Blog
Welcome to the AM Blog! This is our little corner of the internet where we blog about business advice, accounting tips and designing for business. Kick your feet up and stay a while!
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How to turn around a bad customer experience
When we run our Customer Experience Workshops, one of the exercises we get our groups to do is think of a bad experience they’ve had and describe what made it unpleasant. People have no problem doing this. Sadly, we encounter bad experiences on an almost daily basis. That seems to be the norm these…
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Why are so many customer experiences so bad?
This week I’ve delivered five workshops on service design and customer experience. Our participants have been a mixture of students, employees and business owners. One of the exercises we do is to get people to think about a good and bad experience. We get them to write the name of the brand on a…
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5 reasons why you shouldn’t bother with customer experience
I speak to a lot of people during the course of a normal week. That’s partly down to the kind of work that I do, but it’s also because I’m curious. I like to understand why people do what they do. What drives them to get out of bed in the morning? I’m fascinated by…
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Who is responsible for customer experience?
I was having a coffee with an old friend earlier this week. We talked about recent experiences we’d had as customers, and as we got more vexed, he asked me a great question – who is responsible for customer experience in an organisation? Knowing him of old, I knew that this was a loaded…
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5 ways to embed design in your business
One of the questions I get asked most often is this – is design only for creative businesses? There’s a misconception in the ‘traditional’ business world that design is simply about how things look. So that means the logo, a website and printed stuff. Design, however, is about people. Whatever you’re designing, people –…
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What is a design-led approach to business?
Back in 2013, the Design Council worked with the Arts & Humanities Research Council to measure the value that design brings to small businesses. What they found is that design does so much more than just make products look nicer or work better. It improves the way a business operates. Their research found…
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5 steps to delivering great customer experiences
I met a friend for coffee in Dundee this week. Over cake and flat whites, we talked about what could prevent a company from delivering a great customer experience, even if they wanted to. If they’ve taken the time to understand what their customers needs and problems are, developed products or services to meet…
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What is Design Thinking?
I was in a meeting on Friday with the owner of a large IT services company. Over coffee we discussed what we do and how we help our respective clients. I was explaining that we use design thinking to help our clients transform their organisations, when he stopped me and asked “what is design thinking?“.…
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A quick guide to customer journey mapping
A customer journey map is a great tool to visualise all of the steps a customer takes as they go through your sales process and then receive and use your products or services. But how do you go about mapping the journey? Mapping the customer journey Whilst there are a handful of software applications…
