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As consumers, there’s no question we are being inundated with surveys, lots of them. It seems as if we are sent a survey after every transaction, online, at the coffee shop, when our car is repaired or at the post office. Most of these surveys claim to have just a few questions, they’ll take less than a minute to complete and some even reward us for taking the survey.  This may seem strange coming from someone like me that is a strong advocate for listening to the voice of the customer, but I think we are headed for a revolt if we continue down this path with transactional surveys.  We do need to know the satisfaction and loyalty of our customers so that we develop the right products, deliver effective services, fix poor quality and fend off our competition.  As you think about collecting data through transactional surveys (not to be confused with relationship surveys which are more in-depth and conducted on a much less frequent basis), here are seven “sins” to avoid when surveying customers.   

1. Sending a survey on every interaction a customer has with your organization

It’s true that every interaction could be different but if I’m a frequent customer, getting the same survey from you with each transaction can be annoying and counterproductive.  Unless I’m particularly unhappy, I may simply delete it and thereby impact response rates.  Having tools to monitor the number of surveys sent to customers is important.

2. Surveying too quickly

Often surveys arrive shortly after a transaction has been completed.  There are pitfalls to this strategy.  Has the product arrived yet?  Has the customer used it enough to know if it’s satisfactory and meets their requirements?  Is there an option to provide feedback after several months of use?

3. Pleading for 5’s

Automobile dealerships are notorious for asking, begging and even pressuring customers to give them all 5’s or else!  I once gave a 4 on one question and the next time I visited the dealership the service adviser confronted me upset with my 4!  Dealers are incented in several ways based on survey results.  I did recently complete one survey that asked, did your dealer ask you to provide all 5’s?  Biased surveys are indeed useless.

4. Claiming 30 seconds and taking 15 minutes

It’s important to honestly convey to customers how long it will take to complete a survey.  Having a customer answer one question that leads to more is also unacceptable and can ruin the meaningfulness of the survey.  Instead customers will become frustrated and quit the survey before completion. 

5. Lack of follow through on low scores

If you are going to survey customers, then you need a process in place to handle the negative survey.  Even if your survey is anonymous, it’s important to give customers the option to be contacted by a company representative to address a low rating. 

6. Poor survey structure

You’ve done all the work to prepare the survey and begin the process of collecting data and then fail to execute proper survey structure.  It’s important to test and verify links within an email survey to ensure they are working properly.  Use customer-oriented language not internal corporate jargon. And lastly, be specific so the customer knows which transaction you’re surveying. 

7. Lack of a closed loop system

If you’re going to survey, then know what you are going to do with the data.  Establish a closed-loop system for surveying.  This entails accurate, unbiased collection of data, analysis of the data and then reporting of results and action planning to improve based on what you’re hearing from the voice of the customer (VOC).  Surveying shouldn’t be a feel-good exercise in your company – it needs to be taken seriously by every person to truly make the VOC be alive in your organization. 

One of the best transaction surveys I’ve encountered is from Delta Airlines.  Delta’s after-call survey asks, “If you owned a customer service company, would you hire the agent you just spoke to?”  It’s a great example of a brief, one-question survey using a 5-point scale that provides meaningful results for the organization and the employee.  

Surveying customers doesn’t need to be an expensive, resource-consuming adventure.  Organizations of any size can survey using well-established practices and existing survey frameworks to obtain the all-important voice of the customer.  Remember the seven “sins” above when you ask customers to be a part of how you improve the delivery of your deliver products and services! 

We love sharing content with you from other thought leaders, the original blog for this post can be found here.

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Building trust doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You have to remain consistent in your messaging, understand your buyer personas and deliver on your promises over time.

When your prospects and customers trust you, they are more likely to buy from you. When you have their trust, you can also command a higher price and boost the lifetime value of each customer. But building trust doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You have to remain consistent in your messaging, understand your buyer personas and deliver on your promises over time. Only then will you become the go-to provider in your niche. There is a tremendous upside to building trust in your brand, but it takes time and specific strategies. Here are those strategies:

1. Be accessible

Be available to your customers and allow them to interact with you. Customers often have questions, and if there’s nowhere for them to go to get their queries answered, or you don’t respond in a timely manner, you could begin to lose credibility. James Schramko of SuperFastBusiness has several strategies in place to maintain regular interaction with his prospects and customers. His customer support staff answer questions that come in. His paid membership includes a forum where like-minded entrepreneurs regularly interact; and he also has a yearly event called SuperFastBusiness Live, where business owners can learn how to grow their online ventures. These are some practical ways you too can use to make yourself available to your customers. Consider how Schramko has provided a point of contact for all inquiries, started an online community and organized an event to bring awareness to his brand. You might try these actions, too.

Also consider setting up a proper customer-support infrastructure, using help-desk software like Desk.com, and attending conferences and events. In these ways, you can answer questions in person, which is a great way to increase your likability and accessibility and provide support to your customers.

2. Have a reliable product

People tend to buy on emotion, not logic. The challenge your business faces is that when its product arrives on the customer’s doorstep, those customers be impressed with the quality of the product to justify their purchase. Talking a good game and turning around and selling a low-quality product is sure to draw negative reviews, leading to mistrust and decreased credibility in the market.

One simple way to ensure your product’s quality is to put it through a rigorous testing process. You can also put together focus groups and ask your target audience what their needs are and what kind of product would solve their challenges. Eric Ries popularized the idea of the minimum viable product (MVP) and lean startup methodology. The idea is to speed up the product-development process and get it into the hands of the customer sooner than later. Too many companies spend hundreds and even thousands of hours on research and development, but when they finally launch their product, customers may not even want it. The MVP approach allows you to go to market sooner, test out the viability of your offering and learn from what your customers liked and didn’t like about it. In this way, you can test your product, improve upon it and then launch it more broadly.

3. Be honest

Being transparent means recognizing and being open about both your strengths and weaknesses. If your product isn’t right for one of your leads, you should be secure enough to guide that lead in the right direction, even if that act means boosting your competitor’s bottom line. This is one of the ways the Smart Passive Income blog’s Pat Flynn differentiated himself from his competition. When he was first getting started, he didn’t see many entrepreneurs talking openly and honestly about their journey, especially in the money-making niche. So he decided to be that entrepreneur:

Today, Flynn’s income reports continue to drive traffic to his website month after month and inspire would-be entrepreneurs to take the same transparent approach to online business. Honesty shows you care about your customers and their needs, and your willingness to help them gets them the results they’re looking to achieve.

4. Bring value to your client

Do you put your customers first, or do you put revenue first? People know when they’re just a dollar sign to you, and while they may still buy from you if they believe your product solves their challenge, this does not build long-term trust or encourage repeat sales. I Will Teach You To Be Rich CEO Ramit Sethi relates in a podcast that he doesn’t make some of his products available to customers who are in debt. Is he missing out on revenue opportunities by doing this? Absolutely. But is he also building trust in the process? Unquestionably. He believes it’s important to take a stand on this issue, and it makes sense that he doesn’t want customers who can’t give his resources the attention they deserve.

Delight is in the details. Take the example of Online music story CD Baby. Its legendary CD shipping confirmation email is both humorous and value-adding. It also proves that bringing value to your client need not be complicated.

5. Maintain consistency

Maintaining consistency ensures that your prospects and customers know what to expect. You can set both internal and external goals to maintain the quality of service.

As Bo Bothe, Will Cunningham, Elizabeth Tindall and Leslie Rainwater of BrandExtract write in a blog post: “A consistent brand helps increase the overall value of your company by reinforcing your position in the marketplace, attracting better-quality customers with higher retention rates and raising the perceived value of your products or services.”

They go on to explain how consistency can help your employees understand what their role is within your organization. The building blocks of a consistent brand include:

• Your message. Your brand message should be an extension of your actions and behavior. If it isn’t true to who you are, or you can’t deliver on it, you are being inconsistent. Your brand’s overall tone also factors in to your message — in other words, how you position yourself in the market. Do you want to be perceived as dependable, aggressive, helpful or some other characteristic? Stay focused on the image you’re developing.
• Your design. Creating consistent imagery across your logo, website, social networks and print materials is an easy win that can help you build trust with customers.
• Your delivery. How will you communicate with your target audience, through what channels and how often? Knowing your prospects makes it easy to answer these questions and deliver the expected brand experience.

Final thoughts

Trust is a byproduct of a commitment to quality and excellence. If you can deliver the right results to the right people over the long haul, they will come to believe and trust in your product and service offerings. Once you’ve carved out your identity in the marketplace, be vigilant about your communication. Back up who you say you are with tangible actions.

The original article for this post can be found here.

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Customer Experience Strategy is a term widely used to mean very different things for a lot of companies. Most brands get lost in the conundrum regarding the differences between customer experience strategy and customer service, which are different. And as this CX Innovation space evolves, what we know as ‘customer experience’ continues to evolve as well. In this post, we wanted to define Customer Experience Strategy in terms of how we utilize it with our clients, and cover how any company can look to create a GREAT customer experience strategy.

But first, a definition:

Simply put, customer experience is the sum total of all the interactions between a customer and an organization – including discovery, initiation, purchase, service, and advocacy.

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all” – Michael LeBoeuf

Every single brand interaction impacts your customer experience (online and offline), and therefore, your customer loyalty. (Louder for our friends in the back!)

So now that we’ve defined this ever-evolving term, let’s go over how you can create a great customer experience strategy:

1. Deeply understand your audience 

Today’s consumer expects more from the brands they choose to buy from and engage with. Long gone are the days where superficial information about them (location, age, gender, etc) is all you needed to reach them. You need to understand your customer’s needs more than ever, and be able to take them through a journey that allows them to build trust with you – which eventually turns them into buyers. One of the best ways to dive deeper into your customer is to create customer archetypes (also known as personas/profiles). 

Customer personas challenge you to think about all areas of you customer’s journey and helps you identify where you can unique serve in that journey. From there, you can easily tailor your messaging and create a more thoughtful customer experience for that particular customer.

2. Work backwards from the customer experience you want to deliver

Steve Jobs famously advocated for “beginning with the customer experience and working backward to the technology”. This is for good reason – it’s much easier to reverse-engineer your strategy based on the end result than building the latter from the ground up. However, in order to do that, you need to know how your customer experiences your brand at all stages. Where are your opportunities to make impressions and create connection? For example, Amazon (now a behemoth), started with a very simple customer experience opportunity – early delivery. From there, you can imagine how they might have reverse-engineered the steps to make that strategy a reality.

3. Hire A-Players and get them invested into the process

A-Players are a unique AboutFace methodology that drives all of our hiring practices. A-players, by definition, are harder to manage because they’re bursting at the seams with creativity and innovation. But if nurtured well, they become fierce executioners who will own and help define your broader customer experience strategy. Simply put, employees are key to creating an excellent customer experience. In our experience, it’s the little things at the end of the day that make tiny differences in how your brand is perceived. It’s the same reason why we love it when we go out to dinner with our friends for our birthday and the manager comes over to wish us a happy birthday – or the bartender sends over a special cocktail. 

How your employees engage with customers speaks volumes – so make sure you get A-Players who deeply care about your company’s vision and values. 

4. ASK, & LISTEN

Did you know..

Research from Bain & Company showcased this – and leaders everywhere should be shaking in their boots.

How can you know customers’ needs without asking? And how can you assess brand value without asking?

This is why it’s essential to create feedback loops – which require the company to ask, and listen. There are a lot of creative ways to do this, some of which include a post-interaction or real-time feedback survey, which allows you to followup with customers with more detail. Another, and we would argue (of critical importance), is to see what is being said on social – the good, the bad, the ugly. Customers are incredibly honest on their platforms, and there’s a goldmine of data in there if you’re willing to listen.

5. Build systems for quick and effective solutions

After you’ve digested your customer feedback, it’s time to swiftly and effectively respond. Every single stage in the customer lifecycle should have a support system in place. Here are some ways you can provide thoughtful and effective customer support:

• Live chat: chat bots are super effective ways to provide quick response times to improve your customer’s experience with your brand. Also, live chats are easily integrated into pretty much all CRM and Marketing technologies so that you can reach out to then later and get them re-engaged with the brand.
• Social media messaging tools: since a lot of feedback happens on social channels, heavily monitoring those and quickly responding with direct messages, comments and other engagements, allows you to step up your customer experience game. (Bonus – it also allows others to see that you take your customer experience seriously. Like the saying goes, you attract more bees with honey!)
• Traditional surveys and feedback forms still serve a monumental purpose: Using tools like Typeform, you can integrate automations, photos, and humor in your survey experience.

Ready to dive into how you can create a GREAT customer experience strategy that drives brand awareness and gets results? If you have more than 14 locations, book a call with Paige Hartsfield, our top CX Strategist today. If you have less than 14 locations, please visit our Secret Shopping On-Demand site to order today.

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Let’s start at the very beginning–Mystery Shopping 101.

If you’re hearing the term mystery shopping for the very first time in your life, you might picture a shadowy character darting around the aisles of a department store looking for a clue to some kind of important crime case. Although a riveting idea, this is not mystery shopping.

The mystery in this case doesn’t mean some type of unsolved problem, but rather the shopper themselves. Mystery shopping, essentially, is just one of many ways a company typically involved in product-based commerce of some sort can get an idea for the kind of company they are from the customer’s perspective.

First, a dialog is established between the company interested in putting together a program and the mystery-shopping provider itself. After a plan is in place based on the goals of the client, a mystery shopper survey is constructed and given to experienced consumers who enter stores and evaluate the experience as a regular consumer. The results are compiled, compared and then analyzed to create the starting point for an adjustment plan. Gathering data from this perspective gives companies a much more accurate picture of what’s working and what could use improvement.  When it comes to creating the best experience for customers, entering a store and interacting with both the products and the larger brand is critical.

Mystery Shopping 101: Why a Mystery Shopping Program?

A well-designed and executed mystery shopping program provides you with information a company representative could never gather themselves. It sheds light on what your business is to your customers in an unfiltered, (and most importantly) measurable way with the ultimate goal of adjustment to right any wrongs that surfaced during the assessment.

It’s very much a gift that keeps on giving. When designed correctly, mystery shopping will:

• Increase sales and profitability via more engaged and comfortable customers
• Provide a practical way to improve and optimize services
• Motivate employees to better represent the brand and create an enjoyable atmosphere for customers
• Generate enthusiasm among customers by meeting and then exceeding their expectations

Mystery shopping is all about valuable customer feedback. While email and in-store surveys on the backs of receipts can give your company a broad picture of customer satisfaction, mystery shopping goes further by providing unbiased information about the “feel” of your company at a deeper level.

Mystery Shopping 101: Where to Start

Once you’re on your way to creating a program for your own company, make sure you tailor the strategy to fit your company’s needs. However, you still still need a place to start. Many professionals experienced in creating such programs agree it almost always begins with employee training. Don’t think for a second that a mystery shopping program lives on a colorful whiteboard on the wall of an executive boardroom.

Instead, success requires relationship building, idea implementation and investment plans that actually result in noticeable changes. In-store employees are the human link between your brand and your customers. Have an effective team to represent your company through careful engagement, brand and product knowledge and effective communication skills. These are the foundations by which customer experience is built.

Companies whose employees provide consistent, complete and friendly service to customers of all kinds will find their brand growing in ways previously unachievable using other methods.

Find the Right Mystery Shopping Company & Get It Right the First Time

Of course, before you can start formulating the initial steps of a mystery shopping program, you need to find a provider who gives you what you need. Try to compare and contrast each provider based upon a standard set of questions so you narrow your list to the best mystery shopping company for you.

The following three questions are a great place to start:

• How will this mystery shopping company conduct their program?
• How will this mystery shopping company gather and analyze their data?
• How will they present the data in a way that drives real results?

After fleshing out the broader aspects of a particular company, dive further to narrow your search. Start by comparing how their methodology relates to your specific objectives. These questions can start along the lines of:

• What will this program do for my business’ bottom line?
• In what ways can you customize the program to align with my company specifically?

Mystery shopping is evolving quickly alongside constantly shifting trends in the retail world. As consumer expectations grow and shift to more complicated models through a number of new channels, accurately gauging the quality of customer experience is  a vital part of any company’s sustained success.

Get to know our team at AboutFace and get in touch with us to learn how our Mystery Shopping Programs can help you today.

This content was originally posted here. 

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Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer experience staple, so we wanted to break down the basics of NPS and share why every customer-focused company needs to be leveraging the power of your NPS. 

NPS Definition 

NPS is a metric that measures the loyalty of customers to a company, and its scores are measured with a single question survey and reported with a number from -100 to +100. The higher the score, the better off you are. (Sounds pretty straightforward, right?)

NPS® is often held up as the gold standard customer experience metric, having first been developed in 2003 by Bain and Company, it’s now used by millions of businesses to measure and track how they’re perceived by their customers.

It measures customer perception based on one simple question: 

How likely is it that you would recommend [Organization X/Product Y/Service Z] to a friend or colleague?

How NPS is rated:

Respondents give a rating between 0 (not at all likely) and 10 (extremely likely) and, depending on their response, customers fall into one of 3 categories to establish an NPS score:

• Promoters respond with a score of 9 or 10 and are typically loyal and enthusiastic customers.
• Passives respond with a score of 7 or 8. They are satisfied with your service but not happy enough to be considered promoters.
• Detractors respond with a score of 0 to 6. These are unhappy customers who are unlikely to buy from you again, and may even discourage others from buying from you.

How to calculate your Net Promoter Score

It’s actually quite simple to calculate your final NPS score – just subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

For example, if 10% of respondents are Detractors, 20% are Passives and 70% are Promoters, your NPS score would be 70-10 = 60

The difference between transactional vs relational NPS Programs

Relational NPS surveys are deployed on a regular basis (i.e.- quarterly or annually), and the goal is to get an ongoing pulse on your customers and understand how they feel about your company overall. This data is oftentimes used to used to check the health of a customer year-over-year and provide a benchmark for company success. Transactional NPS surveys are sent out after the customer interacts with your company (after a purchase or support call, for example) – and it’s used to understand customer satisfaction on a granular level while providing feedback about a very specific topic. Typically, it’s best practice to use both types to programs to understand your customer at both the macro and micro levels.

What else can you measure using NPS?

Good news, you can pretty much measure almost anything using an NPS score. In addition to understanding the overall NPS for the company, you can track scores for everything from individual products, stores, websites, employees – and more. While most net promoter score surveys are designed to collect customer feedback, they can also be used to measure employee sentiment, or – what is commonly referred to as employee net promoter score (eNPS). This measures how likely your employees are to recommend your company as a great place to work. There is something interesting to note, however – Qualtrics recommends not using eNPS to measure employee feedback in favor of other more comprehensive survey methodology such as employee engagement surveys because eNPS lacks the complexity an engagement survey has, as it’s only one question. If you’re just getting starting with exploring employee engagement, it can be a great starting place. Although, it is good to notate that it doesn’t give you a complete picture of employee health, and it could be challenging to know where to make improvements once you have the data. That is – unless you partner with a team like ours who are NPS Masters – in which case, bring on all form of NPS!

If you have any questions about how your organization can be leveraging NPS to drive loyalty and enhance your customer experience, get in touch with us!

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“Even when we’re about three years old working with Lego blocks, we want to do something different, we want to build something unique with our own hands.”

It’s clear that from a young age Cisco Customer Experience’s Chief Architect, Dave Malik, had a knack for innovation, the process of deconstructing problems and reimagining new solutions. In his early career, Dave was drawn to the world of finance due to its position at the forefront of enterprise innovation. It was here that he discovered the value of technology to drive companies to find a ‘wedge’ in the market – vital for survival in the highly competitive world of stock trading.

He may have moved on from Lego blocks, but today Dave is still focused on finding and implementing the innovations that set businesses apart from their competitors. “Every customer has a vision of their own masterpiece and we want to help them build it.”

In our discussion with Dave, we uncovered 11 guiding principles he uses to drive innovation and digital transformation for some of the world’s largest companies.

Rule #1: Find the 10%

“When you look at the journey of a customer, it’s typical that 80-90% is fairly commoditized, meaning everyone’s doing the same thing. It’s the last 10% that really differentiates people. It’s about, how do you become the first in your industry, or the second, to really gain a competitive edge in the market. And those are usually extremely challenging maneuvers. Otherwise, everyone would be doing it.”

To unearth this, he works alongside companies in a process of ‘co-innovation’, helping them discover what their customers need, and guiding them to implement the technologies to bring their outcomes to life.

Rule #2: Innovate from the outside-in

One of the most common mistakes Dave encounters in these early stages is innovation from the inside-out. Instead, companies should place themselves in the shoes of their end-customers, innovating from the outside-in. “That’s how most companies fail. They build something they hope customers will embrace. Instead you should look at, ‘what are the toughest problems in the industry that can make an impact if resolved?’ and then you go tackle them.”

Rule #3: Focus on interactions, not transactions

“When you go to a store in a checkout line and get your groceries, that’s a transaction. That’s not what we’re here for.”

Just as important as winning new customers is achieving what Dave calls, ‘customer stickiness’.

But how do you make your customers stick?

The key is to focus on ‘interactions’ – building relationships by leveraging insight-driven experiences that engage customers as individuals, rather than delivering on one-time ‘transactions’.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) are enabling us to unearth these insights by predicting how and when customers require expertise for a solution. When people feel valued, as the result of an outstanding or highly personalized experience, they’re far more likely to come back for more.

Rule #4: Innovate at speed, with safety

In recent years, many industries have been flooded with nimble new players, each vying to innovate faster than the rest and achieve ‘customer stickiness’. This has prompted many established companies to change the way they operate to stay above the high-water mark.

“As an example, we have executed programs with financial institutions with over 200,000 employees, but they know they can no longer operate like a battleship. So we’re seeing a lot of larger customers that are building smaller agile teams. They’re working in sprints and now we’re getting code out to drive cloud applications much faster with micro-releases.” At the same time, these companies should ensure they’re working with trusted, credible vendors to minimize risk.

Rule #5: Secure your network with Automation and ML/AI

Properly managing security is essential to ensuring safety when innovating. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear of a cybersecurity breach, often due to the complexity of maintaining compliance across environments and the sheer scale of the networks that human operators have to protect.

The answer? Automation and ML/AI.

“Humans cannot correlate millions of data points and drive insights from them to take action with low latency. It’s impossible. So, we want to get to the point where you can make an educated decision in a very short amount of time. We take threat and network intelligence very seriously, and we marry them through automation frameworks to protect not only their applications but also their employees and devices.”

Rule 6#: Unlock creativity by removing repetition

Beyond the pivotal issue of security, automation can also accelerate deployments and increase efficiency by batch processing repetitive tasks. Companies improve their bottom line, customers get access to reliable new services more quickly, and employees have more time to focus on innovation.

“A common misnomer in many markets is, ‘automation is going to dramatically reduce my workforce.’  The truth is, it will make your workforce more intelligent if you use it in a strategic manner.”

Rule #7: 24/7 availability is a must in today’s digital landscape

Automation is also key to reducing latency and remediating issues faster, both of which are central to availability. Today, if your experience can’t be accessed 24/7 by your clients, it can pose a serious threat to your brand.

As a concrete example, Cisco’s Customer Experience team is supporting the requirement for high availability for some of the largest mobile operators in the world. Site Reliability Engineering practices are being used to ensure system availability to meet end-user demand.

Rule #8: Drive simplification and choice in multicloud

Whether building a Lego castle or a digital masterpiece, openness and interoperability are key. With Legos we rely on the ability of every piece to fit together to create a masterpiece. This is true for our networks too, particularly when it comes to cloud. Dave believes every business should be able to develop a cloud-agnostic policy, the ability to choose the cloud they want, to innovate in the way they need, without negative consequences.

Multicloud is now a reality and those who exercise it will gain a competitive advantage. The challenge is ensuring these different environments are abstracted with common languages. Businesses must ensure they work with a vendor that can maintain security policies with no vendor lock-in, deliver the right experience and provide full visibility into their applications across any cloud.

Rule #9: Let your technology partner focus on the details while you focus on business outcomes

Automation, machine learning, and the ability to operate securely and efficiently across whatever environment you choose all provide the groundwork for innovation that drive a company’s competitive edge. Despite this, Dave’s point of focus when working with customers is around providing value by achieving their specific business outcomes. At the end of the day, solving these problems is what builds a strong, trusting relationship.

Rule #10: Adopt a holistic end-to-end architecture

One of the ways Cisco sets itself apart is by moving beyond product development, realizing that for companies to get the most out of their solutions they need to be able to look at systems end-to-end. “We’re looking at things very holistically. We’re passionate about how networking, security, applications, IoT, multicloud and emerging technologies can integrate more easily.”

With a cross-architectural approach, aided by Advisory, Architecture and Support teams, and ecosystem partners, Dave is able to help customers take a step back from their individual technologies. With architecture blueprints, key decision makers can view the entire canvas of their masterpiece and understand how it all fits together, and when and where investments need to be made. At the end of the day, IT is run as a business.

Rule #11: Innovation is a continuous process

To stay competitive today, no company can rest on their laurels. Rather, they need to continually ask themselves what new problems they can solve and how they can make their end-customers’ experiences even better across the lifecycle of their solutions. Here Dave draws the comparison to the Cisco’s Customer Experience racetrack.

“The graphic shows that it’s a continuous journey for our customers… We can always do better and improve and learn from what we’ve done.”

It’s this same philosophy that’s driven Dave Malik since day one, from bringing to life creative new ideas with Lego blocks, to stitching together digital solutions and driving innovation at a global scale.

“That’s kind of the mantra. I think, you’re never done. There’s no end. When people think they’ve arrived, they’re mistaken.”

The original article to this post was posted here.

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It’s officially the start to a new decade –

Our team at AboutFace is hitting this new decade with a fresh, new stride. After over 20 years in business, we know now, more than ever, that innovating and changing is critical for growth. Our brand underwent a significant and exciting change last year, which is evident by our new logo and website. Don’t you worry though – our signature smiley is still there and will always be a part of our identity!

We were also proud to launch the first (ever) customer experience subscription service, called ARCHIE, for B2B brands, and we’ve already seen a 400% ROI utilizing this new business model. Mystery shopping is a long-standing, reliable research method to viewing your business through the eyes of your customers. Now with ARCHIE, we are able to help our client move the deeper bigger, and faster.

As a top-tier customer experience research firm, AboutFace has always focused one simple mission: To improve the business of our clients in profound, specific, and measurable ways.

Even with all of our internal growth, this remains constant for our work and for our team. We do this by partnering with leadership teams to conceive clever, customer-centric strategies that engage customers in new and exciting ways. Because we are equally proficient in strategy and research, we deliver robust financial wins for our clients. We help our clients not only understand their customer data, but ultimately improve their brand presence across all areas of their organization. Our staple services include:

• Mystery Shopping
• Competitive Intelligence
• Advanced Customer Experience Strategy (ACES)
• Employee Engagement
• Customer ForensiX
• Compliance and Auditing
• Loyalty Driver Solutions
• …and a lot more

“There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization’s overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow. It goes without saying that no company, small or large, can win, over the long run, without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it.” –Jack Welch, former CEO of GE

So as we hit our biggest stride ever in 2020, we invite you to follow our journey, notate our mission to improve our client’s success in profound, specific, measurable ways, and join us in continuing to provide exclusive and ground-breaking growth for our clients.

Click here to view our top-tier research services.

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