Standing Out From The Crowd

Apple’s finest moment leads to big mistakes.
From a totally neutral perspective, Apple appears to believe that “the customer is always right,” adapting to their customers’ needs and attempting to accommodate every request. Apple’s desire to appease their most loyal customers, however, may come too late. The company has received multitudes of negative press since the […]

Sometimes companies will bend backwards, and spend a lot of money, creating ad concepts that will highlight how great their Customer Experience is, but no matter how much one invests on marketing campaigns, if the ACTUAL experience doesn’t correspond to what you’re promising, the message you send to your customers will be completely different.
One of those […]

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 you want […]

Stop right there!
If you were looking for some “how to improve your love life” article, you came to the wrong place. Rather, I would like to explore how the emotions involved in customer relationships are strangely similar to those you have with your loved ones.
…
Well, customers may be willing to share the object of their […]

As expected, what really stands out about the new Apple iPhone isn’t the multitude of features squeezed into it, but rather its usability and the overall Customer Experience provided.
Apple understands the importance of superior usability to enhance the Customer Experience and has done an excellent job of this since rolling out the first Macintosh.  Their […]

Security has always been placed in the opposite side of usability.  By default, when you think about adding security measures to a website, you are talking about creating extra processes or at least adding an extra layer or complexity to existing process, so invariably the site usability suffers.  Several promising researches were conducted in the past […]

I recently vacationed at a beach resort in Mexico. Before leaving, I was stressed, tired and a little bored. I didn’t really plan the trip beforehand, so I just hoped to have a clean place to sleep and relax for a whole week.
Once in Cancun, I rented a crappy car and stayed in a crappy […]

Here’s a good lesson to everyone that deals with customer experience:
Learn from your mistakes.
I know it seems obvious, but people usually confuse “acknowledge a mistake” with actually learning from them.
Here are some examples:

The company recognizes that something went wrong but is unable to pinpoint the real problem
The company recognizes that something went wrong, […]

Today I’ve learned two important lessons:
1. Some habits are forced upon you and others are very hard to give up.
2. If you are doing something different from everyone else, you are either remarkable or just plain dumb.
 
If I’d knew that this morning, it would have completely changed my day…
Having lived my whole life in a […]

Everyone around me is overwhelmed by information and I am no exception.
My desk is overflowing with invoices, statements, memos, meeting minutes, reports, articles and books. Post-its® decorate my computer at work and at home. Somewhere in there, I have a paper calendar that I stopped updating long ago. I try to concentrate on the electronic […]