Tag: CustomerExperience

Most companies manage their identity through language. They develop mission statements, brand voice guides, and value propositions. However, these messages often lose their meaning when people repeat them without conviction. What actually builds trust is something different. A strong brand identity often connects to something people can hold, rather than something they are simply told.

Black Friday has become one of the biggest retail events on the South African calendar. What began as a single day of discounted shopping has evolved into weeks of deals. Retailers and e-tailers now promote offers across online and brick-and-mortar channels throughout Cyber Monday. Some even run ‘Black November’ campaigns.

Liverpool Football Club (FC) plays in a stadium that holds just over 60,000 people, but its fan base runs into the hundreds of millions. That gap creates a problem the club cannot solve through football alone. While a crowd in a stadium moves together, a global following does not. It spreads across time zones, devices, habits and local gatherings. Each supporter experiences the club in a different way.

We have concluded a first-of-its-kind benchmark study focused on how employees experience technology across eight major institutions in the Financial Services Industry (FSI). The Employee Technology Experience Index (TEXI) measured employee sentiment across eight core technology categories. It used a standardised scoring methodology. The findings reveal the scale of the cost.

Connecting to a real-time payment rail is the straightforward part. Delivering an experience that genuinely feels instant is where the real work and the competitive advantage lie. There is plenty of excitement about real-time payment rails at the moment. Most of it is justified. Moving money in seconds rather than days changes what a business can offer the people it serves.

For hospitality businesses, a reservation is much more than a booking. It represents a prepared room, a reserved table, an allocated guide or a carefully planned experience. When guests fail to arrive, businesses lose the opportunity to generate revenue from that space. Ultimately, the cost of an empty seat extends well beyond the booking itself.

What is the biggest benefit of your customer portal? Is it the cost and efficiency savings you achieve by reducing reliance on call centre staff? Or perhaps it is the increase in customer satisfaction that comes from allowing customers to manage their accounts on their own terms, whenever it suits them?

Digitalisation has brought, and continues to bring, sweeping advancements in how companies go to market and how customers engage with brands. Agentic AI is now poised to disrupt even these developments. As a result, organisations are scrambling to invest in the "next big thing" because they fear being left behind. However, history shows that when speed becomes associated with winning, companies often blur the line between operational effectiveness and strategy.

Most loyalty programmes are built once and then applied across the board. While this approach may seem logical from an efficiency perspective, what works in aviation does not carry into hospitality or retail. Yet many programmes are still built as though customer behaviour follows a single pattern.

The Chief Marketing Officer role has transformed - but most organisations are still hiring as if it hasn’t. Artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones, social media, influencers and shifting customer expectations have transformed the way growth is achieved. Yet many organisations continue to misunderstand the evolution of the role.