Why Customer Experience? Why now?

Kerry Bodine at Forrester, in a great blog post, writes that “For decades, companies have been promising to delight customers, while simultaneously disappointing them in nearly every channel. That tactic won’t cut it anymore. Why not? We’ve entered a new era that Forrester calls the age of the customer — a time when focus on the customer matters more than any other strategic imperative.”

Here are 3 reasons why now:

• Commoditization has stripped away existing sources of differentiation. Competitive barriers of the past like manufacturing strength, distribution power, and information mastery can’t save you today – one by one, each of these corporate investments has been commoditized.


• Traditional industry boundaries have dissolved. Companies in every industry find themselves competing with new types of competitors – automakers with services like Zipcar, newspapers with Google News, travel agents with Expedia, and the entire retail industry with Ebay.


• Customers have more power than ever. With online reviews, social networks, and mobile web access, it’s easy for your customers to know more about your products, services, competitors, and pricing than you – and to share their opinions of your company with their friends.

Related articles

• Excerpt from Forrester's Outside in (Manning, Bodine, Bernoff) (serve4impact.com)


• For Customer Experience, "Just OK" Is Not OK (fastcompany.com)

Are we big enough to apologize for firing people because of our incomptence, not theirs?

When I read this I was stunned. It is the right thing to admit this, but I have never heard anyone say they fired people and it is because of their own incompetence.

I must confess. I am in the same boat here. Some of the people I've fired were incompetent. Some weren't and I was the problem. In a big organization, sometimes it doesn't seem to matter. To the people it happens to, it does matter.

So here is the challenge. Go back through the last few years. What percent falls into one group or another?

Then think through. What can I do to prevent that from happening next time?

As the year ends you think about your life, your accomplishments, your failures. In my case, as a tech entrepreneur I was thinking, not about the thousands of people I hired in my life through my companies and who did well and sometimes very well, but about the people I have had to fire. These people come in two distinct groups. The ones I had to fire because they were incompetent and the ones I had to fire because I was incompetent.

With the first group I am at ease. But this post is dedicated to the second group. The ones I had to fire because my start up didn't take off as planned. Like the first employees at Fon, we had to fire half of them only to hire others three years later. Like Fon took off, but later. It was hire, fire then hire again. Before at Jazztel the same thing happened: we hired too many, we then had to lay off hundreds and over time Jazztel has gone to an employee count that is at its highest ever. For both Fon and Jazztel, 2012 has been the best years of their existence but this is little consolation to the people I had to fire at the time. To those I owe an apology. My only excuse really is that the life of an entrepreneur is one of trial and error, and in my quest to build great companies I have to give things a try, and sometimes I am dead wrong. And people lose their jobs because of that. And they have families, mortgages, plans, and they suffer.

So here it is: this is an apology to all of those I had to fire in my life because I screwed up, because I failed, because I was incompetent. I am really sorry.

via An Apology | LinkedIn.

How should we measure results for our customer strategy?

Let's talk a little about customer measurements. 2 measures have gained traction in the last few years. One is Net Promoter Score and the other is the Customer Experience Index. We are beginning to experiment in using them. They give us a basis of comparison to public data that is common to many companies today. Please let me know if you have questions. I’ve also included links to additional resources for each one. There is a great book on the Net Promoter Score.

Are we willing to say "no"?

Now this is pretty big I think. And … I agree that we rarely pay attention to it. We must have a focus and that requires saying no to certain things, certain clients, and more.

Self control is the ability to say no, in the face of temptation, and to take sustained action, despite the difficulty of a given challenge. At its heart, self-control requires the ability to delay gratification. More commonly, it's called discipline, or will. Without self-control, we can't accomplish almost anything of enduring value. And we rarely pay much attention to it.

The Skill that Matters Most - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review

What if we focused on building this skill? What results would be different for us?

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How long does it take to change culture?

Think about this. Is it any wonder change management initiatives are so challenging.

Cultural change takes six months per layer in your organization. If you have eleven layers, you won’t live long enough to get anything done.

— Mike Capone, CIO, ADP

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How can we build a culture of learning?

As leaders we should be about the process of learning all the time. Creating a learning culture is not always easy work. How can we build learning activities into our daily routines?



Here is a very good list via Learn From Others | Lolly Daskal.

Exchange roles: Learning is a two-way street. Connecting and exchanging with key stakeholders around shared development challenges catalyzes considerable results.

Collaborate: When we realize we don’t have to acquire knowledge on our own. Collaboration and sharing make it twice as rich.

Find the smartest person in the room: Who’s the local expert on what we need to know? Who’s been in the department or organization the longest and has a long-term perspective? Who has the deepest well of experience for us to draw from?

Mix it up: Engage in multiple levels of learning. Hone your expertise in one area while you’re taking your first steps in another.

Build a support team: It can be hard to see for yourself how your work is paying off and where it might be falling short. Having a support team of trusted people allows you to get feedback and direction.

Read the past: Read and experience as much history, biography, and autobiography as you can. Learning the past leads us toward the future.

Invest in yourself: Take a risk and do something out of your comfort zone. It’s okay to fail. Its okay to take a chance. Start with small steps and build from there.

We learn when we read, what we hear, how we see, the way we discuss, and where we experience our lives.

Most of all we can learn from what we teach others. The purpose of learning is growth, and our hearts are eager for actualization.

Learning is a practice, not an event. Leadership and learning are invaluable to each other.

Make learning inspirational enough for us to dream more, learn more, do more and be more.

Lead From Within: There is a magnet in our heart that attracts growth. Allow the magnet to focus you— to learn from others and lead you deeper into inner growth.

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What do you need to know about persuasion?

If you have never read the classic book Influence by Robert Cialdini, you really should. But you’re also in luck, because the Influence at Work team just released this summary of the six principles of persuasion that the book covers. Spend 11 minutes watching this video - it’s well worth your time.

http://youtu.be/cFdCzN7RYbw

No time to watch? Here’s my summary of the principles and how they apply to people working for a good cause.

1. Reciprocity - People tend to return a favor, thus all those annoying address labels charities send out as a fundraising ploy.

2. Scarcity - Perceived scarcity fuels demand. “Only four memberships are left” prompts action!

3. Authority - People will tend to obey authority figures. What expert can attest to the value of your organization?

4. Consistency - If people commit to an idea or goal, they are more likely to follow through. It’s why pledging is a great option for people who aren’t ready to take action.

5. Liking - People are easily persuaded by other people whom they like. That’s why you want your champions spreading the word about your cause among their friends and family.

6. Consensus - People will do what other people are doing. That’s why it’s great to show who is taking action for your cause - others are likely to conform.

How effective is self promotion?

We all try, to some degree, to promote ourselves. That's why we're all experts at picking out the self-promoters, shameless or otherwise. And that's why self-promotion is rarely effective.

There's a much better way. Here's a story told by the comedian, actor, and author Albert Brooks in Vanity Fair about an appearance on "The Tonight Show:"

There was always that last two minutes where Johnny was asking people, "Thank you for coming--what do you have coming up?" And during the last commercial break Jack Benny leaned over to Johnny Carson and said, "When we get back, ask me where I'm going to be, will you?"

So they came back. Johnny said, "I want to thank Albert. Jack, where are you going to be performing?"

And Jack Benny said, "Never mind about me--this is the funniest kid I've ever seen."

And it was this profound thing. Like, Oh, that's how you lead your life. Be generous and you can be the best person who ever lived.

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What is going away? That is where things are going.

Some days it is hard to fathom the speed at which things are changing. But changing they are. Seth Godin has some good advice on figuring it out. This makes perfect sense.

What is going away frames where things are going.

We remove shelf space as a limiting factor in books.

We remove the cost of polycarbonate as a cost factor in CDs.

We remove paper as an expense in magazines.

We remove the number of channels as a limiter in the broadcast of TV.

These are not small changes. These are revolutionary shifts in what’s scarce and what’s not.

If you are still organized around them, you will fail. If you embrace their removal, you’ve got a chance.

via When you focus on what’s being removed, it’s easier to understand the revolution - The Domino Project.

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What do you do when they don't understand?

 

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] English: American entrepreneur, author and public speaker Seth Godin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]

 

This is a great point. And technology really helps solve the problem. My blog writing tool (Wordpress) has plug ins that recommend links, tags, photos and related articles for me. It is improving my writing (I hope). What used to take a long time to do manually is now speeded up and I can focus on what I want to say.

Many sources, from textbooks to websites, take the position that if you don't understand a concept or a nuance, it's your loss. I think that's an strategic failure on the part of the writer. (I'll give scientists and other professional writers a pass.)

Just recently (a decade or so) we opened two doors that change the way we communicate: we can link now, which means that any time you're worried you've hit something too complex, you can easily link to more data and more explanation, and second, you can keep writing. Length (given appropriate organization) is no longer an issue.

At the same time, there's an onus on the reader to look up words and references that are easily found in a search engine before giving up.

Ikea, then, should quit trying to jam nonsense instructions with no words on tiny sheets of paper and should instead post videos or detailed instructions in native languages online. Annual reports should get significantly longer (with better hyperlinked indexes), not shorter.

No one is going to read the whole thing, ever again. But we need to make it much easier to read the part of the thing that someone really cares about.

via Seth's Blog: What do you do when they don't understand?.

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Guest Blog: Jeb Dasteel (Oracle) - Are Customers Feeling the Love?

Are Customers Feeling the Love?

Guest Blog: Jeb Dasteel, Chief Customer Officer, Oracle

Oracle is not just the world’s largest business-software company; it’s also a disruptive force in hardware with its market-leading Engineered Systems. With more than 390,000 customers spread across 145 countries, Oracle has its hands full. The challenges and opportunities will only intensify as the company continues to introduce powerful new technologies across every one of its product lines, including Fusion, Oracle Cloud, Social Applications, x86 & SPARC Engineered Systems, Oracle Database 12c, and Oracle Solaris 11.

In that context, success for Oracle means success for those customers by finding ways to infuse cutting-edge technologies into every facet of how the biggest organizations in the world operate, plan, and execute – and doing so smoothly and non-disruptively.

Against this broad landscape, I sat down recently with Oracle President Mark Hurd to talk about leadership, teamwork, and customer focus – all of which are becoming indispensable as the interplay between global businesses and their core technology partners becomes not only more strategic but more intimate.

 “We make a significant effort at Oracle to focus the organization on making customers successful in how they deploy Oracle technology and transform their business through IT,” said Hurd. “Technology is complex and our customers run complex businesses. So, fundamentally, our job is to simplify the technology and enable our customers to systematically improve their business operations and also go after real change that can transform how they compete.”

To achieve that objective, Hurd said, Oracle has to have more than just great technology—it also needs “to have the right mindset throughout the organization to truly partner with our customers.” On top of that, the company needs to have superb processes and discipline for engaging with and delivering value to customers, and Hurd said he believes Oracle has developed a unique approach to deliver just that.

“We’re very good at driving commercial transactions,” said Hurd. “Tens of thousands of them every year. Underlying that, we’ve got to have a very consistent way to build and manage relationships. And that’s not an abstract concept of relationships between organizations. I’m talking about people: a relationship between a CEO, CFO, CIO or other top executive and the Oracle team.”

Oracle breaks that process into three parts: listening to customers; responding to their needs, concerns, and business aspirations; and then collaborating with them on the adoption of leading technology that will help them be successful.

Hurd elaborated on each of those steps:

Listening: This includes transactional surveys on how well the company executes specific business processes and obligations; product surveys covering 15,000-plus products; relationship surveys that evaluate account management; dozens of advisory-board meetings each year; and a range of engagements with the nearly 1,000 Oracle user groups encompassing 500,000 members whose aim is to enhance the customer experience.

Responding: “We start with analytics – much like what we tell our customers to do,” Hurd said. “The analytics help us identify key customer feedback themes and then set priorities on how to address those themes.” These analytics include not only the normal customer satisfaction and loyalty measures, but also analysis of customer engagements and how they correlate with satisfaction and loyalty. Oracle extracts from those analyses 10 “customer feedback themes” that are refreshed every six months, with established programs to improve each.

“We also look at addressing individual customer issues very consistently and very fast. Our Support organization is the best in the world,” Hurd said. “We have reactive processes, knowledge bases and tools, and proactive mechanisms that anticipate issues before they even hit the customer.”

Collaborating for Customer Success: “This is really the core of our customer engagement model,” Hurd said. “It gives us the insight and means to manage relationships and truly partner with customers to mutual benefit.” As a result, Hurd and Oracle are able to apply a customer segmentation strategy that “determines exactly how we invest in the success of individual customers – across a very large number of accounts.”

In turn, that model allows Oracle to leverage many different account team resources: key account directors, team leaders, client advisors, and support account managers—all focused in unique ways and applying different sets of skills to help customers be successful. “We have a sophisticated account planning process that looks at the overall customer relationship across a rolling three-year time horizon,” Hurd said. “The account plan is a collaboratively developed approach to assuring the customer’s longer-term objectives are met at the same time that Oracle’s objectives are met.”

So are customers feeling the love? Yes, according to Kim Hammonds, CIO of The Boeing Company. “Oracle is focused on our relationship, but more importantly – they are focused on our business. Our job in IT at Boeing is to use technology to drive productivity, growth and value for our customers. Through their customer focus, Oracle has gained an understanding of our business, our challenges and our technology strategy so they are focused on our needs and our mutual success.”

Procter & Gamble is as well, according to Filippo Passerini, Procter & Gamble Group President of Global Business Services and CIO. According to Passerini, “In the past couple of years Oracle has step-changed their relationship with us. Traditionally focused on pure sales transactions, they are now bringing the right products, skills, and customer-focus to the table, with our success as the objective. It’s a true partnership.”

Are newspapers losing relevance as a news source?

Last week, mobile ad network Mojiva published the results of a survey regarding news consumption of smartphone and tablet owners in the United States. The results of the survey among 2,000 mobile device owners show that computers and television are the primary news source for most respondents. Meanwhile only one percent of smartphone and tablet owners consider newspapers their primary news source. Now that online sources deliver news 24/7, newspapers appear to have lost relevance as a news medium. To avoid obsolescence, newspaper publishers should embrace their new role and focus on in-depth analysis rather than news delivery.

 

http://www.statista.com/markets/14/topic/113/books-publishing/chart/765/primary-news-sources-of-american-tablet-and-smartphone-owners/

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What trends should we avoid right now?

We all love to focus on the hot trends. We think that will lead us the promised land of disruptive technology.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="220"] English: Disruptive Technology Graph (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]

A good focus may be to avoid some of the "hot trends" and focus on so basics that increase our top line.

Here is a potential list to avoid:

• QR Codes


• Big Data


• BYOD


• Gamification


• Consumer Internet Companies

Check out why in this thought provoking article via  5 Trends to Ignore in 2013 | Inc.com.

Don’t Make These Mistakes With Cloud CRM Solutions

There is a huge movement to cloud solutions for the world of CRM. Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics can make easy and cost effective to implement solutions. There are still pitfalls to avoid. This is not your father’s CRM anymore, so don’t make these mistakes:

Trying to develop the “perfect” solution. Cloud CRM brings increased agility and flexibility, making it easier for organizations to tweak and upgrade the system after it is deployed. Unlike in the past, organizations don't have to deploy the perfect CRM solution all at once. Instead, they can deploy a “good-enough” system at first — as long as it is positioned so that the organization can quickly iterate and add improvements after deployment. One of the companies I talked with recommended, "Your organization should not focus on building the perfect solution, but rather on building a decent and sound solution that puts you in a position to quickly and easily improve it after deployment."

Spending too long on key decision points. Be prepared to make decisions quickly in order to drive development sprints, iterate quickly, and plan on the fly. But even though "agile" means that things get done faster, many organizations remain stuck in a traditional planning mentality. "To do agile well, you need to be able to make decisions very quickly and not spend too long on any one decision point." In order to achieve this, organizations must establish governance boards and project teams that represent interests from across the organization and have decision-making power to approve development plans and changes.

Not using information worker personas to guide development cycles. End user personas — similar to marketers' personas for consumer segmentation — are high-level overviews that illustrate how and why a typical user in a specific job role uses the CRM system and what benefits that user will receive from it. An implementation specialist at a professional services firm told me: "You need to consider how to make it easier for the end user to use the system. How can you make this system an improvement on their day-to-day life instead of a distraction?" Another advises: "Use stories to guide development sprints. Make sure that these stories represent the whole business for everyone who is going to touch the system."

Not having the right skill sets. Skilled business analysts (BAs) will become increasingly important as solution governance makes the shift from a focus on application installation to a business-centric process improvement. An IT leader at a financial information services company said: "We always need more BAs. This is a much more important skill set for working with SaaS solutions. We don't really need developers — that skill is less critical now.” BAs need to be skilled in business analysis, but also be trained in soft skills like facilitation, negotiation, communication, and collaboration.

via Don’t Make These Mistakes With Cloud CRM Solutions | CustomerThink.

 

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iPad eclipses iPhone launch

When Apple introduced the original iPad in January 2010, many analysts were sceptical whether the new device could replicate the iPhone’s success in establishing a new product category. Two and a half years and 100 million shipped iPads later, the answer has to be: yes!

Not only has the iPad redefined (or reignited) the tablet market, it even eclipsed the iPhone in terms of launch sales. In the first ten quarters after the iPad’s launch in April 2010, Apple shipped 98.16 million units of its popular tablet. During the same period after the iPhone’s launch in 2007, Apple shipped 33.75 million units of its popular smartphone. I.e. the iPad outsold the iPhone 3 to 1 in its first two and a half years on the market, making it one of the fastest consumer electronics launches ever. 

The recently launched iPad Mini could give iPad sales another boost, as the entry price to Apple’s tablet products dropped from $399 to $329.  This chart shows cumulative global unit shipments in the first 10 quarters after the launches of Apple's mobile gadgets: the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.



http://www.statista.com/topics/847/apple/chart/753/apple-s-mobile-product-launches/

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Who are you not reaching today?

Here is a most relevant question.

Who are you not reaching today? The people and the number is huge relative to your potential business partners or customers. You know it is true. The times are changing. It is no time for business as usual.

Who will keep you in business tomorrow? Now think about it but it is the people you are not reaching today.

Avoiding the big sucking sound of a time waster

We've all been there. Whether it is said explicitly or not, the clear message of the project is "I'll know it when I see it." When you hear or sense this you hear the big sucking sound of a time waster coming on. Invariable it creates an endless cycle of, "hmmmm not quite right." If the architectural drawings, high-heeled shoes or ad campaign doesn't meet their unstated standards, you're back to doing it again.

Sometimes you can make a handsome profit on all the fees you charge to redo things that indulge the ego of the customer, but more likely than not, your time is wasted until they're happy. If you have a client who feels the same way, you can work together to save time and money by being clear with each other about what's wanted. I think helping a client say what they want before they see it is a worthy endeavor.

Here are some good ideas from Seth Godin on how to avoid all this.

1. Do it on purpose. When engaging with a new client, intentionally create an environment where personal taste is described in advance, and as much boundary-building as possible is done when it's cheap to iterate, not at the end when it's expensive.


2. Demand benchmarks. The world is filled with things that are a lot like what you've been asked to create. So mutually identify them. Show me three other websites that feel like what you're hoping to feel like. Hand me a hardcover book that has type that reads the way you want yours to read. Walk me through a building that has the vibe you're looking for...


3. Describe the assignment before you start. Using your words and the words of the client, precisely state what problem you're trying to solve. "We're trying to build something that does a, b and c, and not d..."


4. Then, before you show off your proposal, before you hand in your work, restate the problem again. "You asked us to do a, b and c at a cost of under X. What I'm about to show you does a, it does b and it does c... and it costs half of X." This sort of intentional restatement of the scope of work respects your client by honoring their stated intent, at the same time it focuses your work on the stated goals.


5. Make a decision about whether you want a reputation for doing this sort of focused work. If you do, don't work for clients who don't buy into the process. Over time, you'll earn the kind of clients you want.

via Seth's Blog: Avoiding "I'll know it when I see it".

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Crossing the Innovation Chasm. Does CIO stand for Chief Innovation Officer?

Why does the Innovation Chasm exist? As a CIO, you have been charged with protecting your organization’s valuable assets, and with providing a reliable and stable infrastructure. As a result, you have become the “CI-No”:

• “No, we can’t buy that application you saw in an airplane magazine.”


• “No, we can’t have a new Web site built in two weeks.”


• “No, we can’t do that because it will expose our customer data.”

You could be the CI-No because you were the only game in town: if the business wanted access to technology, they had to come through you. That’s not the case anymore. One of the byproducts of the perfect storm is that the business can now access technology directly from the Cloud without your involvement, and without your knowledge. It happens in companies of all sizes, in every industry, regardless of your IT or security stance. When business has access to that technology, it widens the chasm.

IT has to up its game, and smart CIOs are on a path to help the business use technology to innovate both what they do and how they do it.

Here is a great visual of how to align with the CEO.



via Crossing the Innovation Chasm.

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