Bridges for Transforming People and Cities

How extraordinary service communities cultivate human flourishing By Christopher P. Blocker and Andrés Barrios Service experiences are so common we often forget when we are “experiencing” them. As a society, we spend quite a bit of time, money, and energy in service settings like healthcare, education, entertainment, food, government, and transportation, to name a few. For …

When Designing Multiple Channels, Mirror Attributes Matter

Offering a seamless multichannel service is a priority for many companies. This research offers a model that can help marketers focus their effort in achieving customer satisfaction across different channels. The research team introduces the 5C model of customer satisfaction that can be used to benchmark performance across various channels. Getting these “mirror attributes” right …

How Valuable Are the Net Promoter Score and Other Customer Feedback Metrics?

By Evert de Haan and Peter Verhoef A large and growing amount of firms rely on Customer Feedback Metrics (CFMs) to monitor the customer base and the performance of the marketing department. Examples of these metrics include Customer Satisfaction (CS) and the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Recently, new customer feedback metrics, such as the Customer Effort Score …

What You Need to Know About Customer Win-Back

By V. Kumar, Yashoda Bhagwat, and Xi Zhang    It’s a hypercompetitive market and you are doing everything you can to retain your customers, yet you know that no matter what you do, you will still lose some customers to competitors. The competition to acquire new customers is fierce. How do you maintain your customer base? …

The 6 Factors that Influence Product Development Success + The Importance of Being Agile

By Riccardo de Marchi Trevisan At the recent Frontiers in Service conference in San Jose, CA, I had the pleasure of introducing a presentation from 3Pillar Global, Rockbridge Associates and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business that was up for the Best Practitioner award. The …

From Products to Services and Solutions. Embracing Customer Centricity in B2B

Interview with Mary Jo Bitner and Stephen W. Brown, co-authors of the book “Profiting From Services and Solutions: What Product-Centric Firms Need to Know”. The interview was recorded in July, 2014, when the book first came out. Podcast Transcript This podcast was brought to you by the Center for Services Leadership, a ground-breaking research center …

Is Transparency Good for Business?

By Seigyoung Auh, Omar Merlo, and Andreas Eisingerich In 2012, the global fast food chain McDonald’s launched a website in Canada called “Our Food. Your Questions”. The digital platform allowed consumers to ask the company absolutely anything about its food. As the website increased in popularity and customers asked some very tough questions, the company and …

Examining the Student Experience Using Service Blueprinting (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu

“Students often face problems accomplishing their goals because colleges and universities have poor processes. Service blueprinting, a type of process map, focuses on the student (or customer) experience and illuminates things an organization can do to identify and fix problem processes.” In her recent EDUCAUSE article Nancy Stephens shares 3 different examples of how Service Blueprinting can …

Being Your Customer's Hero: Interview with Adam Toporek.

Your new book, Be Your Customer’s Hero, is launching next week. Tell us, what inspired you to write this book? My desire to write this book came from the old business axiom of “find a need and fill it.” However, the need I was filling was first and foremost my own. Be Your Customer’s Hero …