“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…
If 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…
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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…
By Guest Blogger, Jennifer Berkley, Founder & Owner of The Insight Advantage
Talking to your customers is a key strategy to weathering bad times. It’s a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of how loyal your customers are and to increase their loyalty to you — a very critical factor in times like these. It’s much harder, more expensive, and more time-consuming to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. Now, more than ever, you cannot afford a mass exodus — or even a slow leak — of your current customer base.
Why Do You Need to Stay in Touch?
- To stay relevant. You need to ensure that you are keeping updated on what is changing for your customers. You can’t expect that what you knew about your customers and their needs last year still applies.
- To avoid making big mistakes. Getting ongoing input from your customers about what is most important to them is a good way to make sure that you are not cutting
Read more…
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For customer experience management (CEM), it’s natural to focus on smoothing interaction difficulties between paying customers and sales and service representatives. Additionally, innumerable interactions for CEM occur inside the company, causing daily challenges for program managers — or any employee — in follow-through for timely and quality delivery of commitments to both internal and external customers.
Weak interactions mean weak engagement. Lack of timely, quality follow-through causes delays, poor execution, and missed commitments to customers — a source of disappointment and disillusion, bad word-of-mouth, lost sales and lost share of wallet and lower market share. In fact, most customer experience managers say that lack of agreement and cooperation across functions is the biggest challenge in improving customer experience.
Why do we often face gaps in our interactions with others? It may be due to differences in goals, perspectives and incentives — where people are just ‘not on the same page’. Interaction gaps may also occur due to Read more…
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Why is it that only 12% of customers judge specific leading suppliers as extremely customer-centric (CMO Council Customer Affinity study), while 56% of those same suppliers think of themselves as extremely customer-centric? Possibly because of the way we tend to narrowly define customer experience in the first place, and our human nature to view customer-centricity from our own – rather than the customer’s — perspective.
It Takes a Village!
Customer experience is broad — it represents the customer’s journey from realization of a need until the need no longer exists. As such, widespread involvement throughout an organization is essential in Read more…
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Lack of cooperation across organizations is a momentum inhibitor for customer experience management (CEM). Among best-in-class CEM practitioners, top challenges are:
* Cross-channel CEM.
* Organization-wide focus on customer service differentiation.
* Commonly agreed-to metrics.
* 360-degree view of customers.
All of the recent customer experience studies report broken linkages between: Read more…
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Actions speak louder than words when it comes to most things in life. Michael Phelps, Britney Spears, Barry Bonds, Martha Stewart and plenty of others learned that the hard way. Customers feel the same. They hear plenty of promises in ads, on signs, and from sales and service people. Yet customers know you can’t judge a book by its cover. It’s the actual customer experience that really counts.
Most people trust companies less this year than they did last year, according to the 10th annual Edelman Trust Barometer. No wonder, with massive irresponsible decision-making that caused the global economic crisis. Yes, actions speak louder than words!
We need to see it to believe it. Service quality and product quality outweigh any other efforts a business makes to convey trust. Here’s what participants in the Edelman study said: Read more…
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“Do the whole job” is a mantra needed by our companies and society at large. Piecemeal efforts and short-term strategies ultimately lead to finger-in-the-dike management that is rampant today. All of the recent customer experience studies indicate that vital linkages are broken between:
- survey results and business results
- data and actions
- goals across functions and business units
- incentives and desired behaviors
- multiple voice of customer sources
- views of what customers want
- brand promise and what’s delivered
What’s missing here is systems thinking! Systems thinking is a commitment to doing the whole job. It’s a holistic view of Read more…
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Customers automatically use 50 or more metrics for any customer experience, according to author Anthony Ulwick, in his book “What Customers Want”. We may be re-inventing the wheel as we strive to come up with customer metrics that spell success. Looking at things from the customer viewpoint we’ve got to admit that customers really do know what outcomes they want.
“It’s easy to portray customers as emotional, illogical individuals who are incapable of knowing or communicating what they want”, says Ulwick. “This is a convenient way to avoid taking actions that are inconsistent with one’s own thinking, intuition and personal motivations.” Despite financial pressures to take our focus off direct inputs from customers, it’s essential to avoid Read more…
17 February 2009 in
Customer Value,
Experience Innovation,
Voice of Customer | tags:
CEM,
CLV,
customer eperience innovation,
customer experience differentiation,
customer focus,
customer metrics,
customer satisfaction measures,
Customer Value,
user design 7 comments
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To build momentum in reaching goals, best intentions need to be bolstered with 4 basic principles that apply to any resolution, initiative, program, dashboard, or incentive:
1. Connected - make sure you’re focusing on things with strong connections to overall objectives.
2. Actionable - select strongly connected success measures that allow you to control outcomes.
3. Predictive - emphasize actionable, connected metrics with strong cause-and-effect to objectives.
4. Sustained - setup the right environment for predictive measures to keep producing strong results.
Part 1 of this article provided useful tips for identifying connected and actionable focus areas. To increase likelihood of achieving great results, let’s explore ways to make your focus areas predictive and sustained.
How to Make Measures Predictive
Not all actionable metrics are predictive of the big-picture goal. Focusing on Read more…
24 January 2009 in
Internal Branding | tags:
balanced scorecard,
customer satisfaction improvement,
dashboard,
goals,
initiatives,
key performance indicators,
KPI,
metrics,
performance management,
predictive,
productivity,
ROI 1 comment
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Goals are essential for taking your personal life and business prosperity to higher levels of performance, satisfaction and success. All too often, best intentions can get derailed over time. Here are 4 basic principles that apply to any resolution, initiative, program, dashboard, or MBO (management by objectives; incentives or stretch goals):
1. Connected - make sure you’re focusing on things with strong connections to overall objectives.
2. Actionable - select strongly connected success measures that allow you to control outcomes.
3. Predictive - emphasize actionable, connected metrics with strong cause-and-effect to objectives. Read more…
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By Lynn Hunsaker, as published in OgilvyOne’s Customer Futures publication: The Importance of Customer Experience in a Down Economy
Great strides in customer experience improvement are attainable with minimal out-of-pocket investment. Most companies have a wealth of untapped resources within. Proven winners both during and after a down cycle are those that embrace a slowdown as an opportunity to strengthen innovation and business processes. This strengthening better aligns offerings and ways-of-doing-business in ways that matter to customers and are hard for competitors to copy.
Latent Information
Consider the customer data residing in survey reports, complaint logs, service and sales call reports, CRM databases, win-loss analyses, the blogosphere, and so forth. If they are pieced together, a broader and deeper picture of the customer experience emerges. A small team might peruse these disparate sources to create or enhance customer segment personas. Valuable new customer experience insights can extend the typical persona definition from buying-decision-focused toward a panoramic view of the full customer experience spectrum. This spectrum should be defined through Read more…
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