I rarely have time for random conversations while traveling as I’m either too focused on catching my flight or my head is buried in a report—except on my last trip. I had quite an interesting conversation on a flight to San Diego which started as a simple question, “How does product management fit into customer experience?” After all, isn’t customer experience championed by marketing and customer service departments?
Stacy Leidwinger
Stacy Leidwinger serves as product management director for the Vivisimo Velocity Information Optimization Platform. In her role, she assists in driving product roadmap, market requirements, product positioning as well as interacting closely with customers and partners to understand their information challenges. Stacy graduated from Allegheny College with degrees in Computer Science and Managerial Economics. She completed her senior comprehensive project surveying the technical and economic value of Customer Relationship Management. She also holds her MBA from the Katz School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.
Understanding the Product Management Customer Experience Puzzle
Monday, May 7th, 2012People Skills in Customer Experience
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012Memorable customer experiences are hinged on great customer-facing professionals (CFPs). People buy from people. Thus, the CFPs that bring true empathy and personality to interactions win. Research shows that seventy percent (70%) of customers left because of a lack of attention from front-line employees. The number one trait for CFPs is empathy. True empathy happens when CFPs are empowered with knowledge.
Field Notes
Thursday, March 29th, 2012As a product manager one of my favorite parts of the job is visiting customers and prospects. These past weeks I was doing just that—visiting several of our clients and prospects getting a firsthand look at how they’re beginning to leverage our solutions within their businesses environments, their challenges and some of their victories. I thought I’d share two of these with you as some of these challenges may very well be within the walls of your company.
The Revelation of Data
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012The artist James Turrell once said, “Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.” This is such a profound statement. Given the influx of data and the spotlight on leveraging Big Data, I immediately paralleled light with information. If we were to sit and think about it, information in the right context, at the right time, is indeed light.
Operationalize Insights to Drive Business
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012According to Annette Franz [@Annettefranz], “A key component of a VOC Initiative is getting the right feedback at the right time from the right customers. Then glean insights, create action plans, and drive it all back to the right departments and the right employees who take action at the right touch points at the right time.” This was the basis of a recent #CXO chat as we discussed, “Operationalize Insights to Drive Business” with guest Annette Franz, Seasoned Client Services (CX, VOC, SaaS) executive.
Customer Experience Motto for 2012
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012Recently, I came across a great quote by Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research, Inc. where she said, “Companies need to start treating customer experience as a business discipline—not a bumper sticker.” It made me wonder if companies, as they start planning their strategy for 2012, are truly embracing what it means to build a customer-centric culture.
Working in the customer experience industry, weekly I meet with numerous Fortune 500 organizations. I am always surprised to hear comments like, “this year we are focusing on our customers first and foremost” or “we have just hired a new senior director to really lead our customer experience initiative.” For many of these companies, they are just starting to embark on the customer experience improvement journey. A 2011 study from the Temkin Group shows only 7% of companies think they are customer experience leaders while 61% of them want to be at the top in their industry in three years. The question I ask then is, “Why now?” Haven’t you always been concerned about your customers?
Who Comes First in Shaping Customer Experience: Customers or Employees?
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011[Excerpt from Vineet Nayar, vice chairman and CEO of India-based HCL Technologies] “The conventional wisdom, of course, says that companies must always put the customer first. In any services business, however, the true value is created in the interface between the employee and the customer. So, by putting employees first, you can bring about fundamental change in the way a company creates and delivers unique value for its customers and differentiates itself from its competitors.”
Leveraging Information Assets to Optimize Customer Value
Monday, November 21st, 2011When asked to identify the greatest barriers to improving multichannel customer experience, “Thirty-four percent of respondents identified difficulty unifying different sources of customer data.” This would indeed be a barrier as understanding your customers’ needs is intrinsic to delivering an exceptional customer experience. To understand the customer, organizations must take each morsel of information left at touch-points across the organization and weave them together to create the customer’s story. The need for information optimization and big data applications then becomes vital. I had the honor of being in the hot seat as we explored this topic at one of our tweet chats. Here is a glimpse into our discussion:
Culture Must Meet Structure
Monday, November 14th, 2011Recently I heard a sales representative say, “We use a CRM and I didn’t visit it once to prepare for my sales meeting.” Interesting, yes? The sales rep went on to say that he would probably enter details about the meeting later in the CRM system—not to improve how he interacted with the customer but so that his manager could view the outcome of the meeting. Unfortunately, many organizations have Customer Facing Professionals (CFPs) with this mindset. A big piece in this equation is understanding what creates this mindset and solving it.
