Luke Williams

Qualtrics · Customer Experience

Managers of CX programs are often faced with a decision between investing more in experience design (memorable CX) or improving experience delivery (frictionless CX). Current measurement approaches in both industry and academia do not provide a useful framework to address this dilemma adequately or directly. Using 6009 brand ratings by 1070 unique...

Purpose – This research compares the results of Maximum Difference Scaling (MaxDiff), Adaptive Choice-Based Conjoint (ACBC), and constant sum scaling with the results of a Wallet Allocation Rule (WAR) approach for identifying the features of smartphones deemed most valuable by consumers. Design/methodology/approach – The authors examine the respons...

Purpose Managers seeking to manage customer word-of-mouth (WOM) behavior need to understand how different attitudinal drivers (e.g. satisfaction, positive and negative emotion, commitment, and self-brand connection) relate to a range of WOM behaviors. They also need to know how the effects of these drivers are moderated by customer characteristics...

The history of modern management has shown that competitive advantage can be built slowly over time or captured in a moment as market newcomers leapfrog traditional players. Managers treat their customer metrics as if they existed in a vacuum. The wallet allocation rule requires that managers take a customer centric perspective. It forces managers...

Given that share of category spending (share of wallet) is the most important demonstration of customers' loyalty to a firm or brand and that traditional metrics do not link well with share of wallet, there is an obvious problem with how one currently measures and manages customer loyalty. This led to conduct a comprehensive investigation to uncove...

The wallet allocation rule makes it possible for managers to easily link customer satisfaction to share of wallet. The three metrics that every firm using the wallet allocation rule should follow are percent first choice, average number of brands used and share of wallet. Satisfaction information in conjunction with other metrics provides important...

This chapter presents the most basic rules for properly executing the wallet allocation rule. Managers must be ever vigilant in ensuring the quality of data used in their wallet allocation rule analyses. Although there are many ways that data can be bad, the four issues that most commonly contaminate wallet allocation rule analyses are as follows:...

Although the Wallet Allocation Rule makes it possible to strongly link satisfaction (and other commonly used customer loyalty metrics) to share of wallet, greater share of wallet is not a panacea. If managers want to make a positive return on their investments to enhance the customer experience, they first need a clear understanding of where the mo...

Marketing's job is to bring the voice of the customer to the company. Positive change for customers will happen only when chief executive officers (CEOs) view their companies from their customers' perspective. CEOs at every public company are obsessed with achieving two outcomes, namely profits and growth. If the goal is market share growth, then o...

Customer Loyalty Isn't Enough. Grow Your Share of Wallet! The Wallet Allocation Rule is a revolutionary, definitive guide for winning the battle for share of customers' hearts, minds, and wallets. Backed by rock-solid science published in the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, this landmark book introduces a new and rigorousl...

The generally accepted view among managers and researchers is that the greater the severity of a service failure, the greater the resulting impact on customer satisfaction and business outcomes, such as lost customers and revenue. The research used to defend this viewpoint, however, does not typically address the severity of service failures, like...

The loyalty research in marketing almost exclusively focuses on managing consumer loyalty for firm profitability. Some researchers hypothesize, however, that consumer loyalty is linked to our happiness and other loyalties in life, and that loyalty is essentially isomorphic across domains. Based on an extensive review of loyalty across multiple doma...

Understanding What It Takes to be Number 1 2014 Alexander Buoye, Timothy L. Keiningham, Luke Williams, and Lerzan Aksoy (2014), “Understanding What It Takes to Be Number 1,” in Customer Experience Management: Enhancing Experience and Value Through Service Management. Jay Kandampully, ed., Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, forthcoming.

Retailers have long known that their long-term success depends upon customer loyalty. In fact, legendary retailers were the first businesses to champion customer satisfaction as a source of competitive differentiation. In 1875, Montgomery Ward differentiated his mail order catalog by promising satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. By the earl...

For decades we’ve been told that we live in fast-paced, dog-eat-dog world, that loyalty gets you nowhere, and that we must look out for number one! We’ve been told that to succeed we have to constantly reinvent ourselves, let go of past relationships, and move on to greener pastures. And we’ve been told that all this is good. But it’s not good. W...

The measurement and management of customer loyalty and its link with firm growth have long been of interest to managers and researchers. One relatively recent word-of-mouth customer loyalty metric purported that the link to growth is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), a metric based on a likelihood to recommend question asked in customer surveys. This r...