Good news for customers’ satisfaction : robots will replace humans
We have some good news for you : robots are about to replace humans. People are finally going to be able to focus on what they do best : having relationships with other humans. Artificial intelligence evrywhere : what is left for real people Artificial intelligence is already everywhere. Some people find this alarming. Other find it great. One thing is sure : artificiel intelligence is getting every day more clever. Look for instance...
Retail : Garconne et Cherubin offers “Pay-What-You-Want” option
“Pay What You Want” is a concept that allows customers to gain control back over the prices they pay. This technique is rather old and academic research dating back to 2009 showed the benefits of that approach. A few concrete examples were noticed here and there, but this marketing strategy remained rare. Firms remain reluctant to let customers decide and fear that this freedom may be misued by customers. In this context...
More debt leads to lower customer satisfaction
It is well known that firms in the US use mainly external financing (debt) to finance growth. It actually is believed to account for 80% of financing. Yet, this external financing puts pressure on the firms and studies have revealed the adverse consequences it represents : less investment in advertising and R&D less full-time employees, lower wages, more part-time employees inferior product and service quality With so many...
Measuring emotions for a better customer experience management
Can we measure customer experience ? This is a topic we already discussed here and the answer was no. Let me come with a new proposal that was addressed by Sensum during the CPDP 2017 conference : can our body reactions be a reliable measure of customer experience (or at least part of it). Please read further to discover more about this very exciting insights into how measuring reliably emotions can help us better understand customer...
How data vulnerability affects firms’ performance and how to remedy it
Everyone talks about privacy. But what is it really ? A recent article in French economical journal “La Tribune” built upon two recent BCG reports (here and there) on data protection and privacy to question firms’ practices around data privacy 62% of French people surveyed by BCG said companies don’t respect the private character of their data. Yet, what is privacy ? Most people will claim they know but once...
Customer satisfaction, customer experience and big data
Improving customer experience is priority #1 of top executives for the next 12 months (Lemon and Verhoef 2016). At the same time Big Data is on every serious company’s agenda. How can Big Data contribute to creating a customer experience that will ensure customer retention ? This is the topic of today’s article where we will question the usefulness of Big Data in today’s digital sphere (yes ! we’ll dare doing...
What are the latest conclusions of academics on customer satisfaction and customer experience ?
In the Journal of Marketing special issue ” Mapping the Boundaries of Marketing: What Needs to Be Known”, Lemon & Verhoef (2016) deliver 5 very useful conclusions on the state of customer experience and satisfaction research. These 5 conclusions, taken from the very latest top research in the field of marketing, are useful for practitioners and lead us to formulate 5 sets of recommendations. Start with service quality...
Artificial Intelligence : why we need respectful algorithms
Developments of artificial intelligence are a source of concern for several reasons. First of all AI threatens jobs, privacy and our perceived freedom. Second, 99,99% of the population doesn’t really understand what AI is and where it originates. In today’s post I’d like to raise the case of respectful Artificial Intelligence and explain why we need the way we conceive “intelligent” algorithms. Why do we...
Banks are laying off : only because of digitalisation ?
ING : 3500 jobs cut. Axa : 650 jobs cut. BNP Paribas Fortis : 1000 jobs cut. As the Financial Times pointed out, some 100,000 jobs will be cut in the banking sector in 2016. Read again. One hundred thousands. That’s a lot. The reason which is given is that digitalisation have made jobs redundant. And I very much agree with the fact that digitalisation has dramatically changed the business landscape and has forced companies to...
Hospitality : this postcard leverages customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction are increasingly expressed online. Capturing this information remains instrumental for most sectors, especially for hotels and restaurants. Bad word-of-mouth can destroy reputation and cut revenues. In the hospitality sectors the norm is usually to have satisfaction surveys distributed to customers. 25 Hours hotels chose a different way. As Bruno Marti, Chief Branding Officer, explains : “In...
Add a human touch to your marketing strategy
Marketing strategies are increasingly ruled by algorithms, IT-based decision systems which leave less and less space for human qualities to make the difference. We just wrote an article about recommendation algorithms and artificial intelligence in the business sphere that you may want to read to understand how it affects the customer experience. If you are in an industry which uses those technologies, you might well consider the...
RAGE 2015 study : customers more dissatisfied than ever with complaint handling
The 2015 edition of the RAGE study is out … and guess what ? Post-complaint satisfaction has never been so low and firms seem to keep doing the wrong things about complaint handling. Complaint handling practices are obviously wrong in most firms and as the results below show, particular attention should be given to the quality of the interaction between the customer and the employee. Customer satisfaction is essential. Only for our...
Payment reminders : how not to lose your loyal customers
Sometimes a small detail can ruin your customer’s satisfaction and end up the relationship. The danger is especially high when you have to send a payment reminder. Whatever the reasons, such a message is likely to trigger strong emotions. Two possible situations, equally dangerous for your business If the customer feels he is right, he may feel betrayed and you’ll lose credibility. If the customer knows he’s wrong, this will only...
Can we measure satisfaction in our bodies ?
I’ve been studying customer satisfaction, dissatisfaction, loyalty for more than a decade. Both my academic and business experiences have taught me one thing : there’s no one-size-fits-all magical recipe to satisfy people. There are almost as many ways to satisfy clients as there are clients. That’s why the quest for efficiency in satisfaction can be considered illusory. Relying on satisfaction surveys is often inaccurate (despite the...
Volkswagen scandal : will customers really care?
In the Volkswagen cheating scandal, every single day seems to bring new information. From ca. 500k vehicles in the US, figures climbed to more than 1m potentially affected vehicles in Europe. As of today Seat vehicles are also under scrutiny and it can be expected that Skoda will soon be the next “victim”. After all, why would the problems be limited to one or two brands while the 4-cylinder engines are shared among all...
How to ruin customer satisfaction in one sentence
Sometimes, satisfying and keeping your customers can depend on very little details. Here’s a personal story of a recent interaction with Coolblue, an e-tailer whose excellent customer satisfaction practices have been discussed several times here. What this story will tell you, is that past performances can’t predict future customer retention. One mistake can be enough to ruin a valuable customer’s loyalty. Coolblue:...
87% customer loyalty : the magic recipe to make billions
In the last years, I’ve been very cautious in explaining to our clients how to increase customer loyalty. When I was giving conferences 10 years ago the equation was still “easy” to solve: more customer satisfaction led to increased loyalty. This equation doesn’t hold anymore. Yet one company achieves an incredible loyalty rate and drives billions out of it : Apple. Apple achieves what is probably the highest...
How Hootsuite leveraged customer dissatisfaction to improve its product
You all know Twitter, right ? Most of us do use it. But some of us have more than one Twitter account. I manage three actually : my own one @pnschwab where I deal mostly with scientific marketing research and personal thoughts, @IntoTheMinds for our marketing agency in Brussels, and @BestPopUpStores which we launched last year together with our online project on remarkable pop-up shops. When you have three twitter accounts the problem...
Naked Wines: great service and amazing customer experience
We are always looking for the greatest customer experience on earth, service quality that will move you to the highest levels of loyalty. We found a new amazing example in the UK in the e-commerce industry : Naked Wines. Read below what those guys did. It’s just amazing. Dissatisfied customer ? Make him happy to regain trust You know we are very much following complaint handling practices in Europe and are especially receptive...
How to get back in touch with dissatisfied mobile app users
In the last 10 years we have been in touch with many companies conducting satisfaction surveys. One thing surprised us. In many cases, these results were used for reporting purposes to the management but were not used to actually improve situation. In other words, dissatisfied customers were not contacted to understand what happened and to attempt to recover the situation. It’s like if companies were too shy (or shameful) to do it. Do...
The one thing to do to handle complaints on public forums well
Complaint management is an Art some people say. And it’s true that given the number of recommendations (sometimes contradictory) that exist about how to handle complaints, firms must be very agile to know what to do at the right moment to ensure customer satisfaction. What to do when customers complain on online public forums ? The challenge posed by online forums is huge. They can damage a brand reputation and be the starting...
What are the mechanisms leading a consumer to be satisfied (or not)
Customer satisfaction is one of the main construct of modern marketing and an important pillar of firms’ strategies. Yet few business people actually understand how satisfaction works in the heads of their customers. Although it is still being debated experts agree on the process of expectancy disconfirmation to explain of customers become satisfied or unsatisfied. What is the role of expectations in the customer satisfaction...
Politeness matters: iOS 8 helps you to be polite
First of all my thanks to our client Florence for bringing this to our attention. A while ago I wrote with my colleague Laurence Rosier an article entitled “Politeness strategies in firms’ answers to customer complaints“. We made an argument that politeness strategies developed by firms help increase customer satisfaction and analyzed which leviers to activate to effectively make your unsatisfied customer more …...
Complaint management: an example you should NOT follow
As you may know our agency is working a lot on complaint handling and complaint management practices. Handling complaints well proves to be very rewarding in terms of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Make sure you listen to the podcast we recorded with Prof. Davidow in March 2020 on this topic. Prof. Davidow is one of the world’s most renown experts as far as complaint handling is concerned. To offer recommendations to...
Google Glass used by SNCF to enhance customer satisfaction
This article is primarily about the use of Google Glass to enhance the customer experience. But let me first start by dealing with the iWatch (sorry … it’s the Apple Watch). The long awaited Apple watch got finally revealed on Sept 9th. Despite the displayed enthusiasm at the conference, I must confess that I was disappointed. It’s not that the apple watch is ugly, or useless. It’s just that waiting so long had made me build some...
Customer satisfaction for airlines : safety announcements made attractive
If you’ve travelled on a plane recently, you had to undergo a session of safety announcement before the plane took off. That’s a legal requirement. Most probably you’ve undergone a regular –boring- session of safety instructions that few passengers actually listen to. That part of the in-flight customer experience is, to say the least, not very satisfying and most probably will not be a trigger for you to remain loyal. Yet, some...
How to transform a negative moment in a positive customer experience
Today we wanted to finish the week on a positive and joyful note. Today’s post is inspired by KLM, the Dutch airline. There are many frustrating experiences that can happen when you travel by plane, and insatisfaction can arise for many different reasons. Loosing something in the airport, forgetting something on the plane (think about your keys, your smartphone) can lead to intense negative emotions. Fixing what one may see as a...
Suit Supply has found a nice way to measure customer satisfaction
Customer Satisfaction surveys have been popular for decades; Yet the response rate to online surveys is very low if there is no reward. One of the major problem is the time required to answer the survey. People don’t have time. Marketing experts have proposed solutions in the form of one-item satisfaction instrument. In other words you get only one question to answer. The NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a good example of such instrument...
Belfius : 95% of satisfied customers. A customer satisfaction survey that failed?
Belfius prides of targeting 95% of satisfied customers. This score is actually so high that it becomes suspicious. In today’s article we’ll investigate the three mistakes Belfius may make that would lead to misinterpreting the results. How did you define customer satisfaction ? The first question that arises immediately is whether or not the questions that were asked in the customer satisfaction survey were really relevant. Let’s have...
Customer satisfaction: BMW enables tracking of your order
A few days ago we were dealing with digital innovation in Brussels’ BMW Flagship store. BMW inspired us once again with an IT innovation proposed to customers ordering a new car. Ordering a car can be an amazing and joyful experience; accepting the delivery time can be much more frustrating especially with German cars which have long waiting lists. If you are an oversea customer this frustration is even higher as you know that you...
O2 and Deutsche Telekom create an innovative customer experience
Choosing a new smartphone, tablet or accessories can really be difficult for most customers. Not only does technology constantly evolve, but you won’t be allowed to actually touch, feel and try real devices in cell phone stores. The risk to get unsatisfied customers is high. Very high. This situation is just unbelievable. Customers about to buy a 500€ device must rely on not trustworthy sales guys and will discover when they are home...
Djump and Uber banned by Belgian authorities… is Airbnb the next on the list ?
For those of you following the news on the startup and IT scene, you may have heard that the Belgian government has forbidden Uber (link in French) to do business in Belgium and that the police even seized two cars (link to the article in French). Last week they went even further and asked Djump, a “ridesharing” platform, to stop immediately its activities. In today’s post we’ll think about what triggers such reactions...
A call for a revolution in customers – firms relationships
You may remember the post published two ago about managing expectations to increase customer satisfaction. In that post I also mentioned a recent negative experience with Coolblue. The guys at Coolblue proved once again their professionalism by handling the complaint perfectly and actually increasing my loyalty even more. Here is how. The complaint handling paradox It’s probably been mentioned already here but I can’t repeat it...
Luxury: shocking bad service and low customer satisfaction
Service quality is essential to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Personal encounters are crucial to increase the level of service; yet some brands in the luxury sector recruit employees that don’t master the codes of the sector which leads to a complete discrepancy and to dissatisfaction. Here is a true story that just happened to me and that involves Berluti, a brand of the LVMH group, and two other less known brands :...
Increasing customer satisfaction through expectations management
Managing expectations is key to increase (or just ensure) customer satisfaction. In this article we explore bit the mechanism of expectation creation based on one actual example : Coolblue How do expectations influence customer satisfaction You’ve experienced already it : you purchased something on the internet. You’ve been waiting several days on the delivery and when it arrives, you unwrap the parcel and you’re disappointed by what...
Western Union blue ocean strategy to increase loyalty
At the International Marketing Trends conference in Venice, Maureen Sigliano presented Western Union’s global loyalty strategy. Maureen is Vice President Global Loyalty Development & Customer Experience at Western Union and her speech, besides being highly inspiring, also shook up some established rules about customer satisfaction and loyalty. A Blue Ocean of untapped opportunities Maureen’s speech was preceded by a...
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