Jon Picoult
Forbes
Connecticut, United States
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Past articles by Jon:
Through The Looking Glass: Why Facebook’s Camera-Enabled Glasses Will Fail
The biggest customer experience challenge for Facebook's new smart sunglasses centers not around who's behind the shades, but rather, who's in front of them. → Read More
The Key To Continuous Business Improvement? Think Like The NTSB.
Airlines are rarely held up as a model of customer experience excellence, but in one important respect, the aviation industry actually deserves that recognition. → Read More
The Best Way To Handle High Call Volumes – While Still Delighting Your Customers
When customer contact volumes swell, many companies rely on "deflection" -- shifting inquiries to a cheaper, automated platform. But that strategy has an important downside, and there's a better way to solve the problem. → Read More
The Inconvenient Truth About Many Customer Experience Strategies
Business leaders might be reluctant to admit it, but there's a simple reason why many customer experience strategies fail to deliver their desired results. → Read More
The Lost Art of the Handwritten Note
[The following article originally appeared in Carrier Management magazine.] When it comes to crafting more engaging employee communications, one solution is literally in business leaders’ hands. From supervisors of small teams to CEOs of large companies, organizational leaders face a common challenge: how to communicate with staff in an authentic and influential way that helps motivate the right… → Read More
For Crying Out Loud, JetBlue! How An Airline Turned Tears Into Cheers
A few years ago, in honor of Mother’s Day, JetBlue released a 3-minute YouTube video paying tribute to mothers who fly with young children: The video is sure to make you smile, and there’s no doubt it’s a great marketing instrument for the airline. But what’s also noteworthy about the clip is how it illustrates the importance of understanding your target customer and their state of mind. As any… → Read More
The Problem With Professional Services
Imagine if what you thought was your company’s greatest strength actually turned out to be its greatest weakness. It’s an unsettling prospect, but also a very real challenge that’s faced everyday by professional services organizations with regard to their client experience. “Professional services” is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of occupations which require very specialized… → Read More
You Can’t Advertise Your Way to a Great Customer Experience
What would it take to convince people that your business delivers a great customer experience? For tech giant Microsoft, the answer was more than $1 billion. That’s how much the company reportedly spent on its Windows 8 marketing campaign when the new operating system was launched in 2012. And how’d that work for them? Not so well. Windows 8 sales were underwhelming at launch, garnering far less… → Read More
3 Tips For Aligning Executives Around The Customer Experience
The single most important driver to the success of any customer experience (CX) strategy is executive commitment. However, aligning an executive team around the customer experience imperative is no simple task. C-Suiters often have competing agendas and departmental budgets to protect. If they even acknowledge that there’s a customer experience problem, they’ll frequently point fingers at other… → Read More
The One Chart Every CEO Should Study
Last month, Watermark Consulting released its latest cross-industry Customer Experience ROI Study. The study, which has become one of the most widely-cited analyses of its kind, was developed, in part, to address lingering skepticism that many business leaders harbor towards the idea of customer experience differentiation. A lot of lip service is paid to customer experience in the C-Suite, but… → Read More
Why Did The Top-Rated Company In Customer Experience Go Bankrupt?
In 2011, bookstore chain Borders filed for bankruptcy. At the time, many brick-and-mortar retailers were succumbing to new competitive pressures. Borders, however, was unique in one important respect: Earlier that same year, it was rated as providing the best customer experience of any company in any industry. That, at least, was the conclusion reached by Forrester Research in their fourth… → Read More
Lessons From Two Customer Experience Legends
Earlier this month, in the span of just a couple weeks, the business world lost two great customer experience strategists. Jack Bogle was the founder of Vanguard Investments, which is now the second-largest asset manager in the world. He popularized the concept of index investing, advocating for low-cost portfolios that seek to mirror the performance of the broader market, rather than outperform… → Read More
Lessons From Two Customer Experience Legends
Earlier this month, in the span of just a couple weeks, the business world lost two great customer experience strategists. Jack Bogle was the founder of Vanguard Investments, which is now the second-largest asset manager in the world. He popularized the concept of index investing, advocating for low-cost portfolios that seek to mirror the performance of the broader market, rather than outperform… → Read More
Most of your company’s customer experience is forgettable. Here’s why.
No matter how hard you try to improve your company’s customer experience, the reality is that your customers won’t remember much of it. That’s because our brains aren’t wired like a video camera, recording every second of every experience. Rather, what we remember are a series of snapshots. And those snapshots aren’t taken at random. The camera shutter opens to capture the peaks and valleys in… → Read More
Insurance Customer Experience Leaders Extend Their Edge Over Laggards
Insurers that earn jeers from their customers are falling further behind those that earn cheers. That’s the key takeaway from Watermark Consulting’s 2018 Insurance Customer Experience ROI Study. The study, which was last conducted two years ago, seeks to provide insurance executives with a macro understanding of the impact that customer experience has on a company’s fortunes. This is important… → Read More
Two Words That Will Hurt Your Business’ Customer Experience
How? Simply by using two words which should be stricken from every business leader’s vocabulary – “back office.” This is a term that many executives throw around without regard to its influence on the culture and mindset of their organization. Here’s the issue: Creating a work environment that supports customer experience excellence requires getting everyone in the organization to view their… → Read More
Is Your “Net Promoter” Really “Not Promoter”?
So, you’ve added the Net Promoter “likely to recommend” question to your customer surveys. You’re tracking the results and reporting a Net Promoter Score (NPS) on your Executive Dashboard. Alas, your company is “doing” Net Promoter – right? Not quite. What your company is doing is what a lot of companies do when they jump on the Net Promoter bandwagon – they measure NPS. But if all you’re doing… → Read More
The Difference Between “Purpose” and “Propaganda”
U.S. pharmacy chain CVS recently announced that it would no longer use “materially altered” imagery to market beauty products in its stores. That means no more perfect, digitally-modified wrinkle and blemish-free photographs to sell everything from moisturizer to lipstick. Instead, consumers will see more realistic pictures of models, complete with crow’s feet and birthmarks. (See the photo… → Read More