Tim Carrigan

Andrew Reise Consulting

Tim Carrigan, Consulting Vice President at Andrew Reise Consulting, helps clients develop and deliver on their customer experience strategies. He recently co-authored the Customer Experience Fiasco, Learning from the Misguided Adventures of a Customer Experience Executive, now available in hard copy or Kindle version through www.Amazon.com. More information on the book, along with other customer experience case studies and guides, is available at www.AndrewReise.com. Follow Tim on twitter (@timjcarrigan)

Five B2B Keys to Customer Experience Success

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Posted on 2013-01-15

Delivering improvements and setting a strategic path forward for a B2B company’s customer experience is not that different than it is for B2C companies. All B2B companies need to ensure they have a solid understanding of their customer through a strong Voice of the Customer (or Client) program and other analytics based on usage, behaviors, etc. They should also understand the lifecycle and activities of their customers through journey mapping and other tools/activities. They should have a clear strategic roadmap, aligned with their brand strategy and designed to deliver mutually beneficial results.

But there are a few unique challenges and opportunities for B2B companies that can be critical to improving customer or client relationships and delivering business value. The items below are what we’ve found in working with, talking to, and helping B2B clients in various industries.

#1) Define the Customer – This is a simple concept for most B2C companies. It’s...

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B2B versus B2C - Debunking Five Customer Experience Myths

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Posted on 2012-06-25

In the dawning Customer Experience era, we talk a lot about why it is important, how to get started, what you need to do to be successful and so on. But too often in those discussions, we use business-to-consumer (B2C) companies as our examples and case studies. We tend to use Starbucks, Apple, Costco, USAA, and some of the other award-winning or mass-appealing B2C companies as our examples because they are so broadly familiar. It doesn’t take much ink to introduce something like the iTunes experience, but it would take a while to first familiarize a reader with the trucking industry and the various players who either need to send goods, carry the goods, or broker the rates, routes, and terms between senders and carriers. That leaves the business-to-business (B2B) folks often scratching their heads while trying to find the parallels and application of what they learned in an article about Zappos to their own industry which can be anything from manufacturing to any of the...

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Six Strategies to Move Your Customer Experience Business Case from Solid to Sold

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Posted on 2012-03-10

I don’t doubt you know how to build a business case for a Customer Experience initiative or even for a full blown strategy. If not, you no doubt have people you work with who can cover all the main steps. I’m confident you are able to engage all the right folks to get all your costs figured out, both to implement and to operate after implementation. You can articulate the benefits, even quantifying the tangible benefits as well as those softer benefits that cannot be defined in terms of dollars and cents, but are good nonetheless for the company. You created and can show how all the financials, the NPV, the IRR, and so on, are all above targeted levels. If you can’t do these things, we can certainly help you out there, but the focus here is on getting it approved. Our topic here is convincing a senior executive (maybe your boss) or even a panel of executives, to see what you see – that yours is an effort the company must do and that the investment will be well worth it in the...

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Finding the Sweet Spot of Customer Experience

3 comments 3,294 reads

Posted on 2012-02-03

With a lot of corporations taking aim at improving their customer experience, it baffles some in the industry how many initiatives fail to ensure that the customer relationship being nurtured is mutually beneficial. By that, I mean, initiatives that are good for the customer and are good for the business. With experience across multiple industries and through conversations at various Customer Experience forums and events, we have heard and seen examples of decisions and initiatives that didn’t turn out well. Usually, it’s easy to see how those efforts were designed to be beneficial to one side, but failed to recognize the other as a member of the customer relationship. When this occurs, the result is almost always a failure to some degree. Customers are either turned off and eventually walk away or business objectives are not met and the company suffers. There are a few exceptions – some examples of dumb luck where one or the other was ignored and things just happened to turn...

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Five Crucial Keys to a Customer Experience Strategy

1 comments 1,804 reads

Posted on 2011-11-29

A lot of talk these days is focused on Customer Experience strategy. Stroll around any forum, talk to any research analyst, or chat with any consultant and the conversation typically steers towards questions about if your company has a strategy, what are its objectives, how are you executing on it, and so on. There are a lot of ideas floating around about what a strategy is and what it looks like. Some I have seen I would call vision statements and others a list of "things to fix," but a good strategy has these five key elements.

1. Sets a Clear Vision
Too often, strategies make pie-in-the-sky statements about delighting customers at every touchpoint or exceeding customers expectations. They might say they aim to be the best in their industry at customer experience or perhaps that they'll combine the best practices from multiple industries. The question left by such lofty statements is "how?" How will we do that and how do we know if we have delivered on it. A...

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A Week That Will Live in Customer Experience Infamy

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Posted on 2011-09-28

The week of September 19th through the 23rd is one that will live in customer experience infamy. Few weeks saw as much turmoil and alienation of loyal users/subscribers as this one. I personally lived through three of them, although a fourth was reported by fired-up friends and colleagues. Netflix, Facebook, and Sprint were the three companies in question. One lost my business for good and two are on thin ice. The fourth was United Airlines. I cannot fully comment on United’s frequent flier program since I really don’t consider myself a customer even though I still carry Premier Executive status. You see, I ditched them a year ago because of uncompetitive pricing and the use of too many regional jets. Nevertheless, in an age of increased focus on the customer, these moves are baffling.

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