Techronicity

Honored to be in such good company - thank you to the Nifty 50!

The Top #Nifty50 Women in Technology on Twitter for 2012

September 10, 2012

A year ago, the #Nifty50 honored 50 remarkable men andwomen on Twitter. This year, colleague Cheryl Burgess and I changed things up a bit, opening the award to nominations but focusing specifically on outstanding men and women who work for technology companies and are active on social media.

These women are executives, thought leaders, bloggers, authors and role models for younger women with an interest in technology. Not only leaders in their professional lives, nearly all these women use their social profiles to express their passions outside the workplace, which range from NASCAR, art, travel, billiards, wine and music to community service, politics and, of course, family.

Among the women profiled below, Emily Gonzales notes that “women in tech are doing really cool things,” while Padmasree Warrior is “passionate about helping women in tech.” True, and important, which is why this year’s #Nifty50 is focused on the technology field.

Ilene Kaminsky
@ilenealizah

Ilene is a “content creationist” whose background includes stints as Director of Marketing and Director of Strategic Development at IBM, Alliance Director at eGain Communications, and Managing Director at Lumina Consulting. She also writes the Techronicity blog.

 

Shopping towards Bethlehem

After re-reading a few sections of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" circa 1998, its relevancy  describes one of the daily challenges facing software scientists, developers, and programmers as well as the companies that love them.  They know all too well that the addition of people to a problem in writing code only expands the problem and timeline exponentially.  If we suppose for a moment this still holds true, what then becomes of our economy and our workforce when cloud-based, crowd-sourced (to a greater or lesser degree) application and software development (if we can still call it software) using open source code takes over the world?  

The delivery of software by the box being replaced with software by the drink, a drop at a time, and the economy based on an "end" of a project or the delivery of a "version" will sound like a dial tone to those born after 2000 - never heard it before.  What does that spreadsheet look like if the platform must not operate with an OS but with browser-like shells to take what we need and leave what we don't.  It's not how money is made today.  

As we watch with horror as another retailer closes all or some of its doors, we witness the very underpinnings of our economy begin to shape shift.  The movement from large to small, many to one - perhaps towards outlets and kiosks as a replacement for big brick and mortar establishments .  We may be witnessing the beginning of the end: the decline of the mall and big box stores.  Even now our "shopping" experience including the ever shifting act of browsing goes wider and farther than ever and the store is just the place you might touch and feel something but you don't buy it there necessarily.  The trend towards picking up locally your new or used goods after a browse around the web will become one of the ways to get your wares.  Big hardware stores better become customer service centers really quickly or they will become extinct, too. Anyone look for wallpaper paste lately?

 Maybe you stumble upon the beloved item that will soothe the vestigial "immediate gratification" craving - filling you with joy and flooding your body with endorphins, which expire upon the weak strain of the unhappy let down that comes after you unwrap your goodie, as though you're laying on the carpet of a party of which the guests have left and only the streamers and ribbon and booze-stench remain…ah shopping. But I digress.

So, assuming the economics shift what happens to the distribution of wealth?  Perhaps Engels correctly, communistically blurted - from each according to his skill, to each according to his need, or something close to that.  Now combine the global pressures placed on the distribution of population to the small percentage of people with and the sliver of distributed wealth.  Now ask where technology gets "manufactured"  and where development of the skilled workers takes place today.  Maybe not though.

 Let's for a moment take a page from Louis C.K.'s distribution of comedy, pardon my weak pun, which allowed him complete creative control mind you when he produced then distributed via his website a $5.00 DRM-free download of a live one hour show.  It took him roughly six weeks start to finish and it would have taken at least six months to work with HBO or ComedyCentral to do much of the same, and they'd have ultimate power over his personal IP.  While he took in, purportedly over a million dollars, to say that perhaps he is onto something - the convergence of the diametrically opposed classic distribution model to the initial stated problem of crowd-contributed software development at the edge by, egads...the madding crowds, the unwashed masses... 

 Then it's fair for everyone perhaps to say that:

1.  Not everyone will develop software because they lack the skills, and those who can will.

2.  The feared skill diaspora risk factors will cause the wealth to gather the skills where ever they exist.

3.  Consumption, like water, will take on the form of the container it's given, and in this case it's bigger and more expansive and full of choices influenced by individuals (socially influenced.)

4.  Those who possess non-technical skills will use the tools those cleverer than us developed and perhaps even ask for new tools to distribute wares more effectively - LCK may not be funny to everyone but he's putting the business of content distribution where it needs to be, at least I believe so.

5. And finally, as always, it's the economy, stupid. Or as Navin R. Johnson said in The Jerk, "ah, it's a profit deal!"

 

Arranged marriage or one made in heaven?

The days of  courting  your customers' hand in marriage and earning long term loyalty are over. We must work harder to gain the life long commitment of our beloved customer.  Fickle, they can be anywhere and want to see us any time and so we must go no matter where our betrothed may be .  They don't seek us out like they used to. The customer doesn't go to the store to browse much anymore... the store must go to the customer.  

We must travel to a place where  standard measurements turned upsidedown as a result of the tectonic shift that changed the landscape where consumerism rules.  And the rules and standards are not, well, standard yet. So how does a company derive the return on investment made by listening to the cacophony of  conversations happening in the unpredictable, truly mobile, increasingly social world we find ourselves struggling to navigate and gain traction in when we hardly recognize the territory?

The good news for some is that marketers’ value jumped significantly as enterprises recognized investments in the web and e-commerce broadened consumer spending power and simultaneously  amplified consumer vocal power.  The voice of the customer echoed through the halls of marketing departments, the same department that set the strategy and spent the budgets for those very programs that got the customer to come to them in the first place.  Nice closed loop siloed away from the contact center.  The very same formerly central function, aside from sales, where the customer speaks to the company about their experience.  

The joining of care and marketing: customer experience.  

What could be more intimate: I am walking the aisles of a store, with a company through it’s live agent who is ready to procure my size shoe, my flavor ice cream, my prescription, my insurance policy. That’s the moment we must learn to seize in the online world too.  Instant, satisfying, personal, and human.  

To that end, real-time conversations begin well before a customer makes that ever important decision to choose a particular brand in a specific location.   At home or anywhere for that matter a consumer is connected and collecting information, price shopping, interacting in conversations about product and service benefits and complaints.

It was consumers who dragged marketers into the contact center.  However, it wasn't social media that began the call to action into the contact center. Retail provides us a blueprint into the new consumer ecosystem.  Consumers retail buying habits evolved, transformed by the convenience of e-commerce and mobile/ smartphone applications and secured a place in nearly every market and throughout every buying cycle.

Consequently, customer service has taken on an additional role in the information gathering and purchase stages of the buying cycle. Agents now shop with their new-found friends in both virtual and brick and mortar outlets using chat, multi-browse, and intelligent content delivery. For the most part, marketing does not participate in this part of the conversation.  Stove-piped from operational decisions in the past, the costs associated with marketing became the opportunities lost in the new value chain, created by the web and reinforced by mobility.

Romeo and Juliet, we know their fate...but this story needn’t be tragic.  

No company can risk their customer’s satisfaction when you can make smarter cross functional decisions.  Real time customer feedback and inputs can come from many channels.  In fact  customer care departments participation increases the value of marketing activities exponentially. Conversely, contact center data collection and interactions become more valuable when marketing can utilize it before creating the next programs or promotions.  

Investments in customer satisfaction and intimacy can be leveraged to support measurement tools used by Customer Experience and Contact Centers to deliver insight to their end users.  So you can measure the conversations that transpire in any channel, with holistic rather than stove piped approaches. Make your wealth of knowledge relevant, dynamic, and available anywhere, anytime.  At the very least you’ll deliver better customer service and learn something about what our customers want.  

 

 

 

 

"Won't you please, please help me," where and when and how I want...

The Beatles had it right  when they sung Help!  Truly, when I was younger I did't need much help, but now that I am older and my priorities have changed in "oh so many ways," I expect not more but different asssitance than even a few years ago.  Organizations employing web-based tools at appropriate service levels can succeed in meeting customer expectations and decreasing shopping cart abandonment rates. However, web self-service alone does not take care of the customer all of time.  Across most demographic segments over half abandon forms online and half of those never intended to fill them out. But engaging a low return customer in exchange for the high value customer ready to purchase is too steep.

Web customer service and sales should keep an eye out for a customer sending the subtle ques just as in traditional brick-and-mortar establishments. Channels such as mobile  and web self-service require none, if only sometimes light human intervention and thus provide more cost-effective results than phone interactions.  But, as we all well know vertical markets exhibit different innovations in this area depedning upon the maturity of the martket, the level of competitive threats they face, and the average value per customer each interaction is worth.

For instance, high-value customers in financial services face more complex tasks and may require more hand holding and assistance online than self service tools can provide.  In this case, combining online assisted service with full agent intervention by phone improves customer loyalty and gives agents the ability to leverage the power of an enterprise’s website.

Also, the insurance vertical, especially auto, health, and homeowners, shows a vast displacement by web customer service of the customer lifcycle.  The reuslt:  the near extinction of the in-person neighborhood insurance agent due to the lower cost of web and mobility based tools but the changing demographic and the newly moneyed consumer’s wish do engage online.  Insurers face losing precious revenue if they don’t figure out the right balancing act between live and assisted customer care tools. 

In retial, when a customer browses for a pair of shoes in a store, the sales clerk doesn't have access to personal choices such as language or other data-centric preferences.  Uniquely, web-based tools provide the combined benefits of the cost savings of other web-based channels while simultaneously delivering the richness of realtime interactions.

When I want assistance it's become expected and goes beyond personalization.  Revenues depend ont it, "and I do appreciate you're bein' 'round," but don't suffocate my ability to feel a sesnse of privacy when I want.  It's a hard formula to perfect.  Likewise, transforming  the purchasing experience could transform into the loyalty of an engaged consumer vs. an abandoned shopping cart and a missed opportunity to win a new customer.

Licensed to Kill Boundaries... Silos, customer care, and the case of the DMV

 

 “The declining effectiveness of traditional marketing tactics, consumer privacy legislation, and the desire to use every interaction to deepen the customerrelationship are driving marketing and service together. Contactcentersshould relinquish control over the customer interaction — viaphone,email, chat, direct mail, or self-service — to amarketing executive who ownsand manages the overallcustomer experience.”

 

ForresterResearch’s report, “Why Marketing Should Own the Contact Center,” illustrates, albeit polemically, the current tension and the tug of war for customer experience ownership.  Traditional models ofmarketing and care do not meet the expectations of mobile, savvy end-customers. 

That report’s publication date:  April 2004.  Fast-forward to2011 and the fundamental underpinnings that prompted Forrester in 2004 still hold true. But marketers and contact centers face far more complex systems and interactions and new channels including mobile applications and social media. Did anyone predict in 2004 that we’d face relatively new fields of CRM study and measurement entirely with Social Media becoming so influential on consumer behavior and brand awareness? 

 The ever-increasing adoption of socially connected content combined with search engine generated content demands that marketers reconsider their knowledge management strategy.  Search Engine Optimization and standard online ROI models, e.g. Net Promoter scores, work for “produced” content in a widely adopted model of commercialization.  We’ve yet to agree on new standards of measurement and there’s no good way to derive the return on listening to the conversations of the unpredictable “social” voice of the customer.

The value of marketing jumped significantly when enterprises recognized their investments in the web, hadn't only increased their customer's vocal power but also their buying power.  In most cases corporate marketing and marketing communications departments set the strategy and spent the budget for social efforts. As a precipitant, Social CRM applications developed as a way to harness the power of the voice of the customer as it moved from controlled programs to the wilds of the Twitter-sphere.  Forrester, “ CMO’s Must Connect the Dots of the Online Brand,” April 2010

It was consumers who dragged marketers into the contact center.  However, it wasn't social media that began the call to action into the contact center. Retail provides us a blueprint into the new consumer ecosystem.  Consumers’ retail buying habits evolved for the convenience of ecommerce and mobile/ Smartphone applications and the new channels secured a place in nearly every market and every buying cycle.

Contact with companies is more intimate: I am walking the aisles of a store WITH a company in hand. Real-time conversations begin well before a customer makes that ever-important decision to choose a particular brand in a specific location. At home or anywhere for that matter a consumer is connected and collecting information, price shopping, interacting in conversations about product and service benefits and complaints.  The lifecycle reaches far beyond our traditional notions of customer interactions. (See Forrester’s Online Branding orchestration table.

Consequently, customer service has taken on an additional role in the information gathering and purchase stages of the buying cycle. Agents now shop with their newly found mobile friends in both virtual and brick and mortar outlets using chat, multi-browse, and intelligent content delivery. For the most part, marketing does not participate in this part of the conversation.  Stove-piped from operational decisions in the past, the costs associated with marketing became the opportunities lost in the new value chain, created by the web and reinforced by mobility.

 No company can risk having their data and their customer satisfaction degenerated when smarter cross-functional decisions.  Increasingly organizations require robust knowledge management platforms to help guide self-service and to personalize the customer experience for consumers who are very eager to have a conversation.  And for employees to have the voice and training required to meet the new demands.

 Real time data comes from many channels and when in the hands of customer care departments increases the value of cross channel marketing activities and can exponentially improve the ROI of Social CRM. Data collection and interactions throughout all the customer touch points have the value of becoming increasingly more personal and more relevant.  Extensive customer inputs can give a company the power to have dialogues using dynamic, continually evolving content repositories supported by robust knowledge management foundations. 

All the events, conscious and sometimes unconscious, equate to what’s widely known in both marketing and CRM circles as Customer Experience.  Customer Experience doesn’t simply occur at the point of sale.  It happens before and after, as we have seen time and again. We can all think of times when, for instance, our expectations weren’t met.  We’re used to not getting great care from government agencies, therefore it’s not uncommon for a consumer of a state’s services to have low expectation.

At the government level we do expect great Knowledge Management.  Although invisible to the customer, great KM in action creates excellent experiences.  Integrated across organizations, at it’s best Knowledge Management can facilitate cross-functional communications because customer expectations and thus experience should transcend traditional barriers between internal departments. 

These same investments in customer satisfaction and intimacy can be leveraged to support measurement tools used by Customer Experience and Contact Centers to deliver insight to their end users.  So you can measure the conversations that transpire in any channel if the approach becomes holistic rather than stove piped - the same corporate tactics that kept marketing and customer care at the other side of the building for years.

The Case of the DMV

 When KM doesn’t work or works poorly, the visible effects to customers include frustration and worse the decision to not only abandon the notion of doing business with a company but also to speak out and have their complaints heard via word of mouth and social channels. The associated costs to any organization far exceed the loss of the transaction.  An unlikely candidate for illustrative purposes is the state DMV.

Renewing our auto registrations is something we can all relate to and very few of us will retell stories of delight.  Typically the experience is described as either a bad or neutral at best.  Traditionally marketing hasn’t participated in state initiatives and most CRM practitioners can relate this experience to KPIs like first call resolution and cost per call.

We can even derive the basic tenants of KM, CRM, SCRM, cross channel integration and brand through the DMV of any given state. 

Several underlying assumptions to keep in mind:

-       Even the DMV delivers on a brand promise and exhibits brand values.

-       Twitter and Facebook (as well as YouTube and other social media channels) provide DMV customers with a variety of educational and customer service tools.

-       DMV’s typically have extremely well documented individual data therefore customers have very high expectations of identification and verification processes.

-       Mandates from the US state government as well as state level initiative require that agencies reduce customer paperwork, improve green initiative metrics, and reduce cost per transaction and require higher customer satisfaction for each department as a result.

In the last several years the broad adoption of electronic payments changed the expectations of most consumers and reflecting this behavior shift the letter that arrives for auto renewal from our state DMV broadcasts in bold letters how easy it is for us to PAY BY INTERNET OR PHONE and provides a corresponding web address and toll-free number to call. 

Several failed attempts at using the DMV’s ecommerce portal prompt a call to the toll free number in order to process the renewal. The IVR presents an option for Virtual Hold, a proven way to improve customer experience and customer satisfaction.  However, the optimal experience might have obfuscated the more costly and less efficient phone channel if a combination of easy to use knowledge based tools were available.  Dynamic search/ FAQ as well as live chat or virtual chatbot online to drive up usage of the web site and increase customer satisfaction for a less frustrating overall experience.

Furthermore, the customer may have several possible IDs at this point in the transaction: web site error code and case number, the renewal notice transaction number, their state ID (driver’s license in this case), the automobile’s tag number, or even the auto registration number.

The IVR does not present options that mirror the most recent web ecommerce experience nor does it give prompts for renewal options, as the original notice advertised.  Finally, the CSR informs the customer he’s unable not able to process a payment over the phone and mail would be the final option.

For some, this meets expectations.  However, experience tells us that corresponding measurements and the tools available likely as anything have disparate oversight departments and suffer from lack of collaboration.  No mandate changes culture.  The end result is fragmentation, lower ROI and higher customer frustration. The implications of the ID conundrum speak to a back office nightmare that no one would dream of untangling.

Make your wealth of knowledge relevant, dynamic, and available anywhere, anytime.  At the very least you’ll deliver better content and learn something about what our customers want to know about us if we do.

 

 

2012 The Year of Critical Enterprise Interconnections

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.  

 

Cable's Future Demise: Greatly Exaggerated? Maybe not.

Cable's revenues derrived from advertising still comprise about 1/3 of the MSO's intake, a little north of $27B in 2010 (NCTA.com).  But the growth of installations of headends slowed significantly last year as well, not because the internet had stolen it's wallet share but IMHO due to market saturation and customers dissatisfaction.

When mobile phones took over the rural US, there were still black phones in the kitchen - Ma Bell had strongholds that we'll never see again with the slow migration to mobile.  No, we'll not find the artifacts of an old Scientific America set top box in the bedroom, or a DISH sitting atop the barn in 20 years.  We shouldn't forget however, that these content providers became content enablers when Comcast, TimeWarner and the lot decided together, as they always do, to overbuild the PSTN's outdated and underpowered local infrastructures to bring us broadband.  

I suspect that Brian Roberts and others have a card or two up their sleeves.  There's only a small handful  of companies granted that kind of access to our homes, and never underestimate the power of having a foot in our front doors.  However, the Cable industry faces a significant challenge with the slow entry into the mobile content market.  Additionally the MSO's consistently rank very poorly in customer satisfaction and customer experience surveys.  And that's year in year out of screaming, yelling, aggrivated customers waiting impatienly for the cable guy to arrive sometime between 9 a.m. and next Yom Kippor.   I remind you of the Comcast Cable Guy Sleeping video on You Tube: http://youtu.be/CvVp7b5gzqU

It's not very often that there's a direct correlation to infer between customer satisfaction and revenues so blatant and clear.  The message: customers won't mind hunting and pecking for content in an unbundled, mobile sea online if the infrastructure and convenience of cable doesn't sit on top of a more customer centric foundation.  

Apple TV anyone? 

Inspired by a link from John Battelle's FM Blog <http://bit.ly/nhoOBD > His Monday Signal links and accompanying short commentary I find informative and funny. Subscribe to the RSS - worth it's place in your reader of choice.

Marketing Departments Care... Really.

The ever increasing adoption of socially connected content combined with search engine generated content demands that marketers reconsider their online knowledge management strategy.  The value of marketing jumped significantly when enterprises (including Service Providers) recognized their investments in the web (generally via the marketing and marketing communications departments) hadn't only increased their customer's vocal power as well as their buying power.  Social CRM applications dragged marketers into the customer care front whining all the way from old school ROI models to newer, unproven sandboxes.  However, it wasn't social media that began the call to action into the contact center. 

Retail provides us a blueprint into the new consumer ecosystem.

Retail customers' behavior has already embraced the web and mobile applications as part of their buying cycle. Contact with companies became more intimate: I am walking the aisles of a store WITH a company in hand.  Our "discussion" didn't just take place after I buy something and I needed help. Conversations with companies begin at home on a PC or tablet connected to the web when I collect information before I ever enter the doors of an establishment.  Post purchase our dialogue continues with the contact center, and doesn't generally begin there as it did in the past.  Consequently, customer service has taken on an additional role in the information gathering and in the purchase stages of the buying cycle. Agents now shop with their new-found friends at brick and mortar outlets. But are CSRs prepared for consumers who price shop using connected applications to read UPC codes and other ID mechanisms?  

Further, the convergence of revenue and cost center confuses some companies.  Cross channel communications, while a great cost benefit in general, can also become a long term revenue drain when brand suffers from channel inconsistency or subpar CSR training. While marketing didn't participate in the conversation before now and was stove-piped from operational decisions in the past, the costs associated with marketing became the opportunities lost in the new value chain, created by the web and reinforced by mobility.

No company can risk having their data and their customer satisfaction degenerated when smarter cross functional decisions can easily be made utilizing tried and true enterprise content management techniques and applications combined with the social inputs that can help drive a richer experience for consumers and for agents and other constituents. Increasingly organizations require robust knowledge management platforms to help guide self-service and to personalize the customer experience for consumers who are very eager to have a conversation.  And for employees to have the voice and training required to meet the new demands.

Make your wealth of knowledge relevant, dynamic, and available anywhere, anytime.  At the very least we'll deliver better content and learn something about what our customers want to know about us if we do.

 

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Analysis and User Experience Design

Heuristic and  qualitative analysis provide beneficial, multi-faceted customer experience data across the multitude of communication platforms, UIs, contact centers, out of box experiences, and so on. Human interactions are nuanced and complex.  Surveys cannot capture nor measure how someone interacts with a product, service, or company. Observation and expertise prevail with richer data to assist user experience designers and practitioners.

Surveys immediately bias the data away from experience and more towards influencing opinion. Although in the past surveys provided statistics and charts for PowerPoint decks and business plans, today surveys for user experience provide only some insight into how customers "feel." If you peek behind a customer experience survey-based analysis, often times statistical bias blemishes the best of intentions.

One example that I recall illustrates how bias can start even before the customer begins to check the boxes: the survey was provided to prepaid (non-contract) mobile users via email. Most of the demographic of the companies compared in the study didn't use email. The results were so biased that price alone seemed to be the real experiential care-about and all that mattered. Hurts consumers, markets, companies, and so on. That's an extreme example, I admit. But I am biased.

Recently, a few established customer experience practitioners took pot shots at the larger research and consulting organizations because  they claimed there was a lack of quantitative survey data in their analysis.  Experts who exhibit this kind of behavior erode the foundational underpinnings of newly formed and growing corporate Customer Experience programs.  A market that's rich and ready become part of the fabric of many enterprises, large and small. Cooperation and best practice sharing should prevail  and the methodologies utilized by trusted firms such as Forrester and Gartner should not become the targets of self serving editorials.  

Yes, surveys still remain an important part of measuring sentiment, however, it's very hard to quantify the je ne sais quoi of customer experience.

Social Media for Dummies?

Smart enterprises view social media as an integral part of their overall customer experience management programs.  At the very least, most companies regognize that it's a good idea to protect their brands by staking claim early to their @mycompany on Twitter and have a page posted on Facebook.  Few big, recognizable brands left their online reputations to fate on the major social outlets, although some poor soul will go directly to marketing hell if they didn't point their organization in the right direction. Certainly every company plans tp develop their presence via Facebook, Twitter, and even local outposts like Yelp! (especially if your business has multi-market brick and mortar presence.)  Right?

Yes, there's a lot to worry about.  But fear not - even the best social marketing pundits and practioners aren't omniscient, omnipresent gods, and no one expects you to read "Social Media For Dummies" and become an expert overnight. 

Most esteemed social media experts and marketers who have any opinion on the topic advise you to become "content curators" and become part of the conversation with your consituents. Control as much of your brand message as possible, and  listen, as if it's a call to your  contact center, to the streams of messages your customers share with you  - and with one another.  

What happens when and irate customer calls your contact center?  Are your Customer Service Reps trained and empowered, like at Zappos.com?  Do your sales people take action when they get a warm lead from a trade show, or does that pile of business cards sit on an event marketer's desk collecting dust?  If a company didn't have escalation paths for complaints or tracking mechanisms for sales leads before social media became top of mind, what do you expect to change when you do make use of these tools?

Sentiment analysis, semantic analytics, and other tools, aren't much good if you don't have the right people, processes, programs, and plans offline to deal with the data you're going to receive. Nor will hiring an individual to become a key stakeholder in your company who is a full time blogger, content curator, tweep, customer care phenom, brand marketing ambassador, and B2B and B2C marketer with over 10 years of experience working as an SME in an enterprise just like yours, oh and who is a futurist with experience in leading teams across matrices.  (Have fun with that.)

Have a plan. Hire good people who "get it" but don't set them up to fail.  Learn from experts who understand the technology and the tools available, and form trusted advisor relationships in and out of your vertical market.  And begin at the beginning.  New social marketing provides organizaitons, large and small, the opportunity to do some customer-centric re-tooling with your eyes and ears open and the world ready to tell you what they think.

 

Can you get too personal? Contact centers evolve...

“Hello!  It’s fantastic to hear that you rolling out your new offshore call center. I’ve been thinking about our discussion last week, and the high touch model talked about really coincides nicely into my next Nuance blog post…”

I launched into an email to an old business associate who works on the cutting edge of outsourcing and often seeks to get inputs and vet his ideas – now via his social network where we reconnected recently on LinkedIn. His current venture in outsourced customer service for technical support creates value through applying something radically new, yet suspiciously old. This direction may reflect the direction many customer service contact centers may need to head towards – with fewer, highly trained, empowered specialists. My friend just launched a contact center focused on, “smaller projects, which are low volume but need a high-touch approach.”

This model, while seemingly expensive and not very profitable at first glance, is a model contact centers not prevalent today, may insure the future of your customers experience with your brand as the calls that do get to an agent become fewer but more complex. Evolving contact centers will at first augment the current business processes including home agents, as well as other channels available to your customers such as mobility.

The current economic and technologic climates require this move towards one to one care. For most enterprises 2/3 to a full 3/4 of people who interact with banks, airlines, telcos, mobile carriers, eTailers, work with them over the web. Additionally, mobile and web payments are becoming more and more distributed to the edge where the individuals sit and data is distributed channels across individual networks (see iPhone apps like eTerminal...) Consumers simply need this high touch, high specialized agent that everyone would have thought only good for Zappos.com about 18 months ago.

But in the end, companies that don't adapt and evolve more quickly can risk losing an opportunity or change. And change they shall, because overall experience matters more than ever.

 

Originally Posted on http://community.nuance.com/blogs/expertsblog/default.aspx

Virgin America vs. Southwest: Experience the Difference

Most likely you’ve flown Southwest Air, and if you anything like me, I LUV them because of price and convenience of scheduling on flights under 500 miles. I like Southwest, and indeed sometimes I love them because the get me home on nights when sometimes I never expected to sleep in my own bed because they’re flexible. Okay. They also do the cattle call boarding style which sometimes I don’t mind, but sometimes I really do – like when I’ve been on the road, and I’ve run to the airport and I am kind of starving from the whole day and they have…lanes of numbers and peanuts. I’ll be fine…oh; I forgot to send that email to the client. Now I am forced to make a personal decision:  to choose between getting home and sending that important email.

If given a choice I want to get a glimpse of that violet hued mood lighting on sleek, cool but warm and friendly Virgin America. I would take great seats and cool colors, and good food (at least for purchase) and WiFi any day over brown and orange colors, and relatively unsexy uniforms and cattle call lines – because I got all of what I needed (price and route) and lots of what I wanted (such as something to eat after a long day) from Virgin America.

Virgin wooed weary travelers in the US market with the promise of entertainment and atypical libations like Absinthe. I, like any self-proclaimed hipster, would fly the same route for the same or lower price to get a feel of that Virgin touch. Or even the curious first time flyer that chose the flight because they were price conscious. What a perfect opportunity to start getting Southwest Air out of the first class cabin and into stowage: Virgin flew both brand aware and brand curious and those that just thought Richard Branson their hero or massive hot air balloon (I am pretty sure Virgin has those, too, by the way – that is hot air balloons). Virgin America flew people to their destinations beginning to end, with great experiences and great brand expectations met.

Virgin does very well across channels, too: online, offline, on the mobile handset, in the air - you can connect to satellite Internet. They sell consistently branded, highly market aware customer happiness and that allows them to come in and hoard a demographic away from a huge incumbent. Yes, granted they have very highly recognizable brand, but they don't rest their reputation in that it is also a source of customer expectations. 

And sure, as we watched their books and record stores shut down, it saddened me to lose them and those great books they’d get into the music stores and the café and the great coffee. However I had another great brand who were picking up the slack nicely across two sectors - music (Apple’s iTunes) and books (Amazon.com).  And I don’t miss Virgin for that any more, something new and better came and took my attentions away with a better experience.

Originally posted on http://community.nuance.com/blogs/expertsblog/default.aspx

Zappos.com and the "WOW" Customer Experience

In preparation for an in-depth analysis of Customer Experience and its connection to customer loyalty and satisfaction, the Nuance Creative Services team decided to take a look at online-based or "non-brick and mortar" companies that:

• Consistently rank high in customer satisfaction surveys
• Provide top-notch customer service and customer experience
• Deliver brand attributes effectively across multiple communication channels
• Participate in social media and value its contribution to their business

Zappos.com met these criteria. "We're a service company that just happens to sell shoes," is ubiquitously stated on their main web site, micro sites, blogs, Twitters, and corporate communications.

Now, I love shoes, and the selection on Zappos.com rates very highly with women (size 8.5, black) shoe lovers like me.  Using better judgment during my workday, I ordered the Zappos.com 2008 Culture Book to gain insight to understand what Zappos culture has to do with their "WOW"-erful customer experience.   What happened next is a true story.

Three copies of the book were left in inventory and I snapped them up. I received tracking data via email immediately.  The next day when we opened the well-branded Zappos.com box - but only one copy of the book arrived.  A problem turned into an excellent opportunity to live their brand promise.

I called Zappos.com and I heard real human voices.  The IVR personas were actual customer-care employees.  Two happy employees offered their names, declared it a great day at Zappos, and then tag-teamed the readout of the four IVR options. (When I called back to check on my order later in the week there were two different employees' voices recorded for the IVR.)  Participation in all aspects of care allows CSR's a sense of ownership - happy, empowered people translates to cost avoidance in the contact center and beyond. 

Critical to note - no store fronts usually equate to no human interaction unless I have a problem - the more human a company without walls, the more it can "WOW" it's customers.

Opting to speak to an agent, I was immediately connected to Giovanna. She was extremely courteous and genuine.  Once I was identified by name and email address (easy to remember) she acknowledged that I've been a long-term customer and that I must really love them because I had ordered the Zappos.com Customer Culture book.

She then proceeded to upgrade me to "VIP Customer" status to make up for my inconvenience.  The VIP program gives me free overnight shipping for life and a special number to call for customer care. While I was on the phone with her, she had me log on to the exclusive site.  Bookmark it, she advised me, and bookmark it I did.

This example of data flow and channel consistency gave me confidence in Zappos.com to deliver. Free overnight shipping for life? Shoes, glorious shoes..."WOW" experience now equates to another loyal customer.

She physically went go over to their internal supplies department to get two copies of the book and sent them to me at no charge...no second guessing, no blame game, no hassles. I realized the Zappos.com Customer Loyalty Team is not scripted, and not monitored. They're empowered to serve me as a human being.

 "WOW" Customer Experience. The human need to be acknowledged and heard really matters to Zappos.com.

I do not suggest that every company can scale this level of care.  The best practices and lessons learned can drive creative thinking throughout your communications channels and "WOW" your customers...driving up sales, reducing operational costs, reducing churn, even getting your brand highlighted for it's outstanding customer care.  It's all in the Experience.

P.S. - Zappos.com was purchased by Amazon.com as I write this post. In February of 2009, BusinessWeek published its annual report ranking the "Customer Service Champs:" Amazon ranked #1 and Zappos.com #7.   

Stay tuned for my next post:  The Changing Voice of the Phone Bank:  the trends in mobility and online self service, and how financial institutions can re-imagine the Voice Channel Experience to meet and exceed their customers' expectations.

 

Originally posted on http://community.nuance.com/blogs/expertsblog/default.aspx

Social Branding: Farmers, Farmville and Facebook

Today, very few of us can deny that social media has broad based influence on brand awareness.  Specifically, social gaming really has impacted enterprise customer experience - evidence Farmville. Facebook, the number one social networking site on the internet, most certainly influences consumer brand experience through targeted and "personalized" ads based on a user's "likes" as well as other criteria. Therefore, as the most popular application across most operating systems, according to The Nielsen Company, Facebook's multimodal and multichannel ubiquity indeed provide enterprises a very enticing advertising platform.   

Gartner's top end user predictions for 2010 states very clearly a statistic that cannot be ignored by any B2C company:  "Facebook-already the largest social network community-is expected to rocket to more than a billion (active users) by the end of 2010. More than 15,000 websites, devices and applications have implemented the Facebook Connect APIs and protocols to interface with Facebook. This interoperability will become critical to the success and survival of other social networks, communication channels and media sites."

The impact of Facebook cannot be ignored by enterprises. Social advertising and branding has reached new, and at times, strange heights. Thousands of new advertising schemes and ploys hit social sites every day. Some brands' cobbled together "social media strategy" does little more than leave a consumer going "huh?" One might relate the social advertising phenomenon to the recent days when iPhone apps sprouted like weeds and enterprises considered an iPhone app a good enough representation for their organization's "mobile strategy." It wasn't as most found out. They required a well thought out, long term approach to mobility and application development. We'll see the same in the coming months as the social gaming advertising market takes off. One promotion or even a fan page does not equate to a strategy. 

On the brighter side, an example of a well executed, targeted social networking-based brand promotion and advertising comes from Farmer's Insurance. On Facebook while playing Farmville (approximately 80M active users - giving advertisers more eyeballs than the Super Bowl), we virtual agriculturalists were given a gift of a Farmer's insurance branded dirigible to float above our Farmville spreads. The blimp's presence provided insurance for my crops: no withering of un-harvested plots for about two weeks. Of course, we all took the blimp. We spend our hard earned Farmville coins and cash to sow our seeds, and Farmer's could insure that we'd be able to reap what we sowed.

Simultaneously, Farmer's Facebook Fan page touted a contest for Facebook fans to win a ride on the Farmer's blimp (now Farmer's have my name and email address and me as a "fan"). Just after signing up for the promotion, Farmer's sent me an invitation to get an immediate quote from one of their agents (now Farmer's knows where I live or at least my zip code). Pretty slick for Farmer's - a fairly staid brand in my demographic of females age 35-45. Now, imagine the impact on customer care for Facebook or Farmer's or Zynga (the company that produces Farmville) if the no-wither feature they promised doesn't work. Now, you've got a bad brand experience and potentially a bunch of complaining, and vocal consumers.  

Well, of course I forgot that my crops would begin to wither again after the two week period had elapsed. I'd not received an email reminder from Farmer's or Farmville or Facebook alerting me to the fact that I should remember that the insurance policy for my crops was about to expire. They could have offered me a chance to perhaps "buy" the high flying protection again, and I'd have been fairly happy. However, I instead received an email that my crops had dried up. Of course, Farmer's allowed me to keep the flying billboard as decoration for my acreage. I got rid of the blimp post haste.

More evidence of this phenomenon comes from a mobile broadband provider, 3UK a service provider with about 1 million customers today. 3UK is experiencing substantial traffic increases which the company directly correlates to Facebook, and specifically Farmville. "With gaming on Zynga and Facebook the profile is very different [from the traditional profile of a 25-35, console-buying male], and much more female and over 35s," said Charlotte Blanchard of 3UK in an interview with The Guardian. However, 3UK like many Service Providers, have no immediate plans to provide support to customers who want to jump into the social gaming space. 

So, who get's the call when my crops wither and die?  Zynga? The Service Provider? Facebook? Or do I get frustrated and blame Farmer's for not living up to their promise? Farmer's in this case would suffer the most damage to its new crop of potential customers, and they're the least able to support the consumer in this ecosystem. I for one am looking forward to more interesting and brand aware social gaming.  I especially am eager for the day when consumers won't wither in the face of bad promotions or poor experience, but rather flourish in the fertile ground of our new multimodal and multichannel experiences.  

Originally posted on http://community.nuance.com/blogs/expertsblog/default.aspx

Complex Content Networks: The Imminent Customer Care Storm

 

 While you’re reading this: another consumer bought a new wireless handheld device. Perhaps she made a call to her sister to test out the voice commands on the headset she bought online to go with her “phone”  - and to tell her about her new car. While on the call used her multifunctional device to snap a photo and sent the MMS to her sister. Before her drive home she paired the device via Bluetooth with her car.  As she drove, she asked the GPS system in her vehicle to locate the nearest bakery.  She listened as the voice over the car’s speakers read out four bakeries in the area. She then said, "call Abigail’s”… RING….

Sound familiar?

Which company, as described in the scenario above, does a customer call should her directions not get delivered to her immediately? The device manufacturer or the content provider? Now, more than ever, enterprises need to re-think customer experience before they’re drowning in complaints and questions that may not pertain to their products or services. 

Our mobile-enabled lives permit us access and to content using a multitude of devices with data flowing over many broadband connections from the PAN, LAN, WAN and over global networks. As our customers enter increasingly complex technologies and the ecosystems that allow for the scenario above, the term “customer experience” became just an overused sentiment headlining advertisements and spam emails. Bad timing. “Customer experience” no longer holds the promise of new customer centric approaches. The promise of truly evolved enterprise care departments and the implementation of dynamic self-service applications should not fade into the noisy network.

A tidal wave hit our shores, and water wings won’t cut it. Here's a snapshot in time of the oncoming tsunami as illustrated by a tour of my own household network topology. 17: the number of networked devices on our home LAN today. That’s 17 simultaneously computing machines with 17 IP addresses, 17 connections to a single wireless router, and any number of video, audio, and gaming applications on those devices... 

Drinking down gallons of media on that LAN: six laptops, two Apple TV’s, two Wii game consoles, two iPhones, two iPads, a multi-terabyte server, and two Sony PSPs. All of these access the world over one pipe – a bargain at a mere $75.00 USD per month thanks to our local Cable provider. AT&T provides wireless services for about $150.00 USD per phone per month and we subscribe to three services – Gamefly , Netflix and Hulu Plus each month. We also pay by the drink for content including e-book, video and audio from iTunes, Amazon and others. That’s more companies providing more services into one household than we’d ever considered.

Consumers, creatures of habit and brand aware as they are, will first try to get help from AT&T or Apple when the video doesn't reach the intended handheld screen. We know these companies; therefore it’s also more likely that as a consumer we’ll call one or two of them when our ability to get instant content gratification fails. If the consumer's confused, then what about customer care organizations? They need to know way more than they used to know - and they need to supply support on and off the phone.  Personalized the way a consumer wants when they want it. 

My wireless service provider may not be the company I need to call if an application on my phone isn’t working - but I call them anyway. As a frustrated consumer, I don’t want to hear finger pointing - I want answers. Service providers of today should look to customer care as their beacon to save them from becoming relegated to just the dumb pipes business with too many consumers calling for reasons and increased customer care operating expenses. All those unhappy customers and associated expenses of getting poor care or increasing handle times for services where margins are thin enough. Instead of drowning in a sea of problems, why not see this as a call to action? Perhaps the service providers can answer this call as all the fledgling, flailing companies out there struggle to understand customer care by taking lessons learned and best practices and new experiences and add this to their own offerings. 

Consider a look at Best Buy’s Geek Squad or Apple’s in-store Genius Bars. 1:1 personal care.  Face to face may be great, but this isn’t the only answer. Of course, we don’t staff our home with an IT department.  But the complexity of our household network represents an early view of the big red flag warning of the hurricane approaching as it waves over our roof waiting for someone to say, "How can I help you?"  

 

Originally posted on http://community.nuance.com/blogs/expertsblog/default.aspx

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Airplane Travel Tips - 100 Words or Less - Gadling - StumbleUpon

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