Customer Experience Journal - 6 Levels Of Proactive Support

6 Levels Of Proactive Support

February 2011

Greetings!

It's been a been a crazy month with all of the snow storms across the U.S. I hope that you stayed warm, dry, and were able to get wherever you wanted to go. Luckily, I made it to all of my client engagements in New York, Toronto, Miami, and Phoenix.

I just agreed to to participate on a panel at South by Southwest (SXSW) next month in Austin. I'm looking forward to my first visit to SXSW. The topic of the panel is proactive support.

Have you heard of the term "proactive support?" Well, it's been floating around for a while and many companies talk about it. But "proactiveness" is not a single attribute, it's a spectrum. So I recently defined 6 levels of proactive support:

New Research: Online Gift Card Experiences

We published a new Temkin Group report, Online Experiences For Gift Card Buying Need Work, that used our SLICE-B experience framework to grade the experiences of 12 company websites. Outback Steakhouse and Radio Shack came out on top while Safeway and Chili's came out on the bottom.

Here are the overall results:

Online Gift Card Results

New Blog Posts

One of my most-read recent posts showed a wide degree of variance in the staffing levels across voice of the customer (VoC) programs. Only one-quarter of VoC programs at large companies have six or more full-time employees.

Here are some other recent posts from the Customer Experience Matters blog that you might want to check out:

AA Site Showcases Design Of Little Things. Highlights how small changes, like one made by American Airlines on its website, can have a large impact.
Even Walmart Needs To Reassert Its Brand. Discusses how Walmart lost its way in winning the low-price positioning. The post also includes 6 questions that need to be regularly answered about your brand.
I Am The Customer Experience... Not! Describes how an American Airlines employee distanced himself from a nearby sign at the airport.
Quick 6 with customer experience leaders. This series of posts is a Q&A with different customer experience leaders. Learn more about these execs:

Don't forget to checkout the "Planning For 2011" category of posts that help develop your customer experience plans.

Temkin Group Update

If you're looking to accelerate your organization's customer experience transformation in 2011, here are a number of the ways that Temkin Group can help:

Assessments of customer experience efforts, to identify gaps and opportunities to accelerate your transformation efforts
Speeches and webinars on a wide range of customer experience and leadership topics
Interactive workshops for executive teams or other groups to gain alignment around key customer experience principles and priorities or to develop plans in areas such as voice of the customer programs
Educational curriculum to establish and reinforce an understanding of proven customer experience principles across an organization
Strategy reviews of marketing and product plans for vendors who want to help companies transform their customer experience