Posts

Showing posts from December, 2014

Imagine that you are a customer

Yesterday I had a meeting in a hotel. We were having a great conversation until someone started vacuum cleaning in our area. It was around 11AM.   We had to almost shout towards each other to make ourselves heard. Actually, I have had this experience in other hotels as well. Around mid-morning they start vacuum cleaning. It looks like that it is a standard procedure in the housekeeping manual. This indicates 2 types of problems: 1.     The employee is clearly disengaged. Otherwise she would have waited or would have asked us whether she was disturbing us. Neither action happened. 2.     The management in the hotel has no clue what happens on the work floor. Or even worse, they also don’t care. This kind of behavior has a negative influence on the customer experience. So, I suggest to regularly change roles (be a customer) in order to get to know what the impact is of what you are doing. This is especially needed for the management. How would you like to be

Who knows all about your customers?

The other day I was wandering about the high-tech content of ecommerce. Every day there are new online stores being opened, where you can buy anything from tennis rackets, to books, to diapers. Placing the order on the website and planning the delivery is most of the high tech activity. Then a large part of the ecommerce business is done offline, i.e. the physical delivery of the goods to your doorstep by couriers. This is actually the high-touch component of ecommerce. Every day there are a number of delivery vans (from TNT, PostNL, UPS etc) cruising through my neighborhood. And these couriers know everything about what the people buy in that neighborhood.   We always have the same man, he is very nice and polite and knows the names of the people in my street, where they live (the number), what they buy, how much and when. He knows my buying behavior across different ecommerce platforms. He knows that about ma and about any person in the neighborhood. It looks to m