With the 2014 Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit just
weeks away, I was lucky enough to catch up with Len Ferman, managing director
of Ferman Innovation, and former Senior Vice President of Innovation and
Ideation at Bank of America.
Today, corporate leaders often lose sight of customer needs
in the constant quest toward next quarter’s earnings. But, what is positive for
stock prices tends to conflict with long term customer satisfaction and
shareholder value.
You simply can’t understand the customer experience if don’t
empathize with your customers, Ferman told me. “You have to be able to see them
face-to-face and listen to them talk about their pain points and challenges,”
he said.
Ferman suggests that corporate leaders need to spend more
time attending traditional focus groups – watching their customers talk about
their interactions with the company and hear their first hand experiences and further,
understand how these fit within the broader context of the goals and challenges
that they have as people.
“When you see customers face-to-face, you pick up the body language and expressions that you cannot discern in the most disciplined reading of a market research report,” explained Ferman. “Only when you have seen your customers talking about your company, can you truly empathize with their needs.
Listen to the full
podcast interview here: http://bit.ly/1fQymj7
Len will be speaking in just a few weeks at the 2014 Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit,
taking place April 9-11th, in a session entitled, “Innovation a Roadmap for
Customer Experience.”
This year’s conference will explore the new realities of building
brands and relationships in today's socially driven and data abundant world. The
event shines an important lens on the power of insights and the critical need
for marketers to focus on factoring emotion into the bigger equation to get a
return on customer relationships.
For more information
about this exciting event, click here: http://bit.ly/OeuKLI
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.
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