So, this year, consider creating a customer advisory board charged with helping your large or middle market company accelerate growth.

Tapping the brainpower and goodwill of your best customers provides a competitive edge. An engaged and energetic advisory board becomes a corps of goodwill ambassadors who provide you and your management team with candid and cost-effective advice.

Plus, who knows your products or services better than your best and most loyal customers? Based on research for my books and articles, I’ve learned that most successful companies have a customer advisory board.

For example, a few years ago, members of Swissotel’s board suggested the hotel provide better tables in the hotel dining room for single travelers. Businesswomen serving on AvisBudget’s advisory board, encouraged the car rental company to reduce the height of check-in counters to accommodate shorter customers.

Establishing a successful customer advisory board requires some planning and investment, but it can pay off based on my research and interviews with hundreds of big and small company executives over the past 25 years.

Your challenge is to simplify the advisory process and provide members with incentives to participate, both financial and personal.

Recruiting members is not difficult. First, review your contact data base. Consider deploying desktop mapping software to identify your best customers, rank potential prospects and better understand the markets you serve. A high-level software program, such as Pitney Bowes’ TargetPro, delivers advanced customer profiling and powerful geo-demographic analysis capabilities. It also features an easy-to-use mapping interface. (For more information visit: http://www.pb.com/software/Location-Intelligence-App/Predictive-Analytics/TargetPro-v47.shtml). The software can also help you define customer behavior, which is something to discuss when your board meets.

Here’s my step-by-step guide to setting up a successful customer advisory board:

1. Focus on recruiting the best possible candidates. Make a list of customers or clients who may have already contacted you with suggestions about how to improve your products or services. Seek out three to five high-profile customers who are respected by their peers and industry leaders. Ask members of your team or outside consultants to recommend potential advisory board members.
2. Draft an overview of issues and concerns you would like the board to discuss. Ask your managers or employees for suggestions.
3. Send personal letters, not email, inviting people to serve on the board. Point out that although you are paying a stipend (usually $2,500 to $5,000 per meeting), this is an informal advisory board with no fiduciary responsibilities.
4. Be prepared to pay members an honorarium, plus travel expenses, to attend at least one meeting a year. After meeting in person annually, try to schedule quarterly meetings via teleconference or on a virtual meeting platform such as LiveMeeting or GoToMeeting.com.
5. Schedule the meetings far enough in advance to encourage attendance. Booking the members’ airline tickets and hotel rooms makes it harder for them to miss a meeting. On the morning of the meeting, invite them to tour your office and meet employees. Host the meeting offsite, at a local hotel or in a private room in a restaurant. Provide breakfast, lunch and healthy snacks and beverages. If possible, end the day with a casual dinner. Conduct a short debrief and tell members what issues you would like them to think about in coming weeks.
6. About three weeks prior to the meeting, send members an agenda with a non-disclosure agreement attached. Once the document is signed and returned, you’ll feel better about sharing confidential company information.
7. Consider hiring a professional facilitator to chair the meeting so you can participate. It is worth the added expense of about $750 to $1,500 for the day.
8. Begin by presenting a brief, but detailed overview of your current challenges and concerns. Be specific about what exactly you hope to resolve by the end of the day. Take notes or ask permission to videotape or record the meeting.

Final note: don’t invest time and money in creating an advisory board unless you are willing to listen to the board’s advice and take their counsel to heart.

Through the years, I’ve avoided some very serious missteps by listening to my advisors. Although I don’t have a customer advisory board since my customers are all corporate executives, I have an informal board comprised of the smartest people I know.

One advisor is a retired partner in a stock brokerage. Another member owns a prosperous food processing company. The third is a consultant specializing in change management. My company, The Applegate Group, produces original print, web and video content for blue chip companies selling quality products and services to small business owners.

While it’s sometimes painful to listen to my advisors’ constructive criticism and feedback, I value the time these busy, successful people are willing to invest in my success.

Jane Applegate is the author of four books on small business management, including 201 Great Ideas for Your Small Business, published in print and digital formats by Bloomberg Press/John Wiley. The Applegate Group Inc. produces multimedia content and special events for clients including Pitney Bowes, American Express and Cox Business. Applegate also produces and hosts Tech Essentials, a new, online talk show sponsored by Microsoft. For more information visit: www.theapplegategroup.com.

The international online population is surging and the growth rates of e-commerce in many countries have outpaced that of U.S. Many early adopters of ecommerce in the U.S. have already added 25 percent to 50 percent of incremental revenue by selling internationally.

But there are substantial challenges to going global. Retailers have to sort through complexities involving product preferences, regulations, customs duties and taxes to serve their overseas customers. Understandably, many American retailers have seen international e-commerce as something that would be nice to have, though not essential.

But a number of factors that make this an opportune time for U.S. online retailers to overlook the obstacles and turn their attention to international markets: soft demand at home, the depreciation of dollar, the high adoption rate of broadband in overseas markets, and the general allure of American brands.

Extending your digital reach may provide a catalyst for growth. The question is, how do you make most of the move into international ecommerce?

Understand the challenges and barriers

From an access perspective, the e-commerce world is borderless. Any online store can reach anybody with Internet access anywhere around the world. But the minute you start the odyssey of getting products delivered to your customers, that border reappears.

International ecommerce is complicated. These common barriers tend to reduce your shopping cart conversion with international shoppers:

• High shipping charges.
• Too many hidden or additional charges, especially related to duty and taxes, or custom brokerage fees.
• Compromised customer experience.
• Language, culture and payment issues.

The good news is that international e-commerce technology has evolved significantly and retailers now have more options available to overcome these problems. You’ll find a variety of choices, depending on your resources for integration, product category and risk preferences.

Your International Expansion

Here a few areas to consider when crafting your international expansion plan:

1. Taking a country-by-country approach
   Find out how much traffic comes from international visitors. (A useful tool is www.alexa.com, a leading provider of free, global Web metrics.) Listen to the voices from your social media outposts, customer service team or any other customer touch points. If there is a large market for your products in specific countries, and if it aligns with your strategic roadmap, prioritize your resources to focus on them. In most cases, start with an English-speaking country like Canada, the United Kingdom or Australia. It represents the lowest risk and demands the fewest resources.
2. Provide reasonable shipping rates and multiple shipping options
   Shipping rates are consistently cited as the top factor affecting sales, both domestic and international. In many cases, though, international buyers are willing to trade faster transit time for cheaper rates. Free shipping, a common marketing tactic for domestic e-commerce, is too expensive to be offered to international shoppers. But if you can find a provider with lower international shipping rates, you’ll have more room to pass the savings on to the shoppers. If you can, provide multiple shipping options, from standard to Express or Priority, to cater to different customer needs.
3. Minimize the uncertainty with the transactions
   Provide transparency for the total costs associated with the transactions. For international customers, the biggest uncertainties are the duty and taxes and customs-related charges. Including guaranteed total landed costs to ensure an accurate quote is a critical to a positive customer experience. Duty and taxes can vary widely for different countries and different commodities. A good solution can translate the comprehensive duty and taxes information into the rate quote during your checkout process.
4. Improve customer experience
   U.S. retailers have invested considerable resources to optimize the buying experience for their domestic customers. The same principles should be applied to the international online shopping experience. A positive customer experience can set you apart from the competition and help build a sustainable international business.

   Analyze the process of your international orders and listen to your customer feedback to gain insight from the buyer’s perspective.

   In addition to including the guaranteed total landed costs in the checkout, a streamlined return process, international address verification and insurance should all be part of the standard features offered to international customers.

5. Transact in familiar currencies and payment methods
   While PayPal is viable solution as an international payment platform, explore other payments methods that are familiar to the local markets as well. Credit cards are popular in Spain. But in the Netherlands, online shoppers want to pay via iDEAL — direct online transfers from their bank accounts. In France, meanwhile, payment by check is still popular. These are just a few examples of nuances that need to be considered.

In the end, the formula for building a successful international e-commerce business isn’t that different from one country to another: a wide selection of products, competitive prices, friendly shipping rates and return policies, and most important, a pleasant buying experience. Take away the unknown, and introduce the familiar.

Sherry Shi is a marketing executive in the Global Ecommerce space. She is in charge of Marketing for Pitney Bowes Ecommerce Solutions (www.pb.com). Follow the latest trends in global ecommerce by visiting our Resource Center and blog.

Finally, a sign that businesses are starting to get it: Customers are increasingly frustrated by what happens when they call customer service. But something else is going on here, too. Businesses are recognizing that call center representatives can do more than field complaints and conduct transactions. Properly trained and equipped with the right information, they are also in a great position to generate revenue.

Organizations are realizing that traditional, outbound marketing, particularly via the telephone, offers diminishing returns for the business. That means the future of the customer relationship lies in sustained, informed and tailored customer service. And the call center is a critical factor in this process. In other words, when a customer calls you, you need to take advantage of the opportunity.

Loudhouse Research surveyed decision-makers of large B2B companies in the U.S. and U.K. with in-house call-center operations. They found that 69 percent of respondents viewed their call centers as business-critical revenue generators.

A further 85 percent of respondents saw their call center staff as important brand ambassadors, making their role even more central in developing profitable relationships with customers.

It’s clear that companies understand the potential of call centers to generate revenue. But not everyone has managed to transform them into those profit-reaping departments yet. Indeed, 86 percent of respondents said their call center staff needed a broader range of skills to deliver these revenues and pursue new real-time cross sell and up sell opportunities.

Sixty percent of respondents also cited the need for better integration of inter-departmental customer data so that call center reps have access to the information they need to make relevant offers when a customer calls. In particular, the need to integrate call center data with online customer service was seen as a primary focus for the next 12 months, with 54 percent of decision-makers citing this as a key challenge for the year ahead.

While customers may not expect to be sold to, they do expect their needs to be met at all times. For progressive organizations this represents a chance to build loyalty and revenues at all levels of customer engagement.

Looking ahead, as markets continue to become more competitive, it will be those organizations that use intelligent, company-wide data to fully understand the needs of their customers and to make relevant offers that will ultimately succeed.

The key message I heard time and time again was how important targeted messaging and personalization are to any service provider, including printers. I totally agree – personal connections are everything and play a critical role in winning new customers. Here are some other Graph Expo takeaways as they relate to Marketers and Printer Service Providers:

Marketers:

1. Know your audience. By understanding how your customers and potential customers like to communicate, your marketing strategies will make a stronger impact.
2. Marketers are moving from mass advertising to more targeted and more local advertising, and direct mail fits into this effort.
3. It’s important to target your messaging and make it as personal as possible. Quick Response (QR) codes, pURLS, and augmented reality, when used effectively, can capture interest and provide for an interactive and personal experience.
4. If you’re using QR codes, it’s important you provide a unique experience.
5. Expand beyond marketing into customer education by leveraging transactional documents (like monthly statements) to provide your customers with relevant information.

Print Service Providers:

1. Redesigned workflows, serving customers better, and diversification are among the keys to success for today’s printers.
2. Mobile, along with programming, data/content, analytics, and sourcing are the big growth areas for printers.
3. Print should be integrated with mobile because it makes print interactive. Print is an important driver to get people to opt in.
4. To go beyond commodity printing, Print Service Providers need to consider making the transition to a higher value Marketing Service Provider role. This requires looking forward to the future and anticipating changes in technology, services, and needs.
5. Offering transactional printing along with your core services can potentially help make you more of a one-stop shop for your customers, while keeping utilization rates high on assets and minimizing overcapacity.

For those who attended the conference please share anything I might have missed.

Regardless of country, many nations are facing unprecedented levels of debt, creativity and innovation need to be utilized to reduce public spending and achieve enormous levels of efficiency but we need to do this quickly and effectively. There is a strong connection between technology and the provision of location-aware online services. Location-aware is simply the “what” being integrated with the “where.” For example, supplying the public with information about what local facilities are available and where they’re located. With websites now a primary channel of communication with the public, as well as being a cost-effective means of communication, it has become a lot easier to tie these two elements together using interactive mapping technology.

Using mapping technology as a portal or shop window to other information is becoming increasingly popular on council sites. It clearly makes sense to help people help themselves by supplying this information visually in a self-service online mapping format. But, of course, that’s not all that interactive mapping can do. Some UK local authorities have pushed this concept further by enabling self reporting of problems within the municipal environment. Rather than having to identify and speak to the department that deals with vandalism, abandoned vehicles, potholes in the road, dangerous paving slabs etc, citizens can create a place marker on an interactive map that shows the exact location of the problem and generates an inspection request. Some councils are even starting to make this functionality available via mobile phones or smart devices, so that citizens can take a picture of the problem and send it to the relevant department with the GPS co-ordinates automatically attached. All of this is enabled by technology.

Empowering the public to initiate remedial actions in their neighborhood frees up frontline council staff from having to field so many of these enquiries and reduces avoidable contact and unnecessary paperwork. The time recouped clearly translates as a cost and efficiency saving, with staff able to better concentrate on core activities – doing more with less, and helping to meet the 25% spending cuts that the UK public sector is faced with over the next few years.

Are you using mapping technology to help your customers?  If so, please share how it’s helped your organization.

Harry Kline expects that in 2011 the Age of the Customer will continue to gain momentum, whilst the financial impact of poor service is driving voice of the customer programs and better customer experience can be worth millions in annual revenue, according to Forrester. The ‘Business Impact of Customer experience, 2010’ report, published November 2010, shows that a better customer experience drives improvement for three types of customer loyalty: willingness to consider another purchase, likelihood to switch business to a competitor, and likelihood to recommend to a friend or colleague.

What role does trust play?

Customer centricity describes an organization orientating itself to focus on the needs and wants of the customer. Organizations try, but it’s difficult.

“In the 1960s, if you introduced a new product to America, 90% of the people who viewed it for the first time believed in the corporate promise. Then 40 years later if you performed the same exercise less than 10% of the public believed it was true. The fracturing of trust is based on the fact that the consumer has been let down”.
Howard Schultz – Lies – Truth – Trust – Customers – Companies – Products – America

In today’s fast moving world of opt-in and opt-out, comparison web sites, instant, viral customer testimonial or bad publicity, companies can struggle to develop lifetime customer relationships – what role does trust play?

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers are recently quoted as saying “We believe customer trust is probably the ‘next big thing’ in business competition.”

What do you think?

We believe trust and marketing basics are vital to every marketing strategy whether traditionally focussed or cutting edge digital. As a way to encourage discussion and debate about trust in marketing, marketing theories and the business of marketing we’ve funded an independent initiative – ‘The Growing Trust Initiative’ – where interactions are led by marketing considerations not technological ones.

With digital channels commonplace, data streams growing rapidly and customer expectations of relevant and respectful interactions, technology is often the only way for a marketer to manage interactions, understand customers and execute campaigns. But sometimes the technology can overshadow the crux of marketing – the connection for a period of time between a buyer and a seller that involves an exchange of some kind.

Central to the Growing Trust Initiative is a series of Discussion Papers designed to initiate the dialogue. The first Discussion Paper, ‘In the Shade of the Trust Arbor: Nurturing Better Business’ is now published (link to hosting site) and freely available (quite timely really when in the UK two major banks have been fined over 4 million dollars for failing to deal properly with customer complaints and another focuses its marketing strategy on forging consumer trust).

We look forward to hearing your views.

- Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point)

About 10 years ago, Malcolm Gladwell published his thesis that ideas “spread just like viruses do.” The Tipping Point is predicated on people, content (the idea), and context (situational environment). Last week, Pat McGrew tweeted that 300K Finnish Itella NetPosti users can now use their iPhone, iPad & Android to get access to invoices, payslips, and letters.  On Friday, Norway Post announced that Norway Post is to launch a digital mail system, allowing customers to choose to receive mail in a digital mailbox as well as physically — with that digital mailbox based on a person’s street address and national ID number.

Moreover, we know that more than half of the population of Denmark is using their consumer consolidation service which Pitney Bowes helped develop.  And most recently, Siemens Mobility and Swiss Post have agreed to pursue a joint marketing strategy of an automation offering for post and postal service providers that converts physical mail into electronic mail accessible from consumers mobile devices.

The context is clear: ubiquitous broadband (wired and 3G/4G), WiFi, and an explosion of smartphones and tablet computers.

The content is clear: secure access to my mail when, where, and how I want.

This idea – a fire lit in the Nordics some 10 years ago is now spreading like wildfire – and it looks like it is ready to reach American shores.

Is America at that tipping point?  We think so.  But viewed from our shores, the idea goes well beyond mail delivery. Our consumer research shows that how we as individuals organize, manage, retrieve, and interact with the critical electronic content in the home is just as important as the convenience of how we receive it.  And that research strongly influenced the design of the Volly digital delivery service.

Context: Check.  Content: Check.  In a few months it will be up to people – the Volly service users – to determine if we are headed for that tipping point.

-Bernie

For the past 18 months, I have been immersed in a project to help Pitney Bowes create something completely digital, and completely new. Today, I experienced real joy as we announced this new service to the world. It’s called Volly™, and it promises to bring the real advantages of digital delivery and interaction to the medium of physical mail.

You can read all about it in the press release that I have pasted below. If you’re a mailer, prepare yourself for a future in which you can have richer and more robust interactions with your customers, and at a much lower cost. If you’re a consumer, hang in there for a few more months. We’re putting the finishing touches on a service that will help you save time, save money, and put you in complete control of who markets to you.

Welcome to the future of customer communications. It’s called Volly.

Pitney Bowes to Launch Volly™: Secure Digital Delivery Service that Connects Mailers and Consumers

• 84% of consumers receive paper statements
• 367 billion coupons were physically printed
• 13 billion catalogs were distributed

In total, this added up to over 170 billion pieces of physical mail last year. So, are your customers simply in love with paper? Not exactly.

It’s true that some simply prefer things the way they are and don’t want to change. However, most consumers could be convinced to give up paper statements IF it were easy to manage their documents—and IF they could receive digital mail more conveniently.

So far, they have not been convinced. Instead, they tolerate the status quo. Every household comes up with distinct ways to manage these communications. Ways that reflect specific attitudes, behaviors and differences involving how consumers pick up, sort and prioritize mail; what they choose to keep and file; who pays bills and how these bills are paid; and the disposition of mail once reviewed.

What would it take to convince consumers to adopt digital?

For starters, people don’t want to visit a different Web site with unique logins for every company with which they do business. What they want is a single platform that consolidates and simplifies bills, statements, payments, coupons, catalogs, and even scanned copies of important household documents—where mail is delivered in a way that matches their individual preferences.

Our research shows that consumers are willing to change if they can receive communications in a meaningful, rich manner… with the tools and functionality that help save them time and effort… in ways that simplify the day-to-day task of running a household.

Why have consumers responded so well to the Volly™ concept?

In the past, organizations have tried to encourage and entice consumers to “switch” from paper to Web portals or company emails. The Volly™ secure digital mail delivery service is unique in that it provides the customized, multi-channel experience that consumers have long desired. Secure, spam-free and available at no cost to consumers, the Volly service offers:

• Mail consolidation, including bills, statements, payments, catalogs, coupons and promotional offers;
• Channel choice, including physical delivery, Web portal, smart phone, iPad and new apps still to come;
• A true, mutually managed experience, which allows consumers to interact with their mail when they want, where they want, and how they want.

Consumers can interact with the Volly service based on their individual needs—and change preferences whenever they like. Every day, consumers will discover new ways to engage the rich features and functionality, such as bill pay, shopping and saving tools; tools to organize, store and archive; and ways to digitally “shred” documents that are no longer needed. Some consumers I’ve spoken to have talked about the Volly service as “an assistant” that could help them manage their lives… and that’s pretty cool.

In practical terms, the Volly secure digital delivery service replicates the role mail plays in a consumer’s life in today’s multi-channel environment.

We know that Smartphone use is on the rise and with it comes more people reading emails on their mobile.  Market research firm Nielsen condensed all time spent on the mobile internet into one hour and found nearly half of it was spent on email.  This is a very telling statistic because it goes beyond corporate, Blackberry-centric, email use to include consumers accessing Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail via their devices.

That’s important as Blackberries, despite their generally justified status as a workplace productivity hero, are hopeless at handling the sort of HTML emails that marketers deploy.  Images are off, links are exposed and the whole point of creating email eye-candy is defeated.  I’m confident this will be sorted out shortly but it’s the current reality.  And it’s one that has driven the existing mobile email paradigm.

The Current State of Mobile E-mail

Marketers that do created ‘mobile friendly’ versions of their emails (and, if we’re being candid, most still don’t) typically take the following approach:  In the pre-header of the email there’s a link saying something like ‘On a mobile device?  Click here’.  Clicking on that link will do one of two things – take the recipient to a text only version or take them to a mobile web page recreating the richer HTML experience. The latter is clearly more favourable from a branding + presentation POV.

iPhones and Android devices do a much better job handling HTML emails.  Images are displayed, for starters. But email design is web-centric.  Multi-column emails are common and with mobile’s smaller screen sizes lead to tiresome side to side scrolling.  It’s a cumbersome reading experience.

According to the PEW Internet & American Life Project, 34% of all cell phone owners have sent or received an email on their device.  This number is slightly higher than the percentage of cell phone owners that have Smartphones but is conclusive enough to confidently say, at a minimum, “Smartphone users = mobile email user.”

With Smartphone penetration set to overtake feature phones in the next year or two and only continue upward, the implication should be clear:  The approach to email marketing needs to evolve to account for changing consumer consumption patterns and expectations.

Your emails are being viewed on devices you haven’t designed and tested for and in contexts than a web-centric email approach simply doesn’t account for leading to lost opportunities to capture interest.

Making Email Work for the Mobile Consumer

To make your email marketing programs work harder and extract more value out of each interaction with a mobile consumer, there are three dimensions to address:  Design, Content, and Destinations.

1.    Design
Consider a design template that’s if not mobile-first, than at least mobile-sensitive.  Employ a single column layout consistent with mobile screen dimensions to remove unnecessary pinching, zooming and scrolling and to focus reader attention.  A vertical scroll motion allows for a more natural email reading experience, especially on a mobile device.

Think about larger fonts, bigger call to action button, and more minimalist colour palettes with high contrast between design elements.  Your design should make it extremely easy for recipients to differentiate content elements and provide intuitive, obvious action elements that account for a user who will be grazing information rather than reading deeply.

I’d also recommend keeping a text only or mobile web optimized version linked from the pre-header. Many Blackberry users will still need this and it’s good practice to be inclusive of all customers in your design (that’s why you’re looking at a mobile-centric design in the first place, after all).

2.    Content
Mobile email readers will be looking for focussed, attention grabbing content.  Consumption will most likely happen during brief moments of downtime.

Combine on-the-go relevance with actionable information with a very sharp editing pencil.  Clear but attention grabbing calls to action are at an even greater premium in a mobile context.  This may involve rethinking your content organization as the mobile consumer is best served by information that satisfies moments of inspiration or need vs. contemplation.  The best advice is “don’t overdo it”. Information overload will lead to session abandonment as quickly as a poorly designed email.  Brevity and clarity will show you’re sensitive to demands on a recipient’s time and attention.

There’s a lot to be gained from allowing recipients to specify ‘web’ or ‘mobile’ versions as well. Knowledge of how they’ll be viewing your emails can give you a glimpse into how content should be prioritized.

3.    Destinations
This is the most important piece. There is no point optimizing design and content for mobile consumption if someone clicks on a link (that’s what you likely want them to do, right?) only to end up on a desktop web experience.  All your hard work will be lost.

Building your mobile web destination involves the same content and design sensibilities you’ve applied to your emails.  Once you’ve locked down a mobile friendly design, content and destination approach, there are a couple other considerations that can impact your open and engagement rates:

• Send times:  Mobile email consumption is more likely going to be in snatched moments of downtime or media multi-tasking.  Consider when those are going to be for your customer. Better yet, allow customers to state when they would like to receive your emails.
• Cross-channel opt-ins:  Mobile email can be a great way to nurture customers into mobile CRM extensions.  Provide mechanisms for users to opt-in to SMS programming.  Enable coupon redemption by having device ‘show and save’ or ‘show and scan’ capabilities.  Push customers to your mobile apps or other content downloads such as videos or wallpapers.

Not all marketers need a mobile friendly email program.  You may be able to survive without it depending on your audience demographics.  Teen and Older demographics are probably not a mobile email/Smartphone sweet spot.  But if your customer base includes urban consumers, 18-45, there’s a good chance you have a growing segment that will expect a tailored, even optimized, experience no matter when or how they happen to view your emails.