Experiment Your Way to Customer Experience Greatness
Innovation at scale. This article makes the argument that despite common assumptions that big businesses are slow businesses, it doesn't have to be that way, especially when it comes to customer experience optimization. The magic is to ensure deep customer empathy: "...when large companies have already done the work of seeing themselves as their customers do, wiring customer voices into decision-making, and driving accountability, they’re set up to use their size to actually speed the pace of innovation in the customer experience and beyond." The results can be innovation, a critical driver of business performance in our hectic times. The article reminds us of the importance of listening broadly inside the enterprise, running concurrent tests and creating easy visibility of innovation efforts across the organization. Structure customer feedback, and experience improvement will come.
Customer Connectedness to Drive 2016 Marketing and Sales Trends
Blogs which forecast the near-future are often a delight. This one, from Vala Afshar of Salesforce.com, has a lot that just resonates as right. Vala positions that customer connectedness - devices everywhere! - will drive an interesting pack of marketing and sales changes. Some are internal to organizations - like the appointment of Chief Revenue Officers with broad responsibilities for cultural shaping to customer centricity and leveraging big data. Others focus on improving the customer-facing position of the organization - including more emphasis on e-commerce and community platforms and sellling. I was intrigued by the "citizen developer" concept, the notion that those without sophisticated software coding savvy will actually disrupt the marketplace with loads of new tools. And finally - the belief is expressed that every organization must implement a better self-service ecosystem, something that taps video, social and web community contact channels. About this latter, I excitedly agree!
Staving Off Desertion of Customers Through Directed and Personalized Customer Journeys
This article reminds us that it is important to engineer customer journeys, with particular emphasis on e-Commerce experiences. The ubiquitous Big Data is of course referenced - but my forays are telling me that we aren't even being pro-active, on websites, of collecting customer insight or information as pages are navigated. There's much we can do without Big Data, and many smaller businesses just won't ever feel inclined to go there. That said, creating personalization opportunities in customer journeys - regardless of the channel - is very important. Those who do will win. Those who don't will struggle.