]

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, [...]

BMW and HBO are among those companies creating online “branded communities” to build awareness and loyalty among consumers. “The holy grail of marketing is when you get a community of people interested so that they not only talk about a product or a brand but everything else in their lives,” said Peter Friedman, chief of [...]