Total CX

Holiday Shopping Fever!

What did you do after stuffing your face with turkey and all the fixings? If you’re like most of us in the U.S., you shopped! In-store, online, or combining the two, alone, or with family members, the call of the sale price lured us in as we fought our way out of our food comas and football immersions.

Patty Seybold has identified a number of shopping trends surfaced by the sales statistics that have resulted from Black Friday thru Cyber Monday, including:

1. Social shopping with family members and friends.
2. Shared online shopping using tablets that get passed around to show each other things they’re interested in.
3. Earlier retail openings on Thanksgiving evening.
4. In-store group shopping with someone as the smartphone guru, responsible for price checking, while other family members use their phones for logistics and coordination.
5. Solo Cyber Monday shopping focused on getting the best deals.
6. Online retailers offering waves of deals throughout the long weekend to encourage shoppers to visit their sites often.
7. Bricks and mortar retailers willing to match prices from price comparison tools.

So, did you follow the trends? If you’re like me, you will be getting very chummy with the UPS delivery person over the next few weeks as I revel in my online shopping deals.

~ Ronni

Shopping Smarter with Mobile Devices Changes the Face of Holiday Shopping
Mobile Makes Its Mark on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday Sales in 2012
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, November 29, 2012

How does consumers’ use of mobile devices change the way they shop? The detailed shopping statistics from the five-day kick-off of the 2012 holiday shopping season gives us some clues. “Couch Commerce” was popular on Thanksgiving, as friends and family passed computer tablets around. Price comparisons on mobile apps helped in-store shoppers find the best deals. On Cyber Monday, power shoppers used laptops and tablets more than phones to grab deals.

Read a sample and download the full article in PDF.

 

Capturing Customers’ Emotions During Co-Design

By Patricia Seybold

Ronni Marshak continues looking at how customer emotions impact their relationships with your organizations and your brands. In an enhancement to our Customer Co-Design methodology, Customer Scenario^® Mapping, we encourage capturing how customers might feel depending on how well you help them achieve their goals. Doing so can give you a line of site from customer priorities through your bottom-line opportunities based not only on how they measure success, but also on how they are feeling while doing business with you.

~ Patty

Assigning Emotions to Moments of Truth
Enhancing Customer Scenario^® Mapping by Capturing Feelings
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, November 15, 2012

Customers are people first and foremost. And their emotions come into play as they traverse their scenarios to their desired goals. Capturing how customers might feel depending on how well you help them achieve their goals can give you a line of site from customer priorities through your bottom-line opportunities based not only on how they measure success, but also on how they are feeling while doing business with you.

Read a sample and download the full report in PDF.

Groupon Gets Clear About Its Recommendations for You

I always assumed that the Groupon offers I was sent every day were based on location: these were the offers for my neighborhood. But I was surprised, and pleased, to see that Groupon is using a recommendations engine to determine offers I would find appealing. The primary daily deal in my in box now includes a statement saying, “Suggested for you because you purchased XXX.” (See illustration.)

I am, however, confused. The offer below is for a Tex Mex restaurant, whereas the recommendation is based on my purchase of a deal for an upscale Italian restaurant in a different town.

By coincidence, the new deal is for a restaurant down the street from me that I quite enjoy. However, I don’t really follow the logic of the recommendation criteria.

Nevertheless, bravo to Groupon for showing customers why it is highlighting specific offers.

Eliminating Customer Anxiety

In this week’s report, I talk about paying attention to customers’ emotions as they do business with you. How fortuitous to receive an excellent example of how one financial provider thought about customers in a crisis situation and made a strategic decision to take one burden off of them as they face the storm—literally.

As a Chase credit card customer, I received the following email on Monday, 10/29/2012 at 7:14 PM, shortly after Hurricane Sandy violent hitting the Massachusetts shore.

We hope you, your families and your customers are safe. Natural disasters are very stressful and we want to help where we can.

This week, we are expanding our efforts to help you and all of our customers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as you manage through the storm.

• We are waiving the following Chase fees through Wednesday, October 31st for customers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Please know that you'll have until the end of business on Thursday to make a deposit or a payment to bring your account current and avoid the fees.
  • Overdraft Protection Transfer, Extended Overdraft, Returned Item and Insufficient Funds Fees for deposit accounts.
  • Late fees on credit cards, business and consumer loans, including mortgages, home-equity, auto and student loans.
• Please visit chase.com frequently and check our branch locator for details on the branches near you.