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.
 
Monday, October 31st, 2011
Everyone is talking about “big data” yet we each have a slightly different view of what it means and its impact. One thing we all can agree on is that we must devise strategies to handle and leverage the “Forty percent projected yearly growth of global data.”
One of the things I have heard is, “Well, we have a lot of information scattered throughout, so if we put everything we own in a single, distributed processing system like Hadoop—which is meant to house massive amount of information efficiently—we can start making sense of it.” I want to shake my head, “No, no, no!”
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Tags: Big Data, contextual intelligence, customer insight, data growth, global data, Hadoop, Information Optimization, information organization, variability of data, variety of data, velocity of data, volume of data
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Monday, October 17th, 2011
“When we forget who we are we drift—movement is inevitable.” I heard this statement recently and immediately thought of how much truth resonated from it even with regards to organizations and customer experience.
Sometimes a company starts in overdrive and sets a high precedence for how they serve and delight customers. As Q1 slips into Q4 and years roll by, overdrive slows and service levels dwindle—“Movement is inevitable.” Customer churn rarely happens all at once—it happens gradually. Time leads to a weakened commitment to the customer experience strategy, vision dims, and Customer Facing Professionals (CFPs) lose their passion. The shift in mindset is almost imperceptible as the organization moves from tolerating subpar service, to accepting it, then embracing it.
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Tags: complacency, core values, customer experience, Customer Facing Professionals (CFPs), customer knowledge, customer retention
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Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
This week is National Customer Service Week and organizations across the globe are promoting a heightened awareness of customer service with the theme: “Refresh, Recharge, and Reconnect.” Customer Facing Professionals (CFPs) are encouraged to take this week and refresh their spirits, recharge their energy, and reconnect with customers. It’s interesting that the focus is on the ‘people’ factor in the customer experience as we’ve had quite the discussion about it this past week on LinkedIn. “Refreshing” and “recharging” is an excellent goal as happy employees can connect with customers more effectively. As part of recharging, companies should ensure the free flow of organizational information and knowledge—the oxygen carrier for any organization.
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Tags: collaboration, customer experience, Customer Facing Professionals (CFPs), customer knowledge, customer service, information insight, information overload, LinkedIn, National Customer Service Week
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Monday, September 19th, 2011
While researching whether or not to pay extra for Orchestra seats, I read an insightful value statement, “You see the show from the perspective the playwright and director saw it. You are seeing the show the way it was created to be seen.” As a product manager, this got me thinking about whether our customers experience the full value of our products they way we had envisioned. How can I help ensure that my customers always have an orchestra seat as they leverage our solutions? And moreover how can I ensure that my own organization is seeing our customers when we develop our products and our brand message?
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Tags: brand messaging, customer data, customer experience, Information Optimization, solution provider
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Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
In today’s economy it’s important that organizations, regardless of size or industry, create customer-centric cultures. Research indicates that “71% of business leaders believe that customer experience is the next corporate battleground.” This means that the entire organization must align with the customer experience vision, strategy and standards. Companies need to empower all employees to ensure they deliver memorable customer experiences. “Eighty percent (80%) of CEOs believe their brand delivers a superior consumer experience yet only 8% of consumers agree.” How then do we create a customer-centric organization that our customers agree is superior?
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Tags: #CXO tweet chats, brand experience, communication, customer experience, customer knowledge, customer-centric culture, data silos, technology
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Monday, August 15th, 2011
I had the distinct pleasure of speaking on a recent CXPA webinar “Gaining Customer Insights from Unstructured Data” along with CXPA co-founder and chair Bruce Temkin and Jason Schneider, vice president of enterprise sales at Clarabridge. One thing that resonated was Jason’s comment that “the marriage of structured and unstructured data is the point of ultimate action for an organization.”
I would have to concur. The challenge many businesses face today though is that the information needed to support customers is scattered throughout the company. Sales professionals, account management and customer support professionals have to log into 10 or more different applications trying to find information to help customers. According to Harris Interactive, even once information is found, 44% of customers claim that they received the wrong information. Added to this challenge is the phenomenal growth of unstructured data from internal blogs, content management systems, and customer survey responses as well as data captured outside the firewall from social media.
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Tags: customer knowledge, customer service, customers, CXO, Information Optimization, information organization, unstructured data
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Monday, August 1st, 2011
“Today, many organizations have multiple data repositories and customer touch points across business units and product lines that capture data. Added to this, many of these repositories and systems live in a vacuum and never talk to each other—only making it harder to leverage the information they hoard. ERP systems ignore WCMS that avoid CRMs and snub email. With such an influx of data and the lack of communication between hubs, it’s easy to see why companies are overwhelmed. As a result, “improvement action on customer data is at a mere 10%.” We discussed this issue and ways to resolve with Michelle Morris, Customer Experience Manager of a global technology company, with $4B in revenue. Here is a summary:
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Tags: #CXO tweet chats, customer data, customer experience innovation, customer feedback, customer insight, ERP systems, multiple data repositories, WCMS
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Monday, July 18th, 2011
In an excerpt from his book, The Intimate Supply Chain: Leveraging the Supply Chain to Manage the Customer Experience, David Frederick Ross says:
“It has also become apparent that the supply chain is becoming more important than ever to support this need for customer intimacy. Assembling the components to continuously deliver such value to the customer in today’s global business environment simply cannot be done by companies acting alone. More than ever, businesses are depending on their membership in effective supply chain communities to drive customer centered strategies.”
Ross is right. Today’s global market—with non-existent barriers and multiple customer channels—demands a well-oiled supply chain system. Many organizations are forced to meet customer needs by using a network of third-party providers and partners. The challenge is to streamline these operations to deliver consistency in product development, filling orders, delivering exceptional service and managing customer expectations.
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Tags: #CXO tweet chats, customer channels, customer experience, customer value chain, CXO, David Frederick Ross, supply chain, time to market
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Thursday, July 14th, 2011
Every business conversation always circles back to the customer. At a recent #innochat on innovation Graham Hill [@grahamhill] asked, “Do customers need us to innovate?” My immediate response was customers “expect” us to innovate—when we don’t we end up at memorial services. And sadly enough it would be our own service.
Tenuous competitive advantages coupled with increased global competition mandate that we continuously innovate or risk losing our customers to competitors. Added to this, customer expectations seemingly inch higher daily. Customers want us to anticipate their needs, to develop new products, to innovate, and deliver solutions that bring efficiency to their business processes, their homes, and their life as a whole.
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Tags: competitive advantage, customers, CXO, innovation
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Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
More and more organizations are realizing that the customer experience they create and deliver impacts their bottom-line. According to Shaw and Ivens, “71% of business leaders believe that customer experience is the next corporate battleground.” The question then becomes how do you measure customer experience and how do you use these measurements to dictate business strategy to win on the battlefield? This discussed this topic at our last #CXO chat with special guest Forrester Analyst, Adele Sage.
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Tags: #CXO tweet chats, Adele Sage, customer experience, customer surveys, CXO, Forrester
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