Focus on the Customer

Sometimes you have to be bad in the service of being good, say coauthors and cofounders Frances Frei (a professor at Harvard Business School) and Anne Morriss. To research their book, Uncommon Service: How to Win By Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business, they conducted a study of companies large and small around the world. The number one obstacle that organizations were coming up against time and time again? Trying to be great at everything at once.Frei and Morris’ advice: rather than trying to do it all, pick one essential thing and do it really well. Take, for example, Commerce Bank. They chose to focus their efforts on customer service, and within that bucket to compete on friendliness and convenience. In this lesson, Anne Morriss walks you through their strategy. By the end of it, you’ll have a framework for rethinking your own customer service strategy.Practice friendliness, convenience, and respect.Make trade-offs that make your customers happy.Service with a smile ...

We’re in the second wave of the digital revolution, says Ralph Rivera, the BBC’s Director of Digital––but not everybody knows that yet.In the first wave, analog businesses started websites and established an online presence, in most cases doing whatever they’d already been doing, but in the digital space. Newspapers became online newspapers. Online television channels showed the same TV programs, online.Take advantage of connectivityThe first wave of digitization involved offline industries moving online. The new phase involves conceiving of online ideas that are not possible offline.Connectivity defines the new era. Engaging directly with individuals or audiences provides valuable data streams. Develop an identity system that allows you to cater service to the individual. Be cognizant of your customer touchpoints. Does customer behavior in one area reveal opportunity in another?Gather the right amount of dataBalance the perceived cost of your data collection with the perceived...

As former CEO, Sir Terry Leahy, took the British retail giant Tesco from a struggling company to become Britain’s largest private employer and the third-largest supermarket in the world. In this lesson, he explains why Tesco’s improved customer service offerings led to greater customer loyalty. By the end of it, you’ll have a deeper understanding of the logic behind loyalty programming.Make customer service a key part of your value proposition.Listen, adapt and respond to customers’ needs.Provide them with benefits.Find the truth.

In a long and successful advertising career, much of it spent in Hong Kong, Tom Doctoroff has managed to avoid many of the marketing pitfalls that Western brands often fall prey to in China. In this module, he teaches you just how drastically Western cultural assumptions differ from those of the Chinese. Because no matter how badly we Westerners may want to believe that each of us is free from any culturally stereotypical thinking, that idea is itself a Western construct, and proof that exactly the opposite is true.