Where you’re from influences what you say!

Where people are from makes a difference…and likely skews their contributions to collaborative or VOC  systems.

A couple of years ago someone asked me if I was from New York.  The fact is I’m from Chicago but I think I understood what they were saying…I speak like I know what I’m talking about; I know what I want…and probably I intimate that I’d like it right now (please).  

The fact is when you ask your customers what they think their responses may be skewed in tone depending on where they’re from.  Let’s remember voice of the customer response collection systems…in fact any collaborative technology, is still a form of social network and the interactions occurring there should be interpreted with a tempered understanding of the social backgrounds of the participants.

It doesn’t mean you shouldn't believe them nor accept rudeness nor push for more than what you’re getting.

It just means you should at least consider where any given comment is “coming from”.

The USA reflects three different attitudes
For instance people from the US can be divided up into three regions with somewhat predictable responses. 

Those in the Midwest, Great Plains, and Deep South can be relied on to be “people who are, on average, conventional, friendly, sociable, compliant, and emotionally stable.” Just like the voice of the newscaster, you can expect responses to questions to come through on an even keel.  “Gee Whiz!  Us folks from Chicago go to bed early!”

Those primarily from the Western portions of the country are “people who are, on average, creative and relaxed, reserved, and perhaps somewhat socially distant.”   Their responses can be expected to be leavened with a friendly frankness.  “No problemo, mi amigo!”

Lastly those folks from the Northeast can be counted on to be “people who are, on average, irritable, impulsive, and quarrelsome.”  So don’t be surprised when their frankness is less than friendly, it’s just their nature.  “Beep Beep…Move it!”

Extreme Weather can produce Rich Innovators!
I manage the idea management group on LinkedIn and a big chunk of the LinkedIn groups I belong to have something to do with Innovation.  So together with my work (which is international in scope frequently) I get to talk to people interested in Innovation from all over the world.  A couple of years ago I noticed a high percentage of innovative people coming from The Netherlands.

I was motivated to ask a couple of these folks why that was.  Predictably the answer I got was something on the order of “it’s cold here so we spend a lot of time in doors thinking, talking and drinking beer”.  I don’t think that’s quite it.

Studies do show those both affluent and from demanding climates (cold or hot) have the most freedom and opportunity.  Because of this they tend to be open minded and are comfortable seeking risks.  They're creative thinkers who are happy to share their opinions.

Where you’re from makes a difference.
We all work to have a social media “voice”.  Sometimes the collaborative contributions we read in news feeds are affected by the geography of the contributor.  Don’t take offense at the tough guy from New York; don’t think the guy from California is slack; don’t be surprised to get a bunch of creative thought from wealthy people in either Denmark or Saudi Arabia.  Just like Real Estate, when it comes to the Voice of Your Customer the three top important attributes might just be location location location.

Rentfrow, P. et al., “Divided We Stand: Three Psychological Regions of the United States and Their Political, Economic, Social, and Health Correlates,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (forthcoming).
Van de Vliert, E., “Climato-Economic Habitats Support Patterns of Human Needs, Stresses, and Freedoms,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (October 2013).
 

Ron Shulkin blogs, researches and writes about enterprise technology focused on social media, innovation, voice of the customer, marketing automation and enterprise feedback management.  You can learn more about Ron at his biography web site:www.shulkin.net. You can follow him Twitter. You can follow his blogs at this Facebook group.  You can connect with Ron on LinkedIn.   

Ron Shulkin is Vice President of the Americas for CogniStreamer®, an innovation ecosystem. CogniStreamer serves as a Knowledge Management System, Idea Management System and Social Network for Innovation. CogniStreamer has been rated as a “Leader” in Forrester’s recent Wave report on Innovation Management Tools. You can learn more about CogniStreamer here http://bit.ly/ac3x60 . Ron also manages The Idea Management Group on LinkedIn (JoinHere).

Create Unforgettable Customer Experiences like Disney

Since 1923, The Walt Disney Company has been delighting its customers with an enchanting and diverse approach to entertainment. As the envy of marketers across the world, the Disney brand has become a global household name with a mass of dedicated followers of all ages. 

So how exactly does Disney do it? Simple: It focused on the customer.

For years, Disney has worked to really understand its customers and to develop a culture that is centered on the creation of great customer experiences. In today’s competitive marketplace, great experiences drive brand advocacy and revenue improvements.

The Disney customer experience can be replicated, enabling retailers to leverage experiences as catalysts for improved advocacy. The key to replicating Disney’s customer experience is to place the customer at the center of brand culture. By reorienting the brand around customers’ needs and emotions, catering to these preferences, and igniting positive emotional bonding, retailers can achieve outcomes like Disney’s.

By following Disney’s lead, paying attention to the details that matter, retailers can develop customer experiences that wow consumers and differentiate their brands.  According to Retail Customer Experience, here are some ways to make your customer experience as unforgettable as Disney’s:

Show Clarity. Retailers often try to create a first-rate customer experience according to their pre-conceived notions instead of gathering customer feedback. But, the creation of the customer experience must begin by asking the right questions and identifying elements that hit home with consumers. These insights will allow you to use customer intelligence to design a customer experience strategy that reinforces your brand’s appealing qualities.

Amplify Strengths. After you have determined how the customer experience should feel to customers, then you must amplify the volume of your brand’s most desirable characteristics. By magnifying the traits that make your customers feel good about buying your products, you can better align the customer experience with customers’ needs.

Image via dailypix.me

Engage Employees. Employees play a key role in the execution of customer experiences. Like Disney, it’s important to empower your workforce to forge connections with customers around targeted dimensions of the customer experience, equipping them with insights about what draws consumers to your brand.

Outperform Expectations. Great brands go above and beyond for their customers.  In many cases, value-added products enhance the customer experience and play a role in differentiating the brand experience from the competition.

Create Connections. Disney knows how to build long-term, personal relationships with its customers. By understanding customers on a personal level, the brand has converted scores of satisfied customers into brand advocates.

Overall, Disney’s success comes from its ability to create customer experiences that reflect the needs of audiences. By developing a deeper understanding of your customers through feedback mechanisms, you can dramatically improve the impact of your customer experience strategy.

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc. 

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Companies are Lacking Integrating Customer Experience Strategy

These days, most companies are surprisingly still in the early stages of formulating customer experience strategies, according to new research published by Econsultancy, a provider of digital marketing and ecommerce solutions, and CACI, which specializes in assisting brands maximize the value from their customers by delivering a truly integrated, multi-channel experience.

“The sheer difficulty and complicated nature of integrating the customer experience is identified as the single greatest barrier to improving the customer experience. This is a challenge but one that businesses need to overcome,” said Econsultancy Research Analyst Bola Awoniyi in a statement.

The Integrated Customer Experience report, based on a survey of marketers and ecommerce professionals, found that 58 percent of companies are still developing strategies in this area, compared to just 20 percent of companies with a well-developed strategy. And, 15 percent of companies said their strategy ‘is being changed’, but seven percent said there was ‘no strategy’. This is despite nine in 10 companies saying there is at least some level of organizational commitment to delivering an integrated customer experience.

“For the majority of organizations the challenges to overcome have remained similar. What is new is that the impact of these challenges is accelerating with the increase in channels, data and organizational silos,” said Matt Hey, director of Consulting at CACI.

The research is based on a survey in June and July 2013, to examine how organizations approach an integrated customer experience, and what marketers regard as factors for success. The research also sheds light on the aspects of the customer experience that organizations are having difficulties with. While more than half of the responding companies see ‘data’ (63 percent) and ‘systems and processes’ (54 percent) as critical areas for delivering an integrated customer experience, most companies have inadequate capabilities in both areas. Only 32 percent of companies rated themselves as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ for data, while even fewer (24 percent) rate themselves this positively for systems and processes.

Awoniyi  continued, “Having an integrated customer experience is becoming less of a novelty and more of a necessity in our heavily connected society. Companies must commit to a customer experience strategy, and start laying the foundations for investment and training in this area.”

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc. 

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How to Create a Great Social Media Customer Experience

These days, when it comes to social media, it is absolutely critical that you create the right customer experience for both existing customers and potential customers. 

In fact, 77 percent of B2C companies and 43 percent of B2B companies used Facebook to acquire new customers in 2012. So, it is key that your social media strategies engage and retain your existing customers, while at the same time attract fans, converting them into new customers.

Luckily, sites like Facebook and Twitter spend a lot of time getting the aesthetics of their pages just right – providing companies with tools they need to set up communities attractive to the right audience. Still, you must perfect your company’s own strategy in order be successful. Here are some tips, according to Social Media Today that will help  you create a great social media customer experience (CX):

Know your Audience

If you want to create a great CX on social media you need to know your audience inside and out. You need to post unique and specialized content that will interest and attract the right people – those who can be converted into customers. Also, encourage your existing customers to follow you on social media sites by putting follow widgets on your website and putting your social media handles in sales and marketing collateral.

You can use other social media sites to connect with your customers as well or, even better, provide a place where they can connect with each other. Create a Page/Group/Community so that you fans can discuss your company: a place where you can get involved yourself, engaging your fans with interesting content and questions.

Perfect your Pages

Make sure you post compelling, diverse, quality content on your pages. Don’t post too regularly, but still frequently enough. Work out what your fans and followers like and work out a posting strategy which takes advantage of this. In addition, be sure that you promote your products enough, but too much as fans don’t like being inundated with advertising, they want to see content that is of use to them.

Next, make sure your profile images and descriptions are eye-catching, interesting and, grammatically correct. Check all the spelling in your posts and tweets and only post images that fit within each social media sites’ image parameters. The content on your pages needs to be both professional and attention grabbing.

And, respond to all the comments on your pages and re-tweets your messages get on Twitter. Be active and polite: you customers will appreciate it if you acknowledge them quickly and consistently. Analyze the sentiment of comments about your company online: if someone is negative about your brand you need to act quickly so that your reputation isn’t damaged.

Reward your Fans

Reward your fans and followers with exclusive content. Post information about new products and behind the scenes footage where only your fans can see it. Send out a new product to you Twitter followers before you send it anywhere else, or invite them to your headquarters to try it out for themselves.

When it comes to the social CX, it is key to find customers who are willing to be your social media brand advocates and provide them with a platform to promote your products. Reward these influential people with discounts and products or, if they’re very good at what they do, a marketing job. 

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc. 

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7 Tools You Need to Make it in the Customer Engagement Era

Did you know that the majority of customers expect you to go the extra mile to keep their business, but a whopping 71 percent of customers don’t think companies are doing enough?  This is because as of late, the rules of customer engagement have changed drastically

Simply acquiring customers is not enough for today’s businesses - the goal now is to deliver an amazing customer experience (CX) at every interaction so that you not only acquire customers, but they become your loyal fans. You must engage customers like never before, along the entire journey from awareness to lead. 

So, here are some tools, according to Business2Commity, that you should use to boost your company’s CX.

Relevant customer insight. Relevant insight enables employees to anticipate and solve customer needs. Make sure you are tracking social and online information to understand opinions and attitudes.

Flexible applications. Happy, empowered employees deliver better customer experiences.

More than CRM. Your CRM strategy must expand and be able to embrace social listening, social engagement, e-commerce, and cross-organization customer analytics.

Imagie via webindiasolutions.com

One unified team. Collaboration tools should extend beyond marketing, sales, and customer service. This cross-organization orchestration is also the secret to your delivering on your promises faster than the competition.

Seamless workflow. Bring the back office to the front office with business processes that span organizations. Your customer shouldn’t feel a transition when they go from marketing, to sales, to billing, to customer service, and back again.

Best practices. Save employees’ time for the activities that will make a difference to your customers. A strategic business partner can help you stay on top of the ever-changing best practices for your industry.

Cloud-based agility. You can’t allow internal issues about whether systems and processes will scale or adapt, keep you from being in tune with your customers’ needs. Let your customer’s changing needs drive your pace of change. Cloud solutions deliver instant value while extending the capabilities of your existing systems.

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc.  

Defining the Customer Experience

Over the last few years, “customer experience” has become a commonly used phrase, but like “innovation” it is difficult to find a clear, common definition. Of customer experience (CX). So, how we can really improve something if we can’t even define it? What encompasses CX? How do we structure it? And, how do we improve it?

People have been grappling with a definition of CX for several years. Sometimes it’s defined as digital experiences and interactions, such as on a website or a smartphone. In other cases, it is focused on retail or customer service, or the speed at which problems are solved in a call center.

According to the Harvard Business Review, CX is the sum-totality of how customers engage with your company and brand, not just in a snapshot in time, but throughout the entire arc of being a customer.

Every company provides a CX. Your company provides a one too, even if you aren’t aware of it or create it consciously. That experience may be good, bad or indifferent, but the fact that you have customers, you interact with those customers in some way, and provide them products, means that they have an experience with you and your brand. Now it is up to you whether it’s fantastic, awful or average.

There is a strong case to be made that companies cannot completely control experiences, because experiences inevitably involve perception, emotion, and unexpected behaviors on the parts of customers. No matter how well we craft an experience, people will not perceive exactly as we anticipate. So, companies cannot afford to throw up their hands and give up in the face of unpredictably. Instead, they need to plan for the worst and aim for the ideal when considering the experiences they want to create.

CX may sometimes seem like something which appears as if by magic, and only certain companies are able to create it regularly. The good news is that creating a great CX does not require knowledge of magical incantations, instead, it springs from controllable elements — the touchpoints. These can be numerous and diverse, but they can be identified, crafted, and integrated.

If this is the case, why are their only a few companies we think of when it comes to great CX? Crafting a great CX requires enormous amounts of collaboration across groups in a company that often work independently and at different stages of product development. In many cases marketing, product design, customer services, sales, advertising agency, retail partners must all be working in concert to create even one single touchpoint.

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is a regular contributor to several of IIR’s blogs including Front End of Innovation, The Market Research Event, Next Big Design, Digital Impact, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc.  

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