The Perfect Customer Experience

Ten Reasons to Making Social Networking Part of your Channel Strategy

Get beyond the fascination and addictive tendency of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking apps and underscoring all of these new approaches to connecting, communicating and collaborating with others is a revolutionary new way of communicating with your channel partners as well. 

Social networking is making channel management more about walking the talk and less about claiming a partnership with another company by virtue of logo sharing.  It’s making channel relationships real again.  And this authenticity is a very good thing. 

But why dive into the social networking pool? 

Isn’t it full of self-promoting opportunitists who would rather help you as long as it helps them and furthers their own goals? 

Or is deeper than that?  Does it address some fundamental unmet need in relationships, both personal and professional? 

I think it is the latter; people on personal and professional lives have never been more disconnected, there have never been more opportunities for confusion over how to get to the truth and deliver it.  In the area of channel relationships, the ten reasons for making social networking part of your channel strategies are as follows:

1.      It’s time to communicate with your channel partners using the processes, systems and apps they want to use. Manufacturers are finding social networking makes them more responsive and gets barriers out of way, staying more relevant to their channel partners over time. 

2.      This is the era of transparency and authenticity, embrace it and win or ignore it and lose. It’s time to drop the pretenses and get real with channel partners.

3.      Your toughest competitors aren’t in other companies; they are distractions to your channel partners’ time and attention.  Using social networking to cut through clutter is a competitive advantage.

4.      Lead escalation and management can be managed in real-time and be less of a source of conflict than it is today. 

5.      Coordinating on advertising, Co-OP, channel promotional programs and product introductions can be truly collaborative when social networking is used versus being sporadic and incomplete when done manually.

6.      The long-ago vision of Team Selling in Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platforms is now a reality in social networking.  If knowledge and insight into solving tough customer problems is how you win business over just price, then social networking can make team selling all the more valuable.

7.      Bring your service attitude to social networking.  It’s great that companies including JetBlue, Starbucks, Southwest and others are relying on Twitter to connect with their customers and listen to them.  If there is only one task you take from this blog entry be sure to check out the excellent index Jonathan Kash continues to expand at http://www.socialbrandindex.com/.  If you join Twitter follow him at @Time@simplify too. 

8.      Get plugged in to what your customers really think.  I’m fascinating with how social networking could contribute to the DMAIC process of Six Sigma, specifically in the area of Voice of the Customer.  Don’t get that formal though; get plugged into your online reputation first. 

9.      Look three years down the road of social networking and realize that the accumulated interactions your company has can become the basis of a more market-driven, responsive content management system.  Every company struggles with knowledge management, yet in collaborating with channel partners, critical knowledge in your company can be captured and put into context.  The area of defining roles, processes and taxonomies is coming to social networking, and that will transform it completely than it is seen today.

10.  Social networking is more about learning and serving, especially with channel partners.  I’ve seen companies dive into social networking and try to take it into the promotional aspects only and los credibility in the process.  Realize that the entire lifecycle of how you serve channel partners must be planned for on a social networking platform.

Bottom line: Look to learn how your channel partners want to communicate, challenge assumptions about your existing channel management platforms, and when you consider social networking, consider each phase of the lifecycle of your channel management strategies.  Taken together, getting more transparent, responsive and focused can improve your and your channel partners’ performance. 

Is the Middle of Your Company Happy?

By Dale Wolf

Happy Employees. Why they so important to the customer experience? That answer is simple if you have caught any of our postings on the role that employees have on customer experience. The rule of thumb: employees that have a great employee experience deliver a great customer experience.

"Caught in the Middle" -- an article published on Knowledge@Wharton confirms that managers are often referred to as the "glue" that holds companies together, bridging the gap between the top management team and lower level workers. They implement strategy and organizational changes, keeping workers engaged during both good times and bad. Yet according to a recent survey of middle managers around the world, 20% report dissatisfaction with their current organization and that same percentage report that they are looking for another job. How do middle managers fare in an uncertain economy, and what should companies be doing to keep them happy? Middle

If middle managers are so valuable, why would they report dissatisfaction and leave their companies? A primary reason is lack of advancement opportunity, says David Sirota, co-author of The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want. "When companies downsize, they will often cut middle management ranks. But even if companies just stagnate, advancement opportunities are limited. This hits people very hard, particularly people in their late 30s and 40s."

Shaun Smith, CEM Consultant, author and contributor this blog, considers the employee experience as one of the three main legs in his tripod of Customer Experience Improvement.

Align your people to deliver your experience

The question, Shaun points out, is how do you electrify and energise people in your organisation? How do you align them with your customer-focused strategy? The answer lies in the following four key factors that are critical to successful employee alignment:

1. Recruit people with the right fit
2. Train employees to deliver experiences that uniquely deliver your brand promise
3. Encourage employees to demonstrate the right behaviours
4. Drive and reward the behaviours from the top of the organisation

The big puzzle to those of us who believe that delivering a customer experience that is unique, relevant and valued have such a difficult time retaining middle managers. Here they are, the glue to a business. And yet, they feel caught, under-appreciated and in peril for their jobs.

Like so many aspects of CEM, the employee experience is cultural. Companies seem to have a hard time changing cultures -- even when they know the culture is hurting their performance. Does it really take a whack along side the head with a 2 x 4 to get the CEO's attention?

Customer Experience Manager a Hot Job Title

In October 2007, Gartner surveyed more than 250 business and IT leaders who influence the CRM strategies in their businesses in preparation for the 2008 CRM Summit. They told Gartner that their top three business issues revolved around creating a customer-centric enterprise, managing organizational and cultural change for CRM success, and managing and improving the customer experience.

The importance of focusing on the customer experience was further highlighted in all three award presentations as well as by the fact that all the presenters had this term in their job titles:

• At Fiat, Giorgio Cavalieri Is Senior Director Customer Experience
• At Philips, Arjan Burgers Is Director Consumer Experience Management and CRM
• At SBSA, Rolf Eichweber Is Director of Customer Experience

Deciding If SaaS-based Applications Enable a Growth Mindset

Louis Columbus, Cincom

After reading the book Mindset: The Psychology of Success by Dr. Carol S. Dweck I began to wonder if her concepts of fixed versus growth mindsets were either accentuated by or detracted from when it came to customer relationship strategies enabled with SaaS-based applications.  The many benefits of the SaaS platform including agility, updates across an entire customer base, and low barriers to user adoption made me curious.  Could SaaS-based CRM applications, supporting customer loyalty strategies, be more effective at enabling growth mindsets in companies?  I dug into this question and started to research it.    If you haven’t read this book I highly recommended it, and you can catch a clip of Dr. Dweck discussing the differences between the foundational concepts of her book here, courtesy of Guy Kawasaki’s blog entry last year.

While there is an abundance of information on TCO of SaaS versus licensed software, the closest area of research I found pertaining to productivity of SaaS users relative to licensed users was in the area of customer loyalty.  One report I found that was particularly interesting on the topic of customer loyalty was from Accenture, titled Seller Beware: The Curse of the Disloyal Customer. 

Cultivating Customer Loyalty with a Growth Mindset 

After extensively researching if either SaaS-based versus licensed applications foster a greater growth mindset, several key take-aways began to emerge, which are provided below:

• Creating processes that prized speed over completeness of response seem to be worthless from a customer loyalty standpoint.  Now this process cuts across both SaaS-based and licensed CRM apps, yet the approach SaaS-based vendors are taking to create a more “one and done” approach is paying off based on both conversations with a friend who is CIO of a financial services firm.  While he resisted SaaS-based CRM, the traditional licensed applications had been designed to look first for efficiency and speed of response – which in the end had not bearing on customer loyalty.  Completeness of response and closure did.  His CRM system had been build to rack up metrics that showed people “working hard” yet there was no closure on the customer side. Putting this into the context of fixed versus growth mindsets, it was clear that when efficiency alone was the priority when a CRM system was designed that it was easier to avoid challenges, ignore criticism from customers (as there was no metric to measure that) and see interactions as a nuisance to be quickly alleviated.  All the signs of a closed mindset, CRM systems designed like this do not foster and encourage learning, only competition between sales and service reps.  The result is that a closed mindset alienates more customers and the company eventually loses more repeat business as a result.   

• Building growth mindsets into customer interactions leads to higher loyalty.  One of the foundational points of the book is the differentiation of a fixed versus growth mindset.  It occurred to me as I re-read the book that so many CRM systems are designed to specifically align with a fixed mindset mentality in all phases of the sales cycle through the customer retention and loyalty phases as well.  Dr. Dweck makes the point that it is not in the winning or losing of life’s challenges, but in the learning from them. To read an excellent overview of how learning figures into creating a growth mindset, this article from Stanford Magazine is worth reading.  The point being that from a CRM standpoint if learning becomes the goal – learning how to better serve customers, how to gain greater levels of loyalty – and not the fixed mindset goal of just ticking off metrics, then greater success comes with time. 

• Making customer-facing strategies more about learning and less about the high-pressure up-sell or cross-sell is critical.  When CRM systems have been designed from a closed mindset the entire customer contact effort is about up-sell and cross-sell, not necessarily about learning how to better engage with and serve the customer in the future.  Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs are becoming pervasive in organizations that have a growth mindset and are willing to listen to their customers, even if it means facing bigger challenges and setbacks than if the customers had been ignored.

• Loyalty strategies must go hunting for challenges and setbacks to grow.  What is the most valuable take-away from Dr. Dwecks’ book is that a person only grows by going out and looking for challenges to overcome and master, and that only by facing down big challenges can any significant growth ever happen. She contends that my doing this a growth mindset can be achieved.  It’s the same with the research completed on customer loyalty; the companies that went out looking for what was wrong with their customer loyalty programs were able to achieve the most.  Arrogantly assuming all is OK lead to disaster.  In speaking with CIOs in the financial services industry and also in the manufacturing industry this became abundantly clear.

The fact that so many CRM systems have been designed from the fixed mindset perspective, seeing intelligence about customers being predictable, supporting processes that are not flexible enough to allow either for tackling obstacles or allowing for negative customer feedback to percolate up an organizations’ ranks needs to change.  Sure, there are those organizations whose cultures are so infused with a growth mindset that their customer-facing strategies, including the loyalty programs reflect that.  The differentiation of fixed versus growth mindsets however has a major impact on the long-term success or failure of customer loyalty programs

Once any company changes from a fixed to growth mindset, their ability to better seek out and respond to challenges is going to be accentuated using SaaS-based applications. 

Bottom line: The speed of deployment, low barriers to user adoption, ability to customize applications and ability to tie in negative feedback from customers which are essential for growth, shows that SaaS-based platforms have the potential to nurture growth mindsets of the long term.

Customer Experience and Innovation

According to Rudy Provost, CEO of Philips Lighting, approximately 19% of the world's electricity bill comes from lighting.

Provost should know since Philips is the world's largest producer of industrial and consumer lighting products.

What is more important than this surprising statistic is that Provose understands one of the main tenents of product innovation and cultural change -- that it should be driven by the needs of people.

What is at stake here is the ongoing transformation from incandescent to solid-state lighting using
LED technology. Provoost says products are "just a vehicle to respond to needs."

Figuring out what those needs are, weeding out needless complexity and innovating with an eye on
the bottom line are the keys to growth, Provoost says. Our needs for energy conservation are now ringingly evident and this industrial leader is fully aware that he must deliver a great experience to the customer while feeding his company's profits.

That is the tricky balance all of us now must pay attention to. So I suggest you learn more from Provost by reading his comments on innovation.

He recently spoke with Wharton marketing professor George Day and Knowledge@Wharton about the challenges of staying ahead in a rapidly changing industry. Read about the role of customer experience in product innovation.

Why Knowledge Sharing is becoming more important than Selling

Louis Columbus, Cincom

Now before anyone says "What a minute! Sales is Always number #1!" just consider the fact that the efficiency of any sales cycle is directly related to how well a company shares information and knowledge to begin with. Sure, salespeople are continually in various phases of sales cycles with prospects and repeat customers and need support, yet the best support of all is building a culture that freely shares knowledge.

Customers buy based on trust not on features. What prospects really want is knowledge and guidance on how to get to their goals, accomplish results, and alleviate pain (even if it is just getting their grouchy bosses off their backs!)

I got to thinking about how much more important knowledge sharing was versus sales after I recently re-read The Tipping Point. Often the tipping point was only found through a network of Connectors and Mavens, all fueled by the catalyst of knowledge sharing. Example after example in the book supports this fact, from the catalyst of the American Revolution to success selling IRAs to teachers. Quite eclectic in examples, the book is worth a re-read from time to time for its ideas.

So if a company is faltering from a selling standpoint, could it be knowledge sharing needs work? Sure, and while it is impossible to just isolate lack of sales success just to a lack of knowledge sharing, there is abundant evidence showing this could also be a major contributing factor.

Knowledge sharing extends past teamwork, even past collaboration. It’s about engraining knowledge transfer into those key processes that are used for interlinking suppliers, buyers, customers and service organizations into a company’s workflows. I just had to throw in this graphic from despair.com on teamwork, and it really is true, jokingly so. A few harmless flakes (and well intentioned contributors) can unleash significant change.

In my classes on international business we talk a lot about how the best performing companies develop into "learning" organizations. Getting past just excelling at marketing, branding, selling or supply chains, certain companies have the ability to drive learning into the core processes they rely on. One of the best papers I’ve seen written on this is Creating and Managing a High Performance Knowledge-Sharing Network: The Toyota Case which is excellent. It’s written by Dr. Jeffrey Dyer from the Wharton School and Dr. Kentaro Nobeoka of Kobe University. It’s a fascinating look inside the Toyota Production System and worth checking out.

Customer Experience Management’s Achilles’ Heel is making Change Last

Louis Columbus, Cincom

From my experience working in companies who have launched customer-facing strategies to working with clients to launch CRM initiatives as an analyst, the issues of making people change consistently surfaces as the most time-consuming and often the most problematic area of rolling out any new system. CEM strategies supported by state-of-the -art software are only as effective as the people using them.

Changing a strategy requires a change in attitude to make it successful; all the best software in the world will for example not turn an introverted accountant into a stellar salesman. Yet attitude can do that – and that’s where I think it’s important to re-visit the most expensive area of any CEM and CRM strategy – getting people to change. Here are some lessons learned:

Killing risk and fear with open communication. By far the biggest stumbling block is people seeing their jobs going away as a result of a new process or system. Tell the truth and get right to the heart of the matter here. If a new system is going to lead to lay-offs then own up to it – lying about it will just crater morale in the long-run. If it’s not true then manages can step forward in perfect confidence and tell their employees the system is there to make the entire company more efficient – make it easier to do their jobs so they don’t have as many headaches getting tasks done.

Involve those most affected early and often. Too often companies rush to complete process re-engineering to become more customer-centric or plan out elaborate new processes using CRM systems yet forget to get those most impacted by the system involved first. Dial these people in early and often so they can own in the solutions defined.

Managers must learn to use their computers, especially if this is a CEM or CRM system. There are those managers who don’t know how to use their PCs or laptops – and everyone on their companies know this. It’s far better, if you want change to stick – for the senior managers to change too and use the systems, changing their way of working. In one instance this was the difference in a system being seen as credible by the rest of the company.

Set realistic guidelines and timetables for change. I recall one company that turned to a new client/server CRM system and the CEO told the sales force by Friday everyone had better be on it or they would not get commissions. This was a small software company that did lots of selling via telemarketing and through a small network of dealers. The Director of Sales, by the afternoon of the announcement, had already signed up for salesforce.com and moved his sales manager onto the system as well. By Tuesday everyone was on salesforce.com. They went to the CEO and had a meeting, explaining the client/server system was a dinosaur and would be impossible to get to in the modestly-priced hotel rooms they stayed in when traveling (not reliable dial-up connections) and that they could go to a Starbucks and check sales status through T-Mobile. The CEO relented and salesforce.com is still in use. What happened? Unrealistic deadlines forced a revolution.

There are many other lessons learned from seeing change work and not work in companies trying to become more customer-centric. The bottom line is that any change management program must respect and give dignity to those most affected if the goals of the system implementation to support strategies ever hope to succeed.

Chief Customer Officers: Only Ass-Kickers Need Apply

Louis Columbus, Cincom

“Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?”

Tom Smykowski, Office Space, 1999

Office Space is a cult classic on so many levels, but when it comes to customer relationships, it’s uncomfortably close to home for technology companies in general and software companies in particular.  I just love the scene where Tom Smykowski just loses it and yells the speech above at the consultants sent it to downsize the fictional company Initech where the movie takes place.

We’ve all known a Tom Smykowski who is given the task of translating customers’ requirements into product specifications and technical guidance for engineers.  They are the deliverers of the customers’ unmet needs to engineering so that the eventual product or software is aligned with what customers see as valuable.  Yet this process has become polluted in many companies with complacency, a lack of passion for serving customers, and in general, arrogance that all that is needed from customers is already known. When the market kicks a company on its rear for not listening to their customers and humility gets dished out, many boards turn to Chief Customer Officers (CCO).

Disruptors with a C-Level Title 

When one thinks of a Chief Customer Officer some think of the best Marriott or Four Seasons Hotel concierge they had ever run into.  Yet this is nothing further than the truth.  For a Chief Customer Officer to be effective they need to do the following:

• Attack processes that get in the way of delivering value to customers.  This includes running over departments that have become insular and as a result, arrogant in their knowledge of what is best for the customer.  This entails significant political risk in companies – hence the reason why a successful Chief Customer Officer must be in the mood to kick ass daily.

• Set the tone of a new culture that makes the organization accountable to the customer first.  Did the software app really deliver what was needed?  Did the service program really work?  Did the quality management and enterprise compliance and quality management (ECQM) strategies work to deliver exceptional products?  There must be accountability to the customer if things in a culture are ever going to change.  Change is painful and it requires someone who can really push an organizations’ culture to not be accountable to itself, but to its customers.

• Creates service and sales warriors by making positive examples of those that go far above and beyond in service to customers.   Rewarding publicly those that show good judgment and deliver exceptional service to customers while also increasing sales – they are the new warriors that a Chief Customer Officer must hold up as examples.

• Makes measures of performance and progress a mile marker and not a religion.  Measuring and showing progress of a culture changing to be more accountable is essential for long-term change to set in.  Posting and celebrating change is imperative.

Bottom Line: Melding the skills of business process re-engineering and a determination to change their corporate cultures to be more accountable to customers, Chief Customer Officers need to be a positive, yet disruptive influence on their companies.  Only ass-kickers need apply.

For you Office Space fans out there, here is a PDF of the TPS Cover Sheet

Men Buy, Women Shop -- Our Customer Experience in the Aisles is Completely Different

When it comes to shopping, women are from Nordstrom's and men are from Sears. Women are happy to meander through sprawling clothing and accessory collections or detour through the shoe department. For men, shopping is a mission. They are out to buy a targeted item and flee the store as quickly as possible, according to a new study by Wharton's Jay H. Baker Retail Initiative and the Verde Group, a Toronto consulting firm. The study's findings have implications for retailers that are looking for ways to tailor their goods and services to specific segments of the shopping population.  Read the Wharton Study.

Customer Experience Goes South in the Contact Center. Who to Blame?

By Dale Wolf

A variety of different surveys indicate that at best only one in ten consumers have an outstanding experience when calling corporate contact centers. The other nine are average, mediocre or poor. The fact that I work for a company selling contact center technology brings an interesting observation. As much as we want to sell our solution, the reality is that providing a great customer experience on the phone is mostly about how you use the technology. Sure, you need certain features to enable agents to fluidly provide fast and accurate responses, but the customer happiness is about how company policies and whether the agent actually cares about providing the customer with a wonderful experience.

The features touted by Cincom as essential elements within the technology are three-fold:

1. A unified agent desktop (that lets the agent see all the information that is relevant to a particular customer call without digging through a lot of back-office applications).
2. Intelligent scripting (to guide the agent into the most productive and relevant conversation path).
3. Automated, personalized fulfillment (that enables an agent to send back to the customer confirming information about the issues they discussed on the phone).

Given these three capabilities, a well-trained agent can extend to the customer a perfect customer experience.

The fact that some 90% of contact center interactions annoy the customer is uncalled for and unnecessary. It is mostly indicative of corporate cultures that have not made the shift to customer experience marketing. The agents reflect the culture and the compensation policies of the company they work for.

Senior executives with poor customer service in the contact center need first to look at themselves and the culture they are fostering. Change that and the customer experience will improve. Change that and you will grow faster and more profitably than your competition.