Raelin Musuraca

Customer Experience Strategist, Musuraca LLC

Raelin Musuraca is versatile and energetic customer experience strategist with twenty years practicing marketing, digital strategy, and user experience. She has led multidisciplinary teams in the development of award-winning marketing and customer engagement programs. Raelin is currently an independent, customer experience consultant based in Pittsburgh and serving clients nationwide.

Dear Customer Service: Show me you love me…

0 comments 755 reads

Posted on 2012-03-20

A poorly designed customer service email can easily cost you a customer. When designing your customer service communications, gain a true outside-in point of view through Contextual Research methods. Your customers love your brand. Show your customers you love them too but taking the time to truly get to know them.

If I send you an email, you would answer me in email. You would never email me back and tell me to call you – that’s rude. If you felt it was best to talk in person, you would at the very least call me – right? It’s logical social norms of human interaction.

...

Read More »
Richard Gans KISS’ed Me

0 comments 530 reads

Posted on 2012-01-16

Now that I got your attention, I thought I would highlight an incredibly simple, yet very effective customer experience gesture sent to me by Forrester’s Customer Experience Community Richard Gans (@Richard_Gans).

Richard KISS’ed me in that he demonstrated that the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle should guide a customer experience practitioner’s strategic and tactical plans.

Below is a picture of a simple, personal, hand-written card (not just signed) from Richard thanking me for my past participation in the Forrester Community and offering me a “cup of coffee.”

The effect – maximum. The cost – minimum!

...

Read More »
We are the 90%

0 comments 618 reads

Posted on 2011-12-21

I noticed in my online banking that my mortgage company had not cashed their check within the usual timeframe. I was concerned – did the address change? So I called, and in the opening telephone greeting, this is what I heard:

“Please be advised that our office may be attempting to collect a debt
and any information provided may be used for that purpose.”

I felt like I had just been read my Miranda rights.

I felt dirty.

Legal obviously added this message to the greeting due to the increased number of folks who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments. I can understand that, but what about the 90% who have been making their payments on time?

This is clearly a case where customer experience was not considered. Nine out of 10 people are calling for some reason other than a payment issue, yet...

Read More »
Understanding Lazy Behavior

0 comments 975 reads

Posted on 2011-09-01

This summer I spent a lot of time driving my daughter back and forth from the community pool, which is right by the tennis courts. Every day I watched people pulling up across from the tennis courts into the dirt along the street despite the fact that empty parking spaces were only one block away (they are free and a flat walk!).

I was dumbfounded by the behavior and thought that folks are just lazy, but this didn’t make sense — they were going to be playing tennis after all.

Parking: People park along the street damaging the grass and creating a...

Read More »
Example: Audience Needs Workshop

0 comments 942 reads

Posted on 2011-07-08

One of my newest clients, a mortgage servicer, engaged me to help refine how they communicate with their audience—homeowners in a foreclosure situation. For me, this assignment posed two very interesting challenges:

1.) The overall mood and sentiment of the audience is already negative and confrontational.

2.) In our communications, we need to direct the homeowner away from what they want to do,
to what they need to do.

I began the assignment by conducting an Audience Needs Workshop with several Asset Managers and their team leads. These are the front-line employees who speak directly with the homeowner. The workshop was divided into several exercises intended to uncover what the Asset Managers needed (they are my audience) and to create a psychologically driven, empathetic persona for the homeowners.*

Read More »
Everything I Need to Know About Marketing I Learned at the Dairy Queen

0 comments 925 reads

Posted on 2011-07-08

During down business cycles marketing budgets are often reduced, if not cut out altogether. You’re asked to do more, with less money. At times like these, I always go back to the basics, to the core fundamentals I learned about marketing in a very unlikely place — a Dairy Queen franchise in Centerville, PA.

#1 Thank Your Customers
A genuine smile and a heartfelt thank you brought people back time and time again. In business, we often forget the importance of the simple Thank You. When your employees talk to your customers on the phone, do they thank them for their business? Do your sales people send out handwritten Thank You cards? Do your senior executives take the time to place an impromptu thank you call? We often get caught up in elaborate marketing campaigns and forget about the power of a simple Thank You.

#2 Make the Customer Feel Special
I’m sure you have a favorite restaurant, a place where they greet you by name....

Read More »
Branding: The Physical Form of Customer Experience

0 comments 2,260 reads

Posted on 2011-04-22

Add a Starbucks logo to the cup and you'll pay more. Is it because of the logo design or the customer experience you know you'll have at a Starbucks?

The Importance of Brand in Your Customer Experience Delivery

The need for a company’s employees to deliver upon a brand promise, reflects a growing and critical need for businesses of all sizes to develop a brand and to effectively communicate that brand to all customer touch points—including employees in their personal daily interactions.

It is often assumed that “branding” is only for large corporations and is the work of the sales and marketing department. Many companies mistake a logo and color palette for their “brand” and fail to properly capture and communicate the true essence of a brand.

A true brand is the physicial manifestation of your desired customer experience delivery. And it can only...

Read More »
We can skip talking to the customers…

0 comments 919 reads

Posted on 2011-04-07

I’m a user-centered design professional, an IA/UX if you will, seeking to do what is so obvious to me—applying user-centered research and design methods to the customer experience. Of course, as you all know, this means starting the process with interviewing your customers, talking to them, having a conversation with them, perhaps even spending a day with them and shadowing them.

I’ve been doing this for 15 years in the “web world.” It seemed a natural and easy conversion to make. In my last role, where I was in-house, I naturally expanded from marketing into those other critical areas of the customer experience—sales, IT, customer service, human resources. My peers saw what user-centered design methods could accomplish and welcomed my involvement in improving their processes and interactions with the client.

But, as a consultant, I’ve hit a brick wall. I keep hearing, “...

Read More »
4 Tips for More Engaging Facebook Pages

0 comments 1,308 reads

Posted on 2011-03-28

Let’s start off by saying that it’s impossible to have an engaging Facebook page. It’s a page. Adding functionality and pictures and games and gizmos is not going to make it more engaging.

These four tips are actually about how to make the people managing your Facebook page more engaging. Because people engage with other people. The most simple content, questions, quotes, jokes, and shout outs make it engaging.

People “Like” your Facebook page because presumably they like your company and they want to get to know “you” the folks behind the company better. Get your folks on Facebook and get them talking.

In this past year, I led the launch of a Facebook page for the regional grocery store chain Shop’n Save*. It was an experiment, we weren’t sure people would interact with a grocery store but something in my gut told me it was JUST RIGHT (inside joke…that is the...

Read More »
Till Death Do Us Part? Unspoken Customer Experience Expectations

0 comments 1,059 reads

Posted on 2011-03-22

Summary: Much like a marriage, a customer-company relationship can fall victim to unspoken expectations and the emotional consequences of not meeting those expectations. Active listening allows companies to create honest, two-way communications that uncover and address these expectations thus elevating the customer experience.

The Customers’ Unspoken Expectations

Recently, I had a conversation with a colleague about the customer, their expectations, and how that may match, or not match, what the company intends to provide. In this conversation the parallels of the customer-company relationship and marriage became apparent. We start the relationship with some sort of contract, or vows. Some interactions, such as buying a TV, have explicit terms; others, such as buying bread, not explicit but present. Often, we bring to the new relationship an entire set of assumptions and preconceived notions about the company and our...

Read More »