What: Customer (dis)satisfaction impacts investors' short selling behaviour, thus enhancing or reducing abnormal stock returns (returns beyond what is expected). Dissatisfaction has more than double the impact compared to satisfaction, highlighting the primacy of not having unhappy customers. This puts the soundness of the advice to 'delight' customers into question. Now what: Don't under-invest in customer satisfaction, for it can directly impact many business KPIs, incl. company valuation. Fight to avoid unhappy customers first, and only then try to delight them. Why not even consider inc ..read more

What: The complaint-handling solutions that work best are those that deliver on the benefits customers desire. When mitigating service failures, match the harm the failure has done to your recovery strategy. Now what: Aim to restore the relationship and the trust with customers you have a strong relationship with by acting quickly and provide appropriate communication For customers you have a weaker relationship with, compensation is key. In a previous post we discussed how important it is for companies to pay attention non-complaining customers; they come in high numbers and often cause m ..read more

What: Low-pitch music makes your product seem larger to customers. This only works if your ad is visually rich and provides a good description of the product. Now what: Make good use of high- and low-pitch music in advertising. If size is a virtue, go with low-pitch music. I think we often define customer experience too narrowly. Instead, I'm strongly in favour of the definition Andre Schwager and Chris Meyer propose in their seminal HBR article: "Customer experience is the subjective response customers have to direct or indirect contact with a company. It encompasses every aspect of an of ..read more

What: You could be worse off if you implement a good CX strategy unsuccessfully, than not having a good strategy in the first place. In the memorable words of Kahneman and Tversky, "losses loom larger than gains" ,,* Now what: Great CX initiatives are great, no doubt about it. But make sure you can also deliver on your promise, otherwise they can backfire. Loss aversion is by now a widely known behavioural economics concept. Put succinctly, it states that "losses loom larger than gains" - the same amount of money, for example, will subjectively feel larger if you are loosing compared to ga ..read more

What: On packages, bottom, right, and bottom-right are 'heavy' locations: products appear heavier when placed there. Vice versa, top, left, and top-left are the 'light locations'. For products for which heaviness is a benefit, consumers prefer packages on which the product image is placed in the heavy locations. Vice versa, for product for which lightness is a benefit, consumers prefer packages with the product image in the light locations. This effect disappears if all other packages on the shelf look similar. This is also a useful reminder that there is not one single Great CX - it's the ma ..read more

What: Loyalty programs do work: companies implementing them saw a 7% increase in sales and 6% increase in profits in the first year. Tiered programs and earning mechanisms increase the return on loyalty programs. Now what: If you are wondering whether to have a loyalty a program at your company or not, go for it. Make it a tiered one or implement an earning mechanism. There is some evidence that these are substistutes. If I were a CX leader, I'd be in two minds about loyalty programs. On one hand, it makes intuitive sense that these should work. They give people benefits and make them stic ..read more

What: Using "I" instead of "We" in service encounters increases customer satisfaction and purchase intention. Explicitly referring to the customer (saying "You") or not, doesn't make a difference to customer satisfaction and purchase intention. Now what: To improve customer satisfaction in service encounters, ask your contact center representatives to say "I". A few words about words Words matter, and how we use them is not a trivial matter. Words are lenses. They mark the boundaries between things; we use them to slice up our world into more or less arbitrary chunks - spaces of meaning if ..read more

The short answer is yes, it is. In this paper Yiyi Li and Ying Xie show that "Including an image in a tweet increases the number of retweets by 119% on average for tweets related to air traveling and 213% for tweets about SUVs." Some pictures seem to be worth more and others less than a thousand words though. "[C]lear-cut theme subject, follow composition rules, and have proper lighting and high resolution" lead to higher engagement. And if you are wondering between pictures of professional photographers, amateurs, and screenshots, go for professionals. Check out the full list of insights here ..read more

What: Consumers pay more attention, evaluate the brand higher, and are more willing to purchase a product when: a. there is a person in the ad and b. the person in the ad is looking towards the product Now what: Keep this in mind when you design your next print advertisement. Human faces are one object in the world that receives the most attention from us. We orient ourselves towards faces from a very early age, and it is perhaps not surprising that we tend to see faces everywhere - in clouds, trees, cars, and others. It is just a fundamental human feature that we pay attention to faces, a ..read more

Many of my clients have asked me, 'What is the impact of online customer reviews on sales?'. This week's snippet presents the findings from a study by Michael Luca, a Harvard Business School associate professor, that answers this question. A couple of years ago he examined whether and how much customer reviews on Yelp.com impact restaurant revenues. They do, and significantly at that, especially for independent restaurants. Here is the full list of findings, as outlined by the author: [A] one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9 percent increase in revenue. [T]his effect is driven by i ..read more