This sounds like an ambitious post and I guess it is, but let me say up front that there is no "one size fits all" answer to how to build a customer experience strategy. There are though, some things that you should consider and some tips that are working for some of my clients.

What is customer experience? I'm not going to spend pages trying to define it here, but basically CX is your company strategy that is built to create a company environment that is focused on understanding and meeting customer expectations. A "good" customer experience occurs when expectations are aligned with experience to create satisfaction. CX then,  is built on a comprehensive strategy or game plan that is defined by your brand attributes and by customer expectations. The strategy defines the intended experience from the customers perspective. Once you've defined the experience then create it, align culture, organization, processes, technology and products / services to the strategy.

The first step in building any CX strategy is understanding your customer; who are they, what do they expect, how do they expect you to act and when do they want interaction. In this data collection exercise, which by the way, is on going to support a flexible strategy and proper execution, you're looking for actionable, data driven insights that can be used to build a customer experience roadmap. Roadmap and strategy in hand, then here are a few tips that have helped companies work through the complex steps to support ongoing execution of the strategy:

1. Organizational model: If you believe that only employees that are considered "customer facing" are involved in CX, you need to step back and rework your strategy. Everyone in your company is involved in CX. Delivering the "right" experience with the "right" product or service at the "right time" to the "right" customer, requires the alignment of actions from every department. Think about it, if the wrong product is shipped, or the product quality is low, or the bill is wrong the customers' expectations are not met and their experience has suffered. If your organizational model is sound and you have built a culture focused on solving the customers problems though, you might be able to recover if quick and correct action is taken. In general organizational silos are the enemy, and a collaborative and empowered workforce can go a long way towards solving your CX issues. And don't forget about incentives, make sure that you are paying people to collaborate and rewarding them for the behavior your customer wants.
2. Culture: Culture goes hand-in-hand with the organizational model. Aligning culture to the strategy is the start of changing behavior to deliver the desired customer experience. Changing culture is not a simple or fast process, but there are solid change management technique that will work if you focus your efforts.

3. Listen - understand (expectations) - focus (employees and processes) - act: You are building the "I own your problem" mentality in your employee population. Build awareness that it is every employees' role to prevent friction points for the customer and that they are empowered to make decisions.

4. Sales Model: Don't focus on building your sales model, instead first learn how people buy / want to buy your products / services. The connected world has changed and often your customer knows a lot about your product before they interact with you. Instead of selling, they want information to support an informed buying decision. Understand how the customer wants to buy and then match that to your sales model.

5. Influence: In the past, when we segmented customers, we often identified a VIP group of customers, mostly based on how much the customer is buying or has the potential to buy. In the new information based economy influence is the new VIP. Instead of just focusing on the customer that are spending the most money, identify and treat your influencers like the special customers that they are. Influencers reach many more customers and prospects and drive a lot more business. Through analytic tools you can find and nurture your influencers and, in some cases even identify them before they reach influencer status.

6. Proactive: A CX strategy needs to be proactive, not just reactive. Build tactics that help you reach out to your customers and especially your influencers. Conversations are good and asking for feedback then using it to improve your CX execution is invaluable.

7. Delivery: Don't forget delivery as a key element of the CX process. Delivery is often the point where the experience has the highest potential to break down, so it is a critical component of the ongoing customer experience.

8. Mobile experience: Don't forget mobile! Now I sort of feel silly for saying something that I think should be very obvious, people use smart phones at a rapidly growing pace and will interact with your brand from mobile devices. I can't tell you how often I try to look up something from a company site only to find that the site provides a terrible mobile experience. I can tell you, that makes a big impression on what people think of your brand.

9. 1:1 feel: Notice I said 1:1 "feel" not 1:1 experience. I'm not suggesting that you need to always interact 1:1 with your customers, but what I do believe is that with the amount of data available you can scale the 1:1 feel and create mass individualization. Customers expect to be treated as an individual, not as a faceless entity. Now I understand that this leads to the discussion of knowing your customer at every interaction, a data problem for most companies but...

10. Identify your customer: Identify your customer at every touch point. this might be the most difficult technical issue that you face but it's absolutely critical. We all have multiple identities online and in person, tying those together is no small task. I believe though, that effective use of customer communities can give you the means to connect all those identities and is a critical part of any CX strategy. See this post for more on this subject.

11. Measure: You are trying to create a consistent experience quality across all interactions. You have to measure and act to effectively manage an ongoing CX program. Embedding analytics into all business processes is essential, but even more so is the culture that uses the data to take action.

12. Technology: This is a tough topic, there's so much that you need to do. I'd say the real underlying concept though, is integration to eliminate technology silos. CX touches tech across all your systems, and includes CRM, but doesn't stop there. You need a community platform, listening tools (social media monitoring and response), and the back office aligned to the CX strategy. The supply chain, financials, product development and design, manufacturing, etc. all have impact on your CX strategy.

13. Removing barriers: It's not enough to build a strategy, you have to create a culture of doing. Empowered employees solve problems and remove barriers. There are other barriers to consider, organization, incentives, collaborative environment, management alignment... I can keep going but the point is to spend time identifying barriers and then building a plan to remove them.

14. Listen - understand - focus - act: Okay, I listed this one twice, but it's just that important.

Hopefully this list is useful. CX is not a simple topic, but there are lot's of good examples and case studies that can help you see what other companies have done successfully. Having the mind set to listen, learn and take action though, is your responsibility.

Tags: CX, customer experience, CRM, technology, culture, customer, prospect, CMO, service, community

I spend a lot of time talking about change; business is changing, the way we work is changing, our expectations around technology and about the way we interact is changing (or has changed) ...I can keep going, but you get the point. We're in a time of near constant change. So what are the technology companies that have been around for 20+ years doing to stay current with today's business technology needs if anything, or are they riding past successes and surviving on their large install base footprints? History tells us that innovative companies that don't keep up with change eventually become like dinosaurs, extinct. This is true across all industries, when disruptive change hits often the largest incumbents are the last to adopt, if they do at all. It seems like there can be a built in latency or resistance to change that comes with success in some market segments. It makes sense, if you have significant market share why would you risk it on radical new ideas? The risk is, of course, that a company waits too long before shifting and cannot recover from the momentum that other, new companies gain with the new idea.

So is there a way to balance the two issues, maintaining a large customer base that often wants, at least for some length of time, to see incremental product improvement but avoid disruption; and prevent new innovators from rendering the vendor and its products obsolete.  You can't really talk about this much in a generic discussion, the specific industry twists impact it too much. So let's look at this in the enterprise software context. No one would deny that we're in the middle of several shifts that have to some extent, disrupted the enterprise software markets. The overall market has been consolidating for 7-8 years anyway, so the landscape is mostly a few very large vendors, a few successful mid-size companies with momentum in the new technologies or in some highly specialized niche, and then a bunch of start ups driving disruption, but most often being bought up by the large and medium vendors when they prove out the new technology.

Last week I attended two different vendor events, and what I learned at those events started me thinking about this topic again. While there are many new technologies that are tied to the changing nature of enterprise software, there really are four major technology shifts (social, mobile, big data and cloud) and a massive business and cultural shift brought about mostly because of the impact of the Internet on business and the personal use of technology. How vendors are dealing with the four tech shifts is I think, a decent indicator of their overall ability to adapt and continue to be successful. The two events that triggered this post; Infor's 2013 customer conference, Inforum; and Oracle's annual analyst summit. Let's look at these two vendors and see how they're dealing with the change.

Infor, while not so old itself (it was spun out of SCT in 2002 as Agilisys); is made up of a series of acquired products from much older technology companies. Before its current management team, many had written Infor off as a company where old enterprise software goes to die. That all changed two years ago with some fresh investments and a new executive team led by ex-Oracle President Charles Phillips. The Infor I saw last week is a very different company than it was 2 years ago, with some very fresh ideas and products.

The overall approach that Infor is taking to modernize its portfolio is somewhat different from what we're seeing from other traditional software companies. Rewriting each of the underlying products on a new platform, or consolidating them on a single platform, would take many years. It took Oracle 7 years to write Fusion Apps, based on the best business processes from PeopleSoft, EBS, JDE, Siebel, etc. If Infor took that approach today, the product would be ready by maybe 2019-2020. Instead Infor needed a way to provide a new user experience, easily integrate across all the portfolio, support platform agnostic mobile, support cloud, more easily support a hybrid IT environment and provide embedded social. They have done this through a new middleware product called ION (Intelligent Open Network). ION takes XML outputs (all events and transactions) from any application and uses that format to integrate Infor apps as well as other 3rd party or in house built apps. ION also includes workflow, business process management, decision support and even data warehousing of all of the XML docs created (now available in the cloud as well). 

One of the biggest complaints from customers relates to the dated and unpleasant user experience (UX) of many traditional enterprise systems. To overcome this issue Infor built an internal creative development organization called Hook and Loop, responsible for "creating experiences people love". The group is made up of ~82 designers, writers, developers, filmmakers and other creative individuals and is mostly focusing on UI design at present. The examples of the new UI that I saw at Inforum are very modern, clean and usable.

Infor is trying to approach the enterprise apps market with a deep vertical lens. This is, I suppose not surprising for a couple of reasons. First, I think that more companies are insisting that their enterprise apps be a a better fit to business requirements and industry vertical focus is important in that respect. The other reason it makes sense for Infor is the broad portfolio of products. Each of the acquired products and suites have specific vertical strengths that Infor can leverage as it builds out deeper micro-vertical functionality, much like Oracle in that respect.

In addressing the technology shifts, particularly around mobile, social and cloud, Infor made several relevant announcements. From a mobile perspective it is taking a device agnostic approach by using HTML5 to provide mobile "anywhere". Infor's social product is called Ming.le and follows the concept of providing social capabilities inside the enterprise workflow by embedding the ESN into the apps. This is key for getting broad adoption and IMO, the most effective long term strategy. Most traditional EA vendors are taking an approach to cloud that provides customers the choice and flexibility to choose the deployment and licensing methods they prefer. This hybrid offering model seems to be the most logical way for traditional EA vendors to compete in the short to mid term. Most of the apps are single tenant and are offered in the SaaS subscription model, outsourced, and on premises. There is also an IaaS offering to help with the hybrid deployments.

Oracle is taking a somewhat different approach that combines organically developed products on the Fusion platform with acquired apps. The next generation of Oracle apps, particularly in the public cloud portfolio is a mixture of Oracle Fusion applications and acquired apps and services. From a deployment model perspective it too is taking the hybrid approach, with the continuation of the Apps Unlimited products with the new Fusion apps plus the Social Relationship Management (SRM) and the Customer Experience (CX) solutions. Oracle of course, has the luxury of having a next generation apps suite in the Fusion product line that it started developing 7+ years ago to use as a foundation for its new cloud portfolio. In addition to this, Oracle has a broad set of vertical offerings built out of both acquired products and organic solutions, mostly on premises today.

To address the changing technology Oracle has developed a mobile development platform that can standardize mobile across all products. On the social front I already mentioned the SRM solutions, which are cloud based and include the Oracle Social Engagement and Monitoring Cloud Service (social media monitoring and response), Oracle Social Marketing Cloud and Oracle Social Network (OSN). The OSN product is Oracle's ESN and is becoming more embedded inside the Fusion Cloud apps workflow with each release. The SRM solutions are tied closely with the CX solutions, since social business and customer experience, as strategies and technologies, overlap significantly and are critically connected. I won't list all the CX products, but you can find them here.

From a go-to-market perspective Oracle is focused on continuing to offer hybrid solutions and customer choice for licensing and deployment models. That said, the company is really putting a lot of effort in building out a broad public cloud portfolio. The overall market is moving there, but honestly I'm not sure how fast that movement is happening, especially in core apps like financials that most enterprise companies have on premises and don't want to replace anytime soon. Investments are being funneled to solutions that offer quicker and higher return like ESN's and CX. Oracle has built and acquired quite a broad set of services, now it must move quickly to complete integrating those acquisitions and in simplifying its messages so that businesses can understand the Oracle Cloud. I heard Oracle start talking about solution sets more at the recent event, something I think is critical for the future. CMO's, for example, really need help sorting out a complete marketing cloud portfolio, something that Oracle is positioned to do.

Both Infor and Oracle are "work's in progress", but they both are making aggressive moves to meet the changing technology and business environments. Their approaches and how well they execute them will prove out over the next few years, along with several competitors.

Tags: cloud, CX, SRM, customer, social, mobile, big data, Oracle, Infor, change, enterprise, software

In part one of this series we looked at gamification and built some understanding on what it is, and is not. In part two we look at the areas of business that could benefit from using gamification and now, in part three we'll look at a few customer stories to get a better understanding of how these techniques and technologies can be used. I have to give a shout out to the folks at Badgeville for sharing some of their case studies with me for use on this post.

The first use case we'll look at is increasing employee performance by leveraging game mechanics. The organization for this example is Deloitte, or more specifically Deloitte Learning Academy (DLA). The DLA provides digital executive development education programs through a variety of content types. Their challenge though, was to get busy executives to actually take advantage of the content for professional development. With lots of competing priorities personal training and development investments often fell of the to-do list. DLA implemented a solution that utilized the concepts of points, achievements and missions to draw executives into learning activities. As the executives interact with content they receive points and achievements that are displayed on the users profile. A series of missions were created to provide a guided learning path and a leaderboard is used to create competition for expertise in several key areas.

As a result of the gamification efforts DLA saw solid results in only 3 months, including increased user retention and ongoing engagement as well as rapid adoption. Return rates increased to >46% daily and >36% weekly. Active users unlocked an average of 3 achievements and some of the top users exceeded 30 achievements. Within 6 months a user had unlocked the top achievement, a milestone that DLA thought would take twice that amount of time and users were using words like addicting and fun to describe using the training content.

The next example is using gamification techniques to increase external community engagement and use. The company is Engine Yard, a platform as a service (PaaS) provider. Engine Yard provides subscription based access to it's platform tools to a community of ISVs which includes active support and training for the developers. In what is becoming a common approach to support, Engine Yard wanted to build a customer community that would enhance their customer's experiences while reducing the support burden somewhat. They also saw opportunities to leverage a community for greater innovation and product feedback and improvement, as well as provide a vehicle for recognizing active contributions. Engine Yard wanted to encourage and reward specific behaviors including engaging with content, utilizing the knowledge base, complete surveys and participate in forums, report bugs and submit feature requests by using reputation mechanics. The solution included achievements to reward the valued behaviors and missions to draw customers into completing surveys and providing feedback. As a result of this gamified community environment Engine Yard saw a 20% reduction in support tickets, 40% increase in forum and knowledge base use and 40% reduction in ticket response time by its own support team.

In these two examples you can see good returns and results in customer community engagement (business process optimization) (Engine Yard) and improved employee performance (DLA). These aren't the only use cases of course. Internal communities, or enterprise social networks (ESNs) can benefit from gamification, for example EMC used gamification to increase employee collaboration measured as a 41% increase in employee activity in its employee community. Here are links to some additional case studies from Badgeville and Bunchball.

Tags: gamification, engagement, community, bunchball, badgeville, game mechanics, reputation mechanics 

In part one of this post we looked at what enterprise gamification is and some of the methods and techniques that can be used. In this post I am focusing on what types of things you can actually do with enterprise gamification. There are many business processes that can be strengthened using a gamification strategy. It's probably easiest to break them down into two larger groups focused on employee engagement and customer engagement.

For employee engagement gamification is an excellent tools to increase engagement, modify behavior and create a more motivated workforce. Some of the areas and processes that can be impacted include:

• Sales productivity
• Performance and learning
• Participation / collaboration
• Increase usage of technology
• Product input and feedback

For customer engagement gamification again provides the capability to draw customers into activities, increase loyalty and encourage behavior that creates a more active customer / company relationship. These processes include:

• Loyalty
• Participation and community management
• Increasing engagement
• Product input and feedback
• Commerce
• Lead generation

Beyond employees and customers, there could be opportunities to use gamification with partners. I haven't seen specific examples of this kind of application yet, but I'd think that partner engagement and motivation would be relatively similar to the other uses I've mentioned. In particular using gamified processes to increase sales, drive greater partner participation in activities like product input (ideasourcing), marketing programs, training, use of new technology and lead management seem like natural fits for the technology.

In part 3 of this post, which will be out shortly, I'll look at some specific case studies and examples that more clearly demonstrate how to use gamification on some of the listed processes.

Tags: gamification, motivation, engagement, customer, employee, performance, sales, collaboration, loyalty

Over the next few posts I'll explore the growing use of enterprise gamification. I became interested in the topic after an interesting keynote at IBM Connect this year by Jane McGonagal, author of the book 'Reality is Broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world". I have to admit that while I "get" the concept of using game theory to shape behavior I was skeptical about how useful it really was in an enterprise context. I've spent some time over the past few weeks researching the topic and at this point my attitude has shifted quite a bit. When used correctly I now believe that gamification can provide a powerful tool to help companies encourage behaviors that they define as desirable.

First though let's make sure that we all understand exactly what gamification is and is not. Gamification is a business strategy that applies game mechanics to a non-game situation to drive or change some behavior. You will notice that nowhere in that definition did I mention technology. Gamification is not technology, it is underpinned or enabled by technology, but that's not the point. The point is that its a business strategy and as such must be defined clearly to lay out what behavior you're trying to change, why changing that behavior is important from a business strategy standpoint and then, how will game theory be applied to bring about this change. Gamification is about experiences; employee experience, customer experience, partner experience; creating fun and engaging experiences that ultimately results in a behavioral modification.

To understand how gamification is used it's probably useful to understand game mechanics and some of the techniques used in enterprise gamification, First though, remember the origins of gamification, it came out of the computer / video game industry so some of the fundamentals are closely tied to techniques in use there. I won't spend time talking about some of the research I found on the impact of gaming on consumers, although it's really worth reading McGonagal's book. 

 Game mechanics are the building blocks of a game experience. They are the basic rule frameworks and feedback processes that produce an engaging game. These are fairly well documented online, but it's useful to at least list them here (at least the ones I know, I'm sure there are some others):

• Achievements - physical or virtual representation of accomplishment
• Appointment dynamics - using a predetermined time and place to set the expectation of play for positive effect
• Behavioral momentum - tendency of players to continue to do what they're been doing
• Blissful productivity - the phenomenon that playing the game in conjunction with hard work makes you happier than relaxing
• Bonuses - rewards for completions
• Cascading information theory - the concept that its easier for players to gain understanding of information if it is broken into smaller pieces that are provided when needed
• Challenges - (sometimes called quests) a journey of obstacles that players must overcome to be successful in the game
• Community collaboration - the viral rallying of a group of players to solve a common problem or obstacle
• Countdown dynamics - limiting time to accomplish certain tasks or challenges
• Epic meaning - a higher purpose that provides motivation for the player to continue
• Exploration - a dynamic that plays off players curiosity and desire to discover new things
• Free lunch dynamic - creating the perception of getting something for nothing
• Infinite game play - games that don't have an explicit end defined
• Levels - a method to measure progression in a game
• Loss aversion dynamic - the tendency of players to avoid scenarios that create some loss of status
• Lottery dynamic - a situation where the winner is determined by some chance driven method
• Ownership - creates connections, desire and loyalty
• Points - continuing numerical value to measure progress in a game
• Progression dynamic - a public measurement of progress through a set list of tasks
• Reward schedules - predefined delivery mechanism for rewards in a game
• Status - level, rank, accomplishment
• Urgent optimism - compelling desire of a player to tackle an obstacle quickly and with some reasonable expectation of success
• Virality - a method of spreading engagement and game play among a group

And then there are game techniques that support game mechanics, and can be applied to game projects. These techniques include:

• Activity streams (or tie in to existing enterprise social network activity stream)
• Advancing game levels that help keep players interested and challenged
• Avatars (a way to give individuals unique, recognizable profiles)
• Badges (or other ways to publicly reward behavior)
• Challenges or "quests"
• Embedded games (inside other enterprise processes)
• Gifting (some way for individuals to reward each other)
• Leaderboards / progress bar / visual indication of progress
• Real-time feedback
• Virtual currency

So that's your introduction to gamification. In the next post I'll show some specific examples of how companies are using the techniques to influence employees, customers and partners in positive ways.

Tags: gamification, experience, behavior, game mechanics, game theory

In part three of this series I'll focus on customer intelligence driven marketing and the proper use of data. In the "information economy," data is created at an unbelievable pace, but to make some reasonable business use of that data is challenging. The concept of being a data driven business isn't new, but  there are a lot of barriers that must be overcome, both technical and cultural. In other words businesses need to systematically move from "big data", which is just a large pile of useless "stuff", to "smart data", or data in the right business context, delivered to the right person at the time of need. 

Analytics and business intelligence are evolving from the days of historical reporting to a dynamic approach to providing real time usable insights. From a system standpoint, I've written about this idea before, moving to systems of decision. I won't go back through the 3 systems, transaction, decision and relationship again here, but you can refer to several other posts including this recent one on productivity.

The purpose of this series and this post is to talk about these systems of decision in the context of customer intelligence driven marketing and the data value chain. This application of data in the marketing context is a very important transition for marketing and requires a more coordinated and integrated approach both from the necessary technology and from the marketing employees themselves. Focusing on the data value chain it looks something like this:

Customer Data Value Chain:

• Collection - The collection and storage process isn't something new really although it must involve more data sources, many of which are unstructured and will require new ways of storing and processing. Traditional data like customer information, transactions, service issues, etc. are a part of the mix of course (which presupposes that the company has a basic CRM system in place). The newer sources of data, which can come from social media monitoring tools, customer communities or even smart sensor data (think smart electrical meters for example), can prove a rich source of additional customer insights when processed and mapped with the traditional data sources.
• Optimization - Once data is collected various types of analytic software can be used to make the data useful. The data is often integrated, processed and turned into various visualizations that could range from reports to dashboards. Optimized data is referenced to some business context that is the key to making the data into usable information.
• Trend - Once data is processed and visualized in some way it can be used to establish historical trends that can be useful across many marketing activities. Trend data is used to refine targeting of campaigns, find cross sell opportunities, support dynamic web content, define and refine loyalty programs and a variety of other functions.
• Predictive - Taking publically available social web data, which represents attitudes, opinions, needs, etc. of customers as well as transaction data and applying behavioral models can yield analysis that can with reasonable accuracy, predict customer and prospect behavior. There are a lot of uses of this model driven approach across marketing and sales. In the customer community context, for example, these behavioral models could be used to identify future influencers or find influencers that were starting to cool off on your brand. In sales the same techniques could predict buying signals to optimize sales efforts.
• Decisions - The top of the chain is providing data in the correct business context and in real time to the right employee or group of employees to support effective business decisions. This move from backward facing historical data to forward facing real time decision support is the building block of the data driven enterprise. The systems of decision integrate with systems of relationship to help identify and bring together the optimized set of employees or other constituents in the business context of the issue, decision, problem, etc. to facilitate fast, efficient real time business issue resolution, strategy optimization and more accurate, iterative actions.

Just one additional thought about this data value chain, it does not and can not, in any way, risk customer / prospect privacy. This point is critical and a privacy breech is one of the fastest ways to tarnish a brand. The social data collected and analyzed must all be from public sources and any confidential customer data around transactions and other activities with the company must be protected. I hope this is just me being over careful with all the discussions and focus online over privacy, but I guess you never know.

Tags: marketing, data, big data, smart data, customer, CRM, SCRM, socbiz, sales, real time, context, business, decisions, transactions

In part two of this series I'll focus on the comprehensive marketing technology solution and then in part 3 we'll look at customer intelligence driven marketing, the customer data value chain and the technology that underpins that approach. One of the biggest issues facing marketers today is the overwhelming influx of technology into the marketing process. The tools are powerful and necessary but too often disconnected and their use isn't necessarily tied to an overall marketing strategy and plan. There are a lot of point solutions that have a very narrow focus and do an excellent job at one or two functions, but they exist in a silo. Integrating those silos to get to a broader solution approach can be quite challenging.

The cloud plays heavily in these new marketing applications of course, and while it's making it easier to try different apps and find the best, it also has created some of the problem. The ease of self provisioning, which is positive in many ways, has also created a situation in some companies where unapproved and unsupported tools are finding their way into use "under the radar" of both IT and marketing leadership. The BYOD movement can also be BYOA (bring your own app), with employees solving problems the best way they can when the tools they are given fall short.

So what are the marketing functions that are being impacted by technology? We've had CRM solutions and marketing automation solutions for quite a while now, but those packages don't provide the best solution to all of the different functions that have fallen to marketing and don't deal with the need to meet customer expectations in a dynamic online environment. The following chart shows the marketing functions and ties them to technology that can help facilitate the process. I've also included a few example vendors, but caution you that this list is not comprehensive and that there are many more very credible solutions available, I just didn't have room/time to try and list them all:

As you can see I've listed 12 key functions including collaboration, for marketing and tied those to the respective application types. What's not mentioned though, is also very important. Integration across the different functions and apps is very critical and must be a part of the overall solution. Device agnostic mobile access is also necessary to support today's workforce and from the other end, to support how customers want to interact with you.

Underlying all this marketing technology and the need for a very tech savvy marketing organization is the idea that tech decisions and perhaps control of the marketing tech budget is moving away from IT (or maybe has already moved away). The most effective approach in most companies would be for  IT and marketing to build a close partnership to drive the marketing strategy and it's technology needs, but it's complicated. Is that actually happening though? I'm not so sure, but there does seem to be some shift in many companies around which organization controls the technology decisions and budget. I won't spend more time on it in this post, but it is a related issue. I hope to have some new data to use to drill into this issue in the near future, so look for a post on the subject.

As a marketing organization if you had all of the functions and tools laid out above would you have a comprehensive marketing suite? Well, if they were integrated and not silo'ed you'd be pretty close, but there are some other considerations. The one function that is completely overlooked in the above function list and is still in most companies not considered a part of the marketing functions, is customer service. From a customer experience perspective I'd argue (and have here) that customer service is an important part of a comprehensive marketing strategy. Word of mouth marketing is very powerful and with the amplification created by the social can be a powerful force, both positively and negatively for your brand.

Anyway, look for part 3 shortly, where I'll look at customer intelligence driven marketing strategy and the customer data value chain.

Tags: marketing, socbiz, customer, CX, strategy, technology, CRM, SCRM, service, applications, solutions

Marketing, more than most business functions, has seen a great deal of disruption and change over the past several years, fueled by the Internet, the social web, social media and social networks. The dramatic change in customer / prospect expectations as well as the changing nature of influence are putting a lot of pressure on CMO's to find new and different approaches. The shift online and to an always connected mobile reality has spread like wildfire and while opening up a lot of new and potentially more effective marketing tactics these tactics are often enabled through new technology that require new skills and expertise. Over the next few posts I'll take a look at marketing technologies and how they are impacting the marketing organization today.

The first generation of the Internet was what I call the static web. Companies built web sites, people visited those sites for information about the company / brand / products. The company controlled the message. When the web moved forward it next became a vehicle for online transactions. While this was more interactive, it still allowed, for the most part at least, the brand to control the message. I suppose the subtle change was the addition of customer rating systems that provided some insight to product performance on the eCommerce web site, like Amazon. Of course now we know that some (maybe many) of the online review systems can be gamed by the brand through special offers and incentives.

When the web moved on to social interactions, brands started losing control of the message. As the social web grew, social media disrupted traditional media and provided alternate sources of product and service information that were more independent and balanced (not in all cases of course, there is still sponsored content, but that sponsorship is somewhat more transparent). Social networks also offered alternate sources of brand / product information and became "the" trusted source of that information for many. These new information sources coupled with dramatically changing expectations created by the consumerization of IT phenomenon and the free flow of information created what some have called the social customer. Whatever you call it, people's behaviors have changed, and those changes are proving even more challenging for marketers.

With the changes in customer expectations and in the available technology, how effective are traditional channels and methods of marketing...or in other words are the new digital methods replacements for more traditional marketing methods, or necessary additions to comprehensive marketing strategies? Unfortunately I think there's little that can be abandoned and much that must be added to effectively execute a modern marketing strategy. When we talk about what I suppose is often referred to as "digital" marketing, there is much to sort out. 

The prevailing trend is to talk about customer experience (CX) and the need to build a comprehensive strategy around CX. At a high level that's not incorrect, but unfortunately as they say, "the devil's in the details". Customer experience is the company strategy that drives functions across the company, but it's not specifically a marketing strategy. The marketing strategy supports the broader company strategy of course, but its focus is a comprehensive approach to all the functions that must be driven from the marketing organization. Much of the marketing strategy today is tied in some way to specific technologies that act as the facilitator of the tactics that execute against the strategy. More than ever marketing and technology are intertwined and with that technology we move closer to "customer intelligence driven marketing".

Many of the CMOs and marketing executives I talk with are struggling with the changes in marketing strategy and that underlying technology. On one hand with the broader availability of applications in a SaaS or cloud model, it's easier for marketing to get access to all sorts of technology. The cloud model also opens up a new level of flexibility for marketing that means they can experiment with new technologies much easier to find the best fit. The problem though, is that many of these self provisioned apps are point solutions that solve a single marketing problem and are not integrated into an overall marketing solution. Customer intelligence driven marketing is based on data and to get a complete picture of the customer and be able to leverage the approach effectively, you cannot create data silos. Integration then, is critical.

You might be thinking as you read this, that I'm leaving IT out of this technology discussion completely. That's not entirely the case but there are some extenuating circumstances that seem to exist in many companies. The role of IT and the CIO, in some (maybe many) companies has shifted since the IT boom days of the late 1990's. It seems that in many organizations the CIOs were moved under the CFO and their function moved more toward governance, compliance and cost control and away from innovation and strategy. That's not universally true of course, there are plenty of CIOs that are helping drive technology innovation in their companies, and if you're in one of those organizations, solving the marketing solution problem should be much easier. If you're not though, your problems may seem a bit overwhelming. In many of these organizations budget has crept over to the CMO and the marketing organization is driving the technology discussions, something that may or may not be a core competency.

So that's the problem, but what's the solution? In the next post I'll dig deeper into what it takes to build a customer intelligence driven marketing solution and what the top marketing organizations are working on today.

Tags: marketing, social, socbiz, data, intelligence, customer, CX, experience, strategy, CMO, CIO, technology

There continues to be a lot of discussion of the trend that's sometimes called consumerization of IT. I wrote about it here, and to summarize that post, I think the trend is really about two things, changing expectations and the source of tech innovation. That's may be an oversimplification, but I think it at least captures the root of the trend that has led to things like BYOD, which is an acknowledgement by companies that are using it as a policy that employees feel very empowered to use devices that are of their choosing and support themselves; or that employees will work around IT if an IT provided solution to a problem doesn't meet their expectations or doesn't exist by self-provisioning a consumer cloud-based solution that does solve the immediate business need. Consumerization is having a big impact on tech vendors as well as IT as they scramble to provide user experience (UX) that match the expectations created by consumer cloud-based solutions, to support multiple mobile device OS's and form factors and to meet both the consumer expectations and the enterprise business requirements around security, compliance, governance, etc.

This year during our preparations for our annual predictions briefing we started to discuss the other half of this trend, the ITization of consumers. Now we didn't coin the phrase, I did a quick Google search and found that several bloggers and analysts have used the term, although there doesn't seem to be a uniform definition of it. What we're really taking about is the natural inclination of trends to move to an extreme and due to the friction cause a counter-balancing trend to move both sides back toward the middle. We're also talking about the source of the major tech forces that are a part of the shift to the 3rd technology platform and how their interrelated nature helps move both enterprise and consumer back to an acceptable middle ground. That looks something like this:

Anyway, where this leads is to a new balanced or blended approach to enterprise IT, that takes the best of both worlds. We're already seeing this in some leading apps like Box that originated with consumers but now has added the requisite level of security, integration capabilities, platform capabilities, etc. that make it a "enterprise" while keeping it's consumer influenced UX including the ability to self-provision and so easy to use that employees support themselves. From an enterprise app perspective it won't happen over night of course. There is a period of transition, maybe a long period actually. Changing the UX of traditional enterprise apps is not an easy proposition and for many companies core apps won't be replaced for a long time, so for the transition period there will need to be some workaround. As I've said many times before, that workaround for many businesses will be the ESN, which forms a new UX for aging apps, at least for a large portion of the enterprise.

From a consumer app standpoint there are a number of things that are required to ITize the apps and make them enterprise ready. Generally I doubt that scalability is an issue for consumer cloud apps, as they already support large numbers of geographically diverse users. What is necessary though, is to meet enterprise security requirements, to accommodate enterprise governance and compliance needs and to provide higher levels of IP protection. That's not to say that all consumer apps can't meet this, it's just that the apps "must" meet these requirements to be acceptable enterprise solutions over the long term.

Tags: consumerization, IT, ITization, social, socbiz, mobile, big data, cloud, UX