Great service defines a company. But a recent study by Accenture found that customer service standards are in freefall. The problem is that service is complex, cross-functional, rational and emotional. In our experience, there are five archetypal failure points of service management. … Read More

A folding plug won the Brit Insurance Design Awards in the UK this week. As gadgets get smaller, Britain has the largest plug in the world. The traditional British plug was invented in 1946. Why did it take 64 years to invent a better one? More importantly, why didn’t any of the rest of us have that idea? … Read More

In March 1876, the New York Times trumpeted the birth of the home entertainment industry. It would be powered by the telephone. It (mostly) never happened. Exactly 134 years later Facebook became the most visited website in the USA, pulling in more visitors than Google. There’s a connection between these facts. We’re learning what the web is really for. … Read More

If we measured customer attention like Gross Domestic Product, we’d know we were in trouble. Advertising, promotion and information are locked in an inflationary spiral as too much data chases too few eyeballs. Per capita, ‘Gross Domestic Attention’ (let’s call it GDA) is falling off a cliff. Thinking about the SEO arms race, is making me get very clear that imagination is worth more than cash. … Read More

Government is a Seventeenth Century machine, with late Twentieth Century middleware operating in a sceptical Twenty-First Century environment.  To solve its (our?) public expenditure challenge needs solutions that do more with less, and not less with less.  Getting those solutions … Read More

Investing in customer insight but cutting customer contact makes no sense. Service teams have huge emotional investment in putting right the things that cause customers angst. They should be central to strategic product and service innovation. … Read More

“Payday loans” are poisonously expensive debt wrapped in sugar-coated brand and service for poor and desperate people. A constant or frequent loan at 2500% APR is the financial equivalent of a crack addiction. … Read More

Strategic marketing plans need to build private foresight out of (often) public data and to seize their audiences’ hearts and minds. That means that plan data has to presented with elegant, resolved simplicity. … Read More

In a just world, everyone would love the new utilities like Google, Skype and Facebook. Reality isn’t like that because people expect great customer service. New utilities could meet that expectation. But they need a new approach to service management and design. Customers are demanding a good service experience and that’s exactly what the new utility’s struggle to provide when things go wrong. … Read More