Outside Innovation

Best of 2013 Customers.com Articles

To kick off the New Year, we offer you our best articles from last year. In fact, in order to make it easy for you to read these, we’ve removed the “paywall” for all of them for 30 days. We hope you’ll take a few minutes to sample those you haven’t noticed or had time to read during the last 12 months.

Every week we publish a new article. Each one takes hours of research, thought, and preparation. Which of these articles did anyone read? Of the visitors to the Customers.com website in 2013, the largest number of you landed on, lingered on, and/or downloaded these 5 of the 60 articles we published last year.

Strategic Thinking:

1. Defining the Customer-Centric Organization: What Are the Attributes and Behaviors that Define True Customer-Centricity? by Ronni Marshak, 7/25/2013
 

2. Peer-to-Peer Business Models: Facilitating “Matchmaking” between Individuals for Fun and Profit, by Ronni Marshak, 7/12/2013

CX How To’s:

3. Utility Customer Experiences: Stark Contrasts in Dealing with NStar and National Grid: What Each Did Right and What Needs Improvement When Helping Customers in Need, by Ronni Marshak, 1/31/2013
 

Private Searching on Your Phone: DuckDuckGo’s Mobile Apps

This week, DuckDuckGo launched its iPhone app, DuckDuckGo Search and Stories. Now you can enjoy the same anonymous, non-trackable, non-invasive, clutter-free search experience on your iPhone, Android, or Windows phone that many of us now use as our default Web search engine.

DuckDuckGo’s Private Search: Now Available for Mobile Phones

I’m not as impressed with the “stories” part of DuckDuckGo’s offering. (The home page shows you the most popular news stories.) But I love the search. It takes advantage of two capabilities I’ve come to value using DuckDuckGo: instant answers and !bang searches tightly integrated into my favorite sites.