Monday, April 13, 2015

Focus on the Front Lines of the Customer Experience

Photo by Zyance. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
 
 "The customer's perception is your reality." - Kate Zabriskie, Organizational Consultant

In "IBM Study: CIOs Have a New Boss - The Customer," Tricia Morris, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Parature, from Microsoft cites that "top CIOs are moving from a focus on the back-office to the front-lines as customer engagement and customer experience become key to winning business strategies."
 
Where are you focused? Join Michael Lenz, Global Director of Brand Experience, Cisco, as he presents "Beyond Products, Managing Experience for Tomorrow's Business Now" during the Total CX Leaders Conference June 3-4 in Miami, Fla.

In this session, Michael will share:
  • His insights on how Cisco's brands are the experience frontline
  • His experience changing a $140 billion company from the inside, including the program that helped his team win the CXPA 2014 Innovation Award 

Total CX Leaders Conference will help you "learn how to listen to your customers, understand their differences and set the foundation to build a road map to create a seamless experience for modern customers."


Join Michael at Total CX Leaders Conference (TCXL) 2015 in Miami. Register today!

Stay connected with TCXL15:
  • twitter.com/#TCXL15
  • linkedin.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders
  • facebook.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders














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 6, 2015

How to Win the Customer Experience Battle


Photo: USMC HUMVEE in battle, Wikimedia Commons

"The customer experience is the next competitive battleground." - Jerry Gregoire, former CIO of Dell

The quest for quality customer service and winning customers' loyalty continues to be a major battle for many companies. In "Experiencing the Next Competitive Battleground" by Jena McGregor, Tom Knighton, Executive Vice President, Forum Corp., "expands on what's driving the increasing importance of the customer experience -- and how incremental improvements might not always lead to success."

Want to learn what it takes to win the customer experience battle? Join Brian Byrne, President, Aviador and Associates, as he presents "Classic Patterns of Competitive War Gaming" during the Total CX Leaders Conference June 3-4 in Miami, Fla.

In this session, Brian will:
  • Describe the classic patterns of competition
  • Share case studies across a range of sectors such as Mobility, Food & Beverage and Personal Care
  • Describe how scenario planning and white space mapping are applied as tools of competitive warfare to identify and conquer key profit pools
Total CX Leaders Conference will help you "learn how to listen to your customers, understand their differences and set the foundation to build a road map to create a seamless experience for modern customers."

Join Brian at Total CX Leaders Conference (TCXL) 2015 in Miami. Register today!

Stay connected with TCXL15:
  • twitter.com/#TCXL15
  • linkedin.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders
  • facebook.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders
 














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 1, 2015

Creating a Millennial-Friendly Customer Experience

Retailers today are striving to make sure that their companies provide a millennial-friendly customer experience. As a millennial myself, I have been fortunate enough to have grown up in a more advanced technological world where I, like many others in a similar age bracket, will have been more tech savvy than their parents by their early teens. Customer experience for millennials has been molded by the increasing number of platforms available for retail and this creates opportunities and challenges for retailers.

Monitoring online social experiences are seen as a must for retail companies; consumers are often flocking to the web to look for answers to issues as well as contacting a call center or an online chat for information. The web has a huge number of forums and communities where consumers go to discuss products and are in my eyes a great resource for gaining first hand insights into exactly what customers want or think about products. Often, companies only monitor comments from customers on their own sites and may miss people’s comments from sites such as TripAdvisor or other discussion rooms.

Social media sites such as twitter are now becoming a popular resource for companies to talk to customers. According to Forbes, millennials take up 29 percent of the twitter-sphere and use the platform for commenting on purchases; leveraging the resource to monitor posts and often responding via twitter can give the customer a sense of being personally looked after rather than having to wait on hold whilst a customer representative at a call center keeps you on hold for three hours.

Giving the customer a more personalized feel is deemed another priority in giving a better customer experience. Repeating personal information that could have been retained by companies I find very irritating. Fundamental information such as contact information and home addresses I expect to be able to be seen across different platforms and having to re-input information could put customers off returning. Being able to access personal information and interests is key to giving a customer a comfortable and easy experience. Online retailers such as Amazon and ASOS retain previous purchase information or what has been searched for in order to give suggestions. I believe the next step would be to take that technique in store.

The world is becoming far more interconnected; so I believe creating systems that register a smartphone when a person has entered a store can bring up information of again past purchases so that a shop assistant would be able to give the customer a more personal experience.

Catering to the desires of the millennial generation could be a great opportunity to boost customer satisfaction. Other strategies could be being more engaged in price comparison or giving more of a story behind a product rather than just it being made for profit. TOMS shoes is a prime example, it helps the consumer appreciate the company for doing something to help rather than just making money. Millennials have grown up in a world where global issues such as poverty and climate change are often at the forefront of discussions; so creating a retail platform that goes beyond wanting to make an easy buck, for me and I’m sure many others, would be the difference in choosing between two retailers.

About the Author: Harry Kempe, a marketing intern at IIR USA, who works on various aspects of the industry including social media, marketing analysis and media. He is a recent graduate of Newcastle University who previously worked for EMAP Ltd. and WGSN as a marketing assistant on events such as the World Architecture Festival, World Retail Congress and Global Fashion Awards. He can be reached at hkempe@IIRUSA.com.