How conjoint analysis, a tried-and-true market research tool, can be used to support organic growth.

Excellent customer service is a critical success factor for businesses across all industries. But how many organizations can really claim to be giving fantastic, WOW factor customer service across all customer touch points?

Mounting competition and ever-more demanding customers mean that companies must deliver exceptional service. While no service model is a guarantee of success, companies need to align strategic and operational issues with customer and employee needs. In their latest research, IESE professors Philip Moscoso and Alejandro Lago offer a clear model for turning service offerings into profit and growth.

Effectively managing service operations is crucial to controlling labor costs and improving customer satisfaction. By addressing six drivers of performance, executives can go a step further — turning their service operations into a key source of competitive advantage.

There is a better way to determine how many—what portion—of your customers were satisfied. Time and again studies have shown that customer loyalty is fleeting for all but the most satisfied of customers, because any customer who is not “completely satisfied,” is dissatisfied to some degree, and/or with “something.” That “something” is the “crack in the door” through which competitors can sneak and steal your business.

I propose one fundamental question to ask; with just two multiple-choice follow-up questions. The first question will tell you how many of your customers are really satisfied—and thus likely to be loyal.

The cliché goes: “We can learn from our mistakes.” And it is true, especially as it applies to customer service. No matter how good we are, nobody can be perfect, although it is a lofty goal. At anytime there can be issues, problems and complaints. I call these negative customer service issues Moments of Misery™. Whenever something goes wrong, this is the opportunity for your best customer service strategies to kick in. So, I’ve compiled a list of questions to ask when something goes wrong. Hopefully this list will help you learn from these experiences and help prevent them from happening in the future.

New research revealing a disparity between what shoppers say and what they do debunks the myth of the ethical consumer.

It is becoming ever more crucial for companies not only to keep customers happy but to keep the right customers happy. But how can they measure the value of customers through the whole customer life-cycle? In this article the authors explain the methodology developed by Arthur D. Little that helps companies to measure satisfaction levels and translate the results into actions with sustainable results.

In this paper we focus on the growing trend toward outsourcing customer contact, and argue that particular care is required to ensure that the customer relationship is not, in effect, itself outsourced. Outsourced customer contact centers (CCCs), like their internal counterparts, are a key channel for interaction with customers, acting as important transactional, service and point of sales channels. However the danger and unintended consequence, particularly in the case of outsourced CCCs, is their greater potential to lead to a weakening of the 'connective tissue' between the firm and its customers. The 'voice of the customer' can become muted or lost to decision-makers and strategists within the firm, and important organizational learning dissipates. This can result in a negative spiral of 'organizational unlearning', and potential disintermediation of the customer relationship itself. The authors explore this phenomenon, and suggest strategies to ensure that such 'organizational unlearning' is both guarded against, and that a more thoughtful analysis of the end benefits is undertaken from the outset.

There’s an important difference between a client and an advocate. Advocates do more than simply buy from you. Advocates are engaged customers who demonstrate their vendor allegiance through such activities as spreading positive word of mouth, recruiting new prospects and helping their vendors improve. How can a firm nurture trust to help sustain these important advocate behaviors?

Top-down Net Promoter Score (NPS) provides a clear understanding of a company's competitive position in key markets with an emphasis on its target customers. It gives the leadership team a roadmap to improve that position and focus the organization on the customer.

When consumers are overwhelmed with options, marketers should give them what they really want: ways of shopping that lower the cognitive stress.

New consumer research shows that when people are told in advance that they will be asked to respond to a survey, they look for problems more actively. The researchers found that people who expect to evaluate are decidedly more negative. They also discovered that merely asking people to state their expectations before they receive a service made people more negative—even though their predispositions may have been quite positive. These findings are quite relevant in this increasingly survey-happy world.

CRM is a management approach that seeks to create, develop and enhance relationships with carefully targeted customers. CRM should be viewed as a strategic set of activities that commences with a detailed review of an organisation`s strategy and concludes with an improvement in shareholder value. The notion that competitive advantage stems from the creation of value for the customer and for the company is key to the success of CRM. This demands that responsibility for value delivery is shared across functions and hierarchies. Because CRM is a cross-functional activity it can be difficult without a systematic approach.

How do we keep customers satisfied and loyal for the long haul?

How a new view of consumers changed the way we think about products, companies, and economies.

Most managers associate complaints with customers, but complaints also come from colleagues, staff, and suppliers. Unfortunately, when co-workers and contractors complain, they are frequently seen as “whiners.” For some reason, we don’t view their complaints with the same concern we show to customer complaints.

But what if we saw our complaining colleagues as providers of information or perspectives that might be useful to us? Or as valuable assets, who, like unsatisfied customers, might leave us if we don’t listen? Perhaps then we would respond to their complaints with a bit more utility.

In addition to listening to those who call you, e-mail directly, or chat with you in person, there are four ways you can "listen" to what your customers have to say.

Speaking about what motivates a network of people to collaborate with companies, the excerpt comes from Chapter 7, “Collaborate: Involve Your Customers at Every Stage of Your Enterprise,” in Part II of the book, “Five Strategies to Thrive with Customer Networks.”

Here, based on working with scores of clients from around the world, is the real-world approach for integrating customer experience into your operation.

For some products and services, such as power tools or software, an owner’s manual is a very necessary and accepted part of the deal. But many businesses can take this notion to heart and use it as part of their education experience, even if others in the industry don’t practice this approach.

Following on the first article on defining customer experience, this second installment looks at the first essential step of improving the experience you deliver, which is mapping out your customer journey.

Customer retention is ultimately driven by value. Even the best segmentation, targeting, positioning, creative messaging, or promotion with flawless execution will fall flat in the absence of value.

Therefore, in developing a plan to maintain and upgrade a customer base, it is necessary to build on a solid foundation. Only then will the plan lead to greater customer retention and overall organizational success.

The path to customer retention involves six key steps.

Listening to real time conversations for opportunities, leads, and reputation management is now a standard marketing item on the to-do list.

While there are services that provide this kind of tracking for a fee, there are a number of tools that any do-it-yourselfer can employ to capture much of what’s being said about their brands, people, products, and industries in real time.

By guiding the design of customer interactions, the principles of behavioral science offer a simple, low-cost route to improved customer satisfaction.