Experience Blog

The Ethnography of Experience

Posts tagged customer experience
Intersectionality and COVID-19 - Multiple Voices and Divergent Experiences

Developed by attorney Kimberle Crenshaw, intersectionality underscores the “multidimensionality of marginalized subjects lived experiences.” It was first conceptualized around how race and gender intersect with one another, leading to Black women having unique experiences related to other women. We are living in a moment that matters, but differently for different groups. Use the concept of intersectionality to drive your organizational and community response in order to take steps to best get through this historical time.

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From Call Center to Experience Center: The Elevation of Marginalized Work

When you think of call center work, what comes to mind? If you are like most people, the images are not very favorable. However, perhaps no group is as responsible for the image your customers have about your company and brand. Companies need to capture this reality, elevate ‘call centers’ into ‘experience centers’ and turn their staff into knowledge workers.

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Living in the Narrows: Mutual Misery and Relationship Building at Zappos

Conversation analysis is a tool that can help us understand how to engineer better conversations to build relationships and rapport not matter the topic. As Madison shows us, it doesn’t necessarily take a lot of speech to accomplish a lot of work. When we can engage in our conversations consciously and deliberately, we are in a better position to do as Madison does, and build better relationships with everyone in our lives. See how e can apply CA to a brief exchange between a contact center work and customer to unlock the power behind these moments.

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Delta Blues: Missing Those Moments that Matter

Travelling is hard. Travelling with a child is harder. Travelling with a child to attend her grandmother’s funeral is even harder still. Travelling with said child to catch a 7:00am flight? Forget about it. Read how one small interaction can make the difference in a person’s day, missing those moments that matter can hurt your brand, and how on-line responses can exacerbate that problem.

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The HR Roots of Customer Experience

Where does customer experience live? For those who are CX professionals, they would like it to live in the hearts and minds of all workers in an organization. But, where in an organization does it live? And why does that matter? More specifically, what role does human resources play in customer experience? This was the topic of conversation at our most recent CX Frontiers.

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Race and Customer Experience

Customers are not only made and lost, they are also constructed and deconstructed in the point of contact. Watch Gary give a talk at the American Sociological Association meeting (appropriately in Philadelphia, home of the Starbucks incident) about how race factors into customer standing. Using cell phone footage posted online, he explores what can happen when a person's skin can become more important than his or her standing as a customer. 

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The Customer is Always Right (Except for All Those Other Times)

The customer is always right, right? Or perhaps it is not that easy. We collected some industry expert as in our first CX Frontiers event to explore this axiom of service and sales, finding the boundaries of where it applies and where it fails. Read the key take-away points that the experts settled on from their own experience in working with customers, clients, and crafting experiences.

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Brand Knew

The following is a guest blog by Rebecca Tinkleman, a graduate student in the Human Factors in Information Design MA program at Bentley University. Rebecca produced a wonderful ethnography on the Park Slope Coop, located in Brooklyn, NY. What is striking about her work is the extent to which the coop seems to violate every pretense of customer experience that we might think matters and is essential. Nevertheless, customers have a very strong loyalty to and identification with the coop. In this blog, Rebecca explores the reasons for this commitment to the coop.

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In Praise of the Mundane

An experience arms race is heating up. Companies are being faced with the challenge of trying to provide not only timely service and quality products, but also an “experience.” Staging experiences can be tricky business when considering that others are trying to stage their own experiences. In a frantic world of constant demands and changing terrain, sometimes you just want the mundane experience.

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The Social Status of Being a Customer

Defining what it means to be a “customer” should be relatively straightforward. A quick internet search for “customer” shows it can be defined as “a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business.” You come to a store to purchase something, and you are a customer.  Coming on the heels of Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday and coming up on Black History Month, it is a good time to consider the tenuous social status of being a customer.

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