Share Your Skies With Us

This article looks at the challenge for attention that customer loyalty is encountering in the boardrooms of major banks.  It points out that customers are more savvy, demanding more, and are pretty easily frustrated with efforts that fail to reward loyalty. Loyalty is a long-term play that comes from intimacy with the client's worldview; it focuses less on short-term business outcome optimization if it is to be sustainable. Notes the author, "...We found that people are driven by experiences, so offering a range of aspirational and lifestyle rewards will have a far greater impact than pure discounts or cashback. Access to exclusive events, destinations, restaurants, hotels and services are increasingly important for affluent middle-class consumers."

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.

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!