Christopher Brown

A recent survey commissioned by Harris Interactive found that 86% of consumers quit doing business with a company because of one bad customer experience, up from 59% 4 years ago.

*Source: Harris Interactive:

Customer Experience Impact Report 2011

86%! And growing, this is clearly showing an increasing gap between customer expectations of their experience and what companies are delivering.

Why is this happening?

Rationally it does not make a lot of sense. One would think that switching costs and the time already invested by the customer in doing business would preclude them from...

One of the reasons companies struggle in their quest for enhanced levels of customer focus is employees don’t buy the fact that their leadership is serious about making the change. They are looking for signs that this is not just the flavor of the month and it to will pass soon.

Here are 7 ways you can send that message:

1. Define what a customer centric culture means to your organization. What are the values of the organization and how do these translate into how you will treat customers? Even in businesses with very thin margins there are ways to create value that allow companies to differentiate. Take Ingram Micro for example, the world’s largest distributor of computer products. Ingram Micro were the first company to provide their smaller retailers a drop ship capability where they could opt to have products ship directly to customers. This service reduced handling costs for the retailers and added...

It’s a strange irony that the very actions many companies take in an attempt to grow often stops them from growing.

The most obvious recent example is Netflix. Once a darling of customer focus and innovation it has been faced with some difficult growth decisions recently, the result of which has seen 810,000 customer leave.

Here is how Reed Hasting’s their CEO explained things:

“Although we dramatically improved our $7.99 unlimited streaming service by embracing new platforms, simplifying our user interface, and more than doubling domestic spending on streaming content over 2010, we greatly upset many domestic Netflix customers with our significant DVD-related...

We so often hear the negative customer experiences, they are the ones that grab attention, we are shocked!, appalled!  but riveted by hearing about how companies stuff up!

What were they thinking? How could they do something like that? Why Why Why?

So for a change I thought I would relay  a great experience I had with Comcast recently. That’s right Comcast, the company with websites dedicated to a hatred of their customer service….

Don’t get me wrong I have had a number of bad comcast experiences in the past… for now however I have been turned around and feel a tremendous sense of loyalty… so what happened?