THE CAFFEINE KNOWLEDGE BANK
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- 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.
- Customer Experience
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
- 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.
- Customer Experience, Employee Experience
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.
- 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.
- Customer Experience
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?
- Brands, Customer Experience
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
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
- Customer Experience
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?
- Customer Experience
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.
- Customer Experience
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.
- Customer Experience
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,
- Brands, Customer Experience, Employee Experience
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
- Customer Experience
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.
- Brands, Customer Experience
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.
- Brand-led Business Strategy, Customer Experience
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.
- Customer Experience
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.
- Customer Experience
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.
- Brands, Customer Experience, Employee Experience
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
- Brand-led Business Strategy, Customer Experience, Employee Experience
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
- Brand-led Business Strategy, Customer Experience
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
- Customer Experience, Employee Experience
‘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
- Customer Experience, Employee Experience
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.
- Customer Experience
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
- Customer Experience
“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.
- Customer Experience
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
