Chief Customer Officers (CCO) are charged with ensuring that an organization’s customer experience is considered by all departments, in all major decisions, at all times. He or she is the one executive whose job it is to represent the customer at their company.

The trouble is the directives of this position are often at odds with the other directives of the organization, particularly the ones that are focused on cutting bottom line costs to make the earning numbers this quarter. These are the very cuts that often affect the customer experience. For this reason, the CCO must be diplomatic, strategic and patient in order to affect any real change that will achieve his or her goals.

I believe that a CCO is a critical part of any organization’s executive team. If you find that the CCO hat has been placed upon your capable head, I would offer my top 10 Must- Dos. They are:

1. Ensure that you have both Responsibility and...

Big hole in big data

Much has been made about the future of the Internet, of customer relations, and of business interactions with customers. In fact at every conference I speak at I hear discussion about ‘Big Data’ and how it will help improve the Customer Experience – the Big Data trend that seems to be sweeping the globe. Thanks to the prominence of powerful computers, analytics services, and entire companies dedicated specifically to monitoring customer actions, there has never been more data available to companies when it comes to understanding how their customers shop, click, and work. In fact, these programs alone have generated a full 90 percent of all the data in the world over the...

When you see an ad with a celebrity like Leonardo DiCaprio holding a watch or an ad with someone showing emotion like proposing to their girlfriend on their knees, what is more effective?

New research to be launched in June shows that advertisements that align to a specific emotion are more effective than celebrity endorsements. The research states:

In one study, athletes chose to listen to “angry” music and indicated they would pay more to see “angry” bands in concert, while volunteers chose to listen to “sad” music and were willing to pay more to attend “sad” concerts. In another study, athletes found an advertisement more persuasive when the model’s face in the ad expressed anger, while volunteers were more persuaded by a model with a sad face, and environmentalists by a model expressing disgust.

Consumers can benefit from matching...

 How High Standards Can Hurt Your Business

Setting an Unachievable Vision

I was sitting in the reception of a new client the other day and I always take the time to look around, as reception areas start to tell you what the organization is like. I noticed on the wall there was a big sign that extolled the vision of the organization. It said; ‘We will exceed our Customer expectations at all points of contact’. I knew then that I was in for an interesting debate with this organization. This may sound odd coming from a Customer Experience person but the reality is that it is totally unrealistic to exceed...