A few gems from my content curation site on Customer Experience Marketing:

From Inc Magazine:

Author Geoffrey James sees things differently than I do about branding, but sometimes it is useful to see what the “other side” thinks … to challenge our own thinking. I agree with his conclusion that brand is about the customer’s experience with the product. I disagree that this is the only thing that counts. And without brand building awareness and lead generation, there might be no customers to experience your brand. Nevertheless, here’s his comments from prestigious Inc. Magazine:

Bottomline: Your brand is the emotion that a customer feels when thinking about your product.

That’s it. Neither more nor less. And that’s why “branding” is so impotent.

While it is true that branding can associate an emotion with a product, especially when pointed at highly impressionable buyers (e.g. young men who watch beer ads), in the vast realm of B2B sales and even in most consumer markets, there is one, and only one, thing that creates customer emotion: the customer’s experience with your product.

From Impact Blog! –

If you want to provide great customer service, the first thing that you should know is that it’s no longer good enough to answer questions in conventional channels (email and phone, or in person) or at conventional times (during work hours, perhaps on weekends.) Twitter in particular is a channel for customer response that’s changed the expectations of customer service most dramatically, and forever. Your customers talk to you on Twitter because they feel it’s an immediate connection to the people in your company who can solve their problem.

Fine. What does that mean? First of all, it means that the expectations for the timeliness and breadth of your customer service have become headline driven. Can you answer the customer, respond in the appropriate tone, and/or redirect the issue with valuable content in under 140 characters? That’s what your customer expects

From CRM Advocate:

What’s Our Super Glue of Customer Experience?

Here is some of the super glue of customer experience …

1. Being remembered beyond the name. When customers’ preferences are recalled in real time — not just noted in a database that the customers completed themselves — there is a sense of belonging.

2. Easy to do business with. The definition of easy varies by customer base including generations, occupational focus, educational background. Everything online may seem easy to one generation and maddening to another. Nonetheless, easy will always be at the top of the list.

Related posts:

1. Keywords and Customer-centricity
2. Discover Card has evolved into a Customer Experience Company
3. Net Promoter Benchmark Reports Highlight Customer Experience Leaders in Financial Services, Telecommunications, Technology and Online Services