5 Top Customer Service Articles for the Week of April 29, 2019

Each week I read a number of customer service and customer experience articles from various resources. Here are my top five picks from last week. I have added my comment about each article and would like to hear what you think too.

Your Most Important Business Success Metric? Customer Loyalty! by Chad Storlie

(Franchising.com) Marketers are besieged with metrics. ROI, website visits, website return visits, shopping cart abandonment rates, and average customer spend are all important and well-used metrics to evaluate the success of a business. Everyone agrees metrics are vitally important. What no one can agree on is which metrics are the most important. Until now.

My Comment: I’ve always preached that one of the most important (if not the most) statistics in business is if the customer comes back, and that is the focus of this article. By the way, I like the simple definition the author uses for customer loyalty: “… the ongoing instance of a customer who continues to repurchase from a business when they have competitor and substitute offers available.”

Retailers! Are you putting Customer Experience theory into practice? by Daniel Frank

(TruRating) Over the last three months, we’ve been speaking to some of the best minds working in the field today.  Here’s a selection of tips for anyone looking to close the gap between the theoretical and the actual operationalization of customer experience best practices.

My Comment: This article starts with the important finding from Bain and Company stating that 80% of businesses believe that they provide a “superior proposition” (customer service), yet only 8% of their customers agree. That stat is a little old, but there is still a lot of truth to it. The gap between perception and reality, where reality is the customer experience, is still wide for many businesses. The goal is to turn CX theory into CX reality.

Want World Class Customer Service? Add Kindness And Trust by Larry Stuart

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