Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Move Brands Faster and Longer in the Social Media Era


Photo by paul bica


With new social media networks and platforms emerging almost every day, organizations must efficiently engage customers while delivering a cohesive experience that drives customer loyalty. During the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit earlier this month, Nestor Portillo, Director, Social Communities and Customer Experience at Microsoft, shared why customer experience is key to make the content viral and engaging.

Customers in the social media era are in control and are setting companies' agendas. They:
  • Trust in advice made by online acquaintances and strangers
  • Read and create product reviews, product rankings and blog posts
  • Want to provide feedback about the product, brand and the service
  • Seek support to connect with like-minded peers

To move brands faster and longer in the social media era, Nestor contends that organizations must provide a consistent experience across all social media platforms. It needs to be successful, effortless and quick.


Most importantly, organizations must have a game plan that supports the customer journey by:
  • Considering the different ways people learn
  • Pivoting on experience and products
  • Delivering an emotional hook

This game plan must also include a community that:

  • Is healthy and is not intimidating
  • Provides a framework for user-generated content and word-of-mouth triggers
  • Adds authenticity to help establish brand trust

Following this model will lead your customers to purchase more, use more, consume more and tell and share more.




Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.

Friday, April 25, 2014

How NASCAR is Using Social Media to Enhance the Fan Experience - Complimentary Web Seminar

In association with HP Autonomy, The Institute for International Research invites you to join us for a one hour complimentary web seminar, “Driving on the Winning Track with Innovative Customer Engagement: How NASCAR is Using Social Media to Deliver a Dynamic and Engaging Fan Experience.”

The web seminar is taking place Tuesday, April 29th from 1:00 – 2:00 PM (ET)

Presenters include:
Sean Doherty, Director of Digital and Social Media Engagement, NASCAR
Daniel Burke, VP of Multichannel Analytics, HP Autonomy

Reserve your webinar seat now at: https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/s/registrations/new?cid=e76dxuo7mwrw
Please mention priority code: 00UWKCE0D

The rapid explosion of social networks and other media outlets has made it very difficult for marketers to monitor, understand and address all that's being said about their products and services. And this data is becoming so important, as it contains customer insight and growth opportunities that have yet to be identified.

Join us on this webcast and learn how NASCAR, the sanctioning organization for stock car racing, is using its innovative Fan & Media Engagement Center to easily gather, analyze and leverage social and traditional media content to enhance the fan experience and drive revenue growth.

This webcast will be recorded if you can't attend the live session. Please register and we'll send you a link to the recording.

Learn how NASCAR is using its state-of-the-art interactive Fan & Media Engagement Center to:
  • Monitor all forms of media including social and traditional networks
  • Extract meaning and sentiment from all types of social media
  • Discover and act upon emerging trends and opportunities
  • Deliver a more targeted and engaging fan experience
  • Respond quickly to issues and repair damage

Don’t miss this presentation! Register now: https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/s/registrations/new?cid=e76dxuo7mwrw
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Thursday, April 24, 2014

Innovating a Roadmap for Customer Experience

Photo by paul bica
 
 
"There are no traffic jams along the extra mile." - Roger Staubach, former star NFL quarterback
 
Organizations that focus on improving the customer experience will strengthen their customer relationships and their overall business performance. Len Ferman knows this first-hand. Len is Managing Director of Ferman Innovation, specializing in generating and evaluating ideas to improve the customer experience.

Len is also a world juggling champion. During the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit (TCEL) earlier this month, he reinforced the three principles of new product innovation through his unique presentation. TCEL attendees learned how to juggle scarves while learning how to solve their customer experience challenges using this proven process:
 
3 Steps to Innovating for the Customer Experience:
  1. Explore: Understand the customer journey. Identify the customer pain points and challenges. Identify themes for brainstorming.
  2. Ideate: Brainstorm with a diverse group to generate a high quantity of possible solutions. Enable all employees to contribute ideas.
  3. Evaluate: Evaluate, cultivate and prioritize the top ideas for implementation
Learning to juggle not only helped TCEL attendees improve their ability to multi-task, increase eye-hand coordination, sharpen their brains and impress their friends, but also provided these valuable insights related to the 3 Steps:
 
Explore:
  • Break down complex processes into elementary steps
  • Learn how to use the tools that are at your disposal
  • Recognize the patterns and categories in your data
  • Identify your customers' key problems
  • Strive for accuracy in basic tasks
  • Create intentional "wow" experiences
Ideate:
  • Defer judgment - no idea is a bad idea
  • Include all parts of your organization in idea generation
  • Stray out of your comfort zone to generate ideas
  • Balance different methods of brainstorming
  • Go for quantity when generating ideas
  • Great ideas are the result of collaboration and building on others' ideas
Evaluate:
  • Filter out extraneous information and out of scope ideas
  • Evaluate each idea using carefully designed criteria
  • Include subject matter experts and customers in the evaluation
  • Cultivate ideas until they resonate with customers
  • Prioritize your actions to ensure you reach the goal
  • Optimal solutions are the ones that match your core competencies


Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.

 

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

How to Build an Experience Management Core Competency


Photo by paul bica

"People will forget what you said. They will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou, American author and poet

Are you building a true experience management core competency within your organization? According to Lou Carbone, Founder & Chief Experience Officer, Experience Engineering Inc., and author of Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again, there is "a whole lot of discussion . . . without a lot of deep understanding."

Embracing experience management is a cultural adoption - it's not about improving legacy business frameworks, tools or models. Many organizations are focused on process improvement instead of on creating true experience management systems or fully leveraging the opportunity to transform the value they create for customers, employees and other stakeholders.

According to Lou, to create a true experience management core competency within your organization, you must focus on these five absolutes of experience management:
  • Move from "make and sell" to "sense and respond:" Change your organization-driven perspective to an experience-driven perspctive (customer-oriented). Sense what customers don't even know and build on those responses.
  • Think customer back (emotional/rational bond): Focus on the customer perspective first. Be a "firm of endearment," a company that if it went away tomorrow, customers would mourn the loss. Examples include Apple, Starbucks, Amazon, Costco, and Google.
  • Understand and leverage role of the unconscious mind: Focus on "how" customers think instead of on "what" customers think. Understand and act upon the premise that "the tangible attributes of a product or service have far less influence on consumer preference than the sub-conscious sensory and emotional elements derived from the total experience." - Dr. Gerald Zaltman, Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School, Laboratory of the Consumer Mind
  • Become clue conscious: Clue in to how people feel and think as they have the experience, which also includes what they see, hear, smell and taste.
  • Develop rigorous systems to develop and manage clues: Design your systems around how functional (functionality of good or service), mechanic (sights, smells, textures, sounds) and humanic (choice of words, tone of voice, body language) clues are coming together to create the desired effect. Focus on the moments that matter within customers' perception, interaction and recollection of experiences.
Managing your customers' experiences and emotions is what helps you create the emotional connection you need to keep customers coming back again and again.

Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.


Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Customer-Centric Culture: Why it Matters and How to Measure it

Photo by paul bica


"A great customer experience can only be delivered by someone who wants to give it." - Ian Luxford, Learning Services Director, Grass Roots

During last week's Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit, Bill Barnes, Senior Vice President, Client Services and Jaci Jarrett Masztal, Ph.D, Vice President, Practice Leader from Burke Inc.,presented "Customer-Centric Culture: Why it Matters and How to Measure it." Bill and Jaci contend that the employee engagement process and the customer experience process, which are usually separate management processes in many organizations, be brought together to improve organizational performance.

This approach is based on the premise that a high level of employee engagement is critical to creating and enhancing positive customer experiences leading to customer engagement. To improve employee engagement, organizations should focus on ways to:
  • Improve job performance
  • Provide more job growth opportunities
  • Enhance Talent Management
  • Better serve various internal stakeholder needs
  • Improve commitment and retention
  • Enhance customer service
A customer-centric culture that actively focuses on what is best for the customer is a critical factor in improving organizational performance. Customer centricity is a part of all organizational aspects including leadership, strategy, decision making, operations and in ongoing job functions. It's also important to remember that culture is:
  • Broader - it's more than an initiative
  • Cross-functional, enterprise-wide
  • Long-term strategy
  • Motivation, focus, behavior
  • Multi-dimensional
A challenge for most organizations is determining how measure a customer-centric culture. Measurement allows a true gap analysis and a baseline to track change and assess impact. At Burke, Bill and Jaci help their clients to measure their culture with The Customer Centricity Index, which measures across these six important dimensions:
  • Leadership & Strategy
  • Messaging & Modeling
  • Employee Understanding & Commitment
  • Product & Service
  • Excellence Support & Tools
  • Recognition & Appreciation
Leadership drives the strategy and culture which sets the foundation for Who, What, and How, all of which drive and support customer engagement and business success. Employees believe the products and services are worthy and are equipped to deliver. Employees are recognized and rewarded for the customer-centric behaviors to be reinforced and repeated. Full customer centricity is achieved when the organization has a collective mindset of doing what needs to be done to the benefit of the customer.


Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Customer Engagement: The Glaring Blind Spot You Have Been Ignoring


Photo by paul bica

“You get hit the hardest when trying to run or hide from a problem. Like the defense on a football field, putting all focus on evading only one defender is asking to be blindsided." - Criss Jami, author, poet, essayist

During last week's Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit, Kunal Gupta, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Burke Institute, presented "Customer Engagement: The Glaring Blind Spot You Have Been Ignoring in Your Customer Measurement Program." Kunal contends that the ability to achieve business success comes from the desirable behaviors of engaged customers. To achieve higher levels of business performance, you need to understand and measure customer engagement.

Your customer measurement program should measure the underlying mechanisms that can foster stronger customer commitment by helping you answer these important questions:
  1. Is the behavior of your customers "black and white" or "shades of grey?" Customers can exhibit various shades of engagement toward a provider, either from being willing to pay a price premium or readily switch for lower price. At the same time, a customer can be loyal towards multiple providers, but be more sparing in their emotional attachment with a provider.
  2. What drives customer behavior - cognition, emotions or both? Customer measurement programs should make you think more actively about the role of emotions and how they affect the customer decision making processes. In reality, organizations believe that their customers are rational individuals. Increasingly, however, there is greater recognition that their customers also allow inclusion of emotions and the non-rational in their decision making process.
  3. Are needs of tenured customers different than newer customers? Tenured customers have more favorable as well as more consistent perceptions, including emotions toward the provider. In early stages of customer tenure, emotions might not even influence the choice process.
By applying a research framework that applies both art and science as the foundation of your customer measurement program, you can overcome the glaring blind spot and foster greater customer engagement.


Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.

Friday, April 11, 2014

Employee Recognition Programs Energize and Strengthen Customer-Centric Organizations


Photo by paul bica


"The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated." - William James, psychologist and philosopher

Customer-centric companies know how important it is to reward and recognize their employees. If employees feel appreciated, then they are able to effectively and consistently show appreciation for customers.

During the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit (TCEL), Janet LeBlanc, President, Janet LeBlanc & Associates Inc., showed how employee recognition programs are fundamental to the success of a great customer experience program in these three areas of impact:
  1. Employee: Recognize employees as part of the process of developing customer solutions
  2. Customer: Reinforce the ideal customer experience - intentionally
  3. Enterprise: Reward organizational improvements and create a customer-centric culture
Recognition practices are provided to acknowledge or give special attention to employee actions, efforts, behaviors and/or performance and contribute to organizational success. Recognition should be:
  • In the moment
  • Appropriate and in context
  • Tied to employee's perceived value
  • Individual and team based

Stay tuned for more customer experience insights shared at this week's TCEL. Stay connected at:

  • twitter.com/TotalCustomer #TCEL14
  • linkedin.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders
  • facebook.com/TotalCustomer




Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.

How Current Trends are Shaping the 10 Growth Areas of Tomorrow


Photo by paul bica


"The future ain't what it used to be." - Yogi Berra
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford

Yogi Berra and Henry Ford were futurists. Their unique way of thinking influenced and shaped the future customer experience. They were successful because they could look at things from a different point of view.

According to Jared Weiner, Futurist and Vice President, Weiner Edrich, Brown, most of us suffer from "The Recognition of Educated Incapacity." We know so much about what we know, that we are the last to see the future of our areas of expertise differently.

To change our way of thinking, we need to look at everything with "alien eyes." This new perspective will help us shape the "10 Growth Areas of the Future" that will affect the customer experience:
  1. Time Space (the most important area): Becoming more simultaneous and less sequential as seen in Vine, Pinterest and Snapchat
  2. Inner Space: Brain imaging and research on human sensory systems
  3. Design Space: Will underpin everything in the future
  4. Play Space: Gamification and adult play - making the serious stuff fun
  5. Storage Space: Physical goods, waste, e-waste, inner space and data
  6. Cyber Space: Virtual reality and worlds, bitcoin
  7. Inter Space: Internet of Everything, wearable technology
  8. Micro Space: New materials technology like 3D and 4D printing
  9. Outer Space: Space exploration, tourism, searching for alien life, satellite technology, asteroid mining
  10. Green to Blue Space: Giving back more than you took
Stay tuned for more customer experience insights shared at this week's TCEL.  Stay connected at:

  • twitter.com/TotalCustomer #TCEL14
  • linkedin.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders
  • facebook.com/TotalCustomer






Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.



Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Changing Behavior Towards the Customer Experience

"A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all." - Michael LeBoeuf, American business author


During "Changing Behavior Towards the Customer Experience," Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit attendees learned that "checklists and compliance will not change customer behavior." We learn by doing.

Keith Ferrazzi, CEO, Ferrazzi Greenlight and author of Who's Got Your Back and Never Eat Alone, delivered a compelling presentation about the critical factors to changing human behavior, which include:
  • Building key relationships: Initiate and strengthen personal relationships with managers and other business partners
  • Leverage the community: Lean on your peers, managers and the broader community for personal success
  • Strengthen customer centricity: Build a customer-centric mindset within retail
A successful behavior change framework is developed by:
  • Knowing that change management is about relationships, emotion and connection
  • Focusing only on the highest return behaviors
  • Having an aligned purpose
  • Using reflective inquiry to gain engagement
A successful change framework is driven by:
  • Providing an empathetic challenge to ignite a movement
  • Helping your employees join a movement
  • Peer-to-peer coaching for support and success

Stay tuned for more customer experience insights shared at this week's TCEL. Stay connected at:
  • twitter.com/TotalCustomer #TCEL14
  • linkedin.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders
  • facebook.com/TotalCustomer

Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.

The Crazy Ones: How to be a Leader that Inspires Creativity and Innovation


Photo by paul bica
 
My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.” - Steve Jobs, Apple, Inc.
 
Many companies are striving to achieve Apple's level of creativity and innovation, but they don't have the type of culture and leadership to support this goal.
 
Stephen Gates, VP and Creative Director, Global Brand Design, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, presented "The Crazy Ones: How to be a Leader that Inspires Creativity and Innovation" at the Total Customer Experience Leaders (TCEL) Summit in Miami, Florida. Here are the seven characteristics of leaders vs. managers he shared:
 
  • Execution vs. leadership: Managers think that anyone can lead a team. Leadership isn't telling people what to do. Leaders empower them to find their own solutions and embrace their own process.
 
  • Status quo vs. beliefs: Managers believe in the status quo of doing things the way they've always been done. Leaders know that having beliefs gives your team something to rally around and it creates an identity.
 
  • Best practices vs. real insights: Managers think they will find innovation in studies, conferences, and consumer research, but they keep you at the same level as your competition. Leaders know you have to look beyond shared knowledge and have your team spend time finding unique perspectives.
 
  • Execution vs. ideas: Managers have deadlines. Leaders have ideas. Deadline-driven groups are a commodity. Idea-driven groups are a critical asset.
 
 
  • Words vs. actions: Managers are all talk with little to no follow through. Leaders value actions over words.
 
  • Emotional deafness vs. self-awareness: A lot of leadership has nothing to do with your team and everything to do with you. Leaders take time to understand how their teams work. People need to feel inspired, invested and protected to do their best work.

  • Good vs. great: Managers do good work. Good work is a compromise. Leaders understand that good work is the single greatest threat to great work. Great work is born out of passion, investment and attention to detail and creates a culture of dedication beyond reason.

Stay tuned for more customer experience insights shared at this week's TCEL. Stay connected at:
  • twitter.com/TotalCustomer #TCEL14
  • linkedin.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders
  • facebook.com/TotalCustomer
Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.


How does viral content spread via social networks?


Every group of social media marketers I speak to point to the most difficult part of their job:  to consistently produce good content.  

They get their content from:
  • Agencies, 
  • From subject matters from throughout their organizations 
  • They rely on listening tools to discover and amplify mentions of their brands.


Another common theme is the quest for the holy grail of posted content:  A viral posting.  Well scientists are trying to find out what’s in the secret sauce; whether a viral posting can be predicted.
 
Comparing How Many Initial Same Posts
Two Types of Viral Content
A posted photo doesn't have to be posted by a very popular page in order to trigger a large cascade.  It can be an Average Joe with a compelling story or message.  

The research points to two different types of postings that proved viral worthy: 
1.  A posting by someone famous (think Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscars) or 
2.  a posting from a less famous source that found appeal for other reasons. 

How Viral Content Spreads
These viral cascades typically start fast; early reproduction speed, the initial velocity across the network, seems to be a key marker. Further, as the photo spreads, it begins to matter less who spread it originally, and the actual kind of content matters less.  One thing about pictures though, captions do seem to be important.

The Odds Are Against You
You can try to post something that goes viral, but the odds are against you.  In studies, one of out every 3,000 links produced a “large event,” or a sharing phenomenon that reached at least a 100 additional persons. But truly viral events with multiple generations of sharing occur only about once in a million instances.

Postings that start from a very popular source (again think about Ellen DeGeneres or The President with David Ortiz) start with an initial big spurt and then fall off.  On the other hand a viral posting with more modest beginnings (one of those “Please repost this to prove to my girlfriend how much I love her” or “If we get a million shares this young girl will get her medicine”) demonstrates smaller & consistent growth over time.
 
Viral Path Patterns
Who Is Doing All This Sharing?  
Well you can guess some obvious things.  A picture of Mrs. Obama doing a good deed will get more shares from women and liberals.  A picture of a couple with a guy asking sharers to support his commitment to his girlfriend will get more shares from males. 

Well Connected Followers
Still the viral likelihood of the share depends on the importance of well-connected followers.  Or in some cases if there are outside factors like having the news media acknowledge the phenomenon.  Some of the hottest shares were successfully driven primarily by word-of-mouth adoption.  They had to rely on Word of Mouth, in part because those that created them did not initially have large advertising budgets, and in part because, by design, they contained features to explicitly encourage sharing.

So do we know how to produce viral content? Not yet, but we do know how some viral content became viral.

The structural virality of online diffusion,  Goel,  Anderson, et al,  Stanford University
The Anatomy of Large Facebook Cascades, Alex Dow , Facebook Data Science

Ron Shulkin blogs researches and writes about enterprise technology focused on innovation and social media. You can follow him Twitter. You can follow his blogs at this Facebook group.  You can connect with Ron on LinkedIn.  

Ron Shulkin is the Chicago area Director for Spredfast. Spredfast provides a social relationship platform that allows organizations to manage, monitor, and measure their social media programs at scale. Spredfast enables more people, in more places, to engage in more conversations from a single platform on supported social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ YouTube and popular blogging platforms. You can learn more about Spredfast here.