Last week I enjoyed attending Medallia's Best Practices Forum, the annual customer conference for the provider of Customer Feedback Management Solutions.

Medallia is an interesting story, having climbed into a leadership position in the EFM industry in the past few years. Now the company is approaching 300 employees, has opened offices in London and Buenos Aries, and launched an Institute for CX certification. A recent $35 million investment from Sequoia Capital will be used to build out its platform and expand its market presence.

Medallia is probably best known for its work in the hospitality industry, but in recent years it has scored some big wins in retail, high tech and other industries. Some of my favorite brands can be counted as Medallia customers, including Four Seasons, Nordstrom, O2, ... and a certain famous tech company that would prefer not to be mentioned.

Queue in Taylor Swift’s “Mean” and proceed with belting out the tune, “…whyda gotta be so mean?” Then wipe up the tears and go get yourself some ice cream.

Ok, that was rather harsh, but in reality, I need to hear that. Yes, I am talking to myself here.

Admission:

I have a very difficult time with mean customers. While my skin is thickening, if a customer calls me a bad name, I take offense.

Dumpsey: A True story

A customer wanted something that we truly could not provide them with. I was kindly explaining it to them and their angry email back to me referred to me as “Miss Dumpsey”. My last name is “Dempsey” and while growing up, I was referred to as “Dumpsey” quite often. This triggered my inner child and I just couldn’t take it. I went on to forward the email to Jeremy saying, “She called me DUMPSEY! I can no longer assist this disrespectful customer. She’s all yours.” Of course, in the heat of the moment, I hit “reply” instead of “forward” and the already angry customer received my heartfelt thoughts. Yikes!

Or, even more recently, a customer called me a very disrespectful name and I replied with “Well, that’s offensive!” They were pretty furious to hear my thoughts on this and hung up the phone, refusing to even speak with me. But, they called ME the bad name, gosh!

There's an intriguing new application available called Forever.

From a functional perspective it's not ground breaking - it simply provides address book functionality.  What is interesting however is that it does this without actually holding any data.

Of course it manages personal data - it has to so it can bring up a friends address details - but it doesn't persist it.  It keeps your address book in sync and up to date -  but it doesn't change anything.

Forever is a new breed of application known as an unhosted app and this has been defined by unhosted.org as:-

"Also known as "serverless", "client-side", or "static" web apps, unhosted web apps do not send your user data to their server. Either you connect your own server at runtime, or your data stays within the browser"

The application provides a service and works upon your own data, but it never actually "owns" the data.  Instead, you connect your own data store, such as that provided by a personal cloud, which the application can then work with.

In a world where everyone is talking about big data, this really is a breath of fresh air.

A colleague of mine at SDL, David Ashton, recently published a blog post about the six sacred cows of customer experience, really a series of myths that exist around customer experience. Here they are:

#1 IT Professionals don’t care about the customer
#2 NPS is the only metric system you need
#3 CXM is just a new term for better customer experience
#4 A centralized CRM system gives you a 360 degree view of the customer
#5 A managed customer experience is only important with consumers… it doesn’t matter in B2B
#6 I’m not on Twitter therefore social media isn’t a valid marketing channel

After reading David’s post, I had two questions.

1. Is David missing any?
2. Specifically for number #3 ‘CXM is just a new term for better customer experience’, do you think that's true and if so, or not, why?