Zeisler Consulting

AUGUST 1, 2023

My partner gets his hair cut at one of the chain “salons”. I use the quotes because it’s not a fancy place. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s a chain that you can probably guess…there are a few of them and they do fine work for a great price. His only gripe is one I think we as Customer Experience folks can appreciate. They have an app on which you can not only find a location, but “check-in” if you’re looking to get a cut right now or right-now-adjacent.

Wait Times 40

Wait Times Customer Experience Omni-Channel Fashion 40

Zeisler Consulting

JULY 19, 2023

I’ve written before about how astonishing it is that some brands seem to be actively trying to alienate their Customers with obvious slights like specifically using the words “Do_Not_Reply” for the actual name of the mailbox when communicating. It’s as though someone asked a hypothetical question: “How could we best indicate to our Customers that we don’t care what they have to say nor even want to hear from them?

Customer Experience 40

Customer Experience Customer Centricity CRM Customers 40

Zeisler Consulting

JUNE 21, 2023

I was speaking with a friend recently who had some car trouble. Hers is a fancy car (much more fancy than mine ) and she’s used to having concierge-type service and treated very well by her car company when she needs help. However, on this instance, her experience with the tow-truck driver who came to help her was decidedly not luxury. The guy wasn’t offensive or objectionable, but he was late, was a poor communicator (both in manner and style), and sort of curt when it all came down to it.

Brands 40

Brands Customer Experience Consulting Company 40

Zeisler Consulting

MAY 23, 2023

I write a lot (these days, at least, it seems) about cars. Last year I had a lot of interactions with my car company and other support organizations having to do with my automotive needs. So I guess with it front of mind, it seems appropriate that this little anecdote popped into my head the other day: Do you remember in 2022 when BMW decided to make heated seats a subscription service ?

Automotive 40

Automotive Brands Loyalty Programs Customers 40

Zeisler Consulting

MAY 9, 2023

I’m not saying I’m a big shot or anything, but mine is a luxury car. Okay, to prove I’m not a big shot, I’ll concede that it’s the entry-level first-time-buying-a-luxury-car model from a certain German automaker. And , I bought it a while ago. I’ve had it for a while. So yes, boujie I’m not…yet (keep that Growth Mindset going!) But here’s the thing: Recently I had an experience with this brand that was decidedly not luxury in any way whatsoever.

Brands 40

Brands Customer Experience Customers Technology 40

Zeisler Consulting

APRIL 25, 2023

You know that I’m big into walking in your Customers’ shoes. I write about it all the time and it plays a huge part of the book. But you’ve got to go into it with the right frame of mind. It’s not practical to expect you can shed all your priors and blinders, but you’ve got to assert yourself as best you can and imagine the experience your Customers are having.

Customer Experience 40

Customer Experience Brands Customers Customer Care 40

Zeisler Consulting

APRIL 12, 2023

When you ask an analyst a question, ideally it’s met with several in return. That’s because good analysts are inquisitive not just about what you want to determine, but why you’re looking for a quantitative answer. A healthy dialog between you and an analyst will lead to much better analysis and even more importantly, that analysis will come with much better insights.

Analysis 40

Analysis NPS Customer Experience Survey 40

Zeisler Consulting

MARCH 28, 2023

I wrote recently about an interaction I had with a support representative in which I told her I was sorry that she was working for a brand that disrespected her enough to preclude her from being allowed to help me. I’m not sure if she appreciated that I was being honest and sincere in my sentiment, but I imagine the interaction made more of an impression on me, as she surely had other calls to take the rest of her day.

Contact Center 40

Contact Center Knowledge Base Brands Interaction 40

Zeisler Consulting

MARCH 14, 2023

A while back, I participated in a round of judging for a Customer Service and Support awards competition. It was both an honor to be asked to participate, and a real inspiration to read so many great stories of dedicated Customer centricity. I got a few good ideas from some of the stories that were told, and frankly the future does look bright for Customer Experience, if you know where to look.

Customer Care 40

Customer Care Customer Experience Customer Centricity Customer Service 40

Zeisler Consulting

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

This is part of a series of articles about brands that are getting it right. Often we see plenty of examples of brands dropping the ball and failing to live up to their promise, but here’s a chance to highlight those who seem to have gotten it figured out. YMMV, of course, and sometimes these are just anecdotes about only one experience, but as I’ve noticed, when a company really embraces its Brand Promise, these experiences are usually quite common.

Brands 40

Brands Retail Entertainment Course 40

Zeisler Consulting

JANUARY 31, 2023

I was on the phone with an agent on a support line the other day and I told her that I was sorry. No, I didn’t apologize… I’d done nothing wrong… Yes, I was upset, I was disappointed, I was frustrated. But I’d treated the agent with the utmost respect and courtesy and didn’t take it out on her. Such is the subtle difference between saying ‘Sorry,’ and apologizing.

Policies 40

Policies Brands Customers Leadership 40

Zeisler Consulting

JANUARY 17, 2023

The late actor (who also did some other things) Ronald Reagan had a saying: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Now, when it comes to popular politics, what he meant by that was that it’s important to keep your arguments simple: The more succinct you can make your point, the more likely people are to agree with you, and more quickly. If all it takes to come to your conclusion is along the lines of: ‘Well, here’s the fact, therefore, here’s the conclusion,’ you’re likely to win lots of pe

Customer Experience 40

Customer Experience Policies Customers Customer Service 40

Zeisler Consulting

JANUARY 4, 2023

If you read much of what I write, you’re aware that one of the best sources of Customer insights and the one I most frequently recommend is Walking in the Customer’s Shoes. It’s one of the best—if not the best—way for you to understand what your Customers go through when they interact with your brand and your processes. It can be tricky sometimes to get out of your own head (you understand, from the back end, after all, how your systems work, so that perspective is hard to shed completely), bu

Customer Experience 40

Customer Experience Brands Customer Insights Customers 40

Zeisler Consulting

DECEMBER 20, 2022

As a math and stats professor, I assign a lot of homework (my cadets can attest to that), but that homework is distinct from the exams I administer. That’s because the purpose of each is different. When we give homework, the purpose is for practice and learning; getting better at stuff, which is often pretty tremendous to watch from the teaching perspective, because in a lot of topics I teach, that’s going from zero knowledge to proficiency in a short amount of time.

Effort Score 40

Effort Score Feedback Customer Insights Customer Experience 40

Zeisler Consulting

DECEMBER 7, 2022

At one point a while back in my career I spent most of my days teaching Lean Six Sigma around the company for which I was working at the time. From a (much more seasoned) colleague I learned a witty thing to say at the end of each session: “If you have negative feedback, please share it with me; if you have positive feedback, please share it with my boss.

Chief Customer Officer 40

Chief Customer Officer Feedback Survey Customer Experience 40

Zeisler Consulting

NOVEMBER 22, 2022

I’ll often describe CX in terms of an analogy to other operations within your company. If it’s to make an impact, it should have a charter that includes responsibility for and the moving parts needed to drive changes. Otherwise, there’s no point in having a CX department in the first place. The conversation usually comes as a side note to the dreaded ROI of CX discussion.

ROI 40

ROI Sales Culture Training 40

Zeisler Consulting

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

Anybody who’s read much of what I have to say about Customer insights and Voice of the Customer (VoC) knows I’m quite critical of legacy KPIs like CSAT and NPS. Part of that, naturally, is my inherent wiseass contrarian nature, sure. That said, if I didn’t really believe that there’s a better way to do things, I’d not have invented a new top-level CX metric of my own (the Brand Alignment Score ).

NPS 40

NPS Effort Score Metrics Customer Experience 40

Zeisler Consulting

OCTOBER 11, 2022

I recently wrote about how some brands don’t really listen to their Customers when they develop new functions, features, and even new products, and how frustrating that can be. That’s often because a brand feels so comfortable and strong that they don’t really need to listen. “We know what our Customers want, we’ve been doing this for years,” they seem to be saying.

Customer Centricity 40

Customer Centricity Customers Brands Culture 40

Zeisler Consulting

SEPTEMBER 28, 2022

I participated recently in another one of these awesome forums where CXers gather to chat and share ideas about our profession. The main topic centered on VoC approaches, and at one point someone brought up the challenge of interpreting his company’s NPS results. To paraphrase him, sometimes one Customer may rate an experience as a ‘0’ while another Customer may rate the exact same experience as a ‘10’.

Brands 40

Brands NPS Customer Experience Effort Score 40

Zeisler Consulting

SEPTEMBER 13, 2022

I once worked with a client who was having a somewhat complicated concern about survey data: Every time they interacted with a Customer they’d send out a survey invitation. That was well and good, but they never knew (does anybody?) when they’d get a response. They put a time limit on the survey in that the invitation expired after 30 days, but they knew their Customers were busy, so it may be a couple of weeks before someone got around to filling it out.

Data 40

Data Survey Metrics Customer Experience 40

Zeisler Consulting

AUGUST 24, 2022

A friend of mine was ribbing me the other day about the Net Promoter System and how I’m a pretty ardent critic , or at least questioner of it…not least because I think there’s a better approach (hint: It has to do with the proper purpose of doing CX in the first place). He said, “Z, why do you hate NPS so much? Don’t you think there’s anything redeeming about it?

NPS 40

NPS Effort Score Metrics Comparison 40

Zeisler Consulting

AUGUST 9, 2022

This is another in a series of articles I decided to start writing a while back calling out brands for doing the right thing when it comes to CX. There’s a lot of negativity out there, and I’m even a big fan of learning from our (and others’!) bad CX practices. You’ll notice I don’t name names when I write about poor CX, but here it’s the opposite and I endeavor to highlight those who get it right.

Brands 40

Brands Customer Experience Marketing Customers 40

Zeisler Consulting

JULY 26, 2022

I’ve been with a certain service provider for about 20 years now. It’s definitely the longest I’ve ever been with any brand that I can think of off the top of my head. Sometimes you stay because it’s the only game in town (you can likely consider your cable company for this example). Sometimes you stay out of a sense of laziness (are you a Coke person or a Pepsi person?).

Loyalty 40

Loyalty Brands Airlines Course 40

Zeisler Consulting

JULY 12, 2022

What should you do when you’ve met your Brand Promise goal? That’s a question that came up from a former client recently. We’d done some great work in the past and the CEO called just to check in and catch up. His was a pretty specific question, but the general applicability is something that I thought was valuable so I’ll share some broad-brush observations here.

Brands 40

Brands System Exercises Resources 40

Zeisler Consulting

JUNE 16, 2022

I woke up the other day to find that my computer had restarted itself overnight. I knew it was coming, and frankly, it was my own fault; the desktop warning and request that I either pick a time or it’ll happen of its own accord “outside of active hours,” as if a self-employed consultant has such things. Nevertheless, I’ve been assimilated and do expect to fall prey to how The Borg chooses to run my electronic life.

Customer Experience 40

Customer Experience Roadmap Brands Consulting 40

Zeisler Consulting

JUNE 7, 2022

I wrote a while back about questions raised concerning wide ranges in top-level NPS or C-SAT scores, even for Customers who may have had the same experience. The point I called out there was mostly an indictment of the use of NPS or C-SAT in the first place. These metrics allow for way too much variation in interpretation, even in how they’re asked in the first place (i.e., what’s ‘satisfaction’ mean to you as a Customer, and how likely are you to recommend anything to anybody , regardless of

NPS 40

NPS Customer Experience Brands Metrics 40

Zeisler Consulting

MAY 25, 2022

A while back, one of my service providers sent me an invitation to fill out a survey. As I’ve stated before , sometimes CX people can be the best or the worst when it comes to such things. I will usually only fill out a survey when I know that I have something positive to say about an experience. If I have an issue, I’ll usually directly contact the brand and give them some (hopefully, from my perspective at least, constructive) feedback on how they could do better.

Survey 40

Survey Customer Experience Brands Course 40

Zeisler Consulting

MAY 3, 2022

There’s an old anecdote that’s probably apocryphal—at least for some brands that like to tout it—that certain Customer-centric companies are “so dedicated” to their Customers that they leave an empty chair at the table in the meeting room where their leadership gets together that is ostensibly to signify where the Customer would be sitting… i.e., their place at the table.

Customer Centricity 40

Customer Centricity Chief Customer Officer Leadership Customers 40

Zeisler Consulting

JANUARY 5, 2022

So, here’s a controversial statement, but keep in mind what I’m not saying*: Usually, your flight crew, including the pilot, is the least motivated people on the plane to get where you’re going, let alone on time. This occurred to me last year when I went on a mileage run. The same crew that flew me from Denver to Los Angeles was flying me right back again about 45 minutes later on the exact same plane.

Airlines 40

Airlines Hotels Customer Experience Course 40

Zeisler Consulting

JANUARY 12, 2022

I had a support incident a while back with one of the service providers we use in our home. In fact, I had two incidents in close succession with two different brands. Each situation was similar in nature: There was a technical issue that was quickly and easily rectified, but on further inspection (the technical issue brought to light), I realized that I wasn’t really getting what I’d expected out of the services I was paying for.

Customers 40

Customers Customer Centricity Effort Score Brands 40

Zeisler Consulting

JANUARY 19, 2022

Last week I wrote about an interaction I had with a large well-known brand that provides services for homeowners. It was a cautionary tale about how challenging it is to actually communicate with some brands. A brief overview of that instance: At home, we had a service provider with which we’d had a pretty mundane failure, and they fixed us up right away.

Customers 40

Customers Brands Customer Centricity Feedback 40

Zeisler Consulting

JANUARY 26, 2022

A potential client contacted me a while back and was inquiring about my framework (well, thanks for asking, of course, you can check it out in my new book !). If you’ve read much of my stuff, you may know that, once you ground your CX strategy in your Brand Promise , the three moving operational parts of your Office of the Customer should be Insights , Process Engineering , and building a strong CX Culture.

Chief Customer Officer 52

Chief Customer Officer Customer Insights Customer Centricity Customer Experience 52

Zeisler Consulting

FEBRUARY 9, 2022

If you follow my ramblings, you’re aware that I approach CX differently. Rather than promising higher revenue, sales, and market share (at least, rather than promising it directly ), my philosophy about Customer Experience is that it should be founded explicitly on your Brand Promise, and its goal should be eliminating the gaps that exist between your Customers’ experiences and that Brand Promise.

Brands 52

Brands Customer Experience Customers Examples 52

Zeisler Consulting

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

We recently swapped service providers here at home for one of our communication services. The entire experience was a headache and we almost immediately regretted making the switch from our previous provider. What was so frustrating was that, no matter where we went to look for help, be it in a physical store, online, in the provider’s app, or over the phone, nobody could help us with our struggle and confusion.

Omni-Channel 40

Omni-Channel Customer Experience Customer Centricity Customers 40

Zeisler Consulting

FEBRUARY 23, 2022

I was in the post office the other day and experienced a perfect example of how we often miss the mark when it comes to communicating with our Customers. The guy in front of me was shipping some big box, and as the clerk was measuring its linear inches, she asked, “would you like to send this Ground or Priority ?” Even standing behind the Customer, I could practically see the gears cranking in his head, just as they were for any of us within ear-shot.

Customers 40

Customers Customer Experience Customer Centricity Insurance 40

Zeisler Consulting

MARCH 9, 2022

I’ve mentioned before that those of us in the CX profession are both the best and the worst Customers: the best because we are sympathetic to those in the Customer-facing trades, but also the worst because we expect so much and are always on the lookout for improvement opportunities—even if they’re opportunities for others to improve. Hey, we’re just here to help, and all that.

Customers 40

Customers Contact Center Brands Fashion 40

Zeisler Consulting

MARCH 23, 2022

I wrote a while back about how a big-box home improvement retailer made it less convenient for military folks to receive their in-store discount, while saying the purpose was to make it more so for us. My original comment was that, gee, it’s interesting, it seems, that every hassle I go through somehow or another always ends up benefitting them (by, for example, making their marketing to me more streamlined…again, for them ).

Loyalty Programs 52

Loyalty Programs Retail Loyalty Customers 52