almohannad.cx

Articles

78 articles originally published in Arabic on LinkedIn and translated to English, across two themes: customer experience, and marketing research & metrics.

Customer Experience November 2022

The Patient Experience Through the Eyes of the Human Doctor

On a recent visit to my uncle in Jeddah, I wanted to learn about the patient experience through the eyes of a human doctor who has spent over forty years in this humanitarian profession (from 1979 to this day). He…
Customer Experience April 2022

The Waiting Experience

Waiting for the maghrib (sunset) call to prayer during the blessed month of Ramadan reminded me of the waiting experience, and of how many organisations across every sector are working to address waiting as a pain point…
Customer Experience October 2021

Customer Experience Awards

What is the purpose of customer experience awards? What is the purpose for the organizers, and what is the purpose for the participants? Start with the why, as the great author Simon Sinek always advises. In this…
Customer Experience October 2021

Empathy - The Number One Skill

Everyone has heard the saying "walk in the customer's shoes" — but many don't fully grasp what it means or what its purpose is. Today's article is about the most important skill or personality trait for elevating the…
Customer Experience July 2021

Customer Experience with Call Center Companies

Many call center companies are trying to enter the customer experience space and offer CX-related services because of the many overlaps between the two fields (customer service and customer experience). However, the…
Customer Experience December 2020

Customer Experience Strategy

Today's article is about how to develop a customer experience strategy at any company. It's directed at practitioners in the field, and I'll lay it out in sequential sections to make the concept as simple as possible.…
Customer Experience September 2020

World Customer Experience Day

The first Tuesday of October each year marks World Customer Experience Day — this year, October 6. Devoting a specific day of the year to a cause or product is a long-standing tradition; the primary aim is to remind the…
Customer Experience August 2020

Her Experience

The stereotype around women's spending habits is distorted — formed by male dominance in many countries. One of the most popular and most incorrect stereotypes is that women are completely unwise when it comes to…
Customer Experience May 2020

The Customer Experience Council

In today's article, I'll cover one of the recognized practices in customer experience: the so-called Customer Experience Council. This article is aimed at fellow practitioners as well as executives across all companies.…
Customer Experience May 2020

Managing Customer Experience in B2B

I was asked about the difference between managing customer experience at companies that serve individuals (B2C) versus those whose customers are other businesses (B2B). I didn't have a complete answer at the time, until…
Customer Experience April 2020

If Customer Experience Were a Girl, I'd Marry Her

One of the most common questions in qualitative research to define a brand's personality is: "If the brand were a person, how would you describe them?" I asked myself the same question, trying to describe the ideal CX…
Customer Experience April 2020

With Yourself, Not With the Customer

One of the most widely cited statistics is from a Bain & Company survey of CEOs at 362 companies. 80% of them claimed they delivered an outstanding customer experience. But when their customers were asked, it turned out…
Customer Experience March 2020

The Customer Experience Theater

Imagine for a moment that your company is a media company that produces theatrical plays. What if I told you that, in a sense, it actually is? Many customer experience practitioners use the analogy that "companies stage…
Customer Experience July 2019

Are All Salespeople Liars?

The stereotype of salespeople and marketers is often negative, owing to the misguided practices of their predecessors going back to the 1970s. Those practices accumulated to form a poor stereotype about them and about…
Marketing Research & Metrics June 2019

The Product Premiumization Strategy

Consumers make purchasing decisions using one main criterion: value for money. The greater the value a consumer perceives in a product, the more they are willing to pay for it. The premiumization strategy is applied in…
Customer Experience June 2019

Bad Profits

Bad Profit This term comes up across many customer experience books and articles I've read. Convinced of its importance and negative impact on customer experience, I wanted to write an article on it with several real…
Customer Experience May 2019

Customer Experience Ambassadors

Many practitioners in customer experience (the target audience of this article) face various challenges in their journey to drive change in the company's culture and its outlook toward customers. Although many companies…
Customer Experience July 2018

It's Not My Problem

One day I had a problem with the famous crowdfunding site Kickstarter. I had backed a project and never received the product sample I was promised. I complained directly to the site, and their response was shocking: the…
Customer Experience December 2017

Dear Customer: I Have Bad News

The day will inevitably come when we have to tell our customers bad news — whether it's a price hike due to inflation or a service being discontinued for one reason or another. At that moment, we have two choices: act…
Customer Experience October 2017

The Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Experience

People often conflate customer service with customer experience management, despite the substantive differences between them. In this article, I'll try to lay out the most important distinctions to clear up the…
Customer Experience December 2016

The Goldfish Memory

Some writers compare companies that don't manage their customer relationships well and don't keep records of their interactions to companies with "goldfish memory" — the goldfish being known for an extremely short…
Customer Experience November 2016

Introduction to Employee Experience Management

Delivering a distinguished employee experience is a prerequisite for delivering a distinguished customer experience. The employee is the one who creates that experience, and because they are at the frontline, they are…
Customer Experience October 2016

The Customer Is Not Always Right

Most readers have probably read or heard the famous saying: "The customer is always right." It's a rule that doesn't deserve to be generalized — every rule has its exceptions. Over time, customers are becoming more…
Customer Experience October 2016

Customer Journey Map

Do you know the details of your customer's journey if you own a business that provides services or products? Are you sure you know? Even those who answer yes may be stunned once they actually map their customers'…
Customer Experience August 2016

Customer Experience at Starbucks

The success that Starbucks has achieved, and the wide spread of its branches around the world, invites reflection. What made coffee — a drink humans have been consuming for hundreds of years — sell at Starbucks for ten…
Customer Experience February 2016

Zero Moment of Truth

I previously wrote about Moments of Truth in an earlier article. While writing that piece, something caught my attention: a concept Google calls the "Zero Moment of Truth." I wanted to share what I learned about it…
Marketing Research & Metrics December 2015

Introduction to Desk Research

Introduction to Desk Research (AKA Secondary Research) Through my posts and articles I try to simplify the specialized topics of the marketing-research industry and make them accessible to a general audience — a process…
Marketing Research & Metrics December 2015

Response Rates by Data Collection Method

A question constantly comes up in the minds of those working in research, without a clear answer: what response rate you can expect when using a particular data-collection method in quantitative research. In this…
Customer Experience November 2015

Customer Satisfaction vs Customer Loyalty

These two are the most well-known indicators for measuring customer experience performance. So what is the relationship between them? Is it direct or inverse? Have you ever wondered? That's what I'll discuss in today's…
Marketing Research & Metrics July 2015

Using Verbatim Quotes in Quantitative and Qualitative Reports

This article will cover three main axes: what a verbatim quote is, on what basis a particular verbatim quote is chosen for citation, considerations researchers should bear in mind when picking verbatim quotes, and…
Marketing Research & Metrics July 2015

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The first peer-reviewed scientific paper on this metric was published in the Harvard Business Review in 2003, titled The One Number You Need to Grow, by Frederick Reichheld. After that article, many related studies and…
Marketing Research & Metrics July 2015

The Halo Effect

The halo effect is a cognitive bias that leads us to favor all of a person's traits because we have been influenced by one positive trait of theirs — without ever testing their other qualities or verifying whether they…
Customer Experience

Designing the Small Details

In the field of customer experience management, there is what's known as Design of Little Things (DoLT) — the small touches and minor adjustments that can leave a major mark on the customer experience. These are often…
Customer Experience

The Drama Triangle

Drama Triangle by Dr. Stephen Karpman The Drama Triangle is a social model that summarizes the most destructive interactions in human relationships. It consists of patterns of negative communication that focus either on…
Customer Experience

Terms and Conditions Apply

As customers, reviewing the terms and conditions is one of the touchpoints (interactions) within the customer journey, particularly in the service sector. The first impression most readers get from this article's title…
Customer Experience

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

The fisherman starts with simple tools and catches small quantities of fish. As the days pass, he learns multiple methods, his expertise grows, and his toolbox expands. Sometimes he sails near the coasts, sometimes in…
Customer Experience

Startups with a Customer-Centric Mindset

One evening, I was sipping tea with a friend, the founder of a startup whose team you could count on your fingers. He was talking with enthusiasm about his absolute belief in customer experience principles, and how he…
Customer Experience

The Worshipper's Experience

When I was a child, I used to accompany my father every Friday to the mosque. He always sparked my curiosity, and perhaps weighed down my childhood with questions bigger than my years: how could the children of Muslim…
Customer Experience

Deploying AI in Customer Experience

On the sidelines of my participation as a speaker in a panel discussion at the CX World Forum, I wanted to share an article about the topic so the benefit can spread and those who missed the chance to attend the…
Customer Experience

UX Writing

All the digital interfaces of websites, apps, and software — which have become an integral part of our lives — I used to browse in English, despite my love for and pride in the Arabic language. The problem was glaringly…
Customer Experience

How Do We Bridge the Generation Gap

I was twenty-three years old when I bought my first smart device. When my thirteen-year-old daughter asked me to buy her a smart device, I couldn't very well tell her to wait ten years. My generation, which only dealt…
Customer Experience

Managing Expectations

Customer experience is defined as: "The impressions and feelings produced by a comparison that the customer makes, consciously and subconsciously, between their expectations and the reality of their experience." From…
Customer Experience

Why Companies Fail to Deliver Exceptional Experiences

In this article, I want to talk about why companies and institutions fail to deliver exceptional experiences. But first, you have to know that customer experience is a responsibility that sits on everyone's shoulders, a…
Customer Experience

The Car That's Allergic to Ice Cream

The Pontiac, or "the car that's allergic to ice cream", was one of the car models manufactured and launched by General Motors in 1925, with production eventually ending in 2010. The story began with a complaint sent in…
Customer Experience

The Experience of People with Disabilities

A few years ago, I was diagnosed with a herniated disc (slipped disc), and I was advised not to lift anything heavy so that my condition wouldn't worsen. Around that time, while shopping at one of the global furniture…
Customer Experience

Michelin Stars - The Restaurant Sector

The story of the Michelin Guide, the most authoritative restaurant guide in the world, began somewhere between 1888 and 1900, when the brothers André and Édouard Michelin decided to put together a guide for petrol…
Customer Experience

Ignoring Customers

It happens that some service providers ignore customers — intentionally or unintentionally — without realizing the danger of this behavior for the future of the relationship between the brand and the customer. The…
Customer Experience

The Difference Between Brand Experience and Customer Experience

Brand experience specialists work to make their brand easily distinguishable, so the audience can recognize it through specific traits or through the tone of voice used across the channels where the brand lives and…
Customer Experience

Dying Surveys and Soulless Reports

For years, we've faced challenges getting valuable insights and information from customers about their experiences — and later challenges packaging research outputs into formats appealing enough to drive stakeholders to…
Marketing Research & Metrics

Best Practices

Think about resource-poor countries that are economically thriving. Look for the reasons behind their success and excellence. What made a country like Switzerland the world's leader in chocolate production? What made a…
Customer Experience

The Story of Johnny the Bag Packer

This is a true story about a young man with Down syndrome who created a transformation in customer service at the store where he worked (the cover image shows the young man with the storyteller). This story inspired the…
Marketing Research & Metrics

Marketing Research Applications in the Restaurant Sector

In this article I'll cover some applications of marketing research in the restaurant world. Competition in this industry is fierce, and survival belongs to the most worthy and the smartest. The article isn't aimed only…
Customer Experience

Fool, Tamees, and Hala Bil Khamees

Note: The title is a colloquial Saudi rhyme referring to the old leisurely public-sector morning routine — fool [fava beans] and tamees [bread] for breakfast, with everyone counting down to Thursday (the weekend). It's…
Marketing Research & Metrics

Using Satisfaction and Loyalty Metrics as Employee KPIs

What are the pros and cons of using satisfaction and loyalty metrics as employee KPIs? Is it appropriate to use them at all? How can a corporate performance management or strategy function decide whether to adopt them…
Customer Experience

Get Out of Your Ivory Towers

All of an organization's leaders — and at their head, the CEO — are the first and last people responsible for the organization's success in delivering distinctive customer experience. They do this by leading by example:…
Marketing Research & Metrics

Historical Evolution of Financial Marketing Research

In this article I'll cover marketing research in banking, its historical evolution, how it has developed alongside customers' evolving needs over the years, and what direction it is expected to take in the future. Some…
Marketing Research & Metrics

Happiness Index

Research centers conduct many studies to assess countries and measure their level of development. One of the newer growth indicators is the Happiness Index. Some readers may ask why these centers care about running such…
Marketing Research & Metrics

American Customer Satisfaction Index

I mentioned the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) in a previous article as a credible reference that can be relied upon when you want to use benchmarking indicators — provided its use is widespread enough in…
Customer Experience

Customer Experience Centers

Customer Experience Centers (CECs) Customer Experience Centers have spread around the world recently. Their main aim is to enrich the relationship between customers and the providers of products and services, and to…
Marketing Research & Metrics

Benchmarking Indicators

Today's article is about benchmarking indicators and their uses in the marketing-research industry. To begin, I'd like to clarify that the term Benchmarks has different connotations across industries. In marketing…
Customer Experience

Fairness in Customer and Employee Experience

Have you ever received a call from a company telling you that, based on your usage, they recommend a different package that would cost you less? Or that they're suspending a service because you haven't used it in a long…
Marketing Research & Metrics

The Most Common Writing Errors

Translator's note: This article addresses common errors in Arabic writing. The grammar rules and examples below are specific to Arabic script and morphology and have been preserved in their original form alongside their…
Customer Experience

Customer Ratings and Reviews

Customer behavior — particularly that of Millennials (those born between 1976 and 2000) — shows a strong tendency to search online for almost anything before buying or trying it. Reviews from customers who have already…
Marketing Research & Metrics

Microsoft Enters the Marketing Research World

Microsoft recently launched a new product. You can watch the teaser video at this link. I seized the opportunity and signed up for this service, since registering and using it is currently free. This service offers many…
Customer Experience

Citizen Experience

With the evolution of theories related to customer experience, the development of human participation and human-centered design models, and growing consumer awareness and intensifying competition among countries…
Marketing Research & Metrics

In Small-Sample Research - How to Reach the Fairest Satisfaction Score

It was a long journey that I went on to answer this question. The problem lies in the methodology that should be used to obtain the most accurate measurement of satisfaction for customers whose sample is small. I…
Customer Experience

Robert McNamara's Quantitative Fallacy

Robert McNamara is a Harvard graduate who headed Ford and served as US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, then as President of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. The fallacy concerns decision-making that relies…
Customer Experience

The Simplest Time Management Model

The origins of this model appear to go back to the 34th president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower. It's called the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, and it's referenced in many books. I'll summarize it below — it's…
Marketing Research & Metrics

The Top Ten Specialized Associations in Marketing Research

Many associations around the world serve the marketing-research industry and try to organize and improve it as much as possible. In this post, I'll put together a list of the most important relevant associations.…
Customer Experience

Measuring Emotions

Ever since specialists in the human sciences realized that humans are emotional beings, marketers on the other side started inventing ways to measure these emotions for multiple reasons — improving sales, developing…
Marketing Research & Metrics

Brand Naming and the Role of Marketing Research

"Naming a brand isn't like naming a baby." — Hayes Roth, Chief Marketing Officer at Landor The aim of this article is to lay out methods for naming brands and the techniques for generating and creating names, in…
Customer Experience

Customer Charter

A customer charter is a document that defines the minimum levels of service the issuing entity commits to providing its customers. Through this document, customer expectations are shaped — it explains the services they…
Customer Experience

Customer Loyalty - Behavior or Attitude

We use many metrics to measure customer loyalty — whether to predict expected growth or to monitor performance compared with competitors. While these metrics are important and there are statistically proven correlations…
Marketing Research & Metrics

Professional Certifications in Marketing Research

I've been asked about the most popular and important courses that people working in marketing research should attend, so I wanted to write an article on this for the benefit of whoever asked and others. To begin, I'd…
Marketing Research & Metrics

The State of Marketing Research in Saudi Arabia (2) - Professionalism

Professionalism, quality, and competence are loose terms that can be interpreted in different ways by practitioners of this profession. For some, they mean adopting best practices in conducting marketing research. For…
Marketing Research & Metrics

The State of Marketing Research in Saudi Arabia - Field Researchers

There is something we call the eloquence of numbers — the precision that numbers give us in grasping phenomena is unmatched by anything else. But we must note two important things: The clarity of what numbers convey…
Marketing Research & Metrics

The Top Ten Books for Every Marketing Researcher

Seven years ago, I started working in marketing research. I had a hard time defining my career path because I didn't, in those early days, have a leader who liked to share knowledge. Sometimes adversity is a hidden…
Customer Experience

Moments of Truth

Have you ever wondered how the value of a product or service is shaped in the minds of consumers? When you receive a service from a particular provider, you may form an impression that the service is genuinely valuable,…