Posts Tagged ‘customer experience’
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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Monday, September 12th, 2011
Some business and technology decision-makers are rather hesitant about making significant new investments in technology right now. To their way of thinking, it isn’t prudent to spend on a new customer solution implementation right now because demand for their current products is so uncertain. In their minds, it’s better to wait until things pick up a bit. Then, they say, they’ll consider investing in some fancy-schmancy new technology.
This way of thinking is, however, exactly wrong—especially today.
There are three reasons in particular why the failure to invest in a competitively differentiated customer engagement now is completely wrong-headed:
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Tags: competitive advantage, customer, customer experience, demand, institutional knowledge, investment, market, technology
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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, July 25th, 2011
One of the most common problems we have in business is language. Words mean different things to different people. So we often don’t communicate as effectively as we should—even though we think we’re expressing ourselves with perfect clarity.
“CRM” is a great example of this problem. Because of the rise of CRM applications, people will often tell you “We’re doing CRM”—when what they really mean is “We’ve implemented a CRM application.”
CRM applications, of course, can be great. The CRM databases that provide the foundation for these applications are invaluable. They provide a unified repository for structured customer data that organizations can slice and dice in order to both better respond to the needs of individual customers and discern trends in specific market segments. And they layer essential workflow automation on top of these databases so that customer-facing staff can take fact-based actions wherever and whenever it’s appropriate to do so.
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Tags: application, communicate, CRM, customer experience, CXO, database, market, repository, social media, software, Unified Communications
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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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Tuesday, June 28th, 2011
Staring at the departure monitor in JFK airport, I notice my flight has just been delayed another two hours. I am returning—well, trying to return—home after attending Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum held in Manhattan the past two days. Overall, I enjoyed my time learning how organizations are changing their cultures and corporate missions to be more customer centric. Despite appreciating the insight from the analysts and leading industry executives—I feel overwhelmed with mixed emotions as I sit in this excessively crowded airport terminal.
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Tags: business insight, customer experience, customer service, CXO, Information Optimization
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Monday, June 27th, 2011
Your company’s core products and services are the experiential epicenter of your company’s customer experience. So, to deliver a competitively differentiated great customer experience, it’s obviously pretty important to make sure that your product development process is truly customer-driven.
Unfortunately, many companies fail to provide their product managers with adequate insight into the “customer’s story.” Sure, they may generate some customer input in the form of broad market research, surveys and focus groups. They may also get some useful data from their CRM and ERP systems. But, while this information is certainly useful, it is typically limited, fragmented and poorly contextualized.
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Tags: customer experience, customer knowledge, CXO, product development, product managers
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