The Modern Customer Podcast

When Chris McCann President and Chief Executive Officer of 1-800 FLOWERS.COM was sitting in the F8 keynote with Mark Zuckerberg, he had no idea Zuckerberg would be including 1-800 Flowers in the presentation. The reason 1-800 Flowers was everywhere in the press is the announcement of the chatbot release. 1-800 Flowers has always been on the brink of technology innovation. They were the first to al...

You don’t hear the word simplicity very much when it comes to customer experience. But according to Siegel+Gale CMO Margaret Molloy simplicity is the key to running a strong operation. Molloy is responsible for all marketing, communications, and business development initiatives globally. She is a modern Business-to-Business CMO with 15+ years as a marketing leader, a must-follow marketing minds on...

This is the 2nd post in a two-part series featuring Fidelity thought leaders. Find the first post here. It seems that every innovation story you hear today comes out of a start-up. Big companies are often described as dinosaurs, slow with trouble pivoting. So what can big companies do to ensure they too make it a habit of creating an environment for disruption? Big companies today would benefit fr...

Imagine a small rural village in Sweden. It’s nighttime and a new dad drops the only remaining bottle of baby formula on the floor as his hungry son wails. The closest grocery store will take at least 40 minutes round-trip. That was the moment that technology expert Robert Illiason started thinking about alternatives. He realized living in a rural part of the world, where shops close early puts a...

There’s a major challenge today facing every B2B company, and that’s customer engagement. Gallup has recently released a new guide discussing some of environmental factors causing B2B companies to ask themselves about their customer engagement strategy. The guide is based on in-depth interviews with hundreds of thousands of customers and analysis from measuring the engagement of 18 million custome...

Everywhere we look we see more people and brands raving about Snapchat. But we don't hear much about anyone using Snapchat for customer service yet. However one company has recently generated some attention in Social Media Today for actually responding to customers that need help via Snapchat. The company is called iOgrapher—a company iOgrapher sells cases, lenses, microphones, tripods, and LED li...

This week on the Modern Customer Podcast we talk about all things mobile innovation. Our guest is Christophe Gillet Vice President of Product at Vimeo. In this capacity he leads the product vision for the brand, including oversight and ongoing development for Vimeo’s creator platform tools and overall viewing experience. Under his leadership, the team has introduced new subscription tools for crea...

Le Tote is a lot like Netflix—you pay a monthly fee and get unlimited deliveries of clothes and accessories. This company has been growing like crazy. Le Tote shipped 1.7 million products to customers in 2015. They predict they will send out 400 million dollars worth of product in 2016. Revenue grew 600 percent last year. Over 90 percent of their customers are repeat purchasers. Not bad for a comp...

According to Robert Tercek, author of Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World and former President of Digital Media at the Oprah Winfrey Network “Every aspect of our economy and society is set to be reconfigured by technological forces that only a handful of increasingly powerful companies have mastered.” Tercek reveals the inner workings of the biggest cultural and econo...

If your food could talk to you what would it say? Would it help you cook? Would it provide some tasty pairing ideas for dinner? Or would it just tell you you’ve got a devilish smile and you’re ready for a night on the town? This is precisely what Absolut, the Vodka company, is currently mulling over in pursuit of a bottle that talks to its customers. Their digital innovation manager Markus Wulff s...

What is the purpose of a brand? This is a question I’ve been asking to a handful of thought leaders. Ryan Hanley --the VP of Marketing at TrustedChoice.com, speaker, podcaster and author of the Amazon bestseller, Content Warfare--was someone I discovered through his show on Periscope where he took it upon himself to dissect an article I had written on the purpose of a brand.  The purpose of busine...

When you work in customer service and you're dealing with an angry customer—it's likely the last thing you feel like doing is giving them a hug. However this is exactly what author Jay Baer encourages you to do to improve your customer relationships. Baer's newest book is Hug Your Haters: How To Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers. In the book Baer gives many examples of the various ways cu...

    Customer centricity is something we all intend to do--it sounds like it means being "into" your customers. You are interested and focused on them right? Well not really. Customer centricity as defined by Dr. Peter Fader of Wharton might be different than what you think. I saw Dr. Fader speak at the 2nd Annual Customer Centricity Conference--there was a debate with the audience around the purpo...

Peter Drucker's grandson Nova Spivack, CEO of Bottlenose, says that Drucker would have felt today that real influencers are not spending a lot of time on social media. In The Modern Customer Podcast this week we talk to Spivack who is an entrepreneur and investor who at six years old remembers being in line behind Jack Welch for an appointment to spend time with his grandfather, one of the most fa...

Kevan Gammage is senior manager for MailChimp’s social and Pro support teams. After joining MailChimp’s support team as an agent in 2013, he now helps manages the company’s overall support strategy and shapes the way agents communicate with Pro customers and users through social channels every day.  

We're at a crossroads in education. There is an increasing gap between the skills that are in demand in the workforce, and modern day education. It simply is not making the cut. Even though the education system today is largely an old machine, sometimes you come upon stories that give you hope. Enter Paulina Raguimov, a young creative gamer who at the age of 16 applied for an internship at JumpSta...

Darren Pleasance leads the Global Customer Acquisitions team for Google, dedicated to driving Google's growth in the global SMB space across a diverse set of countries and industries. In this capacity,he’s responsible for guiding Sales, Marketing, Market Intelligence and Support teams globally to attract small and mid-sized businesses to Google's many services. His goal is to make businesses aware...

In 2006 I was working at a conference company and I wanted to book Brian Solis as a speaker because he was the foremost thought leader on the topic of social media. Almost ten years later and Solis continues to be on the forefront of digital innovation. Solis, the Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group has recently published his new book X: The Experience When Business Meets Design . He joined me fo...

You might be surprised to hear that this week on Playboy's website you won't find nudes, but rather an article reading " Real Men Make Their Own Thanksgiving Pie Crust ." You will no longer find articles tweeted from their website with the hashtag #NSFW (meaning not safe for work). Playboy is now entirely safe for work.  Playboy has been on a transformative "journey" for two years and recently ann...

Customer service will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about how to improve your products and services. This is the beauty of customer data—but more importantly how are you acting on that customer data? On-demand parking and valet services company Luxe Valet is an example of a cool new company that makes customer data a priority. They actually do something with it. They are also interes...

I can personally imagine a world where I can get anything whenever I want it. Can't you? In 2015 we've seen a proliferation of successful on-demand companies whether  it’s Shoes of Prey  where you can design and order your own shoes or  Blue Apron  that delivers pre-determined ingredients so a consumer can make themselves the perfect meal. Even airports realize on-demand and no fuss services makes...

According to Tim Joyce, Chief Innovation Officer of Xerox Customer Care, business success stories during the past 100 years were primarily about products. He says that now we're moving towards a world where success and value propositions will be based on service. Of course we'll still need products, but he says our purchases will be more about the services wrapped around them. Consumers will be pe...

Today customers want products and services when and where they want them. Not only is timing and delivery key, but customers want to design their own experiences. Customers want the comfort and ease of ordering things via the web, but they want the option to create something that is specific to their tastes.  That said, Shoes Of Prey , a website where you can order your own shoes, is becoming one...

national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is a network of four art museums), Beatrice Burrows , Digital Marketing Officer for Tate, and Robin Zucker , the SVP of Digital for  Playboy . The panel focused on four areas that include: Omni Channel Advertising Challenges in Creating Content for Different Demographics Social Media Challenges How the Rise of Di...

While every department needs a strong leader within the company, it can be said that customer experience needs an exceptionally strong leader. The reason being it’s not always intuitive for companies to invest in strong customer experience programs. Much of the budget goes to marketing or product or sales. That said, on the modern customer podcast this week we feature customer experience leader Le...