Friday, January 27, 2012

Customer News of the Week: CRM, CCOs & CMOs, Oh My

As we move into 2012 and start looking forward to the next Total Customer Experience Leaders (TCEL) Summit, we'd like to occasionally share with you some of our favorite resources from around the web on customer experience, customer experience design, and customer-centricity.

Worth downloading if you're struggling to maintain customer loyalty in a “doing more with less” environment: this week on 1to1media, Oracle shared a white paper with subscribers "Lower Costs and Boost Customer Loyalty by Injecting Knowledge into CRM."

Forrester reported that Chief Customer Office roles continue to grow and found that these executives "tend to be senior leaders hired internally and are as likely to come from the operations side of the company as from marketing." It's hardly surprising that this trend continues as "CMOs' No. 1 goal is to increase loyalty among existing customers," according to this piece in Ad Age.

In the world of Customer Experience Management, this sponsored post on CMSWire discussed the ways that loyalty can be driven by a consistent experience across channels. Your brand should be as consistently represented by the smell of the store as by the website.

What were your favorite customer experience links this week? What resources do you turn to?

Like these updates? Follow us on Twitter (where we just passed 200 followers!) or Facebook for industry news throughout the week. 

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Total Customer Experience Leaders Call for Submissions Deadline Extended to 1/27

The Institute for International Research (IIR) presents:
Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit June, 2012 in Boston, MA 

Due to the high volume of submissions, we suggest you submit your proposal early and no later than Friday, January 27, 2012 to Stacy Levyn, Conference Producer at slevyn@iirusa.com or 646.895.7335.

Total Customer Experience Leaders is an event that showcases trends, insights and best practices for measuring, aligning and communicating your customer experience strategy to ensure business relevance.

3 Full Days of NEW Topics 
Day 1:
Customer Experience Design & Measurement • Experience Engineering • Design Management • Redesigning a Program • Analyzing VoC • Data Deployment and Data Dissemination • Social Media Feedback • New Innovative Methodologies • Internal Customer Index Scoring vs. NPS • Enterprise Feedback Management
Day 2 & 3:
Strategic Thinking & Action Planning • Using VoC to Take Actionable Insights • Alignment • Employee Engagement • Monetizing Your Customer Experience • Recovery Strategy • Linkage • Customer Service High Level General Sessions that Focus On: • The Rising Role of the CCO • Innovation & Creativity in Customer Experience • Operational Perspective • Digital Customer Experience • Leadership • Behavioral Economics

Plus! Idea gathering forums following each session topic.

The Audience:
• Individuals within the company responsible for customer experience, voice of customer, customer research • Individuals with direct experience for the customer experience and/or voice of customer collection, dissemination, interpretation and results • Individuals seeking to enhance their own company's capabilities in these areas (become more customer-centric and drive business results through improved customer experience), and willing to help others advance through sharing of best practices and experiences
Speakers receive FREE admission to the conference as well as any pre-conference activity such as workshops or symposium.

Sponsorship & Exhibition Opportunities:
If you are interested in sponsorship or exhibit opportunities please contact Jon Saxe, Business Development Manager at jsaxe@iirusa.com or 646.895.7467.

Interested in Becoming a Media Partner or Featured Event Blogger? Contact Kacey Anderson, Marketing Manager, at kanderson@iirusa.com.

Call for Presenters: For consideration, please email slevyn@iirusa.com with the following information by Friday, January 27, 2012:
• Proposed speaker name(s), job title(s), and company name(s)
• Contact information including address, telephone and fax numbers and e-mail
• Talk title
• The main theme you plan to address
• Summary of the presentation (3-5 sentences)
• Please indicate what is NEW about the presentation
• What the audience will gain from your presentation (please list 3-5 key “take-aways”)
• Previous conference experience
• Short bio Due to the high volume of responses, we are unable to respond to each submission.

All those selected to participate as speakers will be notified shortly after the deadline. Thank you for your interest in the Total Customer Experience Leaders conference. We look forward to receiving your proposal!

Friday, January 20, 2012

Customer News of the Week: Getting Social and More!

As we move into 2012 and start looking forward to the next Total Customer Experience Leaders (TCEL) Summit, we'd like to occasionally share with you some of our favorite resources from around the web on customer experience, customer experience design, and customer-centricity.

Here are this week's picks:
The Social Customer named 2012 "The Year Social Marketing and Social Customer Service Get Cosy" forcasting it as the year that social customer experiences reach maturity where "companies will focus on delivering a complete and consistent customer experience" throughout channels. Plus, NACCM and TCEL favorite speaker Becky Carroll pointed out some great uses of the medium.

Over in our NACCM LinkedIn Group a member shared the following post "Feedback is NOT a sandwich; 'Where's the BEEF?'" regarding the best ways to give feedback to employees providing front line customer experiences. A lively conversation on the topic is still happening if you care to join.

Finding inspiration in new and different places, this week the #PRStudChat on twitter featured Jim Joseph, President of Lippe Taylor, and the author of The Experience Effect: Engage Your Customers with a Consistent and Memorable Brand Experience. Joseph discussed customer experience and loyalty in relation to PR, and you can read a recap of the interview here.


What were your favorite customer experience links this week? What resources do you turn to?

Friday, January 13, 2012

This Week In Customer Experience

As we move into 2012 and start looking forward to the next Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit, we'd like to occasionally share with you some of our favorite resources from around the web on customer experience, customer experience design, and customer-centricity.

Here are this week's picks:
"Understanding and Delivering Customer Experiences that Count", this round-up by Prophet discusses the customer experiences that leaders like Zappos and Starbucks offer and deconstructs the process it takes to get there.

"Courtesy: What Comes Before Customer-Centricity", this blog post on ClickZ explores some great (and fairly easy to implement!) ways to improve your digital customer experience. Be courteous!

"In Chicago, insurance company launches community café for locals". One of my favorite resources for new ideas, this week Springwise drew my attention to "Next Door," a State Farm branded cafe in Chicago that aims to humanize "finances and insurance stuff" by bringing a friendly resource into the community.

What were your favorite customer experience links this week? What resources do you turn to?

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

CALL FOR PRESENTERS: Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit

The Institute for International Research (IIR) presents: Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit, June, 2012

Due to the high volume of submissions, we suggest you submit your proposal early and no later than Friday, January 13, 2012 to Stacy Levyn, Conference Producer at slevyn@iirusa.com or 646.895.7335.

Total Customer Experience Leaders is an event that showcases trends, insights and best practices for measuring, aligning and communicating your customer experience strategy to ensure business relevance.

3 Full Days of NEW Topics
Day 1: Customer Experience Design & Measurement
• Experience Engineering
• Design Management
• Redesigning a Program
• Analyzing VoC
• Data Deployment and Data Dissemination
• Social Media Feedback
• New Innovative Methodologies
• Internal Customer Index Scoring vs. NPS
• Enterprise Feedback Management

Day 2 & 3: Strategic Thinking & Action Planning
• Using VoC to Take Actionable Insights
• Alignment
• Employee Engagement
• Monetizing Your Customer Experience
• Recovery Strategy
• Linkage
• Customer Service

High Level General Sessions that Focus On:
• The Rising Role of the CCO
• Innovation & Creativity in Customer Experience
• Operational Perspective
• Digital Customer Experience
• Leadership
• Behavioral Economics

Plus! Idea gathering forums following each session topic.
The Audience:
• Individuals within the company responsible for customer experience, voice of customer, customer research
• Individuals with direct experience for the customer experience and/or voice of customer collection, dissemination, interpretation and results
• Individuals seeking to enhance their own company's capabilities in these areas (become more customer-centric and drive business results through improved customer experience), and willing to help others advance through sharing of best practices and experiences
Speakers receive FREE admission to the conference as well as any pre-conference activity such as workshops or symposium.

Sponsorship & Exhibition Opportunities
If you are interested in sponsorship or exhibit opportunities please contact Jon Saxe, Business Development Manager at jsaxe@iirusa.com or 646.895.7467.

Interested in Becoming a Media Partner or Featured Event Blogger?
Contact Kacey Anderson, Marketing Manager, at kanderson@iirusa.com.

Call for Presenters:
For consideration, please email slevyn@iirusa.com with the following information by Friday, January 13, 2012.
• Proposed speaker name(s), job title(s), and company name(s)
• Contact information including address, telephone and fax numbers and e-mail
• Talk title
• The main theme you plan to address
• Summary of the presentation (3-5 sentences)
• Please indicate what is NEW about the presentation
• What the audience will gain from your presentation (please list 3-5 key “take-aways”)
• Previous conference experience
• Short bio

Due to the high volume of responses, we are unable to respond to each submission. All those selected to participate as speakers will be notified shortly after the deadline.

Thank you for your interest in the Total Customer Experience Leaders conference. We look forward to receiving your proposal!

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Welcome to 2012: The Year (or Decade?) Of The Customer

I came across this discussion on Focus this morning and thought it would be the perfect way to start off 2012 here on the Customer's 1st blog. 

As we saw throughout 2011, customers are increasingly empowered to share their experiences (be it via Twitter, Mobile Apps, or elsewhere online) leading to the need for a holistic digital customer experience strategy. As we conducted our TCEL podcast series this past summer, this need was repeatedly confirmed by our industry experts.

Going back to the original Focus discussion, the first poster posits "customers are finally feeling their own power. Bank of America and Netflix are two great examples of when customers said "No!"" And it's certainly true that the digital world provides myriad opportunities to do so. This calls to mind my other main takeaway from our Storyteller Spotlight Series and all of our exploration in 2011: that the need to make a more personal, human connection with customers in this highly digitized world (perhaps by "walk[ing] a mile in your customer's shoes.") is more important that ever.

So, will 2012 be the year of the customer? Is this "The Decade of The Customer"? What do you think?

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