We all know that in today’s increasingly competitive arenas it is essential to not only meet our customer’s expectations but to exceed them. We know that our customer’s experiences will most likely have a great influence on their personal networks and their peers.
We need all the help we can get to achieve and then maintain a very high level of customer service in order to ensure loyalty and positive word-of-mouth promotion.
Luckily for us there is an abundance of excellent guidance and reliable information that we can use to devise winning Customer Experience strategies. But sometimes an abundance of information can be bewildering, making it difficult to know which CX blog or expert is the best to read. So we have carefully selected a short list of what we consider to be some of the best customer experience blogs to read and monitor. This is, of course, a subjective shortlist and there are many additional CX blogs and podcasts which are worthwhile reading (or viewing and listening).
Forrester Blog
Forrester is a widely respected USA based market research organisation providing proprietary research and advice to clients and the public. It operates multiple research centers in the United States, Europe and Asia. They provide research and analysis services as well as events and consultancy services.
Their widely respected blog publishes content from a variety of authors on an extensive range of topics including technology, online marketing, customer experience and innovation.
Some of their most popular blog content includes:
- Sales Digital Transformation: It’s Now Or Never!
- Industrial Firms Must Embrace Digital As They Evolve From Grease To Code
- Drive More Impact From Data And Analytics With Insights Storytelling
- Ready To Get Serious About Customer Obsession? Start By Benchmarking Against Peers
- The Recent NPS Debate – What You Should Really Know
As you can see, they cover a range of topics from their blog. Here are just a few of their recent CX related posts which we have found useful.
- Customer Experience Index Reveals Brands Lack Human Connection
- Predictions 2019: Customer Experience Comes Under Fire
- Real-Time Customer Experience
- Back2Basics: Why B2B Marketers Should Differentiate On Customer Experience
Zendesk Blog
We are big fans of Zendesk, not least because their excellent customer service and engagement platform is recognised as one of the very best software solutions available today. And it integrates beautifully with Customer Thermometer.
We also love the Zendesk blog which provides some truly actionable guidance and insightful posts on a wide range of CX and technology related topics.
Some of their most popular blog content includes:
- Stairway to success: How to grow in your support role
- Businesses are made up of people
- Execs need to be the kind of leaders people want to follow
- What if language wasn’t a barrier for customer support?
- Using more than technical skills to solve technical issues
These are all great and well worth a read. But here are just a few of their recent, excellent customer experience blog posts which will be of interest to anyone dealing with CX.
- 10 Customer experience KPIs
- How a great customer experience comes from chat support
- 5 ways that AI is already benefitting the customer experience
CustomerThink Blog
CustomerThink is described as a global online community of business leaders. The site offers content across a range of topics including customer experience, customer engagement and technology. We love that this site provides some great advice and guidance on everything from SEO to leadership. The CustomerThink blog publishes content from various knowledgeable and authoritative authors.
The following popular articles demonstrate the breadth of the blog content:
- How Coupons Can Be a Marketing Weapon On Restaurant Marketing Arsenal?
- Design-Based Process Improvement
- What Is Machine Learning and Deep Learning and How to Use Them?
- Top 10 Challenges to Practicing Data Science at Work
- 10 Things You Need to Know About AI, Big Data, and Analytics in 2018
Here are a few of our favourite CX articles, from various respected authors.
- How Do You Measure #CX Success?
- Why Can’t We Get Customer Experience Right?
- Use Machine-Assisted Predictive Analytics to Capture Your Customer’s Heart, Mind, and Pocketbook!
Shep Hyken’s Customer Service Blog
Shep Hyken is a well known and well respected customer experience and service expert whose blog just had to be included in this shortlist. He is particularly well known as a motivational and insightful speaker who provides real-world, actionable insight, used by many businesses and organisations to massively improve their customer experience.
Here’s just a selection of some of the most popular content from Shep which we have enjoyed this year:
- Treat Your Current Customers Better than Your New Customers
- $75 Billion Dollars Is Lost Due To Poor Customer Service
- How To Get More Customers To Take Your Surveys
- Three C’S Of Customer Service Success
- “That’S Not My Department” And 10 Other Phrases Customers Hate
We particularly like the amusing, illustrative cartoons used in most of Shep’s posts. They always make us chuckle.
HeartoftheCustomer CX Blog
Jim Tincher, a certified customer experience professional, is the man behind HeartoftheCustomer.com. Under the ‘resources’ section of his website you will find some valuable case-studies along with a number of thought leadership white papers which are all well worth checking out.
But for this article we are focused on his excellent CX-Blog. Although it’s not updated as often as many, the quality of the content is very high. Here are some of the posts which we have appreciated.
- CX + EX (Employee Experience) = Great Experiences
- Social Proof: A Powerful, but Underutilized, CX Tool
- Do airports care about CX? Should they?
- Why do you need to talk to customers?
CustomerBliss Blog
CustomerBliss.com is the website of customer service expert Jeanne Bliss. She is a well known speaker with a track record in improving customer relations, developing customer loyalty and engagement.
Her regularly updated blog is full of excellent articles and videos – great for those times when you would rather watch than read. These include some fantastic guest posts from respected authors. Here’s a small selection of posts which we think you will enjoy.
- Take These 3 Actions To Prevent Customer Experience Implosion
- How To Understand And Engage The Outliers In Your Organization
- The Importance Of Simplicity In Customer Experience
- My Rock, My Story: How Airbnb Uses Customer Listening To Determine Goals
- Inspire A Customer Service Mentality In Your Organization
CX-Journey Blog
Annette Franz is the customer experience strategy consultant behind CX-Journey.com. She is well known for her expertise in transforming business cultures to ensure customer centricity.
Here’s a small selection of recent CX-journey blog posts which we have found insightful and useful. Some of these were featured as guest posts on other well known CX blogs.
- How Do We Ensure Employees are Happy and Engaged?
- Do Leaders Really Care About Their Employees?
- How Do You Measure #CX Success?
- 7 Customer Experience Strategies You Can Hack from Amazon
- Developing Your #CustomerExperience Strategy
Hopefully you will have found some of these blogs and blog posts useful and interesting. We apologise if your favourite CX blog has not been included in our shortlist but there are just so many excellent blogs to choose from we just had to be quite selective.
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