I love traveling and I love flying. However every time I am in an airport, I think that in customer service we are definitely forgetting the basics. We are thinking so much about knowing customers, their behaviours, their expectations, trying to establish relationships and giving them the best experience, that we are forgetting the minimum any human being expects. Relating to nice people and being heard.

How many times have you told your favorite airline that you like ailes. How many times have you gone thru an inmigration line without getting an answer from a good morning or a bonjour! How many times have you talked to airline agents who do not smile? or how many times have you been told "there is nothing we can do about it". How many times have you had to wait until they hang up their mobile calls to get an answer?

The theory says that customer service has to do with people, with processes like handling complaints, and in many cases with too much technology. People...

There was an airline in Colombia that had very old airplanes that had problems very often, yet the airline was the leader in customer satisfaction and loyalty. How did it do it? By applying some basic principles that created a customer-oriented culture.

"Customer culture"—which along with "customer focus" has become some of consultants' favorite buzz phrases—relates to instilling values and behaviors in a company. It is oriented toward implementing a process in which a company understands what customers need and want and develops products and services accordingly.

The emphasis on getting a customer-centric culture right is definitely a growing trend. In its 2006 study, High-Performance Workforce, Accenture asked 470 global executives to classify the greatest challenges their organizations were facing. Two issues had the biggest response: information technology (48 percent of respondents) and keeping up with industry change (47 percent). And to...

Has 2006 been a good year for customers? I definitely think it has been. Many companies have focused on implementing customer-oriented strategies; many others have made real efforts in understanding what customers want and value; and others have come up with creative and innovative ways of catching and sustaining the customers' attention so they won't go to the competition.

But not all has been golden. Companies have backtracked tremendously in their ways of making customers feel different, understood and special. Haven't you seen that wonderful place where you get your coffee every morning behave in a different way? Are you getting the same customer experience you had a couple of years ago?

Are you feeling closer to retail stores on the web? Or are they still sending you the same advertising emails, forgetting your size and preferences? Has your bank or insurance company stopped sending you tons of mass marketing catalogs and campaign pieces that clearly show they...

Marketing experiences. CEM. Customer Experiences. A new term has just come out, and it is becoming quite fashionable to speak about the experience your customer has with your company. I am sure it will be just a short while before companies are speaking about PEM (partner experience management), EEM (employee experience management) and all kinds of "EM" acronyms.

It's nothing new. Thinking about customer experiences has been in the minds of marketers for a long time. It is something so logical that when you hear about it, you think "yes, it is obvious." But at the same time, you get the feeling you've just discovered hot water or air conditioning.

I have spent the last four years of my working life thinking about how to make a total end-to-end customer experience something that differentiates companies from others and can give them a competitive advantage. It all started at a CRM conference. A speaker from the United Kingdom was talking about the...