Steve Hurst: Customer Strategy

7 06 2008

Customer Strategy log

I had the pleasure of putting the customer experience world to rights yesterday morning over a bacon roll with Steve Hurst, Editorial Director of Customer Strategy, a CMP publication. Steve has been with Customer Strategy (previously Customer Management) as long as I have been with Foviance (over 7 years) and has seen the same developments in the industry that I have observed. As a result we had a wide ranging conversation which frequently resulted in the conclusion that “customer experience only gets better if the CEO wants it to”. It seems in quite a few organisations, they simply don’t!

I recommend checking out Steve’s Blog Industry Insider as it covers ground beyond customer experience. We both agreed that actually customers are pretty much at the centre of everything organisations do - or at least they should be.

One area I was particularly interested in is an interview Steve has lined up for next week with Premier Hotels. One of the aspects he hopes to discuss is the expansion in India and I hope to hear whether they intend to include mobile booking engine as part of their expansion plans. Given the ’single screen economy’ nature of India this would seem sensible although I haven’t yet seen figures about mobile internet penetration. A ‘to do’ for me. I did read this week about the drive to produce a lower cost mobile (sub $30) and the work Motorola were doing here but I am fairly certain these devices don’t contain web access. The target market for the hotels is the growing middle class in India and these I assume will have mobile access to the web, and presumably desktop access also. Like I say, more research required.


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