Archive for the ‘Customer Focus’ Category


Prescription for customer experience:
Have patience with your patients

Customer experience is a critical factor in customer retention and/or earning repeat business. Restaurants, stores, and other service-oriented businesses understand this basic tenet – or become a statistic within a year or so of opening. Yet professionals who should provide the best customer service are often the worst offenders: doctors.
There are really only three reasons [...]

Stupid Marketing Tricks: TNT’s fake mix tape doesn’t ‘Say Anything’ interesting

Cable network TNT sent its marketing team in the wayback machine this week to send out a “sneak peek” at a new show, Men of a Certain Age. Which, based on the cast (Scott Bakula, Andre Braugher and Ray Romano) is somewhere in the late 40s to early 50s. Presumably, these men of a certain [...]

Does Neil Patrick Harris use The Lunchbox Method?

On a flight this weekend, I finally got to catch up on some magazines. In the Sept. 21 New York cover story, Neil Patrick Harris admits to a different method of acting that, quite frankly, reminded me of my own customer experience exercises that I’ve dubbed “The Lunchbox Method.”
Most actors try to get inside their [...]

Get inside your customer’s head: It’s just like packing a lunch!

For some reason, relating the work I do to the customer’s experience of it comes naturally to me. I think it’s because I’m empathetic, which in high school made me pathetic but now, as an adult, it’s a job skill! I just instinctively look at a particular deliverable (be it a site, article or tool) and [...]

Work Samples – Writing killer home page headlines

I spent several years refining the art and science of the home page headline at Microsoft.com. Some of these approaches may seem commonplace today, but they were quite original at the time they were published. These are just a few of the many thousands of headlines that I wrote:

 

The key to good headline writing is to have [...]

Car talk: How to lose (or gain) a customer in 10 minutes or less

This is a tale about customer loyalty, and just how easy it is for one person to screw it up.
Car salesmen have a reputation for being slightly below pond scum on the evolutionary scale. I know this to be true, having encountered many sub-evolutionary beings while car shopping in Texas. The bar has been set [...]

I’m tweeting this: Twitter is this year’s hot marketing tool at San Diego Comicon

Based on media coverage alone, Twitter would appear to be mainstreaming to the tune of a MySpace or Facebook. In reality, the Twitterati remains a small but vocal segment of the Internet, identify trends and riding them for brief cycles.
This week represents the motherload of all Twitter cycles, as the Twitterati descend upon San Diego [...]

Case in Point: When marketers underestimate their audience

One of my deepest passions is gaming, and I have a particular love for casual games since they are great pick-up-and-play options for busy gamers like myself. I developed and maintain BusyGamerNews.com to help other likeminded gamers find resources to keep up with gaming news and to advocate on their behalf.
So when I find a code for [...]

Introducing The Writer’s Bloc

Welcome to our Seattle-based consulting company home page. But we’re more than just consultants. We’re scribes, community experts, project managers and social networking afficionados. We want to share back some of the ideas we develop in the course of our daily work.
So we have relaunched this site as a blog where we can tell you some of [...]



© 2009-2010 Dave and Jacqui Kramer dba The Writer's Bloc.