Lessons From Apple: Schedule-driven release produces half-baked products and kills innovation

In the October 29 post by Om Malik, From inside Apple, the Scott Forstall fallout at Gigaom.com,Om shares: “Unlike in the Jobs era, when the company would ship features when they were ready for primetime, a culture of schedule-driven releases has become commonplace. The time-based schedule is one of the reasons why Siri and Maps … Read more

Commit to the Customer – not the Technology

One of our greatest challenges in designing the best experiences for our customers is not letting the technology limitation determine the customer experience. When organizations commit to the technology instead of committing to the customers – everyone loses. In this age of the experience economy, this can mean the end for organizations that do not … Read more

Outside In

Determining, developing and delivering your customer experience is an Outside-in process. Too many companies make the mistake of thinking that they know what is best for their customers. Oftentimes they may think that by asking their customers for input  they will no longer be perceived as being the expert. As the experience leaders know, these … Read more

The Six Stages of CX Maturity

In the Temkin Group Insight Report: The Future of Customer Experience, Bruce Temkin shares the six stages of CX maturity: Ignore: Company does not see customer experience as a key differentiator. Explore: An ad-hoc group is established to understand how the company can improve customer experience. Mobilize: A full-time executive leads the effort to improve … Read more

Users are not Designers and Designers and not Users

Users are not designers. You can ask them what they want but they can only give you insight into the incremental improvement that they are concerned with their immediate needs. They do not have your aggregated insight that you have across your customers and new technologies. Designers are not users. They may guess what users … Read more

What is Important is the Entire Experience

In an interview for June 2000 interation magazine, Dr. Donald Norman stated: “I don’t like the term ‘usability,’ and I don’t want to be called an ‘HCI expert.’ I believe that what’s really important to the people who use our products is much more than whether I can use something, whether I can actually click … Read more

Customer Journey Maps, Customer Profiles and Touch Points

CX Journey

Customer journey maps are a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through in engaging with your company, its products and services. The journey map is a tool to measure your customers’ satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy to create sustainable long-term revenue. Consumer behavior is driven by the innate human need to satisfy identifiable as … Read more

Designing Great Customer Experiences with the Power of A/B Testing

“Over the past decade, the power of A/B testing has become an open secret of high-stakes web development. It’s now the standard (but seldom advertised) means through whichSilicon Valleyimproves its online products. Using A/B, new ideas can be essentially focus-group tested in real time: Without being told, a fraction of users are diverted to a … Read more

Five Design Principles to Make a Great Customer Experience from Citrix

Citrix Design team put out this great video, Why Design Matters to Me – Using Design to Make a Difference, where they explain five design principles to craft the total experience that your customer has with your company: Make it Simple by reducing the amount of information that people have to deal with and create … Read more

The Secret to Success to Creating an Excellent Customer Experience

Whitney Quesenbery, author of Storytelling for User Experience and Global UX, says about The Customer Experience Revolution:  “Van Tyne and Bean explore case studies of some of today’s most successful companies. As they look at their business, marketing and product design, it becomes clear that the secret to success is to put the entire organization … Read more

Customer Experience, Brand and that Emotional Connection

“Where does your brand begin and end? Where does your marketing stop and delivering online start? With cloud computing, online purchases, SAAS use, and live support in social forums, can you even define where your product experience begins and ends? These days you cannot and should not even try. Successful companies have prospered in response … Read more

Companies that delight their customers outperform their peers

According to Larry Tesler, “Companies that delight their customers outperform their peers.” We should listen to Larry because he knows what he is talking about. Larry was one of the researchers at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated) back in the 70’s. PARC, if you didn’t know, has been responsible for such well known and … Read more