How to Create a Customer Experience that Sells

Today, businesses of all types and sizes must provide high quality products, but customers tend to remember the details of their experience with the product or the company better than the product itself.

So now it is more important than ever for businesses to focus on developing customer experiences that enables them to grow and retain their customer base. Here are a few ways businesses can create a customer experience that truly sells the product.

Recognize Your Customer. A key step you can take to enhance your customer experiences is to personally recognize your customer when they return to make a purchase. It’s the personalized treatment that adds value to a purchase, makes the customer feel special, and injects loyalty into your customer base. Evaluate your business operations to for areas where you can ensure that your customers know you are paying attention to their purchases.

Provide a Personalized Experience. It is also important to focus on providing your customers with personalized shopping experiences. Integrating interactive experiences along with in-store shopping is an excellent way to do this. Customers expect VIP treatment from brands in both online and in-person experiences. Providing customers with the same personalized experience when shopping online as they receive when they are in the store can go a long way toward encouraging repeat business.

Tapping into the Customer’s Emotions. For many consumers, shopping is an emotionally driven experience. No matter what they are shopping for, consumers are seeking opportunities to connect those events with their experiences with products. So, provide consumers with the option to build shopping lists and share with friends. Along with seeing what people close them are shopping for, these lists also make it possible for consumers to save the products they like for future reference, increasing the chance of making a sale.

Related articles

• Why customer service is so important to online shoppers
• 6 Secrets to Offering Exceptional Customer Service
• New Study Shows Retailers Now Understand Importance of Customer Experience, Plan to Spend More On It

Create Your CX Story at The Total CX Leaders Conference

Immerse yourself fully in a world of best in class, seamless customer experience programs at the Total CX Leaders Conference.  Elevate your understanding from insight to implementation through interactive keynote discussions, collaborative sessions and insightful case studies.

Total CX Leaders Conference

June 3-4, 2015

Trump National Doral

Miami, Florida

Acquire the tools you need to accelerate your Customer Experience practice and get hands-on instruction in creating journey maps and service blueprints in TCXL's groundbreaking interactive workshop series.      

·         Journey Mapping & Service Blueprinting
Kerry Bodine, CX Expert and Co-author, Outside In

A dynamic, interactive session to help you accelerate your practice. We will share customer experience as a framework and best practices. Focused on actionable takeaways - driven by your questions and needs - this workshop is a combination of presentation, facilitated ideation and small group work sessions. The challenges of CEM - big data, change management, organizational alignment - will be included as topics for discovery and sharing

·         Customer Experience Hat Trick
Diane Magers, Office of the Customer Mobility and Business Solutions, AT&T
Every person in an organization impacts the customer experience in some way, and all employees must be aligned in order to produce customer interactions that are useful, easy, and enjoyable. This requires tools that help both frontline and behind-the-scenes staff understand the end-to-end customer experience from the customer perspective - and the role they personally play in delivering it. In this workshop, participants will get hands-on experience creating journey maps and service blueprints. We'll discuss what these tools are, how they can be used to drive experience improvements and organizational change, and how participants can leverage them within their own companies.

Download the brochure for full conference details: http://bit.ly/1EogAMC

Unite with other change-makers responsible for creating a strategic customer experience program this June 3-4 in Miami, FL.

Mention code TCXCL15BL & Save$100 off the current rate. Register today: http://bit.ly/1EogAMC

Visit the Customers 1^st Blog for customer experience feature stories, industry news, interviews, and event updates: http://bit.ly/1z7oWIB

Best,
The Total CX Leaders Team

@TotalCustomer

#TCXL15

Customers1stblog.iirusa.com

Trends in Customer Experience Management

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is all about bringing the customer into the center of the organization. A big challenge operators will have is to break down the silos inside the organization. How you integrate different departments into the single view of the customer is very important.

Check out this insightful video featuring Julio Puschel, Principal Analyst, Head of Operator Strategy, Informa Telecoms & Media. 

Related articles

• Global Customer Experience Management Market 2012-2016 : Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends And Forecast Latest Research Report
• What A Customer Experience Management Professional Does
• 5 Steps To Success On The Customer Experience Management Journey
• Fundamental: The experience economy

5 Steps to Successful Customer Experience Management

These days, customers expect companies to offer customer preferences in order to reduce the buying cycle time and increase the value. With the increasing number of channels and the need for consistent experience, we have been hearing about the ever-evolving ‘customer experience’ systems. This journey from CRM to CEM, marks a shift from an internally focused to externally focused solution to offer better customer experiences.

In the past, being internally focused gave more time for companies to adopt and evolve, but in the CEM era, companies don’t have the same time. The balance is between great customer experience that drives loyalty and ‘relevant preference’ that will drive commerce. According to a recent Business2Community article written by Ramesh Ramakrishnan, a marketing and organization culture enthusiast and author of www.futuristCMO.com, here are five steps to get the best out of CEM initiatives:

1. Build seamless interactions

Customers are expecting seamless interactions across traditional channels like in-store, call-center, online as well as new channels like mobile and social. Though technology can play a role in enabling this, employee (internal) based seamless interactions can really transform customer (external) based seamless interactions. 

2. Deliver consistent value

Consistent experience across channels due to end-to-end processes, functionality rich channel systems, de-centralization to harness channel incubation, management commitment offers a chance for customers to build trust. Flexible and functionality rich solutions across fast moving channels such as social, mobile will help companies deliver consistently in a fast paced environment.

3. Offer relevant preferences using real-time approaches

Connecting the customer transaction data, front line interaction information and non-enterprise data such as social, mobile can help companies to understand the current and future needs of the customer. Leveraging big data and analytics to come up with relevant preferences for customers will be a key differentiator considering the number of alternatives available. Real-time solutions through big data, analytics, In-memory and human intelligence will transform commerce and customer experience.

4. Develop a partner ecosystem that can collaborate

Customer experience management is a cluster of products that have to work together to offer a holistic solution. It’s critical to have the right set of partners who are innovators, have a good partner ecosystem, and are open to integration with other vendor products.

5. Implement Total Customer Experience (TCE)

In Total Quality Management (TQM), the quality of products is the responsibility of everyone involved in the creation and consumption ecosystem. So, TCE should be a philosophy across the entire organization. Customer experience is not just a front line issue as competition, delays across departments can badly impact customer experience. In the connected media age where customers immediately share more of their negative experiences than positive ones, such negative stories can impact commerce.

Overall, CEM will continue to evolve due to innovation and customer trends, so companies must create an agile ecosystem.

Related articles

• How to Dig Deeper into Customer Experience Management
• Omni-Channel Retail and Cross-Channel Marketing Converge on Customer Experience
• How can Real-time Customer Experience Management (Real-time CEM) transform your Business?
• Digging Deeper Into Customer Experience Management

How to ask for ideas from your customers. The Top 20 Customer Experience Management (CEM) Software Technologies

It’s all well and good to work on ideas and innovation by collaborating internally.  But if we want ideas from our customers we have to deliver that message, along with all the other important messages we communicate outside of the company.  Even if the message is that “we’re an innovative company”.  

Customer Feedback Wanted.  Here’s a fact, in case you didn’t notice…Large companies are trying to figure out how to engage with their customers.  They are asking the public what they’re thinking by using Customer Feedback Management (I wrote about that a few weeks ago here).  And they’re carefully managing how they communicate with their customers.  Customers must be reached where they dwell and they live for the most part in social networks.

Marketing automation used to be simple.  The channels were email, direct mail and phone.  Companies used these simple channels to reach out to customers (and potential customers).  You would pick the most likely prospects, and the best way to reach them and fire away.  Fingers crossed for 1 to 3% response. 

Social networks, where people tend to dwell now, and can be reached, is not just another channel.  It’s a whole new ballgame, requiring an interactive, sometimes real time, conversation between the people who work at your company and your customers.  If you’re lucky you’ll get those customers to be loyal and advocate for you.  

Why is Customer Experience Management important to the innovation inclined?  Two main reasons: 

     1.      You want to find out what your customers are thinking.

     2.     You want to periodically challenge them to provide their ideas.

There are too many social network channels, too many customers and not enough time to communicate effectively (and track the results) without good software.

Customer Experience Management is a class of software on offer from big companies like IBM and Oracle as well as a slew of smaller companies.  Remarkably it’s somewhat of a level playing field.  No company owns the market and the slew of software options are difficult to compare.  It’s not that they’re virtually equal in competencies. It is just that so many have taken different steps to get there.

Some of these come from the email space, recently adding on software to communicate via the mobile channel, then tools to push out messages via Twitter and Facebook.  Other software vendors focus initially on the social channels and add on dashboards to give the bigger picture.  Still others take novel approaches, like providing technology to track contests or setup a social network.   With this blog post I’m endeavoring to take a look at what the choices are.

A List of the Top 20 Customer Experience Management Software Offerings.  Let’s take a look at the most well known, and widely installed Customer Experience Management (CEM) software offerings that can be used to manage the messages and calls to action you put out to your customers and the public. There's actually way more than 20 but that looked better in the headline :).   In all cases, I’m adding the company’s own description.

    1.     Empathica                  empowers employees and customers of leading brands to create places they love; turning transactions into great experiences, employees into owners and customers into advocates.

     2.     Satmetrix                    the leading provider of cloud-based customer experience software for companies worldwide.

     3.     Eloqua  (Oracle)         highly personalized and unified experience across channels 

     4.     Totango          combines big data analytics with powerful segmentation and engagement tools to allow online services to take the right actions with each customer, in realtime.

     5.     Shoutlet                      a social marketing platform.

     6.     SDL                              solutions for managing the global customer experience

     7.     Silverpop                    marketing technology provider with expertise in email marketing and marketing automation

     8.     ExactTarget                 a provider of on-demand email marketing software solutions.

     9.     Hootsuite                   social media management system for businesses and organizations to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks

     10.     Hearsay                       bolster brands across all the major social networks

     11.     Wildfire/ Google         social media marketing software

     12.  Vitrue/Oracle                social marketing solution

     13.  Involver/ Oracle            social marketing platform

     14.  Sailthru                        helping brands deliver individual experiences to millions of unique users in real time.  

     15.  Hubspot                       All-In-One Marketing Software

     16.  Lyris                             data-driven interactive marketing campaigns that facilitate superior engagement, increase conversions, and deliver measurable business value.

     17.  Thismoment                 powers dynamic brand experiences - online social marketing campaigns comprising multimedia-rich content, creative design and social conversations

     18.  Brickfish                      engagement based social media programs through contests

     19.  Dynamic Signal           provides a white-label platform for brands to run high-reach word of mouth marketing campaigns in collaboration with a trusted circle of brand advocates.

     20.  Moxie                            the most complete and intuitive social networking software for the enterprise for employee and customer engagement

     21.  Tongal a social content development platform that helps global businesses connect with global creativity

     22.  Expion                           a social software company with a centralized platform that empowers global brands, agencies, and retailers to localize and manage their social marketing efforts. 

These are more CRM systems, than Customer Experience Management, although CEM is typically a subset of the offering:

21.  Neolane                      provides the only conversational marketing technology that empowers organizations to build and sustain one-to-one lifetime dialogues

22.  IBM (via Unica or their EMM offering) enterprise marketing management software

23.  Aprimo                        delivers technology and insight that accelerates marketing productivity and the ability of marketing to document performance.

24.  Loopfuse                     a sales and marketing automation software

25.  eTrigue                          easy-to-use marketing automation, demand generation and sales acceleration Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications

26.  TreeHouse Interactrive  a leading SaaS provider of marketing automation and partner relationship management (PRM) software for companies that sell B2B, B2C or through partners.

27.  Act-on                         allows business users to integrate their customer relationship management efforts across a variety of popular tools in one easy-to-use interface.

Summary:  Idea Management Solutions are perfect for internal collaboration focused on innovation.  Compelling portals with easily administered security can be configured using existing internal idea management software solutions.  Specialized software exists designed to Challenge customers (and the public) to provide solicited feedback including ideas.  And these software products are perfect to communicate both brand messages and the message that your company embraces innovation.

 
About the Author

Ron Shulkin blogs researches and writes about enterprise technology focused on social media, innovation, voice of the customer, marketing automation and enterprise feedback management.  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.  You can learn more about CogniStreamer here http://bit.ly/ac3x60 .  Ron manages The Idea Management Group on LinkedIn (Join Here) . You can follow him Twitter. You can follow his blogs at this Facebook group.  You can connect with Ron on LinkedIn.

Republished by Permission from The Front End of Innovation Blog.

Do You Have Customer Experience Assassins?

On October 12th, Dave Fish of Maritz Research presented our webinar "Do You Have Customer Experience Assassins?"

Customer Experience Angels and Assassins. They're out there ...lurking... but who are they and where are they? Organizations measuring customer satisfaction need to know who they are and where they are. Researchers need to understand them. This Web cast explains who they are, where they are and how to manage both when it comes to customer experience measurement.

Hard to please " Assassins" frequently take aim at your brand with unfavorable shots at your products and services while "Angels" consistently evaluate services across industries positively. This Web cast utilizes Maritz Research's CEBenchmarks study which helps identify Angels and Assassins and explores who they are, where they live, and how they can be managed.

In this webinar we learned:

• How Assassins and Angels differ demographically from the population as a whole
• What industries suffer from a higher and lower proportion of each
• What areas of the country are associated with higher or lower customer experience
• What you can do about Assassins and Angels from both a practitioners and metric strategy standpoint

If you missed the webinar, but are interested in learning more on this topic, visit http://maritzresearch.com/iirwebcast where you can download the recording or slide deck.

Curt Carlson on Customer Experience: #3: How do your customers feel about doing business with you?

In this new series of posts, we are joined by guest blogger Curt Carlson, Senior Vice President, Customer Experience Management – TNS North America. Read the full series here.

Hi! This is the third of four posts leading up to the NACCM conference. In my last one, I discussed a way to begin to unlock some of the strategic value inherent in all Customer Experience Management (CXM) programs. That approach required becoming truly customer-centric…understanding individual customer’s needs and taking action at that level. We also, however, need to take into account how customers make decisions regarding the companies they do business with. Science is telling us that decision making is not very rational. It is, in fact, mostly emotional.

The earth is flat. The sun moves around the earth. We use our powers of reason to make decisions. All were strongly held beliefs…once upon a time. Today, neuroscience reveals that the emotional regions of the brain are very active when making a decision. Once a decision is made, however, the rational areas take over. It sure looks like we make decisions emotionally and then rationalize them. Like Plato’s Cave, our current process-based survey approach is a shadow, a reflection of the rationalization process, but not necessarily of the decision process itself. Understanding customers’ emotional states is as important as understanding their needs. This is where Dynamic Loyalty comes in.

Most relationships are habitual. You shop at the same grocery stores; you buy business supplies from the same providers; you’re wedded to your mobile device. Eventually, however, disruption strikes. You see on the 11:00 news your grocery store has been charging more at check-out than the posted price (anger). Your business supplier stops carrying the printer cartridges for your older printer (irritation). You try your wife’s new iPhone (“wow” – my own emotional response). Each of these experiences and the emotions they produce disrupts the steady state and influences decisions that will weaken or strengthen current business (or other) relationships. This perspective explains a phenomenon we’re all too familiar with: Customers are loyal until they’re not.

They tell you... “We really like doing business with you.” “Just focus on doing what you’re doing.” “Don’t take this the wrong way, but we’re putting our business up for competitive bid – you can expect an RFP in the next few weeks.” THEY LIED! No, they didn’t. They really believed what they told you in your steady state relationship, but there was a disruptive event. (Management fed up with flat customer experience scores? New information found in a competitor’s blog?) Either you create and manage disruption, or someone else will.

So if you’re going to improve customer experience to drive your company’s business performance, you have to find ways to meet customers’ individual needs (drivers) and manage the emotional states (disruptions) that impact decision-making. That will require strong relationships, excellent performance, and engaged employees. Your CXM framework must reflect these components. I'll have more about that in the next post.
Until next time…Tell me what you think: Does this wider perspective reflect fundamental change in thinking about CXM…or is it just another dress on the CSAT mannequin?

If you enjoyed this post, join TNS this November at NACCM for a session on Best-in-class Customer Experience Management.

To learn more about NACCM, click here. To register, click here. Readers of the Customer's 1st blog can save 15% off the standard registration rate with code NACCMBlog.

Curt Carlson On Customer Experience

In this new series of posts, we are joined by guest blogger Curt Carlson, Senior Vice President, Customer Experience Management – TNS North America. Curt is in the TNS North America Customer Experience Management (CXM) Area of Expertise. In this role, he is responsible for supporting strategy development and Customer Experience – related business, which includes Customer Loyalty, Employee Engagement and Corporate Reputation. In the 20+ years that Curt has spent in Customer Experience-related research, he has also held senior positions at Walker Information, J.D. Power and Associates, and Ipsos Loyalty. Curt received his B.S. in Psychology from the University of Iowa, and his M.A. and Ph.D. (Experimental Psychology) from Kent State University. Curt has also presented at many US and International conferences and workshops including those sponsored by The Conference Board and EFQM, as well as by numerous clients. He is also a member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA).

Hi. I’m Curt Carlson and welcome to my blog, which will lead up to the NACCM conference. It is my hope that this will stimulate some ideas that you can discuss with others at the meeting.

Why am I doing this? I love the customer experience arena. After over 20 years of helping some of the greatest companies in the world with their customer experience programs, I like to think of the good we as practitioners bring: customers have a better experience, clients make more profit, as does my employer, and I earn a living. So what’s the problem…if there is one?

Customer Experience Management (CXM) isn’t working for most companies today. Every company will eventually begin to notice a lack of improvement in customer experience performance metrics that goes on and on. Moreover, they also see few if any strategic insights coming from a program that touches most of their customers and costs six or seven figures. Why?

Let’s start with the flat-line problem. We’ve seen this in all sectors…Tech, Telecom, Financial Services, Retail, to name a few. Everyone’s head nods in agreement when I bring this up in front of large audiences. The critical business issues are that over time, customer experience management programs 1) do not inform change management, and 2) do not contribute to profitable growth. The scary thing for both suppliers and clients is that eventually their relationship will end because of these issues. And like a divorce, it is painful and expensive for both sides.

The lack of strategic information should be no surprise. Programs that measure relationships report the same key drivers over and over; new insights stop in Year Two or Three. Transaction surveys are short, limited to a single touch-point, and intended for Ops management. Over time, however, that’s not good enough for executives who need more value from these programs to impact their company growth. As a transportation company exec once told me, “I’m spending seven figures on my study and not getting any strategic value from it…what can you do?”

The good news is that the problem lies not with the programs, but with us. Practitioners, both client side and supplier side, have a bad case of tunnel vision. Over the next three blogs, I’ll be talking about these programs in more comprehensive (I refuse to say “holistic”) ways. These wider perspectives will begin to reveal how companies can unlock the inherent tactical and strategic value of their CXM programs.

Join this community…Share your stories about how your customer experience programs have worked for you over time in the comments.

If you enjoyed this post, meet Curt next week, Oct 3rd to 5th, at the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit in Arizona, or join TNS this November at NACCM for a session on Best-in-class Customer Experience Management.

To learn more about NACCM, click here. To register, click here. Readers of the Customer's 1st blog can save 15% off the standard registration rate with code NACCMBlog.

Customer Experience Management

Bruce Temkin asks in this blog post, “What the Heck is Customer Experience?” He goes on to provide three key points that he feels is part of Customer Experience Management:

- Discipline. CEM is not about creating slogans like “this is the year of the customer.” It needs to be a set of ongoing activities like a well-established voice of the customer program.

- Increasing loyalty. CEM is not about an altruistic belief that customers should be treated better. It needs to be linked to more profitable (or strategically improved) long-term behaviors of customers.

- Customers’ needs and expectations. CEM is not about technology deployments or internal milestones. It needs to be calibrated from the perspective of target customers.

It is important to reflect on CEM, and what it means to your organization. After reviewing his list is there anything that you would add or change?