Robert G. Thompson's Blog
July 28, 2015
Join me in London at Net Promoter Conference Sept 10-11
I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be keynoting at the Net Promoter conference in London on Sept. 10. My session will be about “Customer-Centric Mastery” — focusing on the top three habits (organization behaviors) that drive competitive differentiation. More details here. The speaker lineup is impressive: Aisling Hassell – Head of Global Customer Experience, Airbnb […]
May 8, 2014
Value Creation — Doing “What Matters” to Customers
This week I hosted a delightful dinner meeting in Coronado to celebrate the release of my new book Hooked On Customers. In addition to local business leaders, long time CustomerThink contributors Dick Lee, Andy Rudin, and Barry Trailer flew in to join the fun. Our dinner conversation centered on a simple question: “What is Value?” […]
May 5, 2014
Connecting the Dots Between Employee Engagement and the Customer Experience
I recently participated in a group discussion organized by NICE on trends and best practices in employee engagement and how it relates to the customer experience. Joining me were Aphrodite Brinsmead — senior analyst at Ovum specializing in contact center markets and technologies, and customer experience trends and Shep Hyken — customer service and loyalty […]
April 24, 2014
Why Reps Can’t Sell. It’s the (Selling) System, Stupid!
Two words for sales reps trying to get time with Pete Sattler, CIO of International Flavors & Fragrances: Lotsa Luck. You’ll need it, because you won’t get past his defenses aimed at avoiding time-wasting reps that pitch “feature bingo.” During his two decades of experience with sales reps, he’s also seen all the tricks designed […]
March 19, 2014
Davinci’s analytics-driven chat powers up Digital Experience strategy
Since starting my business in 1998, I’ve shifted more and more of my computing to what we now call The Cloud. Email distribution, accounting, even our community web site is hosted on virtual servers these days. I really have no idea what the physical infrastructure looks like. Terms like ASP, on-demand and SaaS have come […]
February 26, 2014
Analytics help Western Union deliver loyalty-building service experiences
A few years ago my son was traveling abroad and ran out of money. We scrambled to figure out how to transfer funds and discovered that good old Western Union was the best option. There was a fair amount of stress involved on both ends, but Western Union came through for our family, using a […]
February 6, 2014
Facebook and Twitter: End of the Beginning or Beginning of the End?
It’s being interesting to watch the development of Facebook and Twitter over the past few years. Both trying to navigate a tricky move from a free service to an advertising revenue business, without alienating the user base. Long term, I think Twitter is better suited as an advertising channel, because most people use Twitter as […]
January 28, 2014
Is G2 Crowd the Death Knell for Forrester and Gartner?
A death knell is the ringing of a bell to announce a death. This is also called tolling the bell. –Wikipedia OK, so maybe I’m being overly dramatic. But still, for as long as I can remember analyst firms like Forrester and Gartner have had a huge influence over IT buying. Especially at bigger companies. […]
January 8, 2014
Shopping Experience: New Normal is Mobile, Omni-Channel, and Mostly… LOW Prices!
I’ve been following the retail analyst reports over the past few weeks. One summed up the holiday shopping season as “ho hum,” due to lack of hot products, bad weather and one fewer weekend during the holiday shopping season. Overall, “bricks” are losing out to “clicks.” A ShopperTrak report found 2.7% YTY revenue increase during […]
November 30, 2013
Black Friday proves that (low) price really can be delightful. Will retailer greed kill a good thing?
Most of the discussion around a delightful Customer Experience (CX) has been about company-customer interactions. Like the unusually great customer service you get from Zappos. Of course, some companies are able to dazzle us with their products. Like Apple with the iPhone and iPad. But price? Price is usually denigrated as a strategy for losers […]
