Matt Watkinson > Quotes

“A business is like a boat floating on the ocean, with currents moving it one way and the wind blowing it another.”
― Matt Watkinson, The Grid: The Decision-making Tool for Every Business

“When Sony was introducing the boom box, the company gathered a group of potential customers and held a focus group on what colour the new product should be: black or yellow. After some discussion among the group of likely buyers, everyone agreed that consumers would better respond to yellow. After the session, the facilitator thanked the group, and then mentioned that, as a bonus, they were welcome to take a free boom box on the way out. There were two piles of boom boxes: yellow and black. Every person took a black boom box.’5 Clearly what people say isn’t always a true reflection of what they think, so we need a way of getting into these shadowy issues and seeing how they affect the customer’s goals.”
― Matt Watkinson, Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, The: The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences

“The Industrial Revolution that led to mass production and the division of labour brought separation between the manufacturer and the customer. Over time as companies grew and grew, so did the rift with the customer. Tying executive compensation to share price has shifted the leadership’s attention away from the customer and towards the stock market, a contributing factor to the current malaise. Social media is starting to empower the consumer, providing a largely unregulated, democratic means to hold businesses to account for disappointing or dishonest behaviour. Personalisation and customisation are becoming the norm, raising customer expectations. The profusion of new digital touchpoints – smart-phones, kiosks, websites – has created headaches for”
― Matt Watkinson, Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, The: The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences

“Brands are defined by what consumers say to each other about them, not what a brand says to consumers.”
― Matt Watkinson, Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, The: The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences

“When decision-makers look at each part of a business in isolation they usually aren’t aware of how individual decisions can add up to unintended and undesirable outcomes.”
― Matt Watkinson, The Grid: The Decision-making Tool for Every Business

“Even if a business commits to a well-structured customer experience improvement programme they often find they are hamstrung by legacy technology that is itself the product of the hurry-up mantra. Years of patches, bodges and duct-tape in the technology that runs the company can make the experience that businesses desire so much an impossibility. They need to re-platform first and then the whole cycle starts again because they need the new tech yesterday.”
― Matt Watkinson, Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, The: The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences