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Could this happen to your company….

When the executive convened a group of senior leaders to dig into the competitor’s practices, they found that the challenge ran deeper than they had imagined. The competitor had made massive investments in its ability to collect, integrate, and analyze data from each store and every sales unit and had used this ability to run myriad real-world experiments. At the same time, it had linked this information to suppliers’ databases, making it possible to adjust prices in real time, to reorder hot-selling items automatically, and to shift items from store to store easily. By constantly testing, bundling, synthesizing, and making information instantly available across the organization—from the store floor to the CFO’s office—the rival company had become a different, far nimbler type of business.

Are you ready for the era of big data?
McKinsey Global Institute.

Big data results from enterprises that track everything along the customer and supplier value chain. It might even be the next strategic asset companies include in due diligence when considering an acquisition. Imagine increasing the valuation of another firm because it has first-rate analytics group and a technology infrastructure that is compatible with your own business.

The authors pose several questions for executives to consider, and below they are restated as propositions that will either help your company win or leave you helpless in the face of a more nimble, astute competitor.

1. As massive amounts of data become widely available, capturing every nuance of customer behavior across all parts of the value chain, competitive edge go those who figure out how to mine that data for practical value.

2. Those with an embedded organizational ability to test, to test often, and test well will more quickly leverage the data available. If you ever read Paco Underhill’s classic book, Why we buy, just imagine that capability to monitor, assess and predict customer behavior across all of your brands, across all customer segments, and in response to any marketing initiative. Now imagine being able to do it fast, really fast! Look for the rise of customer insight groups in companies that get this message in a big way.

3. Speed no longer just being faster than the other guy (you know that old joke – you don’t have to outrace the bear, just the guy next to you). Speed, in the world of big data, is the ability to create nearly real-time customization of offers that capitalize on pre- and post-purchase behavior. Consider how Amazon can quickly post a message, “Customers who bought this item also bought…” before you conclude your purchase. Now put that capability on data-driven steroids with an analytics team that knows how to leverage the data.

And now look at your own company:

How are the directors in Marketing, IT, Operations and Strategy working together to get a handle on the coming era of big data?

Is the customer analytics group celebrated as a resource to beat the competition or are they just considered geeks in the back room?

Who is leading the charge to leverage big data across your firm?

Oh, and if you think you can just wait until the era of big data finally arrives, then you might relate to the picture above. Big data is already here.

BestCustomerConnection, by Marc Sokol

Related articles

• Will “Big Data” lead to “Big Answers” for Chain Store Operators? (realanalogies.com)
• Companies Need To Prepare Themeslves For The Big Data Challenge (businessinsider.com)
• Big data in the cloud……..the ability to make business decisions (businessintelligence24.wordpress.com)
• McKinsey Report on BIG Data (personanondata.blogspot.com)

Image via Wikipedia

You probably know by now that Steve Jobs died today, October 5th.  His life story can be read here. Below I invite you to pause to consider one of the many comments in response to his passing. It was a reminder of the original Apple “Think Different” ad and a fitting tribute to Jobs’ spirit and actions; it’s good advice to all of us:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Thanks to “Ted” of Venice, CA for reminding us of these words. They are worth repeating.

BestCustomerConnection, by Marc Sokol

Related articles

• Newspapers React to the Death of Steve Jobs [PICS] (mashable.com)

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Admit it: You worry.

You worry that the new teller who just said “oops” when they mistakenly transferred your money from the wrong account will still get it wrong despite reassuring you it is now correctly transacted. You quietly shake your head as you walk to your car, noting to not go to that teller again.

You worry that the service rep, the 5th service rep with whom you are now speaking, has no idea how long you have been trying to get someone to give you a sense that your problem is understood and that they are authorized to help you.

You worry, that there is a minefield somewhere ahead, as the very enthusiastic people who just sold you a Nook e-reader, can’t actually answer any technical questions, and the nice young guy in the back of the store who can answer your questions (even though it’s not his real role) tells you that the technical people in Corporate really don’t know what they are doing either: “it’s hit or miss whether you get a helpful response from them”.

These aren’t random, isolated incidents; these are examples of customer experience going in the wrong direction. These seemingly small incidents create a level of anxiety that shakes brand confidence in service representatives, in companies, and even across entire industries.

Haven’t you noticed that with certain providers you worry something is bound to go wrong no matter how much the assure you, but for other providers you never worry: they say what they will do and do what they say.

So it is time to initiate a “Worry Index” within customer feedback surveys, interviews, and focus groups. Time to find out how much your company creates that added bit of anxiety for customers.

Ask your customers:

1. How often have you been worried we will not execute as expected when you have ordered a product or requested service from us?

2. If you have ever received a message from us clarifying an order, did you worry that your order would still not be processed as you had originally expected?

3. How often do you feel confident that our company and its employees will meet or exceed your expectations?

Response to the first statement, ideally, should be ‘never’.

Response to the second statement should be ‘no’.

Response to the third statement, ideally, should be ‘always‘.

And if responses indicate that your customers are worried, you now have the opportunity to probe for the reasons behind their concern.  Clarity of communication, an explicit plan to follow through on commitments, personalization of messaging in emails, and clear ownership for getting the order correct — absence of any of these can increase the anxiety of customers, over time leading to a lower score on the Worry Index.

Wouldn’t you like to know what leads your customers to worry about the delivery of the goods and services you provide to them?

What would you ask customers if you wanted to assess their ‘Worry Index”?

BestCustomerConnection, by Marc Sokol

My gratitude to Maz Iqbal, who writes The Customer Blog: his recent post, How to excel at Customer Experience and customer-centricity: 3 tips, was a stimulus for my writing about the “Worry Index”.

Related articles

• Apple customer experience second to none, study finds (news.cnet.com)
• Wanted: customer experience leadership to fill a vacuum. First one to do so, wins! (bestcustomerconnection.com)
• Triggering Happiness in Your Customers (customerthink.com)
• Brand values and the customer experience – a perfect match? (customerthink.com)
• What do customers experience online? It pays to find out (econsultancy.com)
• “I’ll have the usual.” Customer Consistency Leads to Loyalty (customerthink.com)

Perhaps you know the phrase, “Good is the enemy of great”.

Popularized in recent years by Jim Collins, the phrase suggests that satisfaction with just being good keeps us from achieving really great things.

And taken as a touchstone for guiding customer experience, this can easily show up within the vision and call to action for customer-centricity of some organization.

Guess what?

Great is also the enemy of good enough!

That’s right; sometimes good enough is well, good enough.

Somewhere someone reading this is rolling his or her eyes right now. Don’t we say, “good enough for government work”, as a way of referring to work of limited quality?

Great and good enough can each be the right measure of what is needed, depending on the situation. And different stakeholders often land on opposite ends of the issue.

Consider this situation:

The R&D department produces both product and process innovation. They support the operations and commercial divisions of the same company who, in turn, work directly with customers.

R&D, by nature looks to the future and in this company represents a response to ‘the innovator’s dilemma’, creating the next generation of products that no customer is directly asking for at this time.

The operations and commercial divisions, who are by nature very present focused, look to R&D to tweak products and engage their scientific talents toward tangible process innovation to which their customers resonate.

But R&D time is a fixed resource and therein sets the stage for the fight between great and good enough:

An R&D manager recently told me, “the last 20% of the research takes as long as the first 80%. Our scientists and engineers don’t stay engaged unless they can work on that last 20%.” Can you see how ‘great’ is the motto underlying their expectations?

A commercial manager from the same firm had different view: “in the time they want to spend on perfecting those projects, we could be working on client-facing needs. They are wasting our company time”. Can you see how ‘good enough’ is the motto underlying his expectations of the R&D group?

The answer isn’t to side with ‘great’ nor is it to side with ‘good enough’. The answer comes from asking these questions:

• “When and where do we need to be great?”
• “What do we give up in the pursuit of being great in this particular way?”
• “What does good enough allow us to also focus upon?”
• “How and when might good enough not actually be good enough for the aspirations we have?”

As for my client, most likely they will end up with a shorter list of strategic projects for which the added 20% of research time is protected. Perhaps they and their line counterparts will discover how flexible resourcing allows more timely support of immediate customer opportunities and sustained focus on long-term projects. Perhaps they will together learn how to balance great with good enough.

It’s great customer service when a bank teller or check out agent strikes up a conversation with the customer in front of them, inquires about their other needs, and take on a promotional role for the business.

But when there is a long line of other customers impatiently waiting to check out and get on with their day, then a pleasant demeanor while efficiently moving the customer along is good enough customer service.

Where have you seem companies balance ‘great’ with ‘good enough’ to maintain the right level of customer experience?

BestCustomerConnection, by Marc Sokol

Resources
• Good to great, Jim Collins
• The innovator’s dilemma, Clayton Christensen
• Beta-think, by Jim Jarvis. In End Malaria (Michael Bungay, Ed)

Jason Fell shares a thoughtful post, “The new, new rules of business marketing“, building off the recent revised edition of The new rules of marketing & PR.  

Let’s take it one step further and note practical ways to apply these in support of your best customers and for those whom you want to become best customers!

Personas persuade.  Jason advises us not to hype your product or service (which comes off as very salesy), when you can use the same space to show how you solve a client problem for particular types of customers.

Don’t just write a story: develop personas of the type of customers with whom you most often work or want to support and let them help you tell your story. Personas reflect more than just people who do business with your firm; they illustrate the dilemmas and needs lurking inside the heads of your customers.  The story behind each persona creates a draw amongst people perusing your business or your website.  Personas allow prospects to quickly  and emotionally connect to your business and help the identify with the type of personal needs or situation that lead them to become a customer.

Generosity is its own reward.  Share useful content on social media.  If you read any blogs about blogging, you have heard the phrase, “content is the new marketing“. Content that quickly demonstrates relevance is simply the price of entry in a socially mediated world.  In a social media world, the key is to make it accessible through multiple approaches.

That is an admirable idea, but if you have a small business you may lack the bandwidth to stay on top of the fast moving world of social media and know which ones can deliver the best connection for you and potential customers.

Shameless plug:  Seeing this need in the marketplace, my brother developed a business, Social Media Accessories, to fill this precise gap for small and medium business owners.  Check it out if you have a small or solo business and can’t find the bandwidth during the day to become a master of the social media universe.

Experiment with a changing world, but don’t give up on what really works for you.   There are enough variations in marketing and enough people trying new things, that there is going to be at least one success story for every type of social media. The key is to stay curious, experiment and refine to fit your own business model.  That may include some very traditional ways of marketing as well as launching new offers via FourSquare (I know what you are thinking, FourSquare – so 2010!)

My point is that technology keeps evolving and surfacing new opportunities. Some will be game changers, some will just put a few points on the board, and some will distract you from what already works.  You have to be a good consumer of the opportunities to market to your customers.   Think of it less as getting swayed by the hype and more as developing a research orientation to what really works for your business.

So what are the new rules you have discovered about marketing to your customers?

And what are the old rules that are standing the test of time?

BestCustomerConnection, by Marc Sokol

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• Guest Article: “Using Social Media for Sales Prospecting,” by Anita Campbell (salesandmanagementblog.com)

In addition to the  overall 2011 Customer Experience Ratings, Bruce Temkin recently published a summary of ratings for Customer Service across multiple industries.

I have worked with a variety of financial institutions over the years, so I am naturally curious how they score. I also know many well intentioned, customer-centric people who work in banks, investment firms and insurance companies, so the data strikes something of a personal note.

Banks, especially big banks, are really underperforming in customer service. They should be way better than what Temkin’s 2011 study tells us.

I’m sure there are plenty of good reasons why they don’t score higher:

Size. Big Banks just too large to provide strong, consistent customer service.  Hmm…Wal-Mart is pretty big, we’d all have to agree.  While they are not top of the retail industry for customer service, they managed to beat out just about all banks. How sad.

Maybe it’s due to having a large distributed network as do many of the large retail banks; you can’t drive customer service consistently all over now, can you?  Hmm…Rite Aid and Walgreens are each in the top twenty.  In fact most of the top twenty firms have a large and geographically broad distribution network.

Big Banks are just in an industry where you can’t control costs. You see the impact of Federal legislation every day.  Something has to give.  So how does Southwest Airlines, a company in an industry that clearly has limited control over costs, manage to be so high in customer service ratings?

Maybe financial service institutions are just different than retail and hotels. Yes, they are different, but then how do you explain USAA insurance taking the top spot in customer service over all other companies, and Edward Jones investments taking the number two spot?  Even American Express made the top 20, despite being in the credit card industry.

Then again Big Banks, take heart: at least you deliver better customer service than wireless, TV and Internet service companies.  Hmm… maybe that’s not something to brag about.

For those banks who truly care about leading through customer service, there is plenty of room to improve.  The time to do so is now.

What are you waiting for?

BestCustomerConnection, by Marc Sokol

Related articles

• Banking on customer service (eptica.wordpress.com)
• Wanted: customer experience leadership to fill a vacuum. First one to do so, wins!
• Customer-centricity: If you believe in it, bet on it
• Why would anyone want to be your best customer! Three reasons, and you need to address all three…

The 2011 Temkin Customer Experience Ratings are out. I look forward to most anything Bruce Temkin has to report about the state of customer experience, and this report is worth a look.

This is the graphic that always grabs my attention.  What do you notice?

See the averages across different industries?  Pretty sad, especially beyond the first two industries listed.

Now look at the range of scores.  A few industries include companies that reach a ‘strong’ customer experience rating  (no one achieves ‘very strong’ customer experience rating), but boy can some companies across almost every industry rack up very weak levels of customer experience!

Every company wants to differentiate from its competitors. Some achieve this through cost control, the discipline of operational excellence and passing those saving along to customers.  Some through innovation and leading with the next new thing.  So why aren’t customer experience ratings higher?

The opportunity to lead in every industry via customer experience seems to be waiting for whomever is really ready to step up.

For all that is written about delighting customers, something is not translating into action.  At best, this is the gap between knowing and doing.  At worst, this is reflecting choices, when push comes to shove, to prioritize everything but customer experience.

I know you are thinking it’s not you or your company; it’s the other guy and their company.

So why aren’t you stepping up to take the leadership advantage through customer experience?

BestCustomerConnection, by Marc Sokol

Related articles

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• How much does your marketing department really show the love?

For the marketing and business development professionals who read this blog….

Two guys are walking down the same street at separate times. Each is hungry, each is looking into the windows of stores where there is hot food, and each has a pocketful of money.

Only thing is that one of these two guys doesn’t realize he has a pocketful of money. So he looks into the window and blames the world for being a hard place and stays hungry. The other guy uses the money in his pocket to secure a good meal.

Networking is a lot like filling your pocket with money. Some people just don’t realize that they have great resources already available to them, or think that they can’t get what they desire in life. They just focus on the world being a hard place, while they remain hungry for a job, a new connection, a deal, or whatever it is they desire.

So take a look inside your pockets, not for business cards of people you met at the last event you attended, but for the connection you established with someone at that event.

• Did you follow up to reinforce that connection?
• Did you remember something that the two of you spoke about or heard from a speaker that was interesting to both of you?
• Did you ask a question where you really want to hear what they think?
• When is the last time you sent a personal message to someone who made a comment on a LinkedIn discussion that resonated with you?

These are the type of actions that turn a handshake and business card into the start of a new relationship.

I know you have dreams and aspirations.

And I know you are hungry.

So what are you going to do about it?

BestCustomerConnection, by Marc Sokol

(This post was initially written for the American Marketing Association and also appears in the community blog of mnama.org)

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Recently I’ve been focused on a phrase a client of mine has begun to use, “beyond imagination”.

My vision is to create a Global Research & Development Center that isn’t just great; I want others to experience it as beyond imagination!

He is wondering how to best engage his employees, his peers and other business units across the company to so they will deeply resonate with his vision. He aspires to create an organizational capability that will become an industry benchmark and a new reason for customers to remember his company. He wants to raise the standards against which we set all other expectations. In his future world, the R&D Center is not just a source of product innovation; it is also an agent of marketing and public relations, an opportunity for employer branding and recruitment, and an enabler of a vision that connects customers more closely to the business.

Nice aspiration, isn’t it?

As we map out his strategy, the transition plans, and ways to take his story on the road, I find myself searching for my own sense of when I have been taken beyond imagination.

My first image isn’t how far reaching my thoughts are, but rather how small they seemed in comparison to someone else.  I remember  a training program in which one exercise was to imagine the vacation of a lifetime. I told my partner about wanting to visit Hawaii, a place I’d never been. At his turn, he beamed as he talked about space travel and a trip to the moon. Hawaii would still be great, but space travel was clearly beyond my imagination at that time. Not any more!

How do you tap into what it looks and feels like to go beyond imagination?

• Do you remember your first trip to Disneyland? Or watching the expression on your child’s face as they experienced utter delight?

• Have you ever listened to a futurist describe how dramatically different your world will be in just a few short years? Or discovered that some of those amazing ‘future states’ were already here?

Star Trek and Star Wars fans know this experience intimately: with every story you expected to be transported to some setting that you knew you never could imagine. Real fans can recount episode after episode, still taking delight in the discovery.

That’s what I now think about when I hear the phrase, ‘beyond imagination.’

It may start in your eyes and ears and head as you take it all in, but it settles in you gut as an emotional reaction takes over. That’s beyond imagination!

Can you take your customers beyond imagination?

What happens when your customer has an experience that is beyond imagination?

• They keep thinking about it, and not just in their head; they continue to feel the experience over and over.

• They look for others with whom they can share the experience; sometimes they become your best advocates, what Michael Cowen at Ravetopia refers to as raving fans who become agents of word of mouth marketing.

• They immediately think about you whenever a competitor even begins to present an alternative option.

Not a bad place to be, huh?

So when was the last time someone took you beyond imagination?

How did they define a new standard and reset the stage for how you benchmark the products and services you receive?

The key is to reconnect with that moment of discovery. It’s one step, but a big one, toward finding a place that is beyond imagination.

BestCustomerConnection, by Marc Sokol

If you were among the billion or so people who watched The Royal Wedding today, the word that should come to mind is ‘Brilliant’!

And your customer service function can learn valuable lessons from the ceremony and it’s design:

1. Inclusive. Planning a wedding always leads to tough decisions whom to invite.  This couple had a clear view to include people who have made a difference in their lives, even if it be the butcher, the baker or the pub experience maker.  It says that they don’t forget about the people (or in your case, the customers) who have contributed to your success along the way.

2.  Transparency. No, not everything is transparent, but clear efforts were made to let the important actions be visible to as many people as possible. For some it was being there in person, for others it was viewing from public parks on a jumbo screen, and for others it was staying glued to the telly early in the morning. Multichannel social media tools allow you to also be transparent to your customers.  It’s not that they require identical access; rather, they require an access route that lets them feel adequately connected to your business.

3.  Intimacy.  Every commentator that I listened to this morning noted the special connection between William and Kate, the mutual respect, and the sense that they really are there for each other.  I don’t care how carefully you monitor call time in your customer support center or if your contact center is modeled after the notion of ‘fast, fun and friendly’ to keep costs down; your customers want to know that you care.

4. Optimism. The happy couple are of course optimistic, but so are the observers all over.  The optimism is simply infectious. I even expect the London FTSE to rise today simply from the sheer joy across the country. Your customer service team needs to mirror that same optimism in a way the conveys the message, “I can help you”.

Inclusive, transparent, intimate and optimistic – not a bad way for your customer service function to be described by customers and the employees themselves, don’t you think?

Marriage is about the commitment to create a future together.  Don’t you want that type of marriage with your customers?

BestCustomerConnection, by Marc Sokol

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