There are a lot of elements that must come together brilliantly for an experience to be perfect. One essential element often neglected, but essential is the training of your Customer-facing teams. In my view, there is a great lack of training on soft skills with Customers and when there is training available it is too basic and not frequent enough. There are, however, three major things your training must address to be successful. MORE

Your brain makes up 3% of your total body weight. However that 3% of your body weight takes 20% of your body’s energy to run. As highly evolved humans, we are always looking for ways to preserve energy, and one of the ways we do this is relying on habit. It’s important for Marketers to understand customers’ habits when marketing to them. We engage in habits every day. And we do these things automatically. MORE

​With an informative video from Forrester on assessing the current state of your CX, and a great piece from Gartner with 5 top tips to improve your CX innovation, this week’s CMO Perspectives will not disappoint when it comes to thought leadership in the customer service industry. Enjoy MORE

It doesn't matter what we share in this week’s CMO Perspectives or what we write in this intro blurb because OMG the first article talks about the rumours that Twitter is planning to release a new product that does away with the 140 character limit, be still our Tweeting hearts. What is interesting is the debate already surfacing about the impact this will have on customer service. We share some pieces from adweek.com, Socialmediatoday.com, WSJ.com and Forbes.com​ talking about this rumour. MORE

It is rare that we highlight two posts from the same source in the same CMO Perspectives blog post. But this week marketingprofs.com has delighted us with two excellent pieces on marketing and customer experience. Well worth the read. Enjoy MORE

Reserve your spot at this informative webinar presented Thursday, June 17th, 2015. Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group, led the charge for better parental leave benefits this week for his employees. The new policy at Virgin allows new parents one year of fully paid leave following the birth or adoption of a child. With Virgin’s announcement on Monday, they are one of only a few companies that offer this kind of benefit for its employees. MORE

We've Moved! Update your Reader Now. This feed has moved to: [link] Update your reader now with this changed subscription address to get your latest updates from us. Customer Service Blog customer-service-training national customer service week MORE

​In this week’s CMO Perspectives, we feature Tony Zambito [customerthink.com] talking about three new perspectives to consider for customer journey mapping. While Tony Bodoh [Linkedin.com/pulse] dares you to try and wait until 2020 for your CX to become your key differentiator, saying, “Don’t wait the future is here.” Enjoy MORE

Even in the throes of summer vacations the web is ripe with great content to fill this week’s CMO Perspectives, including a great piece from Brian Solis with his 5 takeaways to make customer experience a competitive advantage. Enjoy MORE

​Omar Akhtar guest blogs on Brian Solis’s blog about unifying your sales, marketing and service departments around the customer experience. Exactly! Add to that these brilliant pieces including; Dr Natalie Petouhoff’s [constellationr.com] “7 Ways for CMOs to Thrive When Leading CX”, Simon Yates [Gartner.com] on the Gartner 2015-2016 CMO Survey and Joe Ruiz [maximizesocialbusiness.com] talking about social capital fuelling CX marketing, and you have this week’s CMO Perspectives. Enjoy MORE

A definite link exists between Employee Engagement and Customer Experience. In spite of this, many organizations choose to keep their Employee Engagement programs and their Customer Engagement programs separate. However, linking the two areas is key to having success in both. Aetna made headlines when they gave their lowest-paid workers a raise to $16/hr. Who are these lowest paid workers? MORE

Jacada is exhibiting at SpeechTEK 2015 , August 17 – 19, 2015 at the Marriott Marquis at NYC. Find us at booth # 620 where we’ll be demonstrating our Visual IVR technology and discussing: Jacada Blog MORE

It seems most organizations have a Customer Experience program and an increasing number have started Employee Engagement programs. The issue for me is these are not combined nor complimentary, which is a huge mistake. Because the experience you give your Customers is the same experience you should give your employees. It’s not only good for employee engagement, but it can mean your Customers are more satisfied with you—and how much they spend with your brand. MORE

The 2015 results appear to go a step further. The opening paragraph of the 2015 analysis written by Tim Knight and David Conway states: It is a universal truth, increasingly understood, that a brand is not what a company says it is, but what its customers feel it is. This 2015 analysis of the UK shows we are moving rapidly into the second great age of branding: the era of experience branding. It is refreshing to see this stance bourne out by the 2015 results. MORE

Is your customer-centric team actively working on providing better customer service in 2015 ? Below are the top six customer service trends for 2015 according to Forrester : 1. According to Forrester, emerging customer support channels such as mobile and web self-service and video chat will gain momentum in 2015. The use of support automation to preemptively address issues with minimal agent intervention will continue to gain traction in 2015. MORE

Customer expectations for the holiday season 2015. 2003 - 2015 Provide Support LLC. Published in Provide Support Blog , 2015. Articles Best Practice Tips and Tricks Uncategorized customer expectations holiday 2015 holiday customer experience holiday customer experience expectations improving customer experience in the holiday seasonHoliday revenue can account for 20-40% of a retailer’s annual sales, according to NRF. MORE

The post Philosophies to Improve Your Customer Experience in 2015 appeared first on Beyond Philosophy. There are many philosophies out there. The thing about philosophy is that it doesn’t always have much real-world application behind it. Anyone can claim a philosophy but can they make it work in the real world? I dedicate my career to helping organizations take their current Customer Experience to the next level, or Beyond the Philosophy of it and into the “real world.”. MORE

More tips, news and notes from the 2015 SWPP Annual Conference, Day 3: I was fortunate enough to grab some time with the winner and three finalists of the SWPP 2015 Workforce Management Professional of the Year Award to find out their best WFM tips and their worst WFM nightmares. MORE

On Friday 25th September 2015, hundreds of passionate Professionals who excel in demonstrating the power of Customer Experience, convened in London for the UK Customer Experience Awards. The 2015 UK Customer Experience Awards was a HUGE event. In 2015, the finalists were quite simply incredible. ’ – Stories that amazed and inspired me at the 2015 UK Customer Experience Awards! The month of September comes around every year. The kids go back to school. MORE

​In this week’s very entertaining CMO Perspectives, we share an amusing post by Marketoonist.com about the dangers of listening to your own opinions. Just the opening cartoon will be enough to make you smile, as we’ve probably all been there, with a senior manager who seems to think he or she knows more about your teenage customers than your own data and research has shown. We also remind you not to forget the small data when looking at the big data with a piece from mediapost.com. Enjoy MORE

Reserve your spot at this informative webinar presented Thursday, June 17th, 2015. Many of us would like to know the secret to lasting happiness. Everyone has ideas of course, and not a few of them involve material items. But science might prove that it doesn’t. Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a professor at Cornell University, believes that material items might provide happiness—but it doesn’t last. The problem is as soon as we have the item, we slowly get used to having it. MORE

Every year, we Workforce Managers get to play with unique and exciting situations around holidays. This year the special one to look out for is Independence Day, because 4th of July happens on a Saturday. By law, when a holiday falls on a Saturday, it is observed on the Friday before, so the big hit […]. Workforce Management call center contact center forecasting holiday forecasting Independence Day July 4th WFM workforce management MORE

19 March 2015. 30 March 2015. People like the convenience of self-service. More and more of your Customers believe access to self-service options is essential to their relationship with your business. Knowing this, it is critical that you plan your self-service options well. Parature is a research and advisory firm specializing in communicating service-centric best practices. MORE

If you had the choice of doing something the easy way or the hard way, and you didn’t have to do anything morally, ethically, or legally wrong to do it the easy way, which would you choose? My guess is the majority of you would say take the easy way. I certainly would. When it comes to brands and their related experience, it’s critical that you KISS it. In other words, K eep I t S imple S tupid. The truth is most Customers want things easy, too. MORE

​Big Data is everywhere. It’s hard to open any kind of media these days without seeing at least one article on it. But how to use it effectively to further your marketing and customer experience goals is the biggest challenge MORE

As we wind up 2015, everyone is talking about what the future holds. We may just have to subtitle this week’s CMO Perspectives as the week of 2016 predictions and analysts. With great insights from the top analysts in the industry, such as McKinsey, Simon Yates from Gartner, and Michelle Moorehead from Forrester all weighing in, we hope we have shared enough to help you as you start planning your 2016 budgets and strategies. Enjoy MORE

Big data is the gigantic data sets whose analysis could reveal predictions of human behavior. Big data is big news. If we can predict what people will do in a given situation, we can create situations that get them to do what we want. But Big data is only showing us a part of the big picture. The biggest part, WHY people do what they do is, as of yet, missing from Big Data. MORE

Looking back, here are 8 things that I will take away: The post Voice of Customer Lessons Learned at the 2015 Answers Summit appeared first on ForeSee. ForeSee helps people focus on the customer experience. It allows you to understand what your prospects and customers think about your website. MORE

The media is the typical culprit for overinflating the minor event in many cases, i.e. Snowmageddon 2015, or winter storm Juno, now simply called the blizzard that wasn’t. I often say people are irrational, but only because they are. We all do irrational things. We like to think we make logical decisions based on rational thinking all the time, but we don’t. The truth is, your mind plays tricks on you every day, and many times, it’s in one of three ways. MORE

According to analysts, 89% of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience by 2016, compared with only 36% five years ago. This incredible jump indicates just how exponentially the importance of customer experience has grown and highlights how making customer experience count is absolutely critical to all businesses cross any vertical market. The reason for this is quite simple, brands no longer have a choice. MORE

Science has begun to predict the intensity of emotions in others with accuracy. This fact is important because when you can predict emotions, you can also plan for them in your Customer Experience. Why do we need to plan for emotions? Simply put, because then we can manage them in others when necessary. Over 50% of any Customer Experience behavior is driven by emotions. MORE

As 2015 comes to a close, we’d like to look back at our 10 most popular posts of the year. It has been an exciting year at Pipeline with the launch of our blog. Do Frontline Agents Receive Enough Ongoing Training? We asked that question in a recent poll on Contact Center Training. The majority […]. Featured agent attrition call center contact center customer experience hiring quality monitoring social customer care training WFM workforce management MORE

Social Media can level the playing field. It’s the equalizer between small and big businesses. Even solo entrepreneurial businesses can create a global presence using social media. With a strong website, optimized with the right words and phrases, a small business can make a big presence. Another benefit to social media is cost. Actually it’s the lack of cost. You don’t need to pay for advertising in newspapers or billboards. MORE

Performance reviews are part of most employer/employee relationships. However, recent developments show that improving employee experience involves finding new ways to give employees feedback to improve motivation and success. Annual reviews are likely to get a resigned sigh out of most managers. After a less than insightful review, most employees might sigh as well. MORE

It’s an interesting question to ask in a CMO Perspectives blog, whether the role of Chief Customer Officer (CCO) is a threat to CMOs worldwide? You will have to read the interesting piece by Nadia Cameron [CMO.com.au] to see her take on this issue. This week we also look at a summary of some research about customer failures and if there is a way to win back your customers after major CX mistakes and we invite you to share your tried and tested methods for restoring good customer relations. Enjo MORE

More than 1,500 attendees, consisting of customers, industry leaders and experts, gathered on June 2nd for the kick-off Interactions 2015, the largest customer event of the year MORE

I find it beyond belief how large organizations can cheat and lie to their Customers. Maybe it’s because I’m becoming old or maybe it’s just because it is happening more. Skechers lied to us that if we wore their (weird-looking) Shape-up shoes that we could get in shape without setting foot in a gym. BP lied about their compliance with safety regulations for their off shore Oil operations; a lie that resulted in 70 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. MORE

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs: Philosophies To Improve Your Customer Experience in 2015. According to trendwatching.com, the feelings a Customer has when they are getting excellent Customer service are the same as the feelings they have when they feel love. I couldn’t agree more. Most excellent Customer Experiences leave Customers feeling valued and important, or, in other words, feeling the love. MORE

The post 7 Signs of Decline for the CX Movement in 2015 appeared first on Beyond Philosophy. Customer Experience continued to be a dominant business issue throughout the world in 2014. We get many inquiries for our services globally. I worked with clients in more countries than ever before last year, including China, India, and Saudi Arabia to name a few. They are all working to improve their Customer Experience. MORE

The post Top 5 Provocative Posts from 2015 appeared first on UP Your Service. Enjoy this selection of “Top 5″ thought provoking posts. Read, reflect, write a comment, and share these ideas with others. Happy New Year everyone! How to Increase Productivity and Improve Service Simultaneously. by Ron Kaufman. 4 Rules for Getting it Wrong and Right in Building Service Culture. by Ron Kaufman. MORE