I belive in the following:
Resumes are a thing of the past; marketing and operations jointly share responsibility for customer care and customer experience; and there is some form of life other than ours in the relative universe. I am not sure which has a better chance of proving itself out in my lifetime, however. On the bright side, all have one thing in common: interconnection.
"Consumers value the services we offer. What we do, helping people stay connected, brings vitality to relationships. And thinking responsibly for the company and the community is the anchor of how we do business," Western Union's 2010 Investor Relations presentation.
Customer Care and Marketing should rise to meet the demand that B2B and B2C and B2W (Business to Whomever) and think with their customers and in some cases for them via innovation or better ways to listen to what they have to say and act upon those findings. 2012 we won't see much in the way of real enterprise change - there's much to do to facilitate foundational requirements to actually deliver on the true promise of excellent Customer Experience. The kind exhibited by Zappos.com, Virgin, USAA, and others.
While the top brands in the Meaningful Brand Index may not be in your top 20 <http://www.havasmedia.com/2011/11/meaningful-brands-havas-media-launches-global-results/> the relationship of what customers want to what brands deliver in terms of experience coincides with the notion of creating a relationship with a customer:
“It’s clear from our analysis that we need to take a new look at the relationship between brands and consumers. Nowadays we want so much more from brands than just promises or stories. Brands that manage to create better relationships dominate the marketplace," Hernan Sanchez Neira, CEO Havas Media Intelligence.
Let's face facts: we're still in the era of selling the sexy story around Customer Experience (and Social CRM and so on.) Mostly, companies have yet to take a hard look across the matrix or down into the stovepipes and mandate customer experience as a company-wide focus. Bygone are the days of lip service and the figure head with no real power and no real strategic imperative. In 2012 shifting out of the single, black-clad hipster who shows up to meetings to pay homage to the fact that a company is committed to experience to actually doing something more than creating a better IVR or an iPhone app that simply raises awareness or provides a store locator doesn't keep a customer happy. (Admittedly, I wear a lot of black and used to prostheletize about customer experience…)
No one owns the customer experience as such, and quite often, CxP (and I predict we'll not settle on an acronym either) commingles with User Experience - imagine a venn diagram where there's about 1/5th of each circle overlapping. This intersection provides insights into the overall meeting of customer care, marketing, operations, and the other sub-groups within a firm (big or small). Which, as time goes on ideally brings about the real subtext of the challenge of our discussions...
...the rise of Customer Care and Marketing out of the shadows of cost centers and into the spotlight of profit center and the keeper of the keys to the customer experience must set standards in the next year for the rest of their organizations. Having lived in both camps, both historically whined about budget and demanded recognition for their valiant efforts. Okay, here's a medal. You win - now go become the harbingers of change but start in your organizations and work your way outwards. However, do eat your own dog food before you start barking at the rest of your company. For example, Customer Care's KPIs are out of sync with web self services and mobility. Also, Marketing now has the luxury of the fly A/B testing of campaigns via Social channels but don't quite take the customer's immediate feedback (did they buy, click, abandon carts, use only a small part of the app, where did they drop out of the application) but are still in the days of measuring SEO as a means to justify the existence of web marketing.
So, get the basics right (Knowledge Base and Management, CRM systems, and all the other hard stuff) in 2012 and plan to have a bright future in 2013.
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