SuccessfulWorkplace

Dear Jeff Smisek, We hope the holidays find you and your family well. We wanted to drop a letter to you to know how your airline is doing and to give our appreciation for some of the remarkable people you have working for you. We know the airlines are an easy target. Since deregulation and […]

I’m flying today. It’s the end of the Thanksgiving holiday and I’m frankly stressed about the prospect of crowds, hassles and delays. But I’m fortunate. I fly on an airline that is focused on outside-in business process management. They live for the kind of customer-centricity that Janne Ohtonen talks about in Chapter 1 of his […]

It’s official. Apple’s recently and quietly released new iBeacon tech has been deployed as ShopBeacon by shopkick. First a little about shopkick…it is an app that offers customers “kicks” that translate to points for performing the act of browsing for information on a retailer. The customer can redeem kicks for gift cards for allowing the […]

In previous blogs we referred to the operating models of retail banks by identifying certain product and channel features that drive the changes in the industry. This post will focus on the evolving operating model and the impacts it has on people, process and enabling capabilities, which is more than the technology that drives most […]

There’s so much customer data around us, and it gets richer and faster each and every day. People are talking non-stop about Big Data and its many uses in various parts of the market. But what’s not really getting as much attention is how analytics are used to make loyalty platforms effective for meaningful customer […]

Beaches, believe it or not, are a fantastic way to analogize customer engagement, Big Data and right-time marketing. Everyone loves the beach and its complex interaction of soil, wind, sea, geography, and physics. It has a course-grained scale like wave breaks and dunes, and is also very discreet at the level of drops of water and […]

What is more important to company success, a strong external focus on customer experiences or an internal focus on effective and efficient operations? Of course, it’s a false dichotomy — you need both. I described in an earlier post how Tesco worked for years to improve its supply chain capabilities, then leveraged this value by using deeper customer knowledge […]

The following is a guest post by Sandesh Sharanappa. The banking industry is poised for a sea change as a result of the changing global and national regulations, demanding customers, disruptive technologies and the arrival of non-traditional players offering retail banking services. The industry faces a challenge in providing seamless customer experience, becoming truly customer […]

Recently, I had a great bad experience in brand social media use. It was great as a timely reminder of the danger of impersonal customer engagement, especially for someone who works in customer loyalty. It was bad because that lesson came at the expense of hours wasted at the airport. The Story My husband and I flew […]

We usually think of customer experience (CX) as a consumer-facing concept. In most retail companies, it is a full-time position that puts heavy focus on the physical interfaces to the customer (Web, social, stores, support). It becomes easy to believe that customer experience is a combination of marketing, sales and service. CX has an identity […]

In a previous post I commented on the lack of innovation in retail banking in the UK and in other European countries. Riding the waves of the digital revolution, there is no doubt that most retailers will eventually adopt an omni-channel (‘OC’) approach to customer service. But is this equally true for retail banks? With […]

Getting the right information on demand is an eternal problem of today’s knowledge workers, and will only grow. Lack of knowledge causes a delay in decision-making, and ultimately leads to bad decisions. This is the essence of the Two-Second Advantage, where a little knowledge in the correct context at the correct time is much more […]

I used a long drive to Northern California this week to catch up with my insurance company, USAA. I had a laundry list of things to cover from a birth to a death and from selling a motorcycle to buying a new car. These administrative changes can take a long time and involve being passed […]

Predictive analytics is big business now. Hand in hand with Big Data they represent one of the only ways to get to know your consumer market and understand how they’ll behave under conditions, respond to marketing and react to incentives. But the problem with all of this is that it’s a constant cat and mouse chase, consumers are […]