Bob Thompson

... Also Meeting Basic Service Expectations

That's my rebuttal to the 2010 HBR article Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers, by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman of the Corporate Executive Board (CEB).

Provocative headline, but if taken literally is profoundly wrong.

Let's start with what the CEB study got right. If your customers are calling to get a problem solved, satisfying that request quickly and easily is very important. If you don't, customers will be dissatisfied, and that leads to defection and negative WOM.

But the authors take that point and extrapolate too far, implying that:

• Customer service transactions are the only opportunity to create true loyalty.
• Placating customers after a failure is the same as creating delight.
• Companies should adopt Customer Effort Score (CES) as a...

Rexer Analytics just released results of its 5th annual Analytics Data Miner Survey. For those interested in tools to gain insight from the Big Data explosion, this report is a must read. It's a comprehensive survey of 1,319 data miners from over 60 countries.

A few highlights I'd like to share from the report.

• Data mining / analytics can be used for a wide variety of problems in the enterprise. But for the past 5 years running the study had found CRM/Marketing as the top field. Data miners said that "improving the understanding of customers” and “retaining customers” were popular goals.
  
  
• Text mining is on the rise. About 1/3 of data miners currently use text mining and another third plan to do so in the future. Key applications include customer survey analysis (verbatims) and making sense of the Social Web.
  
  
• Based on this chart below, you can see...

Satmetrix has launched a new free service called SparkScore which turns social commentary into a Netpromoter score (NPS). A "spark" is a social comment -- such as a Tweet, Facebook post or other text available on the Internet.

According to Satmetrix CEO Richard Owen, they chose the name "SparkScore" because Satmetrix wanted an exclusive brand. (NPS is a registered trademark of Bain, Satmetrix and Fred Reichheld.) However, it's really just a social version of NPS, calculated by subtracting detractors from promoters.

Scoring social media

But it turns out that was easier said than done. Partnering with analytics firm Metavana, Satmetrix figured out how to put social content into the familiar promoter, passive and detractor buckets. Without that, you can't calculate a "net" promoter score. Only "qualifying" sparks -- those that can be classified in...

I recently took my mother to a Wells Fargo branch office to take a care of 3 different transactions: getting a credit card reactivated, depositing coins and ordering checks.

The coins required a visit, but the other two transactions could have been done by phone or maybe online. I hoped one visit to a local branch would be easier, but deep down I feared it wouldn't.

Frankly, I expected we'd be shuttled around the branch to different people to take care of each transaction. Or, worse, told to use the phone to call the credit card support number directly. (That's happened to me before at a Wells Fargo branch.)

Instead, it turned into a quick and—dare I say it—delightful experience. Because when we entered the branch, a banker warmly greeted us and asked how he could help. After learning what my mother wanted to do, he invited us to sit down at his desk, and then took care of everything.

• Called the credit card division of Wells...