People & customer experience

David Jackson, the MD of Clicktools has posted about a conference on customer experience organised by the Henley Centre for Customer Management.  Quoting David directly;

Henley’s research into the perfect customer experience identified the top three attributes that drive satisfaction for both B2B and B2C.

For B2C the three are:

1. How helpful the organisation (ie its people) is.
2. How the organisation minimises the time consumers have to spend on a transaction.
3. The organisation’s ability to recognise the customer – i.e. knows about them.

For B2B , what matters is:

1. The extent of personal contact
2. Flexibility in dealing with the customer
3. Demonstrating an implicit understanding of their needs

In summary; you can have all the technology you need, but when push comes to shove, it’s still people that make the difference.

This is great stuff.

I wasn’t there, but I wonder if I may add a spin to David’s summary – just to be clear this isn’t an either/or situation:

You can have all the technology you need, but when push comes to shove, it must be integrated with people, business processes, systems and solutions to really enhance customer experiences.  Truly integrated customer experiences, across channels, are a pre-requisite for solving customer problems.

David’s blog home on e-consultancy is here.

HiPPO – Highest Paid Person’s Opinion

What have I been doing? It turns out there is a phrase for it, and it’s been around a while.

“HiPPO’s rule the world when it comes to creating customer experiences. And that’s a bad thing. No matter what you think the optimal customer experience should be on the website it is quite likely that you walk into a meeting room, or office, and regardless of your competence the HiPPO decides what goes on the site.” Courtesy Avinash Kaushik

HiPPO stands for: the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

Thankfully there is some great technology making HiPPO’s extinct. Multi-variable testing tools & platforms like Interwoven’s Optimost will continue to make a big difference in the remainder of 2008 and in 2009.

Eight Business Technology Trends

Bruce discusses The McKinsey Quarterly and their “Eight Business Technology Trends To Watch” ;with a particular emphasis on those trends with an impact on Customer Experience.

As an aside “Business Technology” trends. There’s a phrase that won’t last too much longer.

n.b. 1: Bruce Temkin is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research focusing on customer experience.

n.b. 2 : Don’t forget the BBC’s review of Technology Impact in 2007, now available in pictures too.