We see three opportunities for business leaders who want to enhance their companies’ CX and drive greater satisfaction. First, focus on frictionless commerce. Second, consider augmented experiences. Finally, emphasize intuitive interactions. | Continue reading
Giving employees autonomy is critical for innovation, performance, and motivation. But while giving your employees more decision-making authority might look straightforward, in practice, it’s hard to pull off. The author refers to the gap between the desire for more empowerment a … | Continue reading
The topic of private equity firms acquiring hospitals and health systems in the United States has sparked a fierce debate for years about whether the deals were good or bad for communities they serve. A study of 45 leveraged buyouts produced some surprising findings that should g … | Continue reading
At the heart of Silicon Valley Bank’s failure are uninsured depositors — specifically startup companies who held far more than the insured limit of $250,000 and who couldn’t make payroll without access to their accounts. It’s tempting in light of SVB’s failure to assume that the … | Continue reading
Silicon Valley Bank focused on the startup sector, and that’s part of the story of why it failed. Lack of diversification means more risk. But SVB’s focus has real benefits as well: It allowed the bank to build up a tremendous amount of tacit knowledge about how startups and vent … | Continue reading
A compelling CX demands balancing customer empathy with technology to avoid falling into the trap of what we call “engineered insincerity,” or using automation to simulate interest in who you are as a human being. Engineered insincerity shows up from brands in various ways, such … | Continue reading
If you’ve lost your job, it can be hard to remember all your career successes and stay positive. But you can’t replace your old job by staring at the computer eight hours a day or praying for a recruiter to call you. The author presents five ways to overcome the cognitive dissona … | Continue reading
Burnt out employees show that there are urgent problems to be addressed at the heart of any organization. But burnout is a management and organizational issue, not a physical or mental health issue, so promoting self-care won’t usually help employees recover. The chronic job stre … | Continue reading
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B2B sellers often think of customers as rational decision-makers who seek to maximize value, reduce costs, and save time. But a study of 2,128 office workers across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy found that B2B customers prefer interactio … | Continue reading
Vivek Gulati was one of the 12,000 Google employees laid off in January. It was a shock, but he had been laid off before. With this perspective, Vivek shares his story, how he’s navigating the transition, and suggests ways to take care of yourself first and foremost. In this arti … | Continue reading
Today’s managers are under a lot of pressure. When it’s a constant strain to get work done, it’s easy to have a short fuse. When expectations aren’t met, the brain short-circuits to judgment and reaction. This is exactly the opposite of what your employees need. In healthy workpl … | Continue reading
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Today, more than a quarter of all “new” hires are in fact boomerang employees: workers returning to a former employer after a stint somewhere else. This phenomenon can represent a threat to retention efforts, as new hires may be increasingly liable to boomerang back to their prev … | Continue reading
Today’s B2B sellers drive greater customer loyalty and business success by addressing customer pain points, creating value in every interaction, and stitching together the unpredictable pathways buyers use to reach a decision. To start, integrating digital technology and salespeo … | Continue reading
As the pandemic marks a third anniversary, business leaders around the world are eager to move on. But few companies have systematically institutionalized what they’ve learned from their Covid-19 experience to build resilience. The authors suggest a three-step approach to do so: … | Continue reading
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A conversation with Wharton’s Ethan Mollick on the potential for a great productivity leap. | Continue reading
Network effects have dictated the success of technologies from the telephone to shopping platforms like Etsy, and AI tools such as ChatGPT are no exception. What is different, however, is how those network effects work. Data network effects are a new form. Like the more familiar … | Continue reading
How can a company best create a compelling customer experience? Based on the author’s research involving thousands of companies and analyses of millions of customer data points from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the eight areas that companies need to focus on a … | Continue reading
Housing is already a major part of every company’s HR strategy, simply because wages depend on housing costs. But some companies go beyond wages, attracting workers with rental or mortgage subsidies. And in a few cases they even advocate for more housing to be built in a communit … | Continue reading
A conservation expert must decide whether or not to implement a complex new technology solution to help park rangers manage their patrols. | Continue reading
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Generative AI — AI that creates content — threatens to disrupt the big players (Netflix, TikTok, and Youtube) in video streaming because it changes the power and economics of video streaming. Content creators are able to create smarter content with its assistance while the potent … | Continue reading
To more fully understand how Covid-19 affected the racial dynamics experienced by Asian professionals in the workplace, in their recent study, the authors interviewed and gathered stories from 35 professionals working in a range of different industries, including finance, health … | Continue reading
Understanding where customers are, how they navigate streams in your market, and how to interact with them in a given stream is now central to crafting a good customer experience, and that has implications. Among other things, companies need to shift from thinking about a value c … | Continue reading
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Although the business community has made progress toward climate goals since the 2015 Paris Agreement, fewer than one-fifth of net-zero targets set by national and subnational governments and only a third of the largest public corporations with net-zero targets actually meet scie … | Continue reading
Companies, despite exploding technological power, are failing to keep up with rising customer standards. Customer service technology should build a customer dialogue and foster deeper relationships, just as the best human customer service representatives do. And then it should go … | Continue reading
When things are uncertain, it can feel comforting to avoid difficult feedback. But creating stability for your team — and success for your organization — depends on your ability to learn what needs to change. Burying your head in the sand is never the safe thing to do. A culture … | Continue reading
Through blockchain technology that enables direct participation, the Fan Controlled Football league joins the physical sports and digital worlds to create a new, exciting fan experience. In doing so, the decentralized nature of the blockchain ensures that the FCF platform enables … | Continue reading
Successful businesses focus on three core principles of their customer experience: They put the digital experience in the business context. They recognize that customers are not created equal. And they make zero-based decisions. Continuous improvement is fine, but it’s important … | Continue reading
Two new surveys from Gallup, each conducted in the spring of 2022, reveal stark differences in how well employees and HR leaders say their organizations are doing when it comes to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. While 84% of CHROs say their organizations are increasi … | Continue reading
Delivering superior customer experience (CX) is a mandate that now extends well beyond the bounds of customer service, support, sales, or IT departments. It requires a cultural shift that emphasizes pervasive information sharing and intent analysis across the enterprise. Executiv … | Continue reading
To better understand the leadership challenges and development opportunities facing high-potential employees, researchers analyzed more than 3,000 applications to Harvard Business School’s High Potentials Leadership Program over a nearly 20-year period. The high-potentials themse … | Continue reading
The demand for and number of women’s leadership development programs has exploded in recent years. These programs offer important opportunities for women to become better equipped for the challenges of senior leadership roles and tackling gender bias and its associated barriers. … | Continue reading
A conversation with the former head of IBM about her own career, and how she chose to run the company. | Continue reading
According to research of over 160,000 U.S. employees from 2014-2016, 41.4% cashed out at least part of their 401(k)s when leaving a job — and 85% of those drained their balance entirely. Why does this occur at this moment in particular, despite evidence that it can damage your ab … | Continue reading
Technological advances in natural language processing, computational linguistics, and machine learning, combined with the digitization of everything from cover letters to conversations, have revolutionized our ability to analyze language, yielding unprecedented insights. Think of … | Continue reading
Data collected since the first year of the pandemic has shown that versatility is an even stronger component of effective leadership now than it was before. The correlations between versatility and a variety of leadership outcomes — employee engagement, team agility, business uni … | Continue reading
Maintaining a poker face doesn’t necessarily mean suppressing your feelings or being dishonest. It simply means practicing emotion regulation by being aware of your facial expressions and body language and using them strategically. In this piece, the author explains when to put o … | Continue reading
A recent study suggests that denying AI decision makers access to sensitive data actually increases the risks of discriminatory outcome. That’s because the AI draws incomplete inferences from the data or partially substitutes by identifying proxies. Providing sensitive data would … | Continue reading
Leaps of faith make great scenes in a movie, but in real life they fill us with stress and uncertainty, two emotions that are not comfortable for the human brain. To face down our discomfort, we can take advantage of a revealing data set that we often ignore: our past decisions. … | Continue reading
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Standardized tools now allow employers or insurers to track the effectiveness of mental health care. This, in turn, is making it possible to create contracts that tie reimbursement to the effectiveness of the treatment. In this article, the authors, who are the cofounders of a pl … | Continue reading
Working parents building their families by adopting a child face many challenges, including financial (adoptions in the U.S. can cost up to $58,000), logistical (the paperwork can feel endless), and emotional. When employees perceive their organization to be supportive of their f … | Continue reading
In unfamiliar, high-stakes situations, we’re hard-wired to default to the mechanisms that we’ve relied on the past. However, new situations often can’t be met with old solutions. This is the adaptability paradox: When we most need to learn, change, and adapt, we are most likely t … | Continue reading