I attended the Forrester Customer Experience forum in NYC on June 22 and was particularly impressed by the speech keynote speaker Wayne Peacock of USAA gave. Peacock is the executive vice president of Enterprise Business Operations at USAA.
Continue reading "USAA Weathers the Storm with Keen Customer Focus" »
Some companies call them "office of the chairman" accounts, while others simply refer to them as key clients. These are the flagship clients that propel your growth in good times and provide essential ballast in a downturn. They are broad and deep, transcending any one individual or service offering. Usually, they endure for years. These trusted partnerships account for a disproportionate share of most firms' revenues, profits, and intellectual capital. An archetypical example is Booz Allen Hamilton's 70-year relationship with the U.S. Navy.
In the last few days I've met with two airlines and discussed with each what we consider to be "best practices" for frequency marketing programs. I also got a personal experience, courtesy of British Airways, in "worst practices" for frequent flyer programs. In Martha's and my opinion, the best frequency marketing programs (whether for airlines or other firms) have five qualities: Insight, modularity, openness, customer management, and simplicity.
Continue reading "Frequency Marketing Programs - Five Best Practices" »
I've heard a new term coined that I think will catch on...social customer service. It's the practice of using social media for customer service purposes. But I've always thought customer service is supposed to have a social aspect to it if it's going to be useful. To me, social media is just another platform that companies can use to connect with customers. It shouldn't be considered separate from "regular" customer service.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is known for his mantra that Starbucks is not in the coffee business, but instead is in the customer business serving coffee. Similarly, during his keynote presentation at the Forrester Research Customer Experience Forum 2009, Virgin America CEO and President David Cush said, "We're in a customer service business, not a moving airplanes around business."
Continue reading "Virgin America's Customer Experience Flies on the Wings of its Employees" »
Can there be only one dominant general-interest social network? It appears that question is closer to being answered after MySpace fired 30 percent of its US staff and a large number of international staff over the last week. But does that mean the site will fade into irrelevance? Does it mean MySpace's business model was flawed? Or is this just another step toward resurgence?
Continue reading "100 Million Users Not Enough for Sustainability" »
Know the customer. It's a mantra that has been repeated and implemented by companies in recent years. Lately, that mantra is not only being used to deliver tailored experiences to customers, but also to ensure concise merchandising.
Continue reading "A Return to "Old-Fashioned" Customer Service" »
It's a given--especially in the current economy--that customers want the best value for their money. The catch, however, is that different customers define value differently. For some, value equates with product functionality or brand image; for many, though, it means price.
Heavily price-focused customers can create a heady challenge for businesses.
Recently I switched insurance companies after being with the same company for more than 20 years. Several times over the years I had considered shopping around, looking for a better rate and service. I guess you could say I either got comfortable or maybe I was just too lazy to make the switch.
Before finally shopping around I made a customer experience list of pros and cons to help me decide if I should stay or leave. My list looked something like this:
"Although your customers may be buying less, they care about how you treat them even more." So said Bruce Temkin, a Forrester vice president and principal analyst, during his keynote yesterday morning at the Forrester Research Customer Experience Forum 2009.
Temkin likened the customer experience journey to Dorothy's travel to Oz, explaining that success comprises three elements:
We've come a long way from the soda jerk at the corner candy store. As reported in Information Week last week, Coca-cola will provide some fast-food restaurants with a soda dispenser with 100 varieties of soda, juice, tea, and flavored waters.
When I was 14, my father was the half owner of a red-and-white Cessna 150, a 4-seater single engine airplane that had wings above the passengers. When other teenage girls were spending Saturdays on their nails and hair, I was in the co-pilot seat learning to fly.
Continue reading "Navigating the Internet Without a License" »
The biggest challenge with adoption of social media technologies and strategies is that it's taking a shot in the dark. No one knows exactly what impact an initiative will have (anyone who told you they knew in the past year or two was lying). Recently I've spoken with a few researchers who claim to have cracked the code.
I attended a webinar on Wednesday, June 17 on the Texas Credit Union and how they have teamed up with technology programs to get a better sense of customer feedback and how they can improve their current system.
For years, predicting customers' behavior involved a lot of guesswork. Today, the economy is changing the way customers act and companies must be responive and cognizant of those changes.
During yesterday's Engage Summit, sponsored by Allegiance, Gary Rhoads, co-founder of Allegiance, said he sees a growing interest in predictive analytics. Companies no longer want to be reactive--they want to uncover relationships with their customers.
Zappos.com, the biggest online shoe store, celebrated its 10th anniversary in May. Sales were over $1 billion in 2008. Not bad for a company that had more than its share of doubters when it launched in 1999.
One key to Zappos' success is its ability to listen to customers. Almost everyone at the company faces the customer, yet no one is provided a script of what to say.
This "no scripts" policy benefits Zappos in many ways:
How important is customer experience? Very--and growing in value daily as an increasing number of companies find ways to connect improvements in customer experience to increases in business performance.
I recently spoke with Bruce Temkin, vice president, principal analyst, and Harley Manning, vice president, research director, of Forrester Research, about the research firm's upcoming Customer Experience Forum 2009 to get a sneak peak at what they'll be sharing at the event that will get people thinking about their own customer experience strategies right now.
Continue reading "Gazing into the Crystal Ball of Customer Experience" »
Have you seen the new GM commercial? I saw it for the first time about a week ago, and wasn't sure at first what to think of it. To give context to my comments, it's posted here.
There is a very nice "conversation starter" essay on McKinsey's site today regarding the fact that natural disasters and economic cycles seem to occur with the same kind of frequency and intensity. The actual pattern isn't a normal distribution (the kind of bell curve that we all studied in statistics) but a "power law distribution" - which means, essentially, that there is a "long tail" of outliers. In a power law distribution an event that is twice as severe, for instance, might occur just 1/4 as often (power = 2), or 1/8 as often (power = 3), or 2.83 times as often (power = 1.5). The bigger the power number, the steeper the fall-off in frequency as the size or import of an event increases.
During one of the breaks at yesterday's Incentive2Innovate conference hosted by The Xprize Foundation and held at the United Nations, I asked an editor of a green technologies magazine sitting next to me whether or not he found the content useful. The editor responded, "Quite frankly, this is over my head." He, like many people, assume innovation is just technology when, in fact it's organizationally and culturally driven.
Having just read Ken Roman's excellent biography of David Ogilvy, The King of Madison Avenue, and subsequently reread Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man and Ogilvy on Advertising, I can attest that while some of the mediums may be dated, the fact remains that Ogilvy based his and his agency's success on being relevant to the customer. He used research learned from working for Dr. George Gallup and instigated voice of the customer (VOC), on which he tested and based many successful campaigns. To use Ogilvy's love of succinctness: "Customers talk; we as marketers must listen....and then act."
In March of this year we at Tektronix launched an all new website, www.tektronix.com, based 100 percent on VOC, one-to-one customer interviews, and primary global research. Our old Tektronix website had served us well over the years. It delivered millions of visitors, offered rich content, and contributed to our business growth. However, as we all know, being good is not good enough any more, and our customer research told us this, too. So over a six to nine month period we asked our customers directly what we needed to do to improve and be more relevant to them.
This is what we heard:
Continue reading "Guest Blogger Martyn Etherington: Customers Talk. We Must Listen, Then Act!" »
Last week I spoke with Maritz Vice President of Marketing Chris Gaia about virtual event strategy. What was once only thought of as an option for the high-tech sector has come to the mainstream. It's a networking channel that can't be ignored.
When Jeff Hayzlett joined Eastman Kodak Company three years ago, the imaging company was in the midst of a transformation. As the newly appointed CMO Hayzlett needed to refocus the company's marketing efforts to correspond with those changes. During his keynote presentation early this week at Marketing World 2009: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange, Hayzlett shared some insight into his approach.
There's a fine line between catering to a niche customer group and creating a different experience that essentially says, "Here's a nice, easy way for you to understand what we do, since you wouldn't grasp what we provide like our other customers." Recently, two companies waved goodbye to that line as they crossed it by creating female-driven experiences that are insensitive at best and demeaning at worst.
When dealing with customer service, I think many customers have been conditioned over the years to not expect the unexpected. I'm one of the jaded masses. So when I received a double whammy of exceptional service yesterday with both Progressive Insurance and Enterprise Rent-A-Car, I was so impressed that I shared the experience with anyone who would listen and now in this blog with you.
Continue reading "Hats Off to Progressive and Enterprise Rent-A-Car" »
Sometimes building a one-to-one relationship with customers takes two--partners, that is. That was the case for New York Life when the insurer wanted to reach out to women and position itself as their insurance and financial services preferred provider. According to Barbara Cerf, corporate vice president, the company wanted an expert partner to reach that market; one that would be willing to take a non-traditional approach to achieve a "wow" factor that would help transform its marketing efforts into closed sales.
