Total Customer Experience Leaders: Lowest Early Bird Discount Expires Today

Creating a customer centric culture is essential to businesses of all sizes today. And being customer centric means the entire organization must be aligned. The challenge and opportunity to leverage disparate sets of information into strategic action is a shared responsibility and priority across the board. That is why creating a customer centric culture should be on top of everyone's priority list across the organization.

Join John Cushman, Vice President of Business Marketing, AT&T at the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit, taking place October 3-5, 2011 in Phoenix, Arizona as he delivers his keynote presentation:

Creating a Customer Centric Culture

In this presentation, John will provide attendees with a behind the scenes view of how AT&T is blending people, processes and new technologies like social media, to improve its own B2B customer experiences. Tips on ways to link various touch points in the LEARN-BUY-GET-USE-PAY-SERVICE Customer Continuum will be shared.

You will also learn how to:

• Create a Customer Centric Culture

• Identify areas of opportunity

• Track ROI and measure success

In addition to AT&T, the following companies will also share their inside stories on Measurement & ROI, Data Performance, Operational Metrics and Social Media CRM.

Kelley Blue Book, CVS Caremark, Verizon, AAA Northern California, Rockwell Automation, J.D. Power & Associates, Maritz Research, CPI Card Group, Customer Experience Partners, Customer Bliss, EMC, Forrester, Expedia, Allstate Financial, Peppers & Rogers Group, Pfizer, FedEx Corporation, GE Healthcare, Microsoft Corporation, and more.

Download the brochure to see the full program.
The Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit will enable you to effectively measure, align and communicate your customer strategy to ensure business relevance.

Save $500 off the standard & onsite rate. Register with code TCEL11BLOG here:

We look forward to seeing you this October in Phoenix!
The Total Customer Experience Leaders Event Team

Visit the event webpage.
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Looking at The Apple Customer Experience

It's not breaking news that Apple tends to evoke strong feelings amongst their customers. Indeed, "Apple has led the market for the past few years as one of the most innovative, most loved, and most powerful companies and brands in the world." according to stock market opinion and analysis website Seeking Alpha.

Apple products tend to be innovative and ground breaking, setting the bar high, but challenges like the much-complained-about Apple/AT&T partnership and competing technology available more easily or at lower prices do arise.

It's not just the products building Apple fans. So what is it that Apple is doing right to generate this sort of emotion in its customers?

Unique, coordinated customer experiences
This video below from the Wall Street Journal offers some interesting insights into the Apple retail training process that largely controls customer experiences within the store.


Customer-facing team members such as the "Genuis Bar" employees are trained to solve problems, rather than sell, and employee handbooks provide potential scripts for a wide variety of situations. According to this article on PCMag.com "Apple Store staff is forbidden to correct a customer who mispronounces the name of a product."

The in-store experience also extends to design. Developed by executives such as Millard Drexler, formerly of the Gap, and Ron Johnson (formerly of Target and now moving to JCPenney), Apple develops different stores in unique locations, although each has certain elements in common: an open plan, curved edges, natural materials such as wood, glass, stone, and stainless steel. The stores feel like a larger reflection of the products being sold there.

What can we learn from Apple's customer experience successes? This blog post points out ways to translate Apple's innovation to the restaurant industry, and it's easy to see how a corporate culture that balances innovative ideas with highly coordinated in-store experiences can extend to any industry.

What do you think of these inside views of Apple's training policies? Will the public learning of this negatively affect perceptions of the Apple experience? Share with us in the comments!

Michelle LeBlanc is a Social Media Strategist at IIR USA with a specialization in marketing. She may be reached at mleblanc@iirusa.com.

Breaking Barriers in Total Customer Experience

Much discussion takes place on the nature of the audience when discussing customer experience - is it business-to-consumer or business-to-business? The answer is, it's both: every customer is a real, live breathing person - a consumer who ultimately seeks out experiences that engage his time rather than waste it. In the Experience Economy, many approaches once reserved for the B2C space have migrated to the B2B space as companies realize they are selling to business professionals who are ultimately "consumers."

Join Joe Pine, Author of The Experience Economy and Infinite Possibility at the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit, taking place October 3-5, 2011 in Phoenix, Arizona as he delivers his keynote presentation:

Breaking Barriers in Total Customer Experience

In this presentation, Joe Pine will show you how to create economic value from the experience you create for your customers, featuring examples from many industries that go beyond good and services to staging economic experiences. He will also focus on the increasing use of digital technology, which can make such experiences more efficient and engaging. He will in particular show you how to embrace digital technology in such offerings, creating experiences that fuse the real and the virtual.

Joining Joe at the one event focused on Measuring, Aligning and Communicating Strategy to Ensure Business Relevance are leaders from: Kelley Blue Book, CVS Caremark, Verizon, AAA Northern California, Rockwell Automation, J.D. Power & Associates, Maritz Research, CPI Card Group, Customer Experience Partners, Customer Bliss, EMC, AT&T, Forrester, Expedia, Allstate Financial, Peppers & Rogers Group, Pfizer, FedEx Corporation, GE Healthcare, Microsoft Corporation, and more. Download the brochure to see the full program.

The Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit is the ONLY comprehensive forum for B2B and service oriented B2C leaders to come together for a high level exchange around the issues that matter most.

Register by June 24, 2011 & Save $500 off the standard & onsite rate. Register with code TCEL11BLOG here.

We look forward to seeing you this October in Phoenix!
The Total Customer Experience Leaders Event Team

Follow us on Twitter for more updates: http://twitter.com/TotalCustomer

Connect to Your Customers With Social Media - Free Webinar

In association with Citrix, The Institute for International Research invites you to join us for a one hour complimentary Web Seminar.

Social Business: How to Create a Holistic Approach to Social Media
- Alex Beauchamp, Senior New Media Manager, Citrix Online

Thursday, June 16, 2011 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT

Reserve your Webinar seat now

When it comes to social media, there's no single "right way" to use it for business. Within its channels companies of all sizes can engage with prospects and customers to drive sales and provide services in a variety of ways.

What matters, however, is that the social media experience your business provides be consistent across the board. A holistic approach is the key to a successful social media program.

Join industry expert Alex Beauchamp to understand the many components of social business and learn how to put them all together into a cohesive plan that best reflects your organization's personality and value.

In this webinar, you will learn how to:
• Engage and monitor in the social space
• Use reporting metrics, insights and advocates
• Create social content and execute social campaigns
• And more...

Title: Social Business: How to Create a Holistic Approach to Social Media
Date: Thursday, June 16th, 2011
Time: 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT

Register Now. After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar. This web seminar is sponsored by Citrix.

About Citrix Online:
Citrix Online provides secure, easy-to-use online solutions that enable people to work from anywhere with anyone: GoToMyPC® for remote access, GoToAssist® for remote support, GoToMeeting® for online meetings and GoToWebinar® for larger Web events. A division of Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the company is based in Santa Barbara, California.

About The Institute for International Research:
The Institute for International Research (IIR) is the world's largest conference company and has been the leader in the provision of business information for over 25 years. IIR produces over 5,000 events annually through its network of offices in over 35 countries.

What Do Your Digital Customer Experience Strategy Look Like?

This recent post on Mashable by Ron Rogowski of Forrester Research points out some important reasons that brands need to have a digital customer experience strategy in the current market to stay competitive.

For example, the role of mobile devices. "This suite of empowering devices has driven customer expectations to new heights, and has increased the frequency of interactions between customers and businesses." (Last week's post on Gripe is a good example of this.)

But what makes a good digital customer experience strategy? Rogowski gave some good starting points:

• Start with company and brand strategy.
• Describe the intended digital experience.
• Direct activities and processes that support the defined experience.
• Guide digital channel investments

More than just a website or a twitter handle, a digital customer experience strategy needs to reflect the overall brand strategy and directly support and reflect offline brand activities.

Together, these elements add up to the real key to a successful digital customer experience strategy - seeing the digital world (mobile, social media and web) as holistic extensions of the brand. These digital touchpoints provide core moments to connect and engage with customers to create lifelong brand advocates.

So what does your digital customer experience strategy look like?

Looking to learn more about customer experience? Join us Oct. 3-5, 2011 for the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit. Hear from the top B2B, and service oriented B2C companies on Measurement & ROI, Data Performance, Operational Metrics and Social Media CRM. Download the brochure here.

Plus follow us on twitter for updated information at @TotalCustomer.

Michelle LeBlanc is a Social Media Strategist at IIR USA with a specialization in marketing. She may be reached at mleblanc@iirusa.com.

Is Social Media The Place To Gripe?

This post in the New York Times calls attention to a new application called "Gripe." Gripe is a service that allows users to automatically send customer service complaints both to a company and to their facebook and twitter followers.

The makers of Gripe claim that sending the complaints automatically to all Facebook friends will lessen the likelihood of frivolous claims, and features a "word of mouth power" rating to business owners to clarify how many potential viewers a gripe will have.

Given that many consumers are already turning to social media as a channel to vent their frustrations, it seems it was only a matter of time before an app like this was invented. It does provide an important service to businesses, as it alerts them to the problems immediately where regular complaining on a personal Facebook page could be heard by friends, but not by the offending company.

Still, is Gripe really a necessary service? Will having such a "frictionless" way to complain prevent consumers from following proper channels to settle their complaints first? What do you think?