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Thursday: 5 Things You Need To Know About Customer Experience Today

Customer Experience Articles For Today

Paypal Tests QR Codes In Shop Windows; Mobile Check-Ins At Stores For Personalized Service Tech Crunch

Stop Being a Perfectionist And Pay Attention To Customers Business Insider

One Question Every High Technology CEO Should Ask Every Day Forbes

Gamification Can Make Your Customer Service Worse Wired

Facebook Finally Adds Share Button To Mobile Experience Venture Beat

 

 

5 Customer Experience Articles You Need To Read Today

Customer Experience Articles For Today

The Best Way To Use Discounts To Bring In Loyal Customers Business Insider

A Surprising Trick For Building Brand Loyalty Forbes

Brands, Social Media and Customer Service: Are You Ready? Huffington Post

6 Ways Brands Build Trust Through Social Media Forbes

Dear Customers, Sandy Hit. Now What? Inc

 

The Two Pillars To Build A Strong Organizational Foundation

Build a workplace where employees love to work and where customers obsess to purchase from. That’s all, after that, everything else will fall into place.

Think about the world’s most admired and profitable organizations for a second. What do they have in common? Their employees love to promote the brand and their customers obsess over doing business with them.

Case study: Apple

Walk into any Apple retail location and you will notice a few things, one of which is that their team members naturally go above and beyond for their customers. I emphasize naturally because it’s a genuine action for these employees since delivering amazing service is in their DNA. At one time within our careers, I’m sure we muttered “I don’t want to go to work.” I know I did when I was a dishwasher at a restaurant in high school. Now, this is definitely anecdotal, so take it for what it’s worth, but I believe that Apple employees genuinely like coming into work. Why wouldn’t they? They are given the freedom to be themselves, dress in casual clothing and do business with people who love their brand.

How do you equate happy employees to revenue growth? Simple. When an employee is happy they are more likely to want to go above and beyond for the organization and customer. Take for example an employee who has built genuine rapport with a customer leaving an opportunity to cross or upsell which adds to top line revenue. WARNING: make the upsell and/or cross sell genuine. People don’t like to be sold to and can smell a salesperson from a mile away.

Apple customers love doing business with them. A lot of that obsession is due to outstanding products but the process in which they obtain these products also encourages loyalty. If you’ve ever bought an Apple product you may have felt that sense of excitement. When you visit an Apple store or order online it’s painless. Many organizations are guilty of making it difficult to purchase but Apple has structured their sales system to be very pain free which influences repeat purchases. Of course, these repeat purchases lead to additional top line revenue which will grow your business.

When I sit down with friends or customers one of my first questions about their business is, “what keeps you up at night?” Sometimes the response is, “We need to take our business to the next level. We need to market more.” This may be true for some organizations but in most cases the business person simply needs to evaluate their work environment and then their customer experience. After that, your marketing initiatives will be more effective because you have a strong foundation.

 

 

 

3 Customer Experience Articles You Need To Read Today

Customer Experience Articles For Today

3 Questions to Ask Every Employee Inc

Mess With Employee Morale, Lose Your Job Mashable

A Zappos Lesson In Customer Service Metrics Software Advice

How Do You Define An Expert?

This post is not like my typical customer experience pitch but it’s something I’ve been thinking about lately.

Malcolm Gladwell suggests that for one to be an expert they must log 10,000 hours studying and practicing their trade. Whether this is true or not is debatable. If you scan through any social media platforms, you’ll notice that there are many people that bestow the title of expert or guru on themselves while others have it given to them.

How do you become an expert in anything? Who designates this? What is the exact time one becomes an expert? Why not 9000 hours? Does it make you better than others? What’s the value in positioning yourself as an expert?

It’s obvious I have passion for customer experience and growing business organically, however I like to consider myself a lifelong student. I will continue to educate myself, ignore any titles and pass along my education to others. There is a lot of value in doing that.

The day you stop learning and growing is the day you begin to die.

@garyvee Explains How The Culture Of The USA Will Bring Apple To $1000/share

What are your thoughts? Is he right?

Apple, It’s Your Move

The latest iPad was released just a couple of weeks ago. Apple has reported great sales and Apple enthusiasts appear to be loving the new product. The Wall Street Journal reported that some customes are complaining that the product is slightly overheating (http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120320-711963.html).

Apple is undoubtedly amazing at building, marketing and selling their products. They also have amazing customer service but what about “service recovery”?

Let’s see how Apple responds to this.