customer experience

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It’s nearly the season to make merry – but it seems that it’s already the season for people to start making predictions for the coming year. I’m going to start a collection of interesting ones, hanging off this post, in an attempt to revitalise my blogging instinct.

Here’s Verizon’s top 10 in which Enterprise Social Networking comes top. No surprises there then, and this is something that we’ve been discussing with clients for a couple of years now. Couple of barriers to takeup – the lack of any really good tools, and the reluctance of business to see the real value in social tools for collaboration and effective working. Clearly, many companies still see social interaction as a distraction from the important cut-and-thrust of work, and lock down their employees’ access to Facebook, Twitter, and the rest. Time to reconsider surely – we need to start seeing the ability to collaborate and communicate in a more natural way as a differentiator, and something that’s vital to success rather than an inhibitor.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time this year travelling backwards and forwards to the Middle East, and found myself wishing for better tools than we’re currently using – and on the back of this, to work with people that find it second nature to work remotely when required. We’re still not very good at it.


As more and more people give Caffeine a whirl, the increased prominence of results from the social media sphere appears to be a widespread phenomenon.

Interesting piece questioning the value of increased prominence of social media content within Google’s new, Caffeine-enhanced search engine results pages. The author suggests that maybe there isn’t extra value to be had from doing this – because relevancy is the most important thing in a search set.

via Econsultancy


Wow. I happened across a white paper produced by IBM & Cambridge University, with the title ‘Succeeding Though Service Innovation‘. It’s a first stab at trying to draw some shape onto what is essentially a fragmented, cross-disciplinary domain, and I have to say, it’s pretty bloody good. Read the rest of this entry »

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Hot on the heels of my post about My Starbucks Idea, I thought I’d share a couple of pieces of Brand 2.0 love that I’ve come across recently:

  • The church of co-creation and community, Communities Dominate Brands: go here for some deep insight into how some companies are recognising the (well-documented) need to get closer to their customers, and embed them into their processes.
  • Understanding what co-creation actually means: by Corante.

I’m starting to think of brands as being porous – for the reason that the word ‘porous’ implies a flow into something, but in a gradual, slow-but-sure way. It’s not like most large businesses move (to use Tom Peters’ phrase) at the speed of light, and yet they’re waking up to the fact that they have to constantly shift and adapt to the changing needs of their customers. So…porous.

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This is fabulous example of a global company reaching out to its customer base and giving them the opportunity to share their ideas on how to reinvigorate its customer experience. Of course, the idea is only as good as Starbucks’ willing to adopt any of the suggestions that are made – and from what I’ve seen, they’re taking steps to do just that.

I’d like to see more companies taking this kind of approach – and it ties into some thinking I’ve been doing recently around brands and how they become more porous… 

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