2-way conversations are now the norm! Social media, reality TV show voting, and smart phones make high interaction and accessibility a way of life. This is a trend that’s here to stay. And business processes that invite interaction at all employee levels are also proving more effective. So I’m wondering …. Which business process have you adapted to Web 2.0 principles of 2-way conversation?
Let’s talk about interaction and accessibility of employee recognition, and in particular, team recognition. Typically, managers are asked to nominate deserving recognition candidates – which is great, but of course this is dependent on the manager’s perspective … it’s 1-way communication. The managers typically need to document the recognition candidate’s achievements, adding to the managers’ already high load of paperwork duties. And this usually happens last-minute. Once the recognition recipient is selected, there is one-way communication from management. Really, how accessible and empowering is this process?
Have you ever considered what might happen if your team recognition program became a 2-way process? What if … Read more…
Key performance indicators are important gages of progress in customer experience management or any other endeavor. Balanced scorecards encourage 360-degree views of progress for a corporation or initiative.
The scorecard typically covers several categories, for example: customer, financial, productivity, and competitive metrics. By linking these categories in a single view, managers may see linkages between these areas and make all-encompassing, better informed decisions. Of course, the selection of these metrics Read more…
‘Customer-focus is important for certain job roles, but for other roles, we rely on our own wisdom.’ This is poisonous thinking when some parts of your company are excused from customer-focus.
When anyone in your organization is disconnected from customers, their decision-making may in fact interfere with your company’s customer centricity and ability to maximize value to and from customers. Certainly, customers aren’t expected to have the wisdom required to run your company — but the point is, that your wisdom in all areas should be guided by customers’ values and concerns. Like a set of dominoes, what happens in one part of the company has a ripple effect on customer-facing employees, and possibly on customers as well. Every group in your enterprise can benefit from understanding their own role in improving or hindering the customer experience.
How can every part of your organization get involved in customer experience management?
Idea #1: Relevant Customer Data Streams: Read more…
For holistic customer experience management, the challenge is horizontal alignment to deliver intentional customer experiences. And to design intentional customer experiences, the company has to decide that experiences are a differentiating factor competitively. In my interview with Desirree Madison-Biggs, Director of Customer Insight and Measurement at Symantec, we discussed the keys to horizontal alignment, and what it takes to energize your customer experience strategy as a long-term journey enterprise-wide. She emphasized the importance of:
- Executive sponsorship from the CEO, defining customer experience management as a way of life rather than “the initiative du jour”.
- Championing listening to customers and driving action for customer experience improvement through engagement across all functions.
- Systematic prioritization for fixing broken pieces of the customer experience.
- Consistent data, with focus on a key metric, communicated throughout the organization.
- Change management, including recognition, rewards, and ties to compensation.
- Champions within each business group to drive communication and actions.
- Keeping it fun through Read more…
You’ve probably heard of the blind men who touched part of an elephant and were adamant about their interpretations. Businesses are in the same predicament without customer data integration for a panoramic viewpoint. In my interview with Swati Saxena, Customer Intelligence Manager at Hewlett-Packard, she outlined some of the benefits of integrating customer data:
- Better prediction and understanding of what drives customer loyalty.
- Identifying which products to sell to customers most profitably.
- Prioritizing customers to target with specific offers.
- Using the most effective messaging and communication channels, etc.
- Reducing waste for customers and the company, for improved customer experience management.
Better Strategies from a Holistic View
“Customer data integration is akin to the parable of six blind men who were brought to an elephant and asked to touch it and describe what it was,” she explained. “One touched the elephant’s trunk and said ‘this is a snake’; one touched the tail and said ‘this is a rope’; still another touched the ear and said ‘this is a fan’. Each viewpoint was useful from a narrow perspective, but none of them were accurate about the big picture. Similarly, Read more…
Social media contains a wealth of information about the customer experience, and savvy managers are paying attention. In my interview with Sean McDonald, fomer director of Dell’s online community, he points out that the social Web is full of customer comments, and engaging customers in conversations enables opportunities for:
- Building brand reputation: turn negative sentiment into positive word-of-mouth.
- Customer service: delight and retain customers for additional growth.
- Competitor analysis: see how they are viewed by customers.
- Sales leads: find customers who are researching your brand category.
- Employee engagement: channel relevant data to all functional areas.
- New product development: augment focus groups with private community inputs.
Transition to Conversations
“Typically customer conversations occur on a need-only basis, which is unfortunate,” he says. “Companies are aligned by departments to facilitate the ease of their production: Finance keeps the books, HR manages people policies, etc. — and most departments are inward facing. Customers’ conversations used to be at barbecues, around water coolers, and in back halls. The social Web has unleashed a billion users with an appetite to share and learn from people like themselves.The Web has become more social and given literally everyone a voice.”
“Companies can engage in conversations both online and offline about customers’ passions and interests to build Read more…
Social media introduces excellent tools and customer feedback data streams for companies to monitor perceptions and trends. Best practices in customer experience management:
- Use social media listening first to determine how best to interact with customers.
- Recognize the importance of making emotional connections with customers via social media.
- Blend social media with other voice of the customer sources to create a holistic view of customer priorities.
- Leverage customer stories from social media to energize employees enterprise-wide in continual improvement of customer experience.
Emotional Connection with Customers
In my online interview with Kimarie Matthews, vice president of customer advocacy and loyalty at Wells Fargo Bank, she explained: “We look at customer loyalty as a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid, you need to meet customer expectations consistently — mastering the basics. If you do that right, your customers will be satisfied. The next step up is: how to delight customers by meeting un-met needs, innovating new products, services, features and functions. The result is that they recommend you to their friends and family. The tip of the pyramid is: customers will step up and defend you when they hear a negative comment about your brand. How do you get there? By connecting with the customer on an emotional level, showing you care and appreciate them. When we Read more…
Humans, as well as all living things, align their behaviors with the rewards in their environment. For example, only 42% of companies agree that they can do what is right for customers despite the pressure to make current-period financial numbers. Interestingly, the same number of companies are actually using customer metrics to evaluate organizational performance.1 To engage executives and employees in customer experience management, walk the talk, and put your money where your mouth is.
Most Rewards are Invisible
There is a wide spectrum of influencers on human behavior, spanning a simple smile of approval, to a sixth sense of what gets you ahead or penalizes you, to fabulous attention and monetary increases. All of these influencers Read more…
One out of two companies (44%) acknowledge that high-profile negative customer experiences have at some time compromised their brand, yet only 29% have high ability to handle and resolve customer complaints.1 Do you proactively embrace customers’ constructive feedback? While surveys have long been in place for most companies, only 31% of marketing executives report that their company takes customer listening seriously, and just 38% of companies are gathering customer insight from customer engagement situations.2 Many customer satisfaction managers emphasize the positive and de-emphasize the negative responses. A lack of processes and comfort levels for digesting and acting on constructive feedback can leave a company vulnerable to severe consequences.
Make it safe for executives and employees to receive less than stellar results – as long as they diligently improve. A motto such as this one may be useful in establishing curiosity rather than fear: Good news is no news; no news is bad news; bad news is good news.3 Make it part of your culture to look at negative feedback from customers as early warning signals, and, as the old saying goes, turn lemons into lemonade.
Virgin Mobile measures Read more…
The hardest thing for competitors to copy is the customer experience you create. And engaged employees are the most dynamic and influential force in creating superior customer experiences. While 80% of executives say they want to use customer experience management (CEM) as a form of differentiation in 2010, only 11% would call their CEM approach “very disciplined”.1 This mis-match of intentions and capabilities reveals a huge opportunity for sustainable differentiation – if your company is one of the few that is willing to adopt a disciplined approach.
Employee engagement correlates with customer engagement. Many companies, including JetBlue, evaluate their progress in engaging employees for superior customer experiences. The company asks Read more…
“More companies are getting to the point of putting the customer at the central part of their data collection systems, and managing from outside-in. That’s when you know you’re working to optimize customer experience.”
This theme emerged in my recent online interview with Theresa Kushner, Director of Strategic Marketing Customer Intelligence at Cisco Systems. Theresa is co-author of the book, Managing Your Business Data: From Chaos to Confidence. Her team at Cisco received the National Council for Database Marketing Award for Analytics and Modeling, as well as The Data Warehouse Institute Best Practice Award, for Cisco’s new customer intelligence center initiative that integrates customer data for sales, marketing and financial applications. This initiative assisted in correlating over $500 million in customer bookings.
Theresa explained how to go after the gold in your customer data, avoid fool’s gold, and refine your customer data gold to make a difference in your business growth and profitability. Untapped opportunities exist in:
*Making use of unstructured data, such as customer inquiries
*Connecting data systems such as order-entry and sales
*Helping Sales, Service, Finance, and the whole company see the customer in totality
*Allowing customer-facing people easy access to combined customer/company data
*Enabling customers to define their profile and why they’re interested in the company
*Demonstrating to customers you can move with them as a partner
*Avoiding pitfalls of fools’ gold, such as Read more…
Traditionally, Marketing takes the organization’s message to the customer base, but now equally important is Marketing’s potential to take the customer base’s message back to the organization.
Marketing sets up the value proposition that the brand represents, but ultimately customers define what brand truly means to them. The way we actually deliver the value proposition is more relevant than what we tell customers.
This theme emerged in my recent online interview with David Cliche, Vice President of Global Interactive Marketing at Aon, a leading provider of risk management and workforce productivity solutions. Dave’s role includes leadership of interactive marketing, customer experience management strategies, sales operations, corporate communications, marketing research and analysis, and knowledge management.
“Delivery on brand expectations is most important and customers will tell us how well we do that. There’s so much to learn from the Sales and Customer Service interactions with customers”, explained Dave. “Take all those lessons learned for improvement, and drive them into creation of Marketing programs and value propositions. Then take the customer experience full-circle back into the organization as part of the strategic Read more…
It’s popular to tout customer-centricity, yet it’s very difficult to consistently demonstrate. The word centric means having a specific thing as the focus of attention and efforts. Customer-centric means that concerns other than the customer’s well-being are in the background while the customer stays in the foreground.
That may seem simple enough, yet reality proves the elusiveness of customer-centricity. In Accenture’s Delivering the Promise study, 75% of executives viewed their customer service as above-average, while 59% of their customers reported their experience with these companies’ service as somewhat to extremely dissatisfying. Likewise, in CMO Council’s Customer Affinity study, half the companies said they are extremely customer-centric, but only a tenth of their customers agreed.
The building blocks of customer-centric culture are Read more…
Why do sales and service representatives feel compelled to tell customers how to answer a survey? Does the company want to know what the customers really think, or is the company trying to build positive publicity by claiming superior ratings?
The answer to the second question exposes the company’s culture and customer experience management motives — whether they are striving to be customer centric (eager to know and act on what customers really think), or happy to be self centric (eager for positive publicity). Maybe the motive behind the satisfaction survey depends on the sponsoring organization; perhaps a Marketing-sponsored satisfaction survey will naturally lean toward PR objectives, while a Quality-sponsored satisfaction survey will naturally lean toward continual improvement. Regardless of the sponsor, here’s why it’s best to pursue a customer centric survey strategy:
1) Investment: Surveys are an investment of customer time and of company funds, manpower and time – aren’t there more straightforward (honest) and cost-effective Read more…
What’s the difference between the way customers volunteer feedback versus the way they’re requested to give feedback? One revolves around outcomes in the customer’s world, whereas the other revolves around customer satisfaction enablers in the company’s world. True customer-centricity requires primary focus and decision motivations be centered on the customer’s world, rather than the company’s.
What Are “Outcomes” in the Customer’s World?
The concept of customers’ desired outcomes throughout the customer experience originated in innovation literature when Clayton Christensen wrote his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, explaining that customers “hire” a product or service to get something done for them. When we understand the circumstances motivating the customer to hire a product or service, then we gain insight into the customer’s jobs-to-be-done.
A great way to identify customers’ desired outcomes throughout the customer experience is to Read more…
f value is defined as benefits versus costs, what’s your company’s customer experience value ratio? Superior value is the objective of customers and marketers alike. And since customers hold the purse strings, marketers are compelled to view value as customers do. In the customer experience value ratio, the numerator includes product and service value, as well as image and personal value. We may often overlook or be unaware of some of the cost dimensions in the denominator: money … plus time, energy and psychic costs.
In managing customer experience, the challenge is not only to maximize the numerator, but also to minimize the denominator. Touch-point analysis can be very helpful, but make sure Read more…
You never know someone so well as when they live with you! What better way to transform your culture to truly customer-centric ways of thinking and doing, than to invite your customer to attend all your discussions? This has long been a practice at Amazon, since founder Jeff Bezos once started an executive meeting by announcing that an empty chair at the table represented “the customer”. Throughout the meeting, the executives were compelled to include the customer in their thought process, and to consider their comments’ implications on the customer, as if “he/she” were present.
This practice became a habit at Amazon, part of their corporate culture. CTO Werner Vogels explains: Read more…
If the “customers’ jobs-to-be-done” concept is becoming embraced as essential for successful innovation, why is it largely ignored for monitoring of customer experience and satisfaction? Customers’ jobs-to-be-done (desired outcomes) are the customer’s viewpoint of functional and emotional needs to be fulfilled. Hence, the solution a firm sells is a means-to-an-end, simply a tool meant to enable the customer’s desired outcome from the points of need awareness through need extinction.
“For any given job, customers collectively apply 50 to 150 metrics to measure how well the job is getting done”, says Anthony Ulwick in his book What Customers Want. “Only when all the metrics for a given job are well satisfied are customers able to execute the job perfectly. Figure out which of the 50 to 150 outcomes Read more…
A new understanding of innovation success factors is making traditional logic obsolete. Successful innovation has less to do with the best investment, technology, research and designers, according to Booz Allen Hamilton: “Unless their R&D efforts are driven by a thorough understanding of what their customers want, their performance may well fall short — at least compared to that of their more customer-driven competitors.”1
A thorough understanding of what customers want is based on desired outcomes rather than features and reactions to concepts and prototypes. From the customer’s viewpoint, the solution that your firm sells is a means-to-an-end. It’s simply a tool meant to Read more…
Why is it hard to retain customers? Of course there’s the ongoing battle with competitors. They may make highly attractive offers to your customers that are hard for them to refuse, and their brand affinity may have strong appeal to your customers – brand affinity here is positive association built through cause marketing, perceived social status and so forth.
Over-focus on customer acquisition teaches customers to switch brands. For example, the brand switching rate, called customer churn, is 40% for the mobile phone industry, compared to a 7% customer churn rate for the insurance and financial services industries. As growth slows in acquiring new customers – either due to the economy or to shrinking technological gaps with competitors, more companies are pursuing customer retention as a vital corporate strategy.
Not Planning or Funding Retention
Most executives and marketers can quote the well-known universal statistics on customer retention – that a small improvement in the number of customers retained can Read more…
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CEM STRATEGY:
