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"Blending art and science is about collaborating in ideas generation: the inter-relationship is critical, you can't have one thing without the other. A bunch of code or data is just a bunch of numbers without the art.
Science can enable us to be more creative, and creativity allows us to get the most out of our data. But consider 'the multiplier effect'. If either the data or creative are bad, the idea will fail. It's not one or the other that we need, it's both. It's not science plus art equals results, it's more science times art, so a zero for either means failure.
That is where the interesting ideas are - at that intersection. The future is all about ideas connecting. Those who can bridge art and science will be in demand, will be powerful.
So if our ideas are going to change hearts and minds, let's blend them together."
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"For those of you not familiar with Zappos, the company is an online retailer who defied the odds and built an Internet empire, initially as a virtual shoe store and now expanding its inventory well beyond shoes alone. Zappos has always charged top dollar for its products and has succeeded primarily because the leadership innovated an experience that consistently exceeds the expectations of customers, vendors, and people who simply encounter the brand. ...
Unlike other failed online vendors from the "dot gone" bust, Zappos invested in both the delivery infrastructure and the corporate culture necessary to produce customer evangelists. To help you appreciate how Zappos might serve as a provocative benchmark for your customer experience, let me give you a few highlights from the 5 principles outlined in The Zappos Experience"
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"You have the wrong tools. And you use them the wrong way.
It isn't your fault. You were taught, as we all were, to make forecast models out of past results. You were taught to look in the rear-view mirror. You were also taught to look straight ahead of you. If that competitor was in your line of sight, you had their number. That's how you knew you were staying ahead.
They were good people that taught you these skills, great professors of the craft in business school, veteran managers and executives in your first, third, and twentieth job. But that was a different time. That was when we could see the future by looking back. Somehow, it made sense back then.
But, now, the rules have changed: our game plans have gone public, and whoever knows what
the customer will do next wins."
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"To reach it's full impact, customer experience needs to be thought of as a strategic agenda item on par with and actually integrated with corporate strategy, managing the brand, and new product development. Customer experience should not be confused with existing efforts to focus on customer service or touch-point management. These efforts are focused more on delivering tactical reengineering of customer-facing processes.
As a customer experience leader, you want customers to talk with everyone they know (and don't know) about your company, employees to live and exude the best qualities of the brand on and off the job, and to be rewarded as a market leader. If you share that vision for your customer experience efforts, here are some strategic tools and ideas to help you do that."
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"It doesn't matter what industry you are in, someone, somewhere right now is building a product, process or business model designed to kick your butt.
If it's you, then you define the rules by which others must play the game. If it's NOT you, then you had better get comfortable playing by someone else's rules. Someone is going to start a revolution that will change your world. How? By producing change that matters—change that disrupts the competition and amazes your customers.
Why can't it be you? ... In a world where everyone and everything around you is getting better, where technology waits for no one, and where smarter, more sophisticated customers who are "wired and dangerous" demand more, people are constantly in search of the next big thing.
Want to find what's next? Make these 10 rules part of your cultural DNA."
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