THE CAFFEINE KNOWLEDGE BANK

Articles

Read our latest insights and articles.

And sign up to our Extra Shot newsletter.

How to get the truth about customer experience

Face the fear: how to get the unvarnished truth about your customer experience

Learn what really drives loyalty, satisfaction, and referrals. No guesswork—just actionable insights to create a customer experience that keep customers coming back.
CX Roadmap

Introducing The CEO’s CX Roadmap to a Standout Customer Experience: six days to set you up for success

Businesses that lead in CX see results that outstrip their competitors, enjoying up to: More importantly, they turn customers into die-hard fans – almost doubling their value. But – spoiler alert – this doesn’t happen

why leaders are crucial to customer experience

Senior leaders: your company’s customer experience needs you!

Senior leaders set the tone for customer experience success. From aligning priorities to embedding a customer-first mindset, their active involvement is critical.
Customer Experience

Customer Experience: Fix It or Feature It – The Secret to Business Brilliance

Looking to elevate your customer experience? Learn how the 'Fix It or Feature It' mindset transforms business challenges into brand strengths.
Employee Experience and Engagement

A 5-Star Employee Experience Will Build Customer Loyalty

Five insights for building a purpose-driven, engaged workforce that delivers exceptional brand culture and employee engagement.
Managing your customer experience

Managing Your Customer Experience: The 7 Deadly Sins

Caffeine's guide to managing your customer experience and the CX mistakes that hold the greatest potential to derail all other customer experience efforts.
AI Chatbots

AI chatbots have a customer experience problem

What are the critical elements missing from the AI chatbot experience? And how are companies like Lemonade setting the standard?
Luxury Brands

Luxury Brands: Combating the ‘Fast Experience’

As luxury brands reinvent retail in the age of fast fashion, here are strategies to combat the fast experience & create unforgettable in-store experiences.
Customer Experience

Customer Experience – it’s not worth the effort…is it?

Is poor Customer Experience costing your business? Learn why prioritising CX is a business imperative and how to stand out from the competition.
Customer Experience image

The Invisible Cost of Spam: Eroding Brand Reputation and Customer Experience

Shaun Smith explores how spam undermines customer experience, highlighting its detrimental impact on brand reputation in today’s digital environment. Spam, in its many forms, from unsolicited emails to intrusive ads, not only disrupts the customer’s digital

hotel christmas animation

No room at the inn? A festive look at some hotel horrors

Ahead of 'frantic Friday', Louisa Clarke shares her top 5 hotel horrors to avoid this Christmas
customer experience

New Energy: The rise of the distinctive customer experience

Customers are expecting more of energy companies today than ever before. What does it take to create the building blocks of a great customer experience?
Employee Experience image

The Magic Ingredient: Harnessing effort to create a Memorable Customer Experience

Shaun Smith looks at how the principle 'Effort Heuristic' can help your customer experience stand out from the crowd.
Robots working on laptops showing the Impact of AI on Customer Service

The Transformative Impact of AI on Customer Service

With the announcement that BT plans to replace 10,000 jobs with AI, Shaun Smith looks at how brands can embrace AI technology and still enhance their customer service.
The secret to ensuring your customer experience strategy becomes a reality. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.

The secret to ensuring your customer experience strategy becomes a reality

When implementing a CX strategy, it often requires the culture to become customer-centric and able to ‘Stand Firm’ in the face of competing pressures and agendas. Without the full sponsorship of the CEO and the board,
The Myth: A strong brand can be used to prop up a bad business. Post, by The Caffeine partnership.

The myth: A strong brand can be used to prop up a bad business

Brands are often credited with powers they simply don’t have. Chief among them is the idea that, a strong brand (or strong advertising) could mask the deficiencies of a bad business, acting as a sticking plaster

How to beat a bear market? Invest in your customers.

We see many examples of companies panicking and cutting costs haphazardly, so here are our top tips for managing in a recession and emerging even stronger.
What's in a name? Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.

What’s in a name?

If you want to change your fortunes then you need to change your behaviour, not your brand name. Understand what your customers expect and invest in creating a great customer experience.
Brands Behave or Beware. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.

Brands Behave or Beware

Brands seem to struggle with striking a balance between bad behaviour and virtue-signalling. You don't need to be a saint, just have a moral compass.
We need to talk about the 'C' word. Post by The Caffeine Partnership.

We Need to Talk About the ‘C’ Word

The word ‘customer’ has moved from the fringes of the housing sector to the forefront of its marketing communications.
Getting the measurement right. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.

Getting the measurement right

As customer experience consultants it is great to see leading companies, SMEs and start-ups making CX a non-negotiable foundation of their business operations.
Being The Brand. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.

Being The Brand

When the strain upon the operations of a company is too much for the system itself, what hope is there for a brand to inspire or maintain customer loyalty? The last line of defence for the
Richer Experiences Make Richer Brands. Post by, The Caffeine Partnership.

Richer Experiences Make Richer Brands

There’s no such thing as the perfect brand. However, our decades working with leading brands to help them with their brand experience, have shown us that there are clear winners across every market and in every
FT UK's Leading Management Consultants 2022 - The Caffeine Partnership

What Matters Most

Our work to help clients to identify and deliver what matters most has led to Caffeine partner Smith+Co being awarded The UK’s Leading Management Consultants 2022 by the FT. This is the 3rd year in a
Benefits of talking to strangers post by The Caffeine Partnership

‘There are no customers in the office’ – the benefits of talking to strangers.

Fear of rejection stops us from making the first move. It stops us from speaking to people we don’t know. But think about the first time you met your best friend, your life partner, your long-standing
Man by van showing brand purpose

Being human will be at the heart of brand purpose

We are entering a new era, one that will require new approaches to marketing and customer experience, but it will go way beyond that. It will challenge the very way we think about brands and corporations.

Covid notice at The Caffeine Partnership, London, UK

Why COVID is not a valid excuse (and other musings from a crazy year) Part Two

In my last blog I reflected on how customer experience has been impacted by the Covid-19 crisis and which brands are succeeding in spite of it. One of the hardest hit sectors in the is the

“We’re just about delivering happiness” Tony Hsieh Partnership with The Caffeine Partnership

“We’re just about delivering happiness” Tony Hsieh

Tony Hsieh, 46, the former CEO of Zappos, died on Friday from head injuries sustained during a house fire whilst he was visiting friends in Connecticut. He was an inspirational thinker who will be sadly missed.

Covid notice at The Caffeine Partnership, London, UK

Why COVID is not a valid excuse (and other musings from a crazy year) Part One

It has been a crazy year. Smith+Co were honoured by being awarded ‘UK’s Leading Management Consultants 2020’ following independent research by Statista. That was a great start! We followed it up by merging with Caffeine, the

Caffeine's Extra Shot

Sign up here to receive your monthly Extra Shot newsletter.

Privacy Policy
We will only use your email address to send you Extra Shot content and will treat your information with respect. By clicking below, you agree that we may process your information in accordance with these terms. You can change your mind at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in the footer of any email you receive from us.
GDPR
We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Need a shot of Caffeine?

Are you an impatient leader wanting to make things happen?

We can help.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Purpose, Pay or Perks?
What Matters Most to Employees.

Download our FREE White Paper.

We commissioned an independent survey of 1000 UK employees with the objective of understanding how expectations around what they want or expect from work have changed since the pandemic.

Fill in the form below to download our report.