Whether you choose to come back to the workplace, or are required to show up in person, your office space has probably changed since you were last there. As the article points out, “a layout that is largely devoted to people working at serried desks alongside the same colleagues each day all feels very 2019.” With an emphasis on collaboration, the workplaces of today have fewer desks and cubicles, more shared spaces, and even spaces devoted to socializing and events, in short, spaces where a company’s employees and clients can have “experiences”. Read more*.
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The “stay at home” versus “come back to the office” debate continues to roil and companies struggle to respond to the roller-coaster ride resulting from changing guidelines. Steelcase notes that “back to work” has impacted everything — people, places, buildings, travel, almost every interaction we have with other people. It’s impossible to look at only one piece of that system to make decisions. Understanding how their employees feel about how to return is at the heart of the company’s approach. Not surprisingly, not everyone is eager to come back, and those who are, are doing so for different reasons. Read more about how one company is accommodating everyone’s needs in a number of different areas including new protocols and behaviors, cleaning regimens, physical changes to the space, and communication and transparency.
We are all excited to get back out into the world of trade shows, conferences, and in person events but it won’t be back to the old normal for any of us. Marketers need to understand that customers and attendees alike are approaching events with a completely different mindset; do they still perceive your brand the same way or do they have different expectations now? The opportunity to share how the pandemic has shaped your business can help bridge a potential gap that may have developed after 2 years of not engaging with your customers in person. Now more than ever it is important to ask your customers for their business and to show your appreciation for sticking with you during a stressful time. Read more.
After investing considerable time, energy and dollars into your customer experience program, are you really sure it’s working for everyone? This article lays out some important considerations for CX testing that many retailers tend to overlook: accessibility, omni-channel experiences, and payments. Accessibility, the author argues, remains one of the primary barriers to ubiquitous great customer experiences. Further, many fail to map the customer journey in enough depth to ensure every interaction with your brand is smooth and seamless. This is especially important to the payment experience which, they say, can round out a great customer journey or ruin it. Read more.
Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar suggests we should jettison everything we know about traditional marketing saying that the four P’s are no longer relevant to today’s consumer. He believes that technology in all its forms, including AI, 3D printing, drones and a host of other recent innovations, has fundamentally changed marketing as we know it and that bank marketing specifically, needs to be reinvented. The ever-increasing importance of data is being used for everything from social media marketing, to location-based marketing, and mobile marketing, and Rajammannar believes this data should be used to create memorable customer experiences, too. The idea of being loyal to one bank over a lifetime no longer holds and financial services marketers need to focus on making banking more engaging, and even fun! The customer experience at your financial institution is everything. Read more on one CMO’s views.
Even as one of the larger
custom exhibit design and architectural design firms in New
England, we’re still a small business. And as we all have
learned through the pandemic, small business is challenging.
Yet the majority of my peers are either small business owners
or are employed by small businesses – and I don’t mean 200
persons, I mean 5, 20, 40 persons. These small businesses are
the backbones of our communities, the hearts of our society,
the foundation of our shared culture – nowhere more than in
small business do you see thee vocation of the Puritan ethic,
that “work hard, learn, make good, get ahead” approach
that...