Unifying Online & Offline Customer Data for a Consistent Experience

Tags

Customer Data, Customer Experience, Ecosystem, Offline Data

Unify Data – Convergence Ahead

The challenge of creating meaningful relationships is complicated by an abundance of data from both online and offline sources, as well as a multitude of communication channels to contend with.

A big issue is how to consolidate customer information to drive consistent communications across channels. By taking a unified approach, marketers can better shape interactions with their organization to create outstanding customer experiences.

What should we think through?

1. How to collect and manage online and offline data in order to truly understand our customers
2. Why a unified experience is essential for growth
3. Common inconsistencies and gaps in the customer experience, and how to handle them
4. How to use data to track customer interactions, and use this information to improve communications across multiple channels

Here are the key ideas:

1. This is an ecosystem built for data, insight and action – Resist the temptation to focus and organize around silos. While silos can maximize a part of the system, they sub-optimize the whole. We are building a customer (digital) ecosystem.
2. What we should collect – We probably shouldn’t try to collect everything. We also should be collecting the “right” data. We should consider enhancing the data we collect to make it more valuable. Several suggested priorities are all online transaction detail and insight, most offline transaction detail and insight, social media data and insights and finally, call center transactions and insights.
3. The value of offline data – Not all data is as valuable as others. The human resources to manually enter offline data can be daunting and so many times it is the last priority. There are great services that automate the collection of offline data at a reasonable cost. The first step in the automation process is to create a data value strategy. That will help justify the cost of capturing the offline data and integrating it into your customer systems.
4. Understanding the customer – Data is very useful if it allows us to understand our customers better. Collecting data is of no value if it doesn’t lead to insight. Think data, insight and action.
5. Unifying the data – Even 2 pieces of unified data is more powerful than one. Having a plan for the most valuable sources and at least integrating some of the data will move insight ahead.
6. Unifying the experience – This is not all about data. At the end of the day, customers will expect a great (unified) experience across multiple channels.
7. Doing something about the gaps – Knowing you have a gap in the data and the experience is one thing. Doing something that improves the experience is another. Insight is very useful but it must lead to action.
8. Creating a value framework – Not all data is of equal value and not every customer is either. Part of the framework that leads from insight to action is understanding which customers are of more value and those that will lead to greater levels of renewal.
9. An “Omni-Channel” approach – Unified data and a unified experience is created by an Omni-Channel approach. Omni-Channel creates a unified approach seamlessly across channels. All channels need to be fused into a single approach.

Employees will provide an amazing customer experience. What should I focus on today?

Tags

Celebrate, Customer Experience, Incent, Leadership, Measurements

When it comes to the customer experience, it is important to think through very carefully what will employees actually do. It is my job, as a leader, to know how to have the most engaged employees possible. No on else can do that for me.

• What is measured about the customer experience, will get done. I have to make sure that I am measuring the right thing. What is the one thing that will make a difference in the customer experience? Do I know? Am I measuring it?
• What is incented will get done. Incentives can include compensation but should not do so exclusively.
• What wins are we celebrating? What I spend time celebrating with employees is important. Everyone will pay attention.

So don’t blame people, change their environment. I can do that no matter what level I am in the organization.

What is the (ROI) return on the investment in the stunning?

Tags

Amazing, Customer Experience, ROI, Stunning

Return on Investment

There comes a time where we have to make a decision. What will we invest in? It is a serious question and not a budget exercise. If we are going to be intentional and proactive, we need to make an investment. At first that may be just our time as a digital executive.

Eventually it will be about people, our processes, our strategies and our technology. If we don’t become intentional in our approach to our digital customer experiences we will continue to be haphazard in our approach; reacting, responding, solving toxic experiences in real time. This intention however must be about heartfelt experiences. It must create a passion for our mission as a digital business.

Here are the key ideas:

• There is a difference in the mediocre / ho hum experience and the stunning. Begin to believe in the amazing. If inspires you it will inspire your customers.
• Decide you are going to decide. Not seeing you have alternatives can create inertia that can undermine progress.
• Reacting to customer pain points is a “net zero” game. It stops the bleeding but doesn’t improve your health. You do need to stop the bleeding however. It can’t be ignored.
• Having stopped the bleeding if you need to, start investing in the stunning. It is one thing to prevent a problem, it is another to improve your wellbeing.
• In considering your investment in the amazing, test your alternatives to help make the decision.

There is of course, a very real cost to reacting. Scrutinize your budget and you will see that most of our fixed expenses are reactionary. What if we invested in proactive and intentional experiences of the heart up front? Could we radically reduce our reactionary and bloated fixed expenses? In fact, my guess is the reactionary expenses vastly exceed proactive expenses. I know companies that are ramping up their expenses in reactionary engagement and relationships. The good news is that they are succeeding in shifting the negative to neutral or even the positive.

So what is the outcome of taking a negative and balancing it with a positive? Is it engagement or damage control?

So what is the cost and value of neutralizing the negative? Shouldn’t we start with the amazing?

What is the return on that investment in the stunning?

What is probably most concerning is that most of use are not measuring much of this. And why are we struggling to generate more sales? Now think about that question. Why is our revenue flat? Why are customers not engaged and renewing?

Is the experience we are creating wonderfully sharable? If not, what is our investment over the next 3 months going to be in changing that? We must invest in not only a positive experience but an experience that screams out for our customer and clients to share it with everyone they know. That encourages others to join in. It also offsets any negative experiences anyone else has shared. Think about it. We all read the ratings and comments. If there are 100 over the top ones we can ignore the one that is virally negative writing it off to a weirdo.

What is the biggest deal? Trying to offset the negative experiences or proactively creating amazing ones? Creating amazing ones is everything. That is not an exaggeration. You know, from your own experiences, that it is true. The cost of reacting is always eclipsed by the upside of the stunning.

Think of what you want. You are a consumer. You are the customer who wants something from your company you are doing business with. Are you looking for the ordinary? No, you are looking for an experience, no, the experience.

Any company that recognizes you, remembers you, and gives you an amazing service experience will win your heart. And it is all about your heart. You will be loyal to them no matter what. That is what we know as relevance. A passion of our heart that transcends anything else. What would the answer be if you asked you customers the following question: Can you imagine the world without (XYZ Company)? On a scale of 1 to 10, what would your average rating be?

And so, that heartfelt experience is not just a so-so something. That heartfelt, amazing experience, is everything. That kind of vision is the father of innovation. Who needs the mother of invention in that kind of world?

You have a number of alternatives before you as a digital executive. Which will you choose? One filter should be which of the experiences will create an emotional connection. Have you factored that into your decision analysis? You can actually measure the difference in terms of engagement. Does one alternative improve engagement or not? Some level of rigor in measuring the results will help.

There are constraints in terms of investments. Consider small tests with some level of “A-B” spilt analysis. “A-B’ tests are not just for the marketing department.

Why Customer Experiences should be intentional

Tags

Customer Experience, Design, Digital Executive, Mission

Intentional Customer Experience

As a digital executive, design is important. What is being sold is important but the experience the customer has in buying it has become critical.

What does the future of your business look like? Is it focused on your mission AND design?

Here are the key ideas:

• Customer experiences need to be intentionally designed.
• Customers aren’t satisfied with the ordinary and expect more.
• Measuring customer experiences gives benchmarks for how we are doing.
• Creating an intentional focus that also frames out what things to stop is transformative.

Digital business transformation is all about being intentional about the experiences your customers are having.

How many products and services do you have? How many channels (Web, Social, Mobile, Call Center, Direct Mail, etc.) are you focused on? Do they all have a unified design and experience?

Mission + Design = Intentional experiences

We are clear about our mission. Are we clear about our design?

If not, we aren’t ready to be the digital executive of the future. If we aren’t ready to be a digital executive, we aren’t ready for the future. If we aren’t ready for the future, will we have a relevant job 5 to 10 years from now? Tough questions I know but worth considering.

So here are a couple more of intriguing questions:

1. How do we ensure that our customers are having an amazing experience?
2. Why make customers cope with the ordinary?
3. Why aren’t customers more engaged with both your mission and revenue opportunities?

Our focus and day to day work should be about creating  amazing “customer experiences” in this new age of consumerism. What is going on in the rest of the world isn’t lost on your customers. They are judging you based on those experiences. We can bury our head in the sand. That will only get us left behind. Our credibility as an executive is at stake.

What should we focus on? What is amazing? There is actually some simplicity to it and it can be measured.

1. How enjoyable are we to do business with?
2. How easy are we to do business with?
3. How effective are we at meeting customer needs?

Consumers expect more from businesses more than ever before. So our products and services have a level of expectation that our business may not be aware of. How does the experience your customers are having compare to USAA for example? Do you know?

Here is the harsh reality. Customers not only expect better experiences, they believe they are absolutely entitled to them. Will we be intentional in delivering on those expectations? Are we ready to get left behind with stagnant growth if we don’t deliver those experiences? We may not be ready for that but it may already be happening. I encourage you to think about it. It is a good question to ponder.

There is a unique opportunity to create amazing and positive experiences at our stores, on the web, at your call center (if you have one), on smart phones and in our direct mail pieces. Are all of those unified? Is the experience amazing?

That amazing or ordinary (or perhaps even bad) experience will be how your business is measured in terms of satisfaction or even our revenue success. Do you know how your customers feel about the experience they are having with your company? If not, why not? Are you being intentional about that experience they just had at your store? Is it consistent with the experience they want on your web site?

As an executive, you have an amazing opportunity to lead the charge regardless of your role. If you do, you will be a hero. To focus on what needs to be improved, the current experiences need to be measured so changes can be proven to make a difference.

Designing and unifying customer experiences will require skillsets that may not exist today. Deciding what else that is being done today that can be stopped so that staff can focus on design, experience mapping and unification efforts will require focus. The constraints of time and money will be important to address early in the transformation efforts.

 

What is our responsibility to engage employees in the customer experience obsession?

Tags

Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, Incent, Inspired, Instruction, Involvement, Learning, Vision

It is a leadership responsibility to engage employees in our customer experience obsession. We know it leads to higher levels of customer engagement and profitability. According to customer experience guru Bruce Temkin, we should consider 5 I’s.

• Employees really want to be inspired with a compelling vision. While salary is important, real engagement comes from an inspired message followed up by real action.
• Employees want to be involved in being part of the solution. The closer an employee is to real customer interactions, the better the insight.
• The need to be informed about what we are doing to improve the customer experience is always essential. Middle management plays a huge role in this on a daily basis.
• We need to create a learning environment where instruction is the norm. Improving the customer experience is a continuous process where our learning is a key.
• Leadership needs to incent employees to be successful. While some of this is about compensation, there are many ways to incent employees that involve soft investments. Have we discovered what works for the members of our team of direct reports?

True employee engagement will lead us to great levels of customer engagement.

Economics of Net Promoter Score, 2017. Does it make a difference?

Tags

Customer Experience, Forrester Research, Net Promoter, Temkin

As executives, we are always faced with the question of will improving the Customer Experience make a difference? A number analysis continues to point in the direction of “yes, it does”. Forrester Research has some great data to demonstrate this.

In addition toe the Forrester data, the Temkin Group just published their annual report, Economics of Net Promoter Score, 2017.

Here’s the executive summary:

“Net Promoter® Score (NPS®) is a popular metric that companies use to analyze their customer experience efforts. But how does this metric actually relate to loyalty? To uncover the relationship between NPS and loyalty, we asked 10,000 U.S. consumers to give an NPS to 331 companies across 20 industries, and we then looked at how this score correlated with four key loyalty behaviors. Here are some highlights from this research:

Compared to detractors, promoters are over four times more likely to repurchase from a company, over five times more likely to forgive a company if it makes a mistake, over seven times more likely to try new offerings from a company, and almost five times more likely to trust a company.

We performed a detailed analysis of the loyalty data for promoters, passives, and detractors across 20 different industries: airlines, auto dealers, banks, computer and tablet makers, credit card issuers, fast food chains, health plans, hotels and rooms, insurance carriers, investment firms, parcel delivery services, rental car and transport agencies, retailers, software firms, streaming media services, supermarkets, TV and Internet service providers, TVs and appliance makers, utilities, and wireless carriers.

Ultimately, if a company wants to benefit from using NPS as a key metric, it must focus on improving customer experience, not obsessing over the metric itself.

Source: Report: Economics of Net Promoter Score, 2017 | Customer Experience Matters®

Why did I start this journey in the first place?

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Change, Customer Experience, Transformation

Transformation isn’t easy. We all know that most transformation initiatives, of any kind, fail. The reasons are well known. Too many priorities. Too little focus. New shiny objects appear on the horizon which beg our desire to chase them.

If transformation in general is difficult, then it must be known that Customer Experience transformation is really, really difficult. Why can it fail? Too many priorities. Too little focus. New shiny objects appear on the horizon which beg our desire to chase them.

It will help to stay positive. It is always way too easy to become discouraged. There are many speed bumps in the way and it easy for the wheels to come off if we don’t slow down sometimes. I must remember why I started the journey in the first place.

It is imperative that we celebrate success along the way. Little benchmarks offers the opportunity to celebrate frequently. Celebrations engages the team members and energizes leadership.

Building a Strong Voice of the Customer Program (Video)

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Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer

Customer connectedness is one of Temkin Group’s four CX core competencies. A key capability in this area is a strong voice of the customer (VoC) program. This video highlights their model for creating a VoC program, called the 6D’s: Detect, Disseminate, Diagnose, Discuss, Design, and Deploy.

via Building a Strong Voice of the Customer Program (Video) | Customer Experience Matters.

“Highly engaged employees make the customer experience. Disengaged employees break it.” ~Timothy R. Clark

Tags

Customer Experience, Heart, Passion, Soul

Heart

Do I believe that highly engaged employees make a difference in the customer experience?

There is plenty of evidence and facts to demonstrate if facts move me.

Or … do I believe in my heart and soul that passionate employees who want to serve customers are the key?

It makes sense to invest in my and my employees heart. Passion for service is a key.

Highly engaged employees make the customer experience. Disengaged employees break it.” ~Timothy R. Clark

Am I willing to prioritize customer experience investments to keep my promise?

Tags

Customer Experience, Investment, Promise

Investment

We have made promises to our customers. They may not have been well thought out but we have made them. If our promises are not the ones that add value, we should think about changing them.

Is our promise clear to us and our customers? Do we know what it will cost us to keep it? It is important to plan our customer experiences around our promises.

Making the customer experience, relative to the promise, a priority will help keep us all focused.

What investments am I willing to make to keep our customer experience promise?

Your Customer Experience Measurement Guide – CX – perience

Tags

Customer Experience, Metrics, Satisfaction

The customer experience

We know the customer experience is important.

We struggle with how to measure it.

At the end of the day, there probably isn’t one “right answer” about what the important metrics are. Having the right culture will lead to the right metrics.

The growth, development and profitability of any customer service company depends on its customers and it’s important to track this growth through customer experience measurement. Companies with many satisfied customers will undoubtedly be more prosperous than companies with few dissatisfied customers. A satisfied customer is one who is most likely to purchase from you, rarely shops around, refer other customers to your company and scores high when it comes to advocating for your company.

via Your Customer Experience Measurement Guide – CX – perience.

Will your company be customer experience driven?

Tags

Customer, Customer Experience, Strategy

Growth in Customer Experience (Forrester Research)

There is no denying that companies are embracing the whole “customer experience” phenomena. This year even more companies will adopt approaches to transform their business. The trend will only continue to accelerate.

What does this mean to you? Why should you not ignore what is going on with your competitors?

Disruption is around the corner. Others may be about to overtake you. Now is not the time to to ignore what is vital to your digital transformation efforts.

Some key areas for focus are:

1. Understand your customers
2. Measure the experience they are having with you
3. Set up a governance or oversight team
4. Create and execute a clear strategy
5. Build better design into your processes
6. Accurately assess where you are from a “culture” point of view

How did I feel about that experience? Was it fun?

Tags

Customer Experience, Effort, Emotion, Goal

The customer experience

Many things make up the customer experience. Three that many agree on are achieving a goal, the effort it takes and how I feel about the experience.

Am I successful in achieving my goal? When I interact with a company, I have a goal in mind. Maybe I am just doing some research. Maybe I am ready to buy. Successful companies understand the goals of their customers and design the journey to meet the goal.

What kind of effort do I have to put into this? Is it easy? How many times do we go to do something and it is so difficult. We have a problem with our bill and we want it straightened out. 2 hours later after talking with 5 different customer reps and it still isn’t straight. It is more common than not that by understanding the goal a customer has in mind, we make it difficult to achieve it.

How did I feel? Was it fun and enjoyable? We are all creatures of how we feel about an experience. It may be the most ignored driver of amazing experiences.

All of these items have an impact on loyalty. So where do we focus?

The most impactful and overlooked is the emotion of it all; how I feel about the experience. Since most companies over look the emotional connection customers have with a company, starting there maybe the most impactful thing I can do. Competitors may never, ever get there.

 

The Rise of Mobile Customer Experience

Tags

Customer Experience, Mobile

Mobile can’t be ignored. The mobile experience can be painful to delightful. None of it happens by magic.

There is a variety of Temkin Group research on the mobile customer experience including: Data Snapshot: Channel Preferences Benchmark, 2016, Five C’s of Mobile VoC Disruption, Data Snapshot: Media Use Benchmark, 2016, and The State of CX Metrics, 2015.

Source: The Rise of Mobile CX (Infographic) | Customer Experience Matters®

The Healthcare Experience Revolution

Tags

Customer Experience, Health care, Mindshare, Multichannel, Revolution

Transform the health care experience

What if your goal (strategy) is to revolutionize the health care experience? I think most of us would agree there is a lot of room for improvement.

This is not so much about technology (although technology is a big part of it) as it is all the processes that make up the experience. I would think the process would come first before any technology is enabled.

To fundamentally transform healthcare, it is critical for payers and healthcare providers to embrace technology and redesign processes. “To succeed and differentiate in the healthcare market of the future, stakeholders must leverage technology,” stresses Pat McCaffrey, TeleTech’s senior vice president for health care and public sector. This includes using cutting-edge technology to build multichannel communication strategies that are customized to members and patients. “Those stakeholders who are successful in this regard will command mindshare with their member and patient population and build lasting ties with them,” McCaffrey says.

via The Healthcare Experience Revolution.

 

What is more important, advertising or amazing customer service?

Tags

Advertising, Customer Experience, Customer Service

How important is the experience that customers have with you? Before you answer, consider this:

• 40% of people began purchasing from a competitive brand because of its reputation for great customer service.
• 55% are willing to recommend a company due to outstanding service, more than product or price.
• 85% would pay up to 25% more to ensure a superior customer service experience.
• 82% have stopped business with a company due to bad customer service.
• 95% of customers have taken action as a result of a bad experience. Of those, 79% told others about their experience.

The Internet has amplified the ability for news to travel and instant speed, especially bad news. Many customer service management software providers focus on developing more effective tools to help you stay on top of managing your customer experience and ensuring that your customers are getting good customer service from your staff, all of the time.

The fine folks at Zengage, the Zendesk blog put together a fantastic infographic outlining the importance of customer experience and the impact that it has on getting new customers and keeping your customers happy.

Source: Customer Experience Is More Important Than Advertising (Infographic) – Business 2 Community

Faking the customer experience

Tags

Customer Experience, Fake, Profit

If the product really stinks can you fake the experience to generate more profit?

You can’t fake the real experience. The real experience is vitally connected to the product itself.

Customers and employees will always figure it out. That spells disaster in the short and long run.

Once they figure it out, they will act and behave accordingly. That means your product is doomed.

 

What will the workforce of the future look like?

Tags

Cog, Customer Experience, Leadership

What will the workforce of the future look like?

Great question. It will be the same and it will be different.

If the focus on the customer experience looses traction, a few companies who stay the course will dominate.

It is clear that great customer experiences pay off. That isn’t anything new. Employees and leaders who get that reap the gains.

What about those who don’t? A life as a cog in the machine. Not too exciting but it may pay the bills. We need people who want more than that.

Because customer experience initiatives continue to dominate the executive agenda, businesses often fail to nurture internal resources in pursuit of external gain. However, as consumer expectations evolve, so must company culture, for future employees will rely upon collaboration, adaptability, and purpose to further personal and enterprisewide success

via Spotlight | The Workforce of the Future.

How should we organize ourselves to deliver a stunning customer experience?

Tags

Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience, Digital Executive

Bruce Temkin does great work on customer experience.  He has identified characteristics of mature customer experience approach. This is essential to the digital executive who is focused on great customer experiences. They are:

1. CX core team
2. Reporting executive
3. CX Steering Team
4. CX Working Group
5. CX Ambassadors

Organizations need both formal and informal structures to drive change and improve customer experience (CX). In this report, we begin by identifying the five elements of a customer experience management group operating inside an organization: a CX core team, a reporting executive, a steering committee, a working group, and CX ambassadors. We describe how five organizations—Arizona Public Service, British Columbia Lottery Corporation, Cornerstone OnDemand, Hagerty, and Safeco Insurance—combine these essential elements to create effective CX management groups. Our research also found that CX groups come in all shapes and sizes, and that the needs of these structures vary according to the maturity level of a company’s CX efforts. Across all different structures, the success of a CX organization is based on three characteristics: make-up of the CX core team, executive commitment to CX, and organizational readiness for CX. To evaluate your CX organization against these characteristics, use Temkin Group’s CX Organization Assessment.

Source: Report: Blueprint for a Successful CX Organization | Customer Experience Matters

Disruption 101: Transforming an Innovative Idea into a Sustainable Business

Tags

Customer Experience, Digital, Disruption, Software

Are you a software company? Should you be a software company? Are you about to be disrupted because you don’t see yourself as a software company?

The new capital of the digital world is the customer experience. Without that, technology will fail us.

It is happening across myriad industries: New companies are rolling out solutions and services that tap into changing customer behaviors and expectations, forcing incumbent firms to keep up or become obsolete. But for every company that disrupts an industry like Airbnb, Uber, and Spotify, there are others that quickly fizzled out (MySpace) or lost touch with its customers (BlackBerry).

via Disruption 101: Transforming an Innovative Idea into a Sustainable Business.

How will it end?

Tags

Customer Experience, Invest, Priority

Return on Investment

How will it end?

There are many things about the customer experience we may not have the resources to impact. We have to have priorities and make some tough choices.

How the experience ends has a huge impact on how the experience will be remembered. Have we thought it through? Do we know what feeling we want customers to come away with? Have we invested in that critical moment?

We can be intentional about that. It will make a difference.

From a millennial to nonprofits – Can you give us bold and robust?

Tags

Customer Experience, Millennials, Nonprofit

This is a stunning way to see what can happen when you are a digital nonprofit. It is a challenge to be sure but seems to me it is the way to go.

If someone can feel that coffee can create a “I can’t imagine the world without this coffee kind of experience”, then imagine what we can do for the mission of our nonprofits. There is an amazing opportunity here for stunning experiences for nonprofit constituents.

Today is the day we need to imagine a group of people differently.

Last night, the finest, rarest coffee beans in the world, known as Jamaican Blue, found their way into my cup.  And it was truly remarkable.

A cup of coffee?  Really?  I mean.. it’s just a cup of coffee, right?  No. This coffee was robust.  It was bold. It was like nothing I’d ever tried before. And it wasn’t just me.  I looked around at the coffee shop, and everyone else was blown away too.  Suddenly, we were all a part of this incredible, mind-blowing experience. Instagram.  Twitter.  Facebook.  Pinterest.  All channels blown up.  I wanted people to know what I was going through – to be a part of what I was a part of.  I had to share what was happening with my circle of influence in hopes that maybe – just maybe – one person would see this masterpiece and buy this cup of coffee too, only to have his or her life impacted forever.

If I felt this way about a cup of coffee, how much more enthusiasm could your cause inspire?  Imagine what could happen if your organization bridged the gap with my generation..

via From a Millennial: Give Us Bold and Robust and We’ll Share It With The World | npENGAGE.

What are the rules of employee engagement for a great customer experience?

Tags

Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, Gallup

More and more, we are beginning to recognize that a key to the customer experience is highly engaged employees. Gallup has lots of data on the correlation. Building a digital business will require strategies and initiatives to improve employee engagement. It should also be a key lagging indicator for the customer experience.

People are central to all we do. Goals are important but engaged people make it happen.

Engaged employees are the backbone of an organization. But while business leaders recognize the importance of an engaged workforce, several organizations have been facing high levels of disengagement for a number of years. In fact, numerous reports have pointed towards a serious problem in the United States. According to the latest Gallup report on the State of the American Workplace, only 30 percent of employees in the United States are engaged, while the other 70 percent are not reaching their full potential. While there is no magic recipe to achieve and retain high levels of employee engagement, there are certainly a number of ingredients that, when combined, will steer organizations in the right direction. These components are not dissimilar from the ones needed to have a successful relationship and manage a household.

via Employee Engagement | Rules of Employee Engagement.

E-commerce Sales Tools and Customer Experiences that Are Shaking Up Business

Tags

Customer Experience, E-Commerce, Marketing, Sales

Consumers are flocking to our E-Commerce sites and buying. The challenge is that the customer experience is not static. Others are raising the bar on what that experience feels like. How am I stacking up is relevant.

Customers have goals in mind, problems they want to solve and feelings about how well we do that. Am I just focused on the transaction? Now might be the time to see how customers feel about how well we are solving their problems. The latest technology may be enticing but not if it doesn’t help the customer.

It’s unquestionable that e-commerce is big business. In 2015, e-commerce sales reached $341.7 billion, a 14.6 percent increase from 2014, reports the Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce. But as more people shop online, the customer experience bar continues to rise.

To continue driving sales, retailers must align shopping tools and experiences with their customers’ needs. Here, we look at sales tools that are poised to transform the retail landscape.

Source: E-commerce Sales Tools that Are Shaking Up Business | 1to1 Media

Do we really want to treat our customers like plankton?

Tags

Customer Experience, Selfie, Seth Godin, Value

Who wants to be plankton? Seth Godin, in a very insightful blog post, gives us the answer.

We don’t want to be plankton. Neither do our customers. Are we treating them that way or are we creating amazing experiences that connect us in a real way with what matters? Let us challenge ourselves to do better. As a digital executive, this is important.

Our marketing, in the digital business, should not be about luck and pandering. The focus on meeting the needs of customers and creating stunning experiences should be more than enough.

Whales have to eat a lot of plankton. A whale needs an enormous number of these tiny creatures because, let’s be honest, one plankton just doesn’t make a meal.

It’s unlikely the whale savors each plankton, relishing the value that it brings.

The fabled Oreo tweet and the now legendary Ellen selfie are examples of whale eating plankton. Each retweet is so worthless to these whales and the brands that come from the TV world that they need millions of them, constantly.

They’re hooked on tonnage, and will dumb down whatever they do to get more of it. To get mass in the social media world, you need luck and you need to pander.

I think our attention is more precious than that.

For most modern marketers, quantity isn’t the point. What matters is to matter. Lives changed. Work that made an actual difference. Connection.

You are not a plankton. Neither are your customers.

via Seth’s Blog: Are we not plankton?.

Will the Rightful Customer Experience Owner Please Stand Up?

Tags

Culture, Customer Experience, Customer Journey, Ownership

The customer experience is a journey involving many along the way.

Does the sales department “own the relationship”? What about the billing department when they send out an invoice in error? What about the service department when they call to complain about it? What about the shipping department that sent the wrong item?

The customer experience journey involves so many of us. We all have to “own it”.

If you’re looking for one specific owner for customer experience, then you’ve got it wrong,” says Gary Magenta, senior vice president at Root Inc. “Customer experience isn’t about a single owner. It’s about an entire corporate culture. It’s a daily practice supported by all people within an organization. It’s about everyone owning it.

via Spotlight | Will the Rightful Customer Experience Owner Please Stand Up?.

How do consumers expect to connect with us?

Tags

Consumer Expectations, Customer Experience, Mobile, Multiple Devices

You know technology is moving fast. So are customer expectations. Adoption of multiple devices is now the norm. I connect from my work laptop, iPad, iPhone, and home iMac on any given day. Most of what I connect to is pervasive from device to device. Just today I have used a “to do” manager on the web via a laptop, my iPhone and my iPad. Everything I need to do is always synched and up to date. I love it. But that is also my expectation now for how things work. Many others, perhaps your customers, have the same expectation. So what experience are they getting from you?

The digital executive is focused on creating this kind of amazing customer experience. This is the essence of a digital business. Our customers expect no less than this. With this understand, we need to focus on customer expectations and technology that enables a seamless experience.

Consider this from Forrester Research:

Thirty-two percent of US online adults accessed the Internet from multiple physical locations using a PC only; for example, from home, work, and the sidelines of a son’s soccer game.

Forty-five percent of all US mobile subscribers owned a smartphone in 2011, slightly less than doubling from just two years before, when only 24% owned one. Forrester forecasts that more than half of US mobile subscribers will own smartphones by the end of 2012. And, in Western Europe, they expect smartphone penetration to jump from 34% in 2011 to 67% by 2016.

Thirty-six percent of US adults with a mobile phone access the mobile Internet at least monthly or more often. In 2010, only 23% engaged in this behavior. Western European adults with a mobile phone accessing the mobile Internet at least monthly or more often grew from 9% to 18% from 2009 to 2011.

We can all connect and interact from multiple devices all day long without missing a beat. What opportunities does this present for us to improve the customer experience?

Here are the key ideas:

• Customer expectations have changed to connect from multiple devices.
• Customers expect the experience to be amazing and consistent from device to device.
• Much of these interactions are moving to mobile devices. Mobile is a reality not a trend.

 

In the world of customer experience, what does the path look like?

Tags

Brand, Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, Leadership, Maturity, Metrics

Customer experience does matter. It isn’t easy to get there but a road-map does exist.

Temkin Group’s research shows that companies evolve through six stages of CX maturity, but the higher levels of maturity take a significant jump in focus and commitment. What does that path look like? Take a look at this infographic.

Source: Customer Experience: The Path From Fluff to Tough (Infographic) | Customer Experience Matters®

Employee engagement is foundational to donor engagement

Tags

Customer Experience, Donor Engagement, Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is foundational to donor engagement. It is highly unlikely that an employee who hates their job or who is disengaged from what they do will create a great donor experience.

Employee engagement, by any number of studies and research reports, leads to higher levels of nonprofit results. Most notable is Gallup’s work in this area evidenced by Gallup’s own Q12 engagement survey. Gallup scientists spent decades writing and testing hundreds of questions, because their wording and order mean everything when it comes to accurately measuring engagement. Their research yielded Gallup’s Q12 survey: the 12 questions that measure the most important elements of employee engagement. Gallup has studied survey results from more than 25 million employees around the world.

‘The lost suitcase and a grumpy old man’ – a story about employee engagement – Blog post by Ian Golding  – Customer centric organizations tend to have a number of things in common. They typically have management teams who collectively believe in the importance of doing things with customer’s interests firmly in mind. They usually design their customer journey(s) to meet and exceed customer expectations. They often recognize that getting things wrong may happen, but that correcting them is a vitally important skill. One thing you can guarantee, is that customer centric organizations do not just put customers first – they also put their employees first as well.

Customer Experience Leadership Requires Engaged Employees – One of the Six Laws of Customer Experience is “Unengaged employees don’t create engaged customers.” That’s why Employee Engagement is one of Temkin Group’s four customer experience core competencies.

The 5 Factors that Ruin Employee Engagement – Experts outline the five main drivers of employee disengagement that business leaders need to steer clear of at all costs. Employees are the backbone of organizations. But despite having the knowledge that an engaged workforce correlates to positive donor experiences and growing donation, high levels of disengagement still plague many organizations. In fact, the latest Gallup report on the State of the American Workplace notes that despite changes to the U.S. economy since 2000, these have not been translated to the American workplace. The recent recession led to a decrease in employment opportunities, making workers less inclined to leave their job because of low engagement and employers less incentivized to ensure that their staffers were happy. However, while the tide is slowly changing, many workplaces are not changing their practices and investing in initiatives that ensure a high level of employee engagement.

What engages employees the most or the ten C’s of employee engagement – A professor in a recent executive education program on leadership elicited a lot of laughs by telling the following joke: “A CEO was asked how many people work in his company: ‘About half of them,’ he responded.” After the session, several participants put a more serious face on the problem when, while chatting, they bemoaned the fact that, in their organization, a significant number of people had mentally “checked out.”

Why should I invest in improving the Donor experience at my nonprofit?

Tags

Customer Experience, Donor Experience, Forrester Research, Laggard, Leader, ROI

It is reasonable to ask, if my nonprofit invests in the donor experience, will it work?

This question drove Watermark Consulting to evaluate the macro impact of customer experience excellence. They’ve accomplished this over the years by studying the total returns for two model stock portfolios comprised of the Top 10 (“Leaders”) and Bottom 10 (“Laggards”) publicly traded companies in Forrester Research’s annual Customer Experience Index ranking. The results are stunning.

For the 6-year period from 2007 to 2012, the Experience Leaders in their study outperformed the broader market, generating a total return that was three times higher on average than the S&P 500 Index. Furthermore, while the Experience Leaders handily beat the S&P 500, the Laggards trailed it by a wide margin.

Keep in mind, this analysis reflects more than half a decade of performance results.  It spans an entire economic cycle, from the pre-recession market peak in 2007 to the post-recession recovery that continues today. The Experience Leaders in this study are clearly enjoying the many benefits that happy, loyal donors deliver:  better retention, greater wallet share, lower acquisition costs and more cost-efficient service.

And the Laggards?  They are being crushed under the weight of high customer turnover, escalating acquisition costs and an uncompetitive cost structure that is inflated by each complaint and avoidable inquiry.

As a digital executive, do you want to be a leader or a laggard? You can be a hero and lead the way to an amazing ROI. Your donors will love you for it.

Here are the key ideas:

1. Start by beginning to measure your donor experience by using the Donor Experience Index.
2. Begin by reporting results, focus on gaps and continuously improve the experience.
3. Encourage a culture focused on building loyalty at every point of the donor journey.
4. Agree on how to measure improvement.
5. Tie loyalty to “bottom line” results.
6. Involve donor experience ambassadors at every level of the organization.
7. Identify budget constraints in investment decisions.

What middle managers really think about the customer experience.

Tags

Customer Experience, Customer Focus, Middle Managers

The challenge

Middle managers face a big squeeze in the focus on the customer experience. Senior management has a vision. Current operations and the “whirlwind of the urgent” siphon off time and energy. It all can’t be done. Something must give. Senior management needs to understand this and allow middle managers the time to focus on the future.

The best thing senior management can do is to get middle management’s perspective on what operationally can be abandoned to enable the future vision that is so necessary to stay in business. It will be a real battle of ignoring the future for the tyranny of the present.

That report you wanted yesterday has to be done. The quarterly numbers have to be met. Middle managers think: “What do you want me to stop doing so I can improve the customer experience?” They have learned, however, not to say it out loud. They simply trudge on and give you what you have asked for today, not what you aspire to for the future.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We can focus on initiatives that improve the customer experience and the future vision. Senior management needs to be disciplined to make it happen.

Why is asking unstructured questions important in “voice of the customer” programs?

Tags

Customer Experience, Feedback, Voice of the Customer

We are focused on our customers. We are making the transition to understanding the goals and needs from their perspective. We have put together a “voice of the customer” initiative. We are beginning to see some trends.

We may be using a variety of ways of getting the feedback, probably all multiple-choice questions, to hear what is important. We can quantify what is working and not working, from the perspective of the customer. We see the numbers.

It is also important to get unstructured feedback. Some surveys and phone calls should only approach it in an unstructured format.

Senior executives should call customers every week to hear how things are going. Again, an unstructured approach.

All of this becomes very actionable. Particularly the unstructured answers. That is how we can continuously improve.

Does an ounce of prevention make a difference in the customer experience?

Tags

Customer Experience, Proactive, Reactive, Recovery

We have many opportunities each day to create a positive customer experience. That should be the norm. We should focus on building the amazing and stunning. Customers should come away thinking: Wow!

If the majority of our interactions are like that, we will be loyal.

It is a truth that one day something will go wrong. A bad experience will occur. There may be a hole in our processes that has gone unnoticed. One day someone finds it and it is not pretty.

Of course, we will fix it but if the other positive experiences aren’t there to offset it, we can lose customers.

Recovery is easier if there is a foundation of trust built on many other positive experiences.

Ruby Newell-Legner, author of Understanding Customers, emphasizes that negative customer experiences require vigorous recovery efforts, for it takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative interaction. Thus, proactive support not only reduces spend by preventing problems from ever reaching the contact center, but also saves money by minimizing the need for reputation repair. But, before companies can truly change their financial situation, they must realize that customer service requires an investment of time, not just money, from both the brand and the consumer.

via Spotlight | An Ounce of Prevention: How Proactive Support Can Cure Lagging Customer Care.

7 Wonders of Effective Customer Experience Leaders

Tags

Customer Experience, Innovate, Leadership, Passion

Leadership

CustomerThink has identified seven principles of simple, powerful, natural gifts that we’ve all been given should be our standard to elevate customer experience to a higher plane.

These make great sense.

• To See… the future, envision possibilities, and create a vision to unique others in the cause
• To Hear… to listen to the core needs of customers and team members
• To Touch… to measure, to analyze, and create effective experiences
• To Taste… to understand, comprehend, and experiment in customer experiences
• To Smell… to predict, innovate, an anticipate what customers need
• To Laugh… to be enthusiastic, and bring a level of personality into our organizations
• To Love… to have passion and appreciate the intricacies of customer relationships

Source: 7 Wonders of Effective Customer Experience Leaders | CustomerThink

How to make employee engagement a key metric

Tags

Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, Metric

When employee engagement becomes foundational to how you do business as a part of people initiatives, it will become a key strategy for organizational planning as well.

There could be a goal, something like “Improve employee engagement from X to Y by DATE”. Establishing lead indicators will drive change as well. Clear dashboards with weekly accountability sessions will make improvement real for management. With the clear link to customer engagement established, customer engagement will improve as well.

According to an article by Bruce Temkin, since 2007, “Bombardier Aerospace’s annual employee engagement and enablement survey has given all employees a voice within the organization. In 2012, 93% of employees completed the survey. Managers are evaluated based on the engagement levels of their employees. To create an environment that ensures performance, every leader has an annual target for employee engagement.

Employee Engagement Define It, Measure It and Put It to Work in Your Organization – Research by APQC, one of the leading proponents of process and performance improvement, has yielded key insights into what engagement is, how it can be measured and how it can be integrated into organizational culture.

Here are the key ideas:

1. Employee engagement is a key to the customer experience and should be a key metric for the C-Suite
2. Setting a quantifiable employee engagement goal is essential
3. Strategies that reflect leading indicators that lead to achieving the goal make a huge difference

What is the return on investment in the customer experience?

Tags

Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience, ROI

People always ask about the connection between customer experience and business results. Well, here’s some visual evidence of the linkage. In this infographic, The Temkin Group shares data from the research report, ROI of Customer Experience 2015.

Source: ROI of Customer Experience (Infographic) | Customer Experience Matters®

Contact center customer experience trends to stay on top of for 2016

Tags

Cloud, Complexity, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Mobile, Self-service

Customer Service

The pace of change in the customer experience is moving fast. Consumer expectations are ramping up to the highest common denominator and not the lowest. Consumers are empowered more and more by the transparency provided by social media.

What are the trends in the contact center and for customer service for us to consider right now?

1. The cloud positions the contact center for lift-off
2. Agents will share the responsibility of CX with the entire company
3. Connecting the mobile channel to agents will take priority
4. Machine learning powers agents’ decision-making
5. Self-service solves the complexity issue
6. Leaders will flip their agent training practices to be more nimble

Overall, 2015 was a banner year for customer service. From getting contact centers to ‘speak Millennial’ to leading with data, customer service organizations made breakthroughs last year in advancing the customer experience.

As companies continue to evolve and build on their progress from last year, 2016 is poised to become a more exciting year for contact centers.

Source: Contact Center Trends 2016 | 1to1 Media

6 important characteristics to step into the digital leadership void

Tags

Bask Iyer, CIO, Culure, Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, Jupiter Networks

Transform Culture

CIO’s are well positioned to lead a company digital transformation. They are logical place to look for leadership.

What does it take for the CIO to be considered?

1. A passion for the business, customers and not infrastructure
2. Ability to speak the language of business, customers and not technology
3. Core understanding of how being digital can propel the business ahead and create amazing customer experiences
4. Willingness to learn more about leading digital technologies and what is important to customers
5. Great leadership and change management skills focused on the customer experience
6. A vision for a digital transformation culture focused on the customer

A good CIO has the street credibility to lead a company’s digital transformation. Digital transformation is more than presenting ideas and painting a shiny picture of the future; digital transformation also means tying the back-end to the front-end. Good CIOs have experience leading the organization through transformation. They have the real world experience of delivering change over and over again.” Bask Iyer, CIO of Juniper Networks, spends a lot of time talking to CEOs.

via Step into the Digital Leadership Void.

11 Customer Experience Trends for 2016 (The Year of Emotion)

Tags

Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience, Trends

There are lots of list like this at this time of year. Bruce Tempkin always has great insight. Culture change is at the top of list, as it should be. Not much else happens with out changing the culture leading out front.

Also right on target is the measuring of the amount of effort it takes for customers to do business with us. This is worth exploring a lot.

Enjoy and happy new year!

It’s once again the time of year for me to publish my CX trends. In my post last year I named 2015 “The Year of Employee.” With this post, I’m declaring 2016 “The Year of Emotion.”

In the upcoming year, CX will continue to grow in importance for companies and an even larger number of organizations will begin their CX journeys

Source: 11 Customer Experience Trends for 2016 (The Year of Emotion) | Customer Experience Matters

What does a modern CRM system look like?

Tags

CRM, Culture, Customer Experience, Customer Journey, Customer Strategy, Leadership

Business Strategy

CRM systems have been around a long time. Companies have had more failures than successes but the systems keep getting upgraded or replaced. They do a lot of things well. It is, however, not about the technology. What is generally missing is a great customer experience strategy, compelling leadership and culture change, along with standard processes that can be replicated.

What does a modern CRM system do once you have customer experience strategy, compelling leadership and culture change, along with standard processes that can be replicated?

The key to all of this is about strategy and people. Not being clear about this can kill any great technology initiative. We should all refuse to implement any technology where this is well thought out. Why flush millions of dollars down the toilet? No reason that I know of.

How do you modernize your CRM?

1) Align your CRM strategy with your customer experience strategy. Uber does this right.  Their customer experience is journey is streamlined for minimum friction. For example, when you sign up, your payment information is accepted by a quick scan of a credit card. When you requests car service, the driver and car details are displayed, and progress can be tracked via GPS. Transactions are effortless as no money change hands. And when you need customer service, its effective and personalized.

2) Focus CRM outcomes on revenue uplift, not operational efficiencies. Don’t focus on intricate cost-based justifications for CRM – focus on business outcomes which quantify the value of driving higher levels of revenue and company profitability through winning, serving, and retaining customers and enabling the workforce to be more productive and aligned to customer strategies.

3) Leverage CRM to support the end-to-end customer journey. Customers are increasingly impatient as they engage with companies. They want to use multiple communication channels and touchpoints in the course of a single interaction, and not have to repeat their situation every time they switch channels. For example, they want to start a return process online, and drop the merchandise off in a store; or they want to purchase merchandise online, and pick it up in a store. You must elimitate points of friction in your customer journeys.

4) Deeply personalize engagement. Customer experiences must be deeply personalized, based on explicit and implicit feedback about customer needs and preferences, and must be delivered in the moment, taking into account a person’s current state and location. Weight Watchers does this well, tracking member online and offline behavior to tailor plans that can transform their health.

5) Extend CRM by leveraging integrations. Welcome to the Internet of Things. With modern services and standardized APIs, it’s easy to use lighter-weight CRM solutions, or best-in-breed applications, allowing organizations to purchase just what they need and integrate it into a larger technology ecosystem, rather than trying to purchase a massive application that covers every eventuality.  A great example is New England Biolabs, a supplier of specialized enzymes and reagents for DNA research, who connects freezers in scientist labs to the internet to track inventory, and product usage. They use this information to better tailor formulas to scientists specific needs.

6) Engage users simply.  Face it, most people hate using CRM, as data entry and retrieval is hard to do. CRM success demands role-based, simplified user interfaces. User experiences should be task-based and map to common processes, which proactively display relevant information such as the products that the customer owns, the services they subscribe to, and what customer tier they’re in.

via The Modern CRM | Forrester Blogs.

Does the customer experience need more emotion?

Tags

Customer Experience, Emotion

Does the customer experience need more emotion? How customers feel about the experience they are having with us is important.

If you like this infographic, then you can download this version in .pdf or download a 18″ x 24″ poster version).

Source: Customer Experience Needs More Emotion (Infographic) | Customer Experience Matters

Have we forgotten to engage emotionally with customers?

Tags

Customer Experience, Emotion

Having the right numbers is critical. But CEOs are human too, so you should also strive to get them to take CX personally.

One technique that can really help is to set up a Customer Room and get senior management to hold meetings there. Keep CX top of mind by including not just common metrics like NPS, churn rates and so on, but also journey maps, customer stories, social media feeds, videos and more.

Still, there’s really no substitute for actually spending time with customers, and with employees who serve customers.

Chip Bell of Chip Bell Group:

“You can pretend to care,” wrote Tex Bender, “but you cannot pretend to be there.” The key action is to spend time with customers and with the people directly serving customers.

Ian Golding:

Continually citing examples of Disney, Amazon et al to try and convince senior leaders to become personally engaged in CX is not an effective strategy – nor is regularly evangelising about CX and repeating theory over and over again. In my experiences, there are a number of things that CX professionals need to consider when trying to engage senior leaders – and they are not complicated. Get them to TALK about experiences of their own as consumers, and … experience the customer and employee experiences for themselves.

Erich Dietz of InMoment:

The customer must be present in all decisions and discussions, regardless if they are about product, finance, operations, marketing, HR, etc. I mean that both figuratively and literally. Not only in all internal company communications, but to the point of having leaders actually sit down with the customers that buy their products or services over a meal. Consistently humanizing the customer in the eyes of leadership and the employee base is critical to long term success.

Jeanne Bliss of CustomerBliss:

When I worked at really large companies, we’d find a leader of a country and would work with them on embedding this stuff and showing it in a more closed environment, if you will, and work it through. You go back and you can present that information, show the results and show what happened. Their people are happier. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t, but we find that when you’ve got a frustrated CCO, finding an early adopter can help.

Source: 3 Strategies to Sell the CEO on Customer Experience Management (CXM) | CustomerThink

Make Money, save money with an amazing customer experience. Any Questions?

Tags

Customer Experience, Results

Make Money. Save Money. Any Questions?

Given that senior executives like to get things done…

… it shouldn’t come as a surprise that touchy feeling stories of customer love aren’t going to cut it in the C-Suite.

Lynn Hunsaker of Clearaction:

Money talks. And logic. Upper management may need to be reminded about the source of revenue: investors leave when customers leave, not the other way around. Earnings per share increases when profitable customers organically expand share of budget with the company. Show the % of customers retained, their revenue contribution, their purchase expansion beyond the first product they bought, their influence on other customers and prospects.

Patrick Gibbons of Walker:

Ultimately I think it must make business sense (which leans toward the “logic” side). If upper management sees that a CX project led to cost savings or revenue gains it will garner some attention. This is more persuasive than observing industry trends, monitoring Net Promoter scores, or believing it is the “right thing to do.”

Colin Shaw of Beyond Philosophy:

Most senior management are interested in cost savings, certainly when I worked at British Telecom before starting your philosophy the way I approached it was to show how improving the customer experience would save money. I’ve never worked in implementation that doesn’t save money. This gets their attention.

Denyse Drummond-Dunn of C3Centricity:

From my experience the best way is through either a test case, or through the use of the cost of not responding to customer complaints appropriately. When you can show the impact on the business, not executive will be deaf. Many FMCG companies till work with TARP’s Damage Model, since it is one of the simplest to use of any trying to model the impact of customer complaints on the business

Source: 3 Strategies to Sell the CEO on Customer Experience Management (CXM) | CustomerThink

3 Strategies to Sell the CxO on Customer Experience Management (CXM)

Tags

Burning Platform, Customer Experience, Forrester Research, Watermark Consulting

Do you have a “burning platform”? If so, making the case for investing in customer experience management is in order. What are the 3 strategies?

1. Make Money. Save Money. Any Questions?
2. Don’t Forget Engage Emotionally
3. Take Advantage of a Burning Platform

These days everyone seems to be on the CX bandwagon. Various studies find that upwards of 70% of executives believe CX is the key to differentiate in a world where it’s not enough to offer a competitive product or price.

And, in recent years industry studies appear to show that firms offering great experiences out-compete those that don’t. Perhaps the most famous is this chart developed by Watermark Consulting, using data from Forrester Research.

Source: 3 Strategies to Sell the CEO on Customer Experience Management (CXM) | CustomerThink

So what exactly does Customer Experience (CX) mean?

Tags

Customer Experience, Digital Business, Marketing

Customer Experience

Customer experience is the big “buzz phrase” of the decade so far. While we use it a lot, what does it really mean?

Here, we answer that question and back it up with research that may surprise you. Earlier this year, Econsultancy published its 2015 Digital Trends report which included a survey of more than 2,000 marketers. One question we asked was, “Over the next five years, what is the primary way your organization will seek to differentiate itself from competitors?” The number one response, by some margin, included this elusive term “Customer Experience” or CX as it is abbreviated nowadays.

So what exactly does Customer Experience (CX) mean? Shared by Luke Bilton

Technology’s Undeniable Impact on Individualization

Tags

CIO, CMO, Customer Experience, Personalization, Web Experience

Consumers now expect certain experiences. We we don’t meet them, they move on. Personalization is expected at every turn.

We all need to look at our customer experiences on the web and make we have a great strategy to personalize the experience.

For the modern consumer, personalization isn’t ideal—it’s essential. Yet, while the technology driving the customer experience continues to evolve, the underlying relationship remains the same, for companies must constantly work to maintain customer trust and loyalty.

One recent Janrain study confirms that online consumers 74 percent get frustrated with websites when content offers, ads, and promotions don’t reflect their given interests, while MyBuys claims that 40 percent of consumers buy more from retailers who personalize the shopping experience across channels. However, integrating the technology necessary to meet this demand continues to baffle many brands.

via Spotlight | Up Close and Personal: Technology’s Undeniable Impact on Individualization.

Is there an ROI to the customer experience?

Tags

Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience, Loyalty, Net Promoter

Is there a correlation between a great customer experience and loyalty?

We all want to know, does it work?

Annually, Bruce Temkin and his team answer the question.

“To understand the connection between customer experience (CX) and loyalty, we examined feedback from 10,000 U.S. consumers that describes both their experiences with and their loyalty to 293 companies across 20 industries.

Our analysis shows a strong correlation between customer experience and loyalty factors such as repurchasing, trying new offerings, forgiving mistakes, and recommending the company to friends and colleagues. While all three components of customer experience—success, effort, and emotion—have a strong effect on loyalty, our research shows that emotion is the most important element. When we compared the consumers who gave companies a very good customer experience rating to those who gave companies a very bad customer experience rating, we found that at companies with high customer experience ratings, the percentage of customers who plan on purchasing more is 18 points higher, the percentage who will forgive the company if it makes a mistakes is 12 points higher, the percentage who will try a new offering is 10 points higher, and the percentage who trust the company is 19 points higher. Additionally, companies with very good CX ratings have an average Net Promoter® Score that is 24 points higher than the scores of companies with poor CX. We built a model to evaluate how, over a three-year period, customer experience impacts the revenue of a $1 billion business within each of the 20 industries. This model shows that CX has the largest impact on the revenue of hotels ($823 million) and rental cars ($755 million) over three years. This report also includes a five-step approach for building a model that estimates the value of CX for your organization.”

Source: Report: ROI of Customer Experience, 2015 | Customer Experience Matters

6 ideas on how to build a digital business ecosystem

Tags

Customer Experience, Digital Business, Ecosystem

Building a digital business is about building an ecosystem, not just a few isolated initiatives that have no impact on each other, the business as a whole or your external networks.

In biology, an ecosystem “is a community of living organisms (plants, animals and microbes) in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment (things like air, water and mineral soil), interacting as a system.” Source: Wikipedia

So, in a digital business ecosystem that is focused on amazing customer experiences, both living (people) and non living (strategy, process and technology) interact as a system along with external networks of suppliers, vendors and customers. In essence, as a digital executive, you are building a system. Leave an essential part out, and the system is not complete.

The concept of a business ecosystem first appeared in Moore’s May/June 1993 Harvard Business Review article, titled “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition”, and won the McKinsey Award for article of the year. Moore defined “business ecosystem” as:

“An economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individuals—the organisms of the business world. The economic community produces goods and services of value to customers, who are themselves members of the ecosystem. The member organisms also include suppliers, lead producers, competitors, and other stakeholders. Over time, they coevolve their capabilities and roles, and tend to align themselves with the directions set by one or more central companies. Those companies holding leadership roles may change over time, but the function of ecosystem leader is valued by the community because it enables members to move toward shared visions to align their investments, and to find mutually supportive roles.”

An ecosystem is not just the company as a whole. It may include, suppliers, vendors, customers, and many other external components. Businesstermilology.com defines a business ecosystem as:

A strategic planning model, popular since the development of information technology, whereby a network of suppliers, distributors, competitors and customers all work through competition and cooperation to advance sales of products.

In a Harvard Magazine interview with Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Arbuckle professor of business administration, in HBS’s general management unit, and chair and director of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative, she discusses the development of the business ecosystem.

I chose “enriching” carefully because it not only means richer nutrients in your garden, but also the sense that we want continued prosperity. We want more people to feel they have rich lives and opportunity ahead. That is important.

In the mid 1990s, I worked on helping communities around the country adapt to disruptions from the Internet and globalization—trends that were very good for the prosperity of the country overall, but had communities worried about being left behind. I developed the idea associated with this transition from the industrial to the digital in World Class: competitive communities had to reach the highest standards in the world because your customers and employers now knew what the highest standards were, and didn’t necessarily need you to access them—they could go even outside their country. Those developments pointed to networks and larger systems—what cities and regions and small businesses needed to do to remain prosperous.

Many times we implement initiatives without looking at them holistically and from a systems point of view. Isolated initiatives may produce some short term results but never achieve the totality of results that a complete system can together. In this world of building a digital business, careful evaluation should be given to how the initiative fits in to “the whole” system. If it doesn’t fit, it may not be optimized to produce the best results.

Consider creating a killer web site that is housed at a hosting facility that doesn’t have the infrastructure in place for pages to be rendered fast. What good does it do to produce the site and the content if it can’t load properly on any device a customer is using? What if it is optimized for PC’s but not mobile devices? If most of your customers are coming to your content from mobile devices, they won’t know what you are trying to say.

Here are the key ideas:

1. Think in terms of ecosystems. Initiatives (projects) should be considered as a part of an ecosystem (including external factors).
2. Manage the digital business in terms of a network of people
3. Shift from static to dynamic notions of value
4. Design the digital businesses for radical change
5. Open the culture of the organization beyond traditional departments
6. Tap into collective intelligence of the “open culture” with collaboration tools

Are you finding it tough to convert insight into action?

Tags

Customer Behaviour, Customer Experience, Insight, Profitability, Sales

It is a challenge to turn raw data into insight. Doing it in real time or near real time just ups the game for us. There are at least 3 factors to think about.

• Accurately anticipate customer behaviour
• Tailor customer experience at an individual level
• Grow sales, increase transaction values and maximize profitability

“Identifying the factors that drive customer behavior has long been the Holy Grail for Customer Insight professionals. Yet in today’s super-competitive marketplaces, it’s not enough. Speed is the new differentiator, and those firms that can acquire insight and translate it into effective real-time marketing stimuli will achieve competitive advantage. 

“The ability to respond and act swiftly is an invaluable asset, and Forrester research has devised a framework that facilitates the transformation of data into knowledge at a pace that today’s customers demand. It’s called the Real-Time Actionable Insight Delivery RAID cycle.

via iQube Marketing Limited » Are you finding it tough to convert insight into action?.

Here is a great overview of how to visualize the approach.

In the digital world, it is “Just the facts” ~~ Please!!

Tags

Customer Experience, Data, Digital, Google, Google Analytics, Joe Friday, Web analytics, Website

Dragnet’s Sgt. Joe Friday character frequently implore informants to provide ‘Just the facts‘. We have all kinds of “facts”, data from analytic platforms and internal operational systems. Take the call center or a website. There is so much there that can help improve digital experiences dramatically because it separates fact from fiction.

To mine data for experience improvement opportunities, we should focus our efforts in examining the actual behavior of customers. Many companies use Google analytics on their website. It helps us understand where visitors are going and what they do when they get there. Nothing like the facts.

When analysts at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) mined web analytics data for design opportunities, they found users pogo-sticking between search results and hotel landing pages, which tipped them off to the fact that users were digging for specific information.

What should we look out for?

• Study customers’ mobile and tablet behavior
• Examine customer behavior across channels
• Look at the moments that matter

This is powerful for improving the customer experience. We have the facts.