By Jeofrey Bean
Jeofrey Bean is the co-author of the business leadership book The Customer Experience Revolution – How Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks Have Changed Business Forever.
What is Customer Experience? Does your company have a consistent and well-known answer that guides decisions and actions to create customer advocates?
We’ve asked many people within the same company and many people from different companies to tell us what they mean by customer experience. We’ve learned that the chances of getting a consistent definition are small. People answer based on their experience and what their situation or role is. This is fine on an individual basis. But when you’re a company seriously eying a customer leadership position so you can be better, different and more profitable, you need a consistent and well-known definition of customer experience.
On average, vehicles seriously injure or kill someone in New York every two hours; last year, 173 pedestrians were killed. Last week Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a bill allowing New York City to enact a citywide default speed limit of 25 miles per hour as part of its “Vision Zero” campaign to reduce traffic deaths to nil.
When the speed at which a car strikes a pedestrian rises a mere 10 m.p.h. — to 40 m.p.h. from 30 — the chance of the pedestrian’s dying rises to 85 percent from 45. The real question is not absolute speed but appropriate speed.
In the face of shrinking budgets and rising fuel costs, several Ventura city departments combined forces to pursue their fleet management goals. This included acquiring an affordable vehicle tracking technology that could help lower maintenance costs, reduce vehicle idling, and improve driver behavior. Managers also wanted to improve routing efficiency to enhance delivery of services to the community. Add in an aggressive environmental goal to reduce fuel use by 10 percent, and department managers faced a significant challenge.
At least eight states have introduced bills that would restrict the use of Google Glass while driving. But the proposed measures targeting the company’s hi-tech spectacles have stalled, failing to clear a single chamber.
But even if the bills gained traction, they would be “practically unenforceable,” according to a new research paper by William & Mary law professor Adam Gershowitz, who suggests his own legislative solution.
READ MORE about the bills
As astute car shoppers know, there’s more to saving money on a car than simply negotiating the lowest price on a given model. Long-term ownership costs – specifically insurance, fuel economy and repairs – can vary significantly from one vehicle to another, even within select vehicle and/or price classes.
Such factors can vary by as much as $3,800 on average over a five-year ownership period, based solely on where a motorist lives, according to a recent analysis compiled by Bankrate.com, with several Midwest states boasting the lowest annual costs overall.
READ MORE to get the state-by-state data