I have hope. I have hope that people will smile again. I see them smiling already. I have hope that the small, non-expensive kindnesses being offered by merchants are being remembered and will be repaid with customers who swarm back to them when their wallets are full again. And I have hope that the fear that we all feel is going to go away soon.


Some may call these sentiments a pipe dream. I prefer to think of them as hopeful. Based on the small glimmer I am now seeing at the end of a very long tunnel.
Like bears coming out of hibernation, for the first time in a very long time, shopping malls are filled with people. Yes, many are stretching their legs, buying cups of coffee not bags of clothes, but customers are venturing out. We're all putting our proverbial toes in the water. If you need data to validate this cautious emergence of consumerism, some new data is indicating dare I say it, that there is some hope out there that has been measured...
The march consumer confidence index indicates that confidence was relatively unchanged in March. Hopeful, right? I say yes...we're holding our own. We want to feel confident.
And Gallup's Consumer Mood Index showed that consumers' moods improved another ten points the week of March 23-29 from the week prior, March 16-22, which showed the greatest increase since September of 2008.
Is it just me, or do you see people crawling out from under their rocks? Am I a hopeful fool? Or do you see what I (think) I am seeing? Talk to me.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Jeanne Bliss
Jeanne Bliss began her career at Lands’ End where she reported to founder Gary Comer and the company’s executive committee, ensuring that in the formative years of the organization, the company stayed focused on its core principles of customer and employee focus. She was the first leader of the Lands’ End Customer Experience. In addition to Lands’ End, she has served Allstate, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker Corporation and Mazda Corporations as its executive leading customer focus and customer experience. Jeanne has helped achieve 95% retention rates across 50,000 person organizations, harnessing businesses to work across their silos to deliver a united and deliberate experience customers (and employees) want to repeat. Jeanne now runs CustomerBliss (https://www.customerbliss.com), an international consulting business where she coaches executive leadership teams and customer leadership executives on how to put customer profitability at the center of their business, by getting past lip service; to operationally relevant, operationally executable plans and processes. Her clients include Johnson & Johnson, TD Ameritrade, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospitals, Bombardier Aircraft and many others. Her two best-selling books are Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action and I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad. Her blog is https://www.ccocoach.com She is Co-founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. www.cxpa.org