Standing Out From The Crowd

Lots of companies make the mistake of believing that just creating an online version of your services is enough to minimize costs, increase ROI and expand your market share. What they forget is that bad implemented solutions (or weakly integrated channels) can hurt the customer experience more than the lack of service in the first place.

Everything changes all the time; it’s just the nature of our modern world.  The real problem is not how fast things change but how out-of-control we usually feel for not knowing where all these changes will eventually lead. We are all afraid of missing the boat for the next big thing. Social Media, Netbooks, multi-touch [...]

Every once in a while a site comes up with a new UI (User Interface) concept or idea that forever shifts the paradigm of the market and redefines people’s expectations on information architecture and element positioning. In other words: sometimes an unexpected new design element may change the way you see things enough to make [...]

Just one day after the election, in a discussion group for UX practitioners and Information architects, I saw a post asking people’s take on the U.S. election with respect to UX & Usability.  Specifically, it was asking if either McCain or Obama would provide a better environment for UX to thrive… Well, my first reaction was to [...]

I am proud to announce that Vox’s 2007 Automobile Insurance Mind Model Study is now available (this represents a considerable part of my work, so I better be proud :) ).  Anyway, the study examines the online channel to determine industry-wide norms and discover why companies succeed or fail in attracting and retaining customers. If [...]

In my last post (“Welcome Back! Long Time, No See“), I commented on how face-to face interactions are being affected by the reliance on technology, subsequently missing real customer relationship development opportunities. After posting it, I realized that it wasn’t very fair. Technology and CRM tools can be useful for improving the Customer Experience in [...]

For the past 4 months I’ve been helping to conduct a study about the Online Customer Experience on the U.S. Banking Industry.  The study is called “Mind Model” and is finally available for free download from Vox Inc at http://www.voxinc.com/banking-mind-model.htm. The Banking Mind Model Representation is a general analysis of how Banking industry websites are [...]

Here are two examples in the opposite side of the Customer Experience spectrum: The first one was pointed out today by Seth Godin in his blog and is a perfect case of holding a grudge against your customers without learning how to deal with them. At the “Four Paws Design” website, an oblivious customer may [...]