Fix the Pain in Customer Experience!
Emotions rule the customer experience, and negative ones - sadness, fear, disappointment, anger, anxiety - are bound to trip up the customer journey, compromising transaction likelihood and/or customer loyalty. It is critical today that customer experiences be documented (through customer journey mapping) and validated for their emotional "tenor". This article, from Forrester, points out that it is less about delight and wow, and a whole lot more about eliminating the negative emotion set from the customer journey.
Free Online Education as Competitive Hiring/Retention Advantage
This brief synopsis of a longer article shares that some businesses are coming to realize the competitive hiring and retention benefits of providing free online university-level education to their employees. I guess we can only hope that the e-learning quality is worthy of the effort!
Customer Experience Can Make or Break a Brand
This article shares best principles and practices relating to improving the customer service experience. While we all know what poor customer service and a rough customer experience looks and feels like, we sometimes can't summarize what needs to be done to improve it. In this article, there is a strong call to both understand and improve all touchpoints of the customer journey, and to personalize the experience for today's consumers. Of note, this article reminds us that marketers are key players in customer experience framing, and that they can derive deep insight to advantage other marketing efforts.