What’s the cost of NOT listening to customers?

A company goes through a change at the top.  The new CEO comes from a financial background.  The new CEO institutes cost-cutting measures (after all, it’s what they know).  One item cut, all the customer feedback mechanisms – that means print surveys, point-of-sales surveys, and online feedback.  The company saves some money on cutting [...]

What counts in customer satisfaction?

  According to the 2007 Retailer Customer Satisfaction Survey what customers look for in a retailer comes down to three things – value, service, and shopping experience. The study breaks these down into cost, employee helpfulness, quality of the merchandise sold, return policies, cleanliness and ease of finding merchandise (“the six qualities”).
The survey indicates that [...]

Let Customers Co-Create Your Cause Marketing

  According to the 2007 Cone Cause Evolution Survey, 87% of us “are likely to switch from one brand to another (price and quality being about equal) if the other brand is associated with a good cause, an increase of more than 31 percent (from 66%) since 1993.”  The study also found that 89% of employees [...]

You Can’t Spell Customer ‘Success’ Without the S’s

I’ve been working on a big “measuring the customer experience” project and it got me thinking. What is it that makes one customer initiative a success and another, well, not so successful? I didn’t want to say “failure” because I believe there is no such thing as failure, there’s only feedback. [...]

Do customers care if you are going “green?”

  At last week’s monthly ACG meeting here in San Diego, the presentation title “Greening the Bottom Line” was delivered by Irene Stillings, Executive Director of the California Center for Sustainable Energy.  The disucssion focused on what companies are doing to make their facilities more energy efficient and the cost savings that they experience.  Along with her presentation, Ms. Stillings moderated a panel discussion [...]

Do you have the right employees for your customer strategy?

When I make my monthly visit to my neighborhood PetCo I often stop at the near-by Jack In The Box drive-thru for a quick meal.  Up until a month ago this Jack In The Box was closed for several weeks to do some remodeling.  It just so happens that I have been there three times in the last month, which for me is a [...]