Perhaps you’re familiar with the Walgreens tagline: At the corner of happy and healthy. Even though the slogan is somewhat new, it is what Walgreens has always delivered.

I have been going to Walgreens since I was a little boy. Growing up, there was always one just down the street, and there still is for me today. People there are friendly. The pharmacist knows me and my family. I’ve demonstrated a high degree of customer loyalty to them, and in return, they have given my family good service and value over the years.

Target Corporation has had a number of challenges over the past few years, from abruptly closing all of their Canadian stores to a 2016 earnings shortfall, plummeting stock price, and a rather negative sales outlook for 2017 (first quarter EPS was 6% lower than first quarter 2016). The company is forecasting a single digit sales decline for the full year.

I had a great shopping experience this past weekend that didn’t involve making a purchase. In fact, I canceled my order. However, it left me so impressed with the retailer that I’ll be sure to shop with them again. I ordered a toy for my daughter from Amazon on Friday night, but on Saturday morning, I was shopping in a local store and discovered something similar, but better, on the store’s shelves. Wondering if I could cancel my web order, I logged onto my Amazon account with my smartphone and requested a cancellation.

How would your customers describe their experience with your firm?
Please take a moment and rate the Customer Experience (CX) that you believe you deliver:

• Better than all companies in any industry
• The best in our industry
• Considerably above average in our industry
• Slightly above average in our industry
• Average for our industry

Customer experience is the new competitive advantage for banks

Established banks are failing their customers with poor customer experience and most have not done enough to win over customers, while technological advances have given startups such as ‘Challenger banks’ Monzo and Atom Bank a more level playing field to compete with the traditional giants.

Accenture Interactive is rapidly expanding. Managing director Michael Buckley heads up the division that aims to provide an end-to-end solution that suits the new wave of marketers emerging, and the challenges they face, to build seamless customer experiences.

The newly emerging marketing landscape requires a new kind of marketer. One that has all the traditional skills and capabilities associated with the discipline, and a whole lot more besides.

If you were to ask people the most dreaded experiences in life, waiting in line at the DMV would surely be towards the top of the list. In fact, a recent survey found that 70% of people think the lines at the DMV are too long, especially considering many people often wait there for hours. Another notoriously unpleasant experience is waiting on hold to talk to a customer service representative—many people avoid calling a contact center as much as possible, especially for simple questions and tasks.

Cross-Departmental Collaboration + CCaaS, by Austin Herrington, Senior Director, Windstream Business

The concept of "Customer Experience" has hit the big time. It no longer resides nearly exclusively in the customer care department, with only occasional field trips out to meetings with the marketing team. Customer Experience is now a topic that is on the agendas of executive team meetings in boardrooms across every industry under the sun, and that means buy-in from the highest levels of organizations for large-scale initiatives to integrate and enhance every point of contact that a company has with its customers.