In my last article I described the balance that all organisms, and that all companies, must strike between exploring for more resources and exploiting the resources they already have. Any complex adaptive system must accomplish both tasks in order to persist in a changing environment. Bees explore distant flowers to discover more nectar, while also exploiting what they’ve already brought back to…
Don Peppers’ blog posts are followed by nearly 300K on LinkedIn. He was among the first invited to be a LinkedIn Key Influencer when the program began in 2012. Today, he is one of LinkedIn’s top CX experts.
Exploit? Or Explore? What’s the True Goal of Your Research Project?
What does your brain have in common with such things as beehives, weather patterns, urban centers, and free-market economies? Each of these can be classified as a “complex adaptive system” – a system in which even a perfect understanding of the individual parts still won’t allow you to predict what the whole system will do….
Ten Ideas for Reducing CX Friction
In physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics specifies that entropy always increases. Entropy can be loosely thought of as randomness, or chaos. Combine a glass of hot water and a glass of cold water together and you’ll have a container filled with lukewarm water, which is just the random mix of hot and cold water. Without introducing…
Get, Keep and Grow Customers: That’s All a Business Ever Has to Do
The most important survival mechanism for every business is simply to get, keep, and grow customers. Unless a business can get customers, keep them longer, and grow them into bigger customers, it will be unlikely to survive for long. This is true for small businesses as well as large enterprises, for public as well as private…
Customer Experience: Not Your Father’s Kind of Marketing
Why is the marketing discipline so different today? Why haven’t marketers been talking about the “customer experience” all along? In the latter half of the 20th Century, virtually all marketing activities revolved around the “Four Ps”—product, price, place, promotion—as originally proposed by marketing expert E. Jerome McCarthy in 1958, and popularized by the very prolific Philip…
Spam and Phishing: Lessons from a New York Times Incident
A friend of mine told me a few weeks ago that the email address he had used to register with the New York Times had fallen into spammers’ hands. To find out how he knows for sure that the Times was responsible for this breach, read on. Depending on whom you ask or how you tabulate it, unwanted junk…
Why Are Corporate Profits So High, While Wage Growth is So Low?
A New York Times article pointed out that FedEx’s tax bill was reduced to zero by the 2017 Trump tax cut, which the company had lobbied for heavily. However, the firm has invested little more in its business, even after the $2 billion it saved from the tax cut (it even reduced capital expenditures below its December…
Identifying a Recession in Real Time
The stock market is in a turmoil, falling farther and faster than at any time since 2008 in a spate of volatility over the last couple of weeks that has been variously attributed to the uncertainty surrounding the spread of Covid 19, tumbling oil prices, disrupted international supply chains, and other things. But is this…
Using Video to Collect More Helpful VOC Feedback
Raj Sivasubramanian is “customer experience insights manager” for Airbnb. I first met Raj a few months ago at a CXPA event, and the other day I caught up with him to discuss Airbnb’s use of an innovative new technology for improving voice-of-customer feedback and generating customer insight. Airbnb fields nearly 2 million inbound service inquiries a…
Economic Downturn Ahead? Or Not…?
In its worst day of the year, the Dow Jones plunged 800 points, a plunge attributed to fears of an escalating trade war and worries about an inverted yield curve. And investors were of course a bit jumpy to begin with, because the current economic expansion is already the longest one in history. So what…