In 1859 Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities, where citizens rise up in revolution. As a teenager studying for A-levels, I spent many hours tearing my hair out trying to decipher it! This is not a tale of two cities, but rather of two cafes, and a quiet revolution where small businesses cannot [...]
If you have read my articles in the past, you will know that I am an ardent fan of investigating the definitions of certain words and phrases. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of participating as a judge at the International Business Excellence Awards in Dubai. One of the awards entrants used the word 'benchmarking', multiple [...]
Customer Experience is now recognised as a profession – as I am sure many are bored with hearing me repeat over and over again! As with any profession, it is defined by a number of competencies, tools, techniques and methodologies that are recognised and practised by thousands of specialists around the world. It is a [...]
Over the last five years, I have had the great pleasure of visiting the Gulf Region on several occasions. Even though I have never quite managed to turn my visits into vacations, I have always found the people I have met and the places I have seen, to be immensely welcoming, accommodating and interesting. From [...]
In my exclusive column for CustomerThink in October 2016, I shared my ‘top tips’ for creating the right culture to enable an organisation to become genuinely customer centric. Whilst the list of seven things is by no means exhaustive, in my experience, together they provide a remarkably solid foundation to embedding the right environment and [...]
Every January in the UK, the business media tend to get rather excited. Whilst on occasion their excitement is slightly macabre, it is driven by their fascination and obsession with the reporting of retail trading results from the critical festive period during the last three months of the previous year. I may be paying a disservice [...]
Having been involved in the world of Customer Experience for many years, nothing should really surprise me - I have very much witnessed the good, the bad and the ugly of business behaviour. However (there is usually one of those in my posts!!), every now and then, something happens to me or someone in my network [...]
What’s the point of doing a customer satisfaction survey? Well, rather obviously, to gauge how customers perceive you, and where their expectations are being—and not being—met. This requires walking in the customer’s shoes and designing your survey from the customer’s perspective. Sound simple? It is…sort of. Unfortunately, organizations run a high risk of tunnel vision, [...]
Whilst there are still some business leaders around the world who are yet to believe it, most organisations have woken up to the importance of continuously listening to the perception of the customer. It seems so obvious that a company or business should constantly monitor how its customers feel about what it is doing, but [...]
Although I have spent a long time working with clients in the customer experience sector, I think it's vital that we continually challenge the way we listen to and understand our customers. Over the last few decades, as the power of the computer has increased and we can gather more and more data about customers, [...]
