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On the Road to Key Account Management, Customer Journey Maps Pave the Path

Prior to the introduction of social media and smartphones, the customer journey was typically linear. Consumers often traveled from the top of funnel to the point of sale with nary a detour. But, now that there are numerous inlets for onboarding, leaders must ensure that each available touchpoint offers customers a coherent brand experience at every stage of the average lifecycle. That’s where customer journey mapping comes into play.

Originally, companies used customer journey maps as an opportunity to nail down any customer experience issues that might arise. However, customer journey maps have become an integral part of the customer experience development process, as these tools offer leaders insight into how consumers might perceive and interact with the brand at all points of entry. Analyzing the customer journey from the initial point of contact to the inevitable point of sale can help leaders determine the best way to nurture such accounts along their path to purchase.

While discovering customer pain points will always prove useful, the fruits of these labors can’t be reaped if leaders don’t have the appropriate guidelines in place to rectify issues and alleviate strain. Thus, customer journey maps provide each member of an organization—from the C-suite to the frontline—with insight into how to manage every single account at the most basic level. Customers now expect instant results, after all, so companies must be prepared to serve every need in real time at any point along the customer journey.
To ensure that customers don’t encounter any obstacles on their path to purchase, companies need to hone their key account management strategies. Because customers and clients can now enter the funnel at multiple touchpoints simultaneously, leaders must integrate methods that’ll guarantee consistency and relevancy in an environment where disparate channels can limit the brand’s ability to satisfy the customer’s wants and needs from the moment of first contact.
Before companies can achieve effective key account management, leaders must first recognize that it’s difficult to treat all customers and clients equally. While everyone deserves top-notch customer service, leaders must segment their client base in order to determine which accounts are the most crucial for their brand’s continued success. Segmentation, as it stands, empowers leaders to assess and categorize customer relationships in an effort to deliver appropriate levels of service at critical moments throughout the customer journey.

Typically, basic account segmentation falls into one of three categories:

Tier I: Significant annual revenue and/or strategic value
Tier II: Potential significant annual growth and/or customer lifetime value
Tier III: All remaining customer accounts

Ultimately, resources can become strained if employees are forced to devote equal amounts of time to clients that don’t ultimately yield the same level of profit. Thus, forming more targeted customer relationships affords companies the opportunity to boost loyalty, sales, and profits. Of course, while exceptional service must be the standard for every client, companies must use this baseline to take relationships with key accounts to the next level.

Segmentation certainly isn’t an exact science, but this process enables organizations to break customers into manageable groups as leaders work to make sense of an increasingly saturated market. Despite the allure, leaders must not become distracted by those accounts that promise the greatest revenue gains, as relationship value must also be derived from the client’s potential for strategic partnerships over time. It’s easy for brands to become preoccupied with the “shiny” prospects that pose the highest potential for profitability. However, it’s important to start small and proceed with caution so as not to strain your resources—or your client’s resources—as you work to establish a synergy that empowers both companies to succeed.

To guarantee that both new and existing customer relationships flourish, leaders will want to train key account managers, as they will become the client’s first point of contact for any service needs they might have throughout their lifecycle. Because they’re responsible for nurturing said strategic, long-term relationships, they must be well equipped with an intimate knowledge of the client and their personal goals, as collaboration remains the cornerstone of any effective, proactive partnership.

But, with the help of customer journey mapping, companies have the capacity to understand clients in new ways as they work to hone their key account management strategies. With critical information in hand, companies have the tools they need to acquaint themselves with prospects right from the start and use data from these early interactions to tailor engagements to meet prospects’ needs in an effort to convert and retain clients. Every interaction matters, especially in a market with ample competitors. By knowing precisely what the client hopes to accomplish, key account managers can provide personalized service that ultimately benefits both parties every step of the way, thereby carving a path that leads to profitability for all involved.

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It’s Not as Easy to Do Business With You as You’d Like to Think It Is

Your executive team is committed to customer experience (CX) success. On paper, your customer journey map looks strong. But that doesn’t mean your organization is easy to do business with.

The proliferation of new channels and touchpoints brings ever greater complexity to customer interactions—yours included. Plus, your current processes and silos may create bottlenecks for customers trying to make a purchase, get service, or expand their business with you.

You can use all the shiny objects you want to add glitter to your marketing and service interactions. But it’s only putting lipstick on a pig if your organization isn’t easy to do business with. Maybe you’ve added more mobile app functionality, for example, but your customers are pinching, swiping, and scrolling to the point of frustration to accomplish a basic task. Or you’ve launched an attractive marketing promotion, but your contact center agents don’t have any information on it for customers who call with questions.

Whether your organization is easy to do business with cuts to the core of the customer experience. It can give you a leading indicator of future trends for customer relationships. After all, your organization can have a great product, a great brand, and even great intentions for CX, yet still be difficult to do business with.

Perhaps most important, “Are you easy to do business with?” is a question that if explored and measured thoroughly, can quickly reveal whether the various pieces of the CX puzzle are working together as they should.

In fact, once you’ve examined whether customers think your organization is easy to do business with and use the resulting feedback to improve, you’ll find that it’s one of the best ways to ensure that your organization’s customer-facing operations (as well as those that support them) are living up to the spirit of your CRM and CX efforts.

Following are three lessons I learned while exploring that pivotal question, “Are you easy to do business with?”

Truly understand, and measure on a regular basis, whether customers think that your organization is easy to do business with.
Internal naysayers will claim that, of course you’re easy to do business with. After all, the CX efforts are refined, leadership is customer-focused, and the company puts the customer first in everything it does.

But, wait, not so fast…

Whether a company is easy to do business with is not solely determined by the efficiency of processes and programs it has in place. Instead, it’s a reflection of customer perceptions that can rarely be gleaned from operational data. To find out whether customers really believe that your organization is easy to work with requires a dedicated effort.

Ideally, you can attain this view of your customers’ true perceptions through a combination of methods. Surveys and one-on-one interviews with customers—preferably through a third party to ensure that feedback is candid—are exceptionally valuable and powerful tools to gather external perspectives. Speech and text analytics tools that make real-time sense of customer feedback, moods, and reactions are also extremely helpful. Customer-initiated digital feedback offers a goldmine of information, as do online communities that marketers and customer experience leaders can use as a listening tool. Use as many of them as you can to really understand where your organization falls on the “easy to do business with” spectrum.

Define what “easy to do business with” means for every
customer-facing role.

One of my aha moments in CX was when a particularly savvy customer-facing employee confided that she didn’t know if she had the ability to make it easier for customers to do business with the company, or even what that would entail. And she was right! Most people don’t intuitively know what something as encompassing as “easy to do business with” means.

To address this reality, we instituted a series of workshops across all departments throughout the company. These interactive sessions begin by exploring why it’s important for us to be easy to do business with. We then delve into what that means for each person in the room, and more specifically, which behaviors for each role will make the company’s vision come to life. Through these workshops, our employees helped to define what it meant to be “easy to do business with” and how to achieve it. Defining expectations is important, because most people have different interpretations of what makes an organization easy to do business with.

Apply what you learn across the organization.

Once you know the customer perception of the ease of doing business with your organization, you’ve defined what that ease means for various departments, and you have a framework in place that outlines required behaviors for specific roles, it’s time to use that information throughout the company to guide other decisions and processes. This includes hiring the right people, rewarding the right behaviors, and creating processes that complement them.

Perhaps, most important, institutionalizing these practices and encouraging these behaviors ultimately creates and nurtures a true, customer-centric culture that not only rewards behaviors that make it easy for customers, but also inherently encourages them among all employees.

Asking your customers if your organization is easy to do business with, and seeking candid answers, isn’t easy. But it’s one of the most powerful ways to ensure not only that the customer relationship and CX programs you oversee are working well, and that they’re being successfully applied where it matters most: with customers.

 

About the Author
Nancy Porte, CCXP, is the vice president of Global Customer Experience at Verint, a board member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association and a frequent speaker at industry events where often presents on her passion: developing meaningful customer experiences through the collaboration of numerous business functions and effective employee engagement.

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Adopting CX Technologies That Maximize Enterprisewide Efficiency

Adopting CX Technologies That Maximize Enterprisewide Efficiency

Despite constant advancements within the technology space, companies often struggle to adopt the latest tools as they become available. Implementation isn’t just costly—it’s also confusing. Leaders might claim their organization remains on the cutting edge of their given industry, but it’s practically impossible to keep pace with the ever-changing landscape. Instead, brands must establish which technologies will help their employees conduct business with maximum efficiency so they don’t spread themselves too thin as they integrate and embrace these practices.

Legacy systems, for instance, pose major problems, as many are obsolete and difficult to work with, often leading to siloed data and integration issues down the line. While the systems comprise critical historical information vital for customer experience programs, these systems might also contain irrelevant customer data and can be inflexible, as they weren’t designed with the modern customer journey in mind. Now that customers dictate the discussion across digital touchpoints, companies must evaluate scalable, more agile technologies that can better support desired engagement strategies.

While contact centers are often slower to adopt these new technology solutions, cloud capabilities now act as an essential weapon against these siloed legacy systems of yesteryear, as many brands falter under the weight of old investments that no longer support the customer experience. Because cloud technology allows for greater growth within the contact center, allowing companies to adapt to changes in customer service as needed, cloud applications will inevitably be the key to better seamless, omnichannel customer experiences overall.

Cloud technologies also enable companies to scale new additions up or down as they see fit in accordance with brand and customer needs. From speech analytics, to social media automation, many vendors now allow companies to purchase solutions on an a la carte basis so they need only spend money on those tools they truly require to elevate the customer experience to the next level.

While it might seem ideal to adopt each new CX technology, leaders must first determine what their company hopes to achieve with regard to customer experience. Many tools simply distract from this underlying mission, as they force employees to focus more on the technology and less on the customer. Not all tools are intuitive or useful within the context of the given brand. Leaders must begin by establishing enterprisewide goals, as doing so will guide them down the correct path to tech adoption and integration.

Ultimately, CX strategy should focus upon what customers want from their relationship with your brand. All other business decisions should grow from this factor. CX strategy varies from company to company, so leaders will likely need to do some soul searching to determine what’s necessary and what’s frivolous with regard to tech adoption. Most new tools are designed to facilitate and improve conversations between company and customer, so it’s critical to only tap those technologies that clear said pathways. Some systems might seem innovative and enticing, but if they lack purpose within the context of your business, the added noise will only push customers to the competition in the end.

Companies often neglect to align their decision journey with customers’ needs. Leaders tend to get caught up in what’s trending at the moment without considering the impact said technologies will have internally, in terms of employee engagement, and externally, in terms of customer satisfaction. Instead, companies must take one step back so they can examine the complete customer journey and create an omnichannel approach that takes every touchpoint into account.

Regardless of the specific technologies adopted, true impact and efficiency can only be measured by the success of those tasked with implementing and employing these tools. Leaders must understand that new technologies are useless unless their employees can use these tools to their greatest advantage. Leaders must also realize that CX success requires collaboration across the organization now more than ever. Technology should empower employees at every level to provide the best customer experience possible.

Modern employees seek purpose-driven roles. Individuals at every level want to feel like their part of an internal community, as it connects them to the brand and makes them feel as if they’re part of something greater than themselves. They also wish to help the customer in ways that better their lives, as doing so makes these employees feel as if they’re making the world better. By integrating technologies that enables your team to achieve these personal goals with maximum efficiency, you’ve also empowered them to take all subsequent customer relationships to the next level.

Customer experience success will ultimately depend upon how leaders choose to invest internally with regard to both technology and talent. By providing employees at every level of the organization with the tools necessary to achieve business goals, all members of the company will feel connected to the brand’s underlying mission, inspiring everyone to create the best customer experience possible. After all, customer experience strategy doesn’t succeed simply because the proper technologies are in place. Instead, customer experience excels when employees can use those tools to preserve and promote both satisfaction and loyalty at every touchpoint.

 

About the Authors

Bill Moore is VP of CRMI. He designs and delivers CEM best practices workshops, as well as CEMPRO employee loyalty, training and retention programs, that result in the increasing customer satisfaction, employee retention, and profitability for CRMI clients.

Tony Santilli is VP, Client Services, for Marketii U.S. Inc., where he oversees the activities of the Customer Experience Operations Team and Professional Consulting Group. His in-depth experience as a service team leader and expertise as a sales leader has led to consistent double-digit growth.

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Focus on Outcomes to Deliver an Outstanding Customer Experience

Focus on the Outcomes to Deliver an Outstanding Customer Experience

Customer experience. It’s the key to any successful business, and that’s not changing anytime soon. Putting the customer first and providing seamless service are table stakes across industries, but nowhere are they more prevalent than among businesses with field service organizations. Customers depend on the men and women who service their machines — from HVACs to oil rigs — to keep their homes, jobs, and communities running. Delays in service can result in frustration so great it can devastate your bottom line.

So, what’s a field service team to do? Luckily, technology is evolving every day with customers as the focus. As industries and field service organizations transform and embrace a more technologically connected future, field service organizations are poised to deliver outstanding customer experience in innovative ways. Here are three approaches that you can adapt to enhance your company’s field service experience.

 

Be proactive with service delivery

Field service organizations were once pen-and-paper operations. They were reactive, and often slow. The companies that were quickest to get on the proactive trend thrived, and years later we see that the demand for responsive, painless service hasn’t changed at all.

What has changed? Service organizations’ ability to offer proactive service. Realizing the potential for the Internet of Things to transform their business, field service providers can now monitor their equipment and collect better data to predict and prevent failures. In other words, they can eliminate issues before a customer even thinks to ask. As a result, better technology and proactive service have ushered in a new industry standard for efficiency and productivity, saving customers precious costs and time.

Take, for example medical device company Elekta, responsible for radiation machines and medical equipment in hospitals across the country. The danger of an outage is massive in this industry — it could be the difference between life and death. So, Elekta orchestrated a proactive service model, monitoring data streaming in from its connected devices to discover patterns, anticipate outages, and, ultimately, lower downtime.

 

Focus on the outcome
Stemming from this transition towards proactive service is a novel focus on what we call outcomes-based service. In this model, manufacturers sell a business outcome rather than simply a product that includes service. It makes sense — a company doesn’t buy wind turbines because they make for beautiful landscapes (though, many would argue they do!). They invest in the equipment because they want to use the energy that it generates. They invest in the outcomes.

By aligning service delivery with signals and data around how well the system is performing, technicians can be on hand to proactively service the wind turbines before they break down, and ensure that there is no down period for what their customer ultimately wants: energy. When technicians focus on the outcome, their customers are less likely to face the frustration and loss of business that would otherwise result from their machines breaking down and their outcomes being delayed. The result of this shift in strategy for field service teams is that the customer relationship is strengthened, and everyone wins.

 

Remember to be human
Technology is evolving and transforming field service for the better. But when it comes to building lasting customer relationships, data will never replace human-to-human interactions. For field service organizations, the technician is the first point of contact between the customer and the brand. The best, most proactive service should fade into the background — the more seamless the experience, the more invisible it is to the customer because it’s so painless.

Field service has never lost this human touch, and no amount of technology — be it mobile apps, AI, or automated data collection — will ever replace the human connection and trust on which this industry is built. At their core, field service teams are human teams. These are the relationships that grow and scale a business, and these are the faces that will continue delivering outstanding customer experiences into the future.

 

Patrice EberlineAbout the Author
Patrice Eberline is Vice President of Global Customer Transformation at ServiceMax, from GE Digital, where she uses her years of service delivery experience working with prospects and customers to fully leverage the value of ServiceMax to their field service organizations. Previously, Patrice was with SuccessFactors, serving as Global Director of SMB Professional Services, as well as SuccessFactors University. Prior to SuccessFactors, she was VP of Professional Services at Infor, where she led a global staff of consultants across four discrete Corporate Performance Management practices and hosted operations.

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The Value of Being an Energized Organization

One of the attributes of Best in Class organizations that has always interested me is their ability to focus their energies so enthusiastically on being customer centric. I often find this is further enhanced by their ability to “walk the talk,” as they share this commitment among their employees and customers.

I’m convinced this happens when a company’s leadership truly understands their business and focuses on what is most valuable in delivering success to their customers. These leaders understand the value of customer experience and how it builds loyalty and grows profits. And, they recognize that a customer-centric culture can result in a better experience for customers and employees.

As leaders, must we recognize what is truly of value to our business, to our customers, and to the way we go about our business. But, just as important, we must work to make sure our employees understand and see it as we do. Remember, a customer-centric organization, one that delivers Customer Success, makes it a point to help customers find the right solutions for their needs wherever they touch the company.

The essence of a company’s business goals must be customer experience and growth.

So, I ask: Can you clearly express the value proposition your company offers? Do your employees and your customers see it as you do? To what extent are you and your team committed to this proposition?

Customer-centric transformation

Customer centricity must go beyond just short-term successes to the more strategic need of creating an environment and enthusiasm that will endure over the long term. It’s about transforming the culture and engaging employees to embrace the mind-set and passion of being a customer-driven organization.

We must put the good of the organization ahead of our own personal desires. This effort should become a single-minded purpose and will be one of the most important effort investments we make as leaders. And let us not be casual about this, as it’s often one of the most challenging efforts of leadership. But it’s worth the effort. Making this change assures we deliver value to our customers and our company is rewarded by continued loyalty, growth, and profitability.

What does the transformation entail? It’s about creating an environment that demonstrates the ability to execute and maintain the change. It’s about being recognized for results in a manner welcomed by our customers. To achieve this, we have to understand a great deal about our business and our people.

The following seven steps will help guide you in creating that “take charge and get it done” environment. This does not come without hard work. And, remember, once you have customer centricity pervading your organization, you need to maintain it, as momentum can easily fade away.

1. Know your people, especially those who are the informal leaders and key go-to persons. Make sure these people have and will “walk the walk” and not just “talk the talk.” Coach them to where you need them to be. Remember, these are the people your team looks to, trusts, and follows.

2. It is also important to recognize employees, the individuals you can rely on to be there, participate, and execute. Take the time to profile your people into groups based on their strengths and weaknesses. Using a skills matrix is one way to do this. Then make the investment in shoring up those weaknesses. Take time to create an environment that inspires people to learn and keeps them well informed. This way, they will remain engaged.

3. Prepare a series of communications to introduce your vision and detail the cultural transformation. Approach the achievers with the plan early on so they recognize their roles. They have a great amount of influence over others, so it’s essential they understand and buy in to the value proposition, the transformation, and what is expected of them.

Then community the strategy, purpose, objective, expectations, etc. with clarity again, and again, and again. You must be clear on the connection to customer centricity at the employee level. How else will they understand its importance and value of their contribution?

4. Assuming you have measured the strengths and weaknesses of your team, you can map the transformation journey. For example, take-charge organizations empower their people. Have your people been trained to understand the importance of being empowered, when and how far to go with this responsibility, and the judgment required for maximizing results?

Once you map the journey, you’ll have identified the key touchpoints and barriers to success. Addressing these along with an empowered team is a formula for delivering customer success. Create a cross-functional team willing to overcome silo barriers. And, ensure that internal teams are connected to the customer teams.

Mapping the transformation journey should also include clear and concise measures of success.

5. It’s essential that you have a communication loop in place. This is a must for feedback, strategy revision, and alignment. Consider using Town Hall-style meetings, internal surveys, small group luncheons, etc. based on what works best for your organization. You can never over-communicate and, likewise, you should never stop listening. Don’t make the mistake of settling back and thinking, “Now that everything is in place, we’re OK.” In an energized organization, there is very little time to relax…further change is always on the horizon.

6. Check and recheck for alignment. This is critical. Rely on those people you can trust to be objective. As painful as it can be at times, we need a candid evaluation about how the transformation is evolving. Also, do not be afraid to make adjustments. The worst thing we can do is to recognize the need for change and then not execute accordingly. Ignoring a problem is rarely the proper approach to take in solving it. It usually just makes things worse and perpetuates a defense mechanism or feeling of denial that ultimately leads to unhappy employees and customers.

7. Finally, think about…

  • When was the last time you spoke to a customer?
  • What does your voice of the customer feedback tell you?
  • When did you last check on how well your message is resonating with your employees and customers?
  • How are you measuring the level of customer centricity?
  • Do your customers achieve Customer Success?
  • Is your customer’s journey seamless and easy?

As business leaders, we put processes in place and train our people to anticipate customer needs. Some of this is predictable and we are prepared. But there are customer events that are less predictable, and cannot easily be resolved in a routine manner. In either case, these are “moments of truth.” Understand how to optimize those moment to ensure customer delight. Excite and energize your organization and you and your team will be prepared for whatever those defining moments bring as you transform to a customer-centric organization.

 

 

Dennis Gershowitz

About the Author
Dennis Gershowitz is founder and principal of DG Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in driving service revenues and profits through the development and implementation of customer experience management (CEM) strategy and service operations improvements. Contact Dennis at dennisg@dgassociates.net

 

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Customer Journey Mapping the Road to Better Business Value

Customer Journey Mapping the Road to Better Business Value

Before technology grabbed hold of the customer experience, the path to purchase was typically linear. Customers entered the funnel and followed through to the end goal, the point of sale. But, now that consumers have countless ways to connect with prospective companies, leaders must guarantee that every touchpoint greets both current and potential customers with one consistent brand message. Customer journey mapping now stands as the essential tool for understanding consumer behavior in modern contexts.

While customer journey mapping was once reserved for simply pinpointing customer experience issues, companies are now putting this strategy at the heart of the development process. Many prior strategies failed to put the customer at the center of the planning process, but doing so at the onset promises to boost engagement and retention. However, not all brands have reached this stage at the present moment.

The CMO Council’s “Making Personalization Possible” report emphasizes that, while marketers recognize that comprehensive customer journey mapping (44 percent) represents the future for successful, long-term customer relationships, deep understanding of each individual customer doesn’t come easy. While the majority of marketers—86 percent—are unable to personalize experiences across the entire customer journey, many can now better tie such engagements to business impact by focusing on improving retention (69 percent) and acquisition (62 percent) rates. However, only 29 percent of marketers agree that an omnichannel approach to customer engagement holds the key to long-term relationships, despite the fact that this holistic method has become the backbone for effective journey mapping.

For those grappling with the intricacies of customer journey mapping, companies must ask four crucial questions as they develop their analytical strategy:

  1. Which channels do our customers prefer?
  2. How does customer sentiment compare at these various touchpoints?
  3. What inspires customers to choose one channel over another?
  4. How are we interacting with customers on each channel?

Successful journey mapping requires equal parts internal and external analysis, as assessing this level of incoming data will be rendered null and void if the brand itself doesn’t have the correct processes in place behind the scenes. Determining customer pain points might offer guidance, but said information serves little purpose if companies don’t have the appropriate protocols for response established. Leaders must also realize that issues need to be identified and rectified in real time. Everything’s instantaneous now, and customers pursue relationships with companies that demonstrate competency and concern at every stage of their overall journey.

For each moment of truth, brands must be ready, willing, and able to service customers. Sure, it seems daunting to position customer service representatives at every available touchpoint, but there’s no longer one or two points of entry where the customer journey begins. Instead, today’s journey seems more like a maze—there may be more than one starting point, but only one path leads to the desired destination. Leaders must ensure that consumers don’t hit any roadblocks along the way.

Brands must also establish one unified brand message to stand guard at each possible moment of truth. Like people, companies have one opportunity to make their best first impression. If one or more channels fail to maintain this level of consistency, brands risk losing business from any prospect that enters the pipeline at said touchpoints. Analyzing the interactions that take place at each touchpoint will better equip team members to handle future engagements, as they’ll be familiar with potential problems and prepared to take the next-best action in cases where issues arise. Operations cannot possibly run smoothly 24/7, so it’s proactive and practical to teach all employees how to manage these contact channels in the case of crisis or dissatisfaction.

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to customer journey mapping or its subsequent back-end adjustments and improvements. However, its underlying value remains undisputed. If brands wish to truly embody the concept of customer-centric DNA—the pinnacle of modern CX for today’s leading companies—leaders must tailor their technique to correspond with the wants and needs of their customers. Journey mapping, though often belated, presents brands with the opportunity to gain deeper insight into every aspect of the overarching customer experience.

Customer experience management ultimately serves as the cornerstone for successful journey mapping endeavors. Without an efficient, long-term CEM strategy, it’s almost impossible to put customer data to good use. Technology has only inflated the volume of Big Data insights, so it’s up to every given company to determine their current CEM maturity level in context with today’s evolving behaviors. Employee involvement, however, can give less advanced brands the upper hand in this highly competitive environment.

Internal branding now stands as one of the greatest differentiators across all industries. Outward relationships depend upon an internal culture that not only puts the consumer first, but also puts employees n the driver’s seat. By establishing an internal culture that highlights each employee’s impact on the customer experience, customer centricity isn’t just learned—it’s lived throughout the entire organization. Internal branding brings the desire for unified messaging to the frontlines, as employees recognize that they hold the power to make or break customer relationships.

Thus, customer journey mapping provides insight into consumer behaviors, which influences the way employees uphold brand promise, which in turn, circles back to the customer experience. Everything’s intertwined, but it’s ultimately the company’s responsibility to manage and maintain CX. Customer centricity will always be the key ingredient for satisfying, long-term relationships, but it’s up to each brand whether to serve it up hot or cold.

About the Authors

Dennis Gershowitz is founder and principal of DG Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in driving service revenues and profits through the development and implementation of customer experience management (CEM) strategy and service operations improvements. Contact Dennis at dennisg@dgassociates.net

 

Bill Moore is VP of CRMI. He designs and delivers CEM best practices workshops, as well as CEMPRO employee loyalty, training and retention programs, that result in the increasing customer satisfaction, employee retention, and profitability for CRMI clients.

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The Impact of Customer Experience, the Differentiator in Today’s Marketplace

The Impact of Customer Experience, the Differentiator in Today’s Marketplace

In today’s ultra-competitive marketplace, customers have more choices than ever before in how to acquire products and services. And, they expect the shopping experience, the buying process, and the subsequent support for those products and services to be as frictionless as possible.

That end-to-end customer experience (CX), which I view as the totality of the lifecycle between the customer and the provider, is now viewed by many organizations as the key differentiator between themselves and their competitors. In fact, a recent report by Gartner surmises that companies see themselves in an “customer experience battlefield.” Not surprisingly, 89 percent of the executive polled for that report believe that CX will prove to be the primary basis for competition in the coming years.

We’ve all heard and read the compelling statistics around the revenue impact of satisfying the customer. A recent McKinsey study, for example, found that e-commerce spending for new customers averaged $24.50—and more than doubled to $52.50 on average for repeat e-commerce customers. But it doesn’t take a data scientist to know that is it’s easier and more profitable to retain existing customers than it is to find new ones. As the adage says, “Customers vote with their feet.” In the brick-and-mortar world, customers simply walk out and find another business that will meet their expectations.

Today, they’re also just as likely to let everyone else know how they voted by posting that poor experience on social media. Consumers are likely to post a positive customer experience on social media about 30% of the time, but tend to post about negative experiences 45% of the time, according to a recent study conducted by Dimensional Research for ZenDesk.

In today’s digital world consumers rely on a variety of channels to interact with the organizations they choose to do business with. Understanding customers’ preferred contact channels and then aligning the appropriate resources and assets are essential to meeting customers’ expectations and maintaining strong relationships. Consider the contact center and how interaction analytics can help optimize the customer experience.

Achieving ideal customer outcomes is the result of getting the balance right between all the elements associated with customer’s interactions in your contact center. Interaction analytics play a powerful role in uncovering how to optimize a customer’s experience.

Common factors that can influence the customer’s degree of satisfaction when dealing with an organization’s contact center include:

  • Agent competency issues
  • Systematic issues (IVR, telephony, etc.)
  • Process issues
  • Unpredicted or predicted product, service or event issues
  • Billing issues
  • Technical support, password resets, etc.

 

Interaction analytics can uncover these issues so companies can address them. But organizations also need to recognize and respond to the unique expectations customers have based on the contact intent, such as customer support, sales, or financial services. The matrix below show some common customer expectations by function objective, along with the key performance metrics that interaction analytics measures to determine strong and weak points in agents’ activities and the impact each has on outcomes.

 

 

This is great, right? Analytics can reveal why customers are calling—and how your operations, processes, systems and, specifically, your agents are handling issues. But how can you leverage this technology to improve customer experience and outcomes? CallMiner has an online ROI calculator that can provide you with a glimpse into how interaction analytics can help optimize your contact center customer experience.

But first, let’s look at some examples of interaction analytics in action:

One company in the tourism industry using speech and text analytics was able to correlate talk and handle times and then make adjustments that led to a lift of 26% in its customer satisfaction score and increase its average revenue per booking—while simultaneously reducing its cancelation rate. As one executive in the organization said, “We turned our contact centers from an operational expense to a profit center.”

An organization in the exercise equipment industry used interaction analytics to dramatically reduce average call handle time and call abandonment rates. This, in turn, improved the company’s call/agent handling ratios. These operational efficiencies led to an 8% reduction in manpower cost per shift for headcount to manage call volumes.

The contact center is just one touchpoint where analytics can reveal opportunities to optimize CX and boost profitability in the process. So, it’s easy to see that improving customer experience across channels can lead to significant increases in customer retention rate and revenue per customer, and provide better overall outcomes.

About the Author
Brian LaRoche is Director, Account Based Marketing, and is responsible for direct and channel outbound marketing programs for CallMiner. In addition to his marketing responsibilities, he is the host and moderator of CallMiner’s popular Monthly Education Webinar series. LaRoche, a call center industry veteran, is a frequent guest speaker, panelist, and guest columnist on myriad customer service, technical, collections, sales, and leadership topics related to the analytics field.

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Three Barriers to Integrating CX Into a Company’s DNA

Three Barriers to Integrating CX Into a B2B Company’s DNA

One of my favorite commercials of all time is from United Airlines. In this powerful, one-minute segment, a CEO is in a conference room with all his managers. He informs them that their oldest customer just fired them because the customer felt he didn’t know them anymore. “Things have to change,” the CEO says. “We can’t hide on the phone any longer. We are going to go see every customer we have.” He then hands out United Airline tickets for the management team to visit over 200 cities beginning the same day.

This is a wonderful vignette around the power of a customer-centric strategy and how to incorporate it into the DNA of a company. This commercial was shot in 1990 during a wave of discussion and research around the value of a customer-centric strategy. From a business perspective, analysts such as Don Pepper and Martha Rogers were conducting research into customer-led strategies. Authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersma published “The Discipline of Market Leaders.” In academic research, models for defining and measuring customer focus (MKTOR) and determining the value of such a strategy to businesses were also being deeply explored.

The customer is in firm control

The net is we’ve known and been clear about the value of a customer-centric strategy since the 1990s. We have evidence and case studies that show results of a customer-centric approach include higher margins, higher client satisfaction scores, reductions in cost to serve, improved revenue growth, and an increase in employee satisfaction.

What has changed since the 1990s is the how much power and control the customer now has in the digital age. The pressure from customers being in firm control of their buying process is finally affecting the adoption of customer-centric strategies by B2B firms. Whether B2B firms lost or never had customer focus, it is becoming apparent that a customer-centric strategy is now required to win. Pivoting from a product-centric or operational-centric strategy to a customer-centric strategy pays off.

While there is a lot of excitement around the return to customer-focus, there are unique challenges to changing company DNA to be reflective of a customer-centered pivot. Three main challenges include leadership, defining customer ownership, and how marketing uses technology.

Leadership

In practical terms, customer focus must be pervasive and measured to have the desired effect. It starts with the CEO and the executive team and trickles down to every person in the company. Customer focus must move from “talk” to “walk,” and having KPIs and MBOs for every part of the company associated to customer delight are ways to measure adoption. It’s not possible to transform into a customer-centric organization without belief and behavior starting at the top and cascading to every part of the organization. Just like the CEO in the United Airlines commercial. His flight was to go see the customer who fired them.

Gut Check: Are the behaviors of your company’s executives indicative of a customer-focus?

Who owns the customer?

Coming to terms with “who owns the customer” is a battle in many companies. In companies that are sales led (like many B2B companies), the sales organization often takes great exception to marketing telling them about the customer. The sales organization has always had firsthand and often the only relevant knowledge about the customer. Those days are gone. Marketing now has the most knowledge about the customer through millions of digital interactions. Marketing takes a leadership role in understanding customers as it acquires more knowledge about them and is instrumental in creating customer engagement throughout the entire life cycle. In this scenario, marketing works with every part of the company that touches the customer to create one view of each customer and to create a flawless customer experience.

Gut Check: Do you have a defined and agreed upon customer life cycle map in which each part of the organization understands its role and all actions are orchestrated to create a flawless experience for the customer?

Technology as the enabler

Technology is at the center of operationalizing a customer centric strategy. It is the enabler for consumer and customer control of the buying journey. It is creating the pressure to pivot to a customer-centric strategy. And, it is the answer to operationalizing a customer-centric strategy. In this technology-rich environment, the marketing operations group has emerged to use technology and data to detail and provide relevant customer insights to the CMO and to the organization. In large part, it is the work of the marketing operations group that allows marketing to be the “expert” on the customer.

Gut Check: Is your marketing operations function customer-driven and do it provide key customer insights for organizational decision making?

Take action

I most often see companies tackle CX in silos and with disparate processes and technologies. I also see this same scenario within marketing departments. Once they begin these one-off projects, they begin to claim they are now customer-centric.

Nothing could be further from the truth. To integrate CX into the DNA of a company requires belief and action from the top that trickles down to every person in the organization. It requires some tough talks between customer-facing teams such as marketing, sales, and customer service around who owns the customer—and the answer should be: We all do.

Finally, it requires a customer-centric marketing operations group that is customer-focused and proves it by sharing customer data and insights for improved organizational decision making.

 

 

Debbie QaqishAbout the Author:

Debbie Qaqish is principal partner and Chief Strategy Officer of The Pedowitz Group, and The Queen of Revenue Marketing,™ a term she coined in 2011. Debbie manages global client relationships and leads the firm’s thought leadership initiatives.

Debbie is author of Rise of the Revenue Marketer, Chancellor of Revenue Marketing University, and host of WRMR Power TalkRadio for Revenue Marketing Leaders, which showcases marketing executives from companies like GE and Microsoft sharing advice on marketing transformation. A PhD candidate, Debbie teaches an MBA course at College of William & Mary on Revenue Marketing.

In March 2016, Kapost named Debbie among the Top 40 Most Inspiring Women in Marketing. For the last five years, Debbie has been named One of the 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management. She has also won SLMA’s Top 20 Women to Watch distinction. In 2014 FierceCMO Magazine named Debbie one of the Top 10 Women CMOs to Watch.

Connect with Debbie via LinkedIn, email: Debbie@Pedowitzgroup.com or phone: 770-331-4443. And, to learn more about what it takes to integrate CX into the company DNA, read “7 Hallmarks of Transformation.”

 

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4 Requirements for Linking CX to ROI

Linking CX and ROI

Eighty-one percent of consumers are willing to pay for a better experience, according to the Capgemini’s study “The Disconnected Customer.” Yet, customers don’t feel that companies are delivering high quality customer experience (CX), and one in five consumers stopped purchasing from a company after a poor experience, Capgemini’s research found.

In our own ERDM learnings from more than 16,000 hours of VoC research interviews, consumers were emphatic that short-term sales-focused tactics were irritating, brand damaging, and undermined loyalty. As empowered consumers, they expected engagement oriented communications and experiences.

Here is a representative quote from the research: “You marketers don’t understand that personalized engagement post-sale is valuable for the customer and… forges strong ties with your company that serve as a ‘grace account’ upon which to draw when there is the almost-certain problem or outreach from competition.”

Chris Hull, Chief Merchandising Officer at the iconic American luxury lifestyle brand Shinola, puts it this way, “Consumers are looking for meaningful experiences that differentiate one brand from another. One way we do this is by designing our stores to engage the five senses:

  • Sight – see team members build bicycles or do personalized embossing;
  • Sound – a warm welcome and vinyl playing on our Runwell Turntable;
  • Touch – well-crafted products, such as watches and leather bags;
  • Taste – a complimentary bottle of Shinola Cola;
  • Smell – the smell from our Shinola candles lit throughout the store.

This is all part of conveying our distinctive handcrafted products and has resulted in higher engagement, satisfaction, and conversion rates.”

With this in mind, here are four factors that will help you link CX to improved ROI:

1. CX strategies must align with consumer demands

Too often sales strategies are spray painted to look like CX strategies. However, customers are smart and know the difference between sales pitches posing as engagement and true CX. They resent when marketers think that customers are too naïve to know the difference.

According to Nike Chief Executive Mark Parke in comments about CX strategy development, “The important thing to point out is that changes are being driven by the consumer…. They want it fast, easy, and [they want] personal service.” Nike has implemented measures to drive personalization and has seen sales improvements in a landscape where so many other retailers and brands are failing.

2. Accurate data is essential for driving CX initiatives

As Jim Conning, managing director at Royal Mail Data Services so aptly puts it, data accuracy is non-negotiable for ROI: “CMOs and marketing directors all understand the importance of accurate customer data, but I’m not sure that more inexperienced members of the team understand the increased ROI of more accurate data.”  The company’s research indicated that 34% of marketers fail to fully understand the financial impact of poor quality data; 70% of the 300 companies surveyed admit to having incomplete or out-of-date customer data; and 6% of annual revenue is being lost through poor quality data.

An important, related finding from ERDM’s VoC research: B2B and B2C customers want to shape their own customer experience by providing trusted brands with deep business and personal information in exchange for meaningful, relationship-building experiences.

  1. ROI also requires CX-focused content

Irrelevant content hurts your brand, so stop sending spray-and-pray blasts!

This quote from our VoC research is a blunt reminder. “When I receive generic emails, it’s obvious that you do not care enough to understand my individual needs. Instead, you are trying distill my complex needs into simple generalities to make your email blast easier for you…and useless to me!”

Consider this from a Salsify Study: “If you provide superior content, and a competitive price, you have the opportunity to both close the sale and build long-term consumer loyalty.” The study found that…

  • 88% of consumers say that product content is extremely or very important to their purchase decision
  • Price matters, but it’s product content that gets consumers to buy
  1. Establish CX-oriented metrics and compensate accordingly

New and additional metrics are required to track and compensate for CX-oriented behaviors. Too many companies fail to change metrics to reflect their CX strategies and still compensate based on legacy “sell ‘em and forget ‘em” models.

In this blog post , Michael Klein, director of industry strategy for the Adobe Marketing Cloud, presents some effective soltuions that brands can implement to select the optimal CX metrics. One, from Epsilon’s Rob Cantave, especially stood out: “CRM data helps us understand what current customers are interested in seeing. Combining that with our third-party data lets us better understand what clusters of customers have in common. We present that information to the automated models and have them test and ultimately identify the product, categories, or content most likely to be of interest to returning customers and brand new unknown users who’ve been seen elsewhere in our network.”

Linking CX to ROI is a complex, multiphased, and corporate-wide pursuit. Remember:

  • CX requires company-wide consistency and communication so employees understand and are trained on the goals and behaviors they need to demonstrate every single day.
  • It also requires an omnichannel, data-driven strategy that’s based on meeting the requirements consumers indicate are important—to them. CX is useless without a consumer-focused approach because it will be observed as sales-y and meaningless.
  • Similarly, irrelevant content is perceived as demonstrating that a brand does not care about developing long-term customer relationships.

To achieve maximum ROI, companies need to rethink how they view CX and build impactful and sustainable strategies to satisfy customer needs over the customer lifecycle.

 

 

Ernan RomanAbout the Author
Ernan Roman (@ernanroman) is president of ERDM Corp., leaders in conducting VoC research for major brands. His latest book is Voice of the Customer Marketing. He was inducted into the DMA Marketing Hall of Fame, named by the Online Marketing Institute as one of the “2014 Top 40 Digital Luminaries,” and named by Crain’s BtoB magazine as one of the “100 most influential people in business marketing.”

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Tying Employee Performance to Customer Satisfaction

Tying Employee Engagement to Customer Satisfaction

When looking at how companies measure employee performance, one thing is clear: There’s wide variation across industries in terms of how well businesses are incorporating customer satisfaction into the mix. Generally, companies do a poor job of linking performance to satisfaction. Although we have seen improvements recently, many companies still struggle to enhance the processes linking performance to satisfaction.

One of the key factors required to link satisfaction to employee performance is having sound methods to collect the satisfaction data. Companies that have poor satisfaction measurement methods have trouble linking the results to performance because there’s either not enough data or the data is suspect. Without a reliable foundation of results, employees will resist efforts to link their performance to satisfaction.

Those companies that are successfully tying satisfaction to performance are able to do so because they have clear goals and processes, as well as quality data. Consider the following approaches for improving your satisfaction and performance management processes:

Collect enough data to support evaluating individuals or teams. If there is not enough data to measure individuals, then setting goals and measuring performance at the team level is a viable and sometimes preferable alternative.

Set measurable goals for satisfaction, rather than “soft” targets based on perception. Having weak references to customer satisfaction in a performance review does not focus employees on delivering higher levels of service.

Ensure that customer satisfaction is a heavily weighted component of performance evaluations. The weighting should have a direct impact on compensation for the employees. If possible, put a bonus program in place to reward the staff achieving the desired satisfaction results.

Tie performance objectives to employee-controllable elements, as well as overall satisfaction. These include knowledge and expertise, professionalism, quality of solution, timeliness of status updates, and other factors in an employee’s control.

Regularly review satisfaction results with the staff and include them on performance scorecards or other productivity reports. This will ensure that employees are aware of customers’ satisfaction with their current performance and enable them to focus on areas that need improving.

Following these simple suggestions will have a positive impact on your overall customer satisfaction program and drive the staff towards delivering improved results on a consistent basis. Programs such as the Service Capability & Performance (SCP) Standards can help drive improvements in this area and will help set specific measurable targets for customer satisfaction.

About the Author
Greg Coleman is a principal partner and vice president of Strategic Programs for Service Strategies Corp. He has more than 25 years of experience in the high-technology service and support field. Greg has worked with leading technology services organizations to develop and deploy global standards for service excellence and has assessed the performance of hundreds of service organizations worldwide. You can reach Greg at gcoleman@servicestrategies.com