NACCM 2010: The Power of Customer Advocacy in Business-to-Business Markets – Market Probe’s Research Approach to Leveraging the Power of Word-of-Mouth

Presented by: Michael Lowenstein, MARKET PROBE

Customer retention is important, but the name of the game is how you use touchpoints and experiences to cross sell and upsell.

Touch points and methods that individuals have a standing contact. That will create the positive relationships and outcomes you’re looking for. We currently focus on what monetizes. Advocacy focuses on this. It is critical to this is on/offline word of mouth.

Advocates will do your marketing for you. Leverage the people who already love your brand. Word of mouth is a factor that can’t be looked beyond. Loyalty is a passive state. What do people trust? Word of mouth is a source for making business decisions. Individuals don’t trust organizations and what they have to say. People believe they can trust other people. It doesn’t matter where word of mouth comes from, but what companies have to pay attention to that information says.

NACCM 2009: An interview with Allegiance, Inc.

Guest blogger Norma Huibregtse spoke with Jason Tripp, Sales Manager with Allegiance, Inc, while at NACCM 2009 to find out about their offerings and their views on the customer service industry.

NACCM 2009: Do you outsource your social media work?

Guest Blogger Norma Huibregtse talked to Becky Carroll after her presentation about outsourcing your social media, how you should bring personality in to your social media when using it for customer service, where it's going in the future, and more.

NACCM 2009: In Photos

Day Two was a great experience. We spent most of the day looking at the kind of service we provide through our customers eyes.

Here is the day in photos:

NACCM 2009 LIVE: How Travelocity uses customer information to create a Customer Service Culture

When you’re one of the largest travel agencies in the U.S., and you manage the majority of your business through the web, you’ve got an interesting set of customer service challenges.

Travelocity is a very well-know portal for purchasing travel, not just in the U.S., but around the world through Travelocity.com, Travelocity Business, zugi, travelguru.com and more. All of this traffic is supported by four centers in the U.S., 3 in India, and 2 in the Philippines.

Travelocity achieves very high levels of service, even though they really never meet their customers face to face, and rarely even talk to them on the phone. How do that do that? Through Customer Championship.

Ginny Mahl is VP, Customer Care at Travelocity. Ginny shared with the NACCM Customer’s 1^st conference what customer championship is and why is it important.

Travelocity’s customer promise is “We guarantee your booking will be right or we’ll work with our partners to make it right, right away.” That’s a big promise when you consider the volume of business they do.

• Delivering on their promise requires a deep enterprise-wide commitment.
• When a customer makes them aware of a travel problem, they fix it promptly at the first point of contact.
• They advocate for the customer both within Travelocity and with travel suppliers.
• They not only fix the first customer’s problem but also those of similarly situated customers. They improve the customer’s entire travel experience.

Example: When a booking ends up not being the room type expected, it’s a big problem, particularly when it’s a special event. Travelocity has developed a process to pre-confirm rooms to cut down on this problem. Travelocity tackles the problem, even though they didn’t cause it!

If you look at the many travel websites, you quickly realize that Travelocity cannot consistently differentiate with content. They all look and act pretty much the same.

Customer Championship is what makes Travelocity different.

• It creates a sustainable differentiator between Travelocity and other sites.
• It causes customers to be more loyal to an organization that provides support when needed
• Doing the right thing for customers will forces Travelocity to evaluate its policies and processes and fix those that don’t make sense for the customer.
• Being the customer’s advocate energizes employees

The essence of this effort is echoed in art of their mission statement: To Inspire Travelers and Be Their Champion.

A high-volume, mostly web-based business generates a mind-boggling amount of information about customers and their experiences. Here’s how Travelocity uses that information to support their championship vision. According to Ginny, they use it to:

• Gain a deep understanding of our customers by listening
• Assure the entire organization is accountable for delighting our customers
• Work with our suppliers to improve the travel experience

Travelocity gets a vast amount of customer feedback through surveys, emails, calls, etc. -- hundreds of thousands of times per month. With so many millions of data points, it’s hard to digest it all.

Text Mining allows them to regularly and systematically read mass quantities of customer feedback.

In order to manage this process, they have created a dedicated customer advocacy team. This group researches the issues, contacts customers for resolution, and compile feedback for further study. They also look for customer “cries for help.”

“Cries for help” are verbatim comments that text mining allows them to search for that indicate a real problem. Comments on websites, surveys, etc. like “Do you care?” “Help!” “Refund my money!”Travelocity found that they can triple customer satisfaction when the customer advocacy team responds to them.

Another benefit of mining so much information and being able to make sense of it is that it also allows them to work better with suppliers. They can give real data to suppliers instead of just anecdotal stories.

In short, it helps them, and their suppliers provide travelers with Proactive Customer Care to make their experiences better and better.

As Ginny’s final comments reminded us: “Because it’s not just about getting there…it’s about assuring great experiences."

NACCM 2009 LIVE: Preparing for Customer Centricity 2020: How o Evolve the People, the Process & Technology to Meet Future needs

"If we're in a service economy, what's next?"

That’s the question Bo McBee, Vice President of Enterprise Total Customer Experience and Quality for Hewlett Packard., posed to the general session on Day 3 of the NACCM Customer’s 1^st Conference.

It’s Bo’s job to think about these things. As he puts it, “At HP, the future is coming at us fast. It’s borderline chaos.” In fact, he’s never sent the drivers of loyalty change faster than they are right now.

Customers are empowered, informed, and demanding. They’ve got to see relevancy up front.

HP is a big company. Actually, that’s a severe understatement. A billion people use HP technology every day. Their technology handles two thirds of all credit card transactions and supports top 200 banks & 130 major stock exchanges. HP software makes calls possible for 100+ million mobile phone customers around the globe.

Part of what enables HP to operate so well as such a huge company is their focus on Total Customer Experience (TCE), which they define as the overall customer impression of HP based on perceptions and experiences with HP people, partners, products, services, etc at every touchpoint.

Loyalty enables growth. And when HP measures loyalty & customer service performance, they do it across every touchpoint in the lifecycle of the customer.

Bo simplified their approach to improving the TCE into three steps:

• Execute fundamentals – improve processes and products
• Make it easy – better understand your customer and competitive differentiators
• Transform customer relationships - to be proactive – reinvent the experience

Bo is a big believer in Joe Pine’s Progression of economic value.

It’s a scale that explains the relative value of what you provide as a business. As you move up the scale, the customer receives and perceives higher value (and is usually willing to pay more money). Bo used a phenomenal example of how you might purchase cake for someone’s birthday.

1. At the Commodities level, you’re willing to buy eggs, milk, flour, and sugar to bake a cake.
2. At the Goods level, you’ll purchase a cake mix for because it’s a little easier on you.
3. At the Service level, you’ll go for the pre-baked bakery cake for the total convenience.
4. But at the Experience level, you’ll suddenly spend a lot more for a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.

Bo defines an experience as a “distinct economic offering that people are willing to pay for.” To move up the progression, you customize the lower levels. As you customize something, the lower or existing level of that something often becomes a commodity. Loyalty and growth are becoming more a function of “the overall experience”

To help accelerate the creation of meaningful experiences, HP has designed a methodology they call the IMPACT Model:

• Identify experiences that matter
• Make it uniquely personal
• Process, technology, people to add value
• Add architecture
• Create inspiration and incentive
• Test the experience

One of the most fun parts of the model is you have to come up with a theme for the experience that everyone agrees on, and it’s not always easy. Once you get that theme, every thing you do from that point on has to support that theme.

IMPACT addresses:

• Functional needs: help me accomplish a task
• Emotional needs: help me feel deeply about what I do
• Social needs: help me build relationships with others

Bo’s final tips for making sure you’re prepared for a more customer-centric world:

• You can’t become world-class if you don’t take your strengths to world-class levels.
• Don’t ask a customer what you should already know. Make sure your processes for listening to your customers keep up.
• Tie customer service to growth and profitability. Don’t lose the opportunity to do something really impactful because you didn’t make business case for it.

NACCM 2009: Saving Customer Ryan: The Power of Emotional Brand Equity

Saving Customer Ryan: The Power of Emotional Brand Equity
Dan Hill, Author, Emotionomics

Dan decided to figure out how to bring emotions into business. Brain science breakthroughs have changed and we have always been, “I feel, therefore I am.” And this is now shown through brain science. We are Homer Simpson, we think and act with our emotions.

We have a 3-part brain. Sensory, emotional, rational brain. We are sensory and emotional decision makers. Loyalty is a feeling.

How do we judge what people think compared to:
Facial expressions – 55%
Tone of Voice – 38%
Words Being said – 7%

Pitch, rate, range, articulation can give you a sense of how people are feeling over the phone. A person who is born blind has the same emotions as someone who is not. There is a part of the brain devoted to reading people faces, and it’s 8x as powerful as the one which reads objects.

In a commercial for Best Buy, eye tracking goes to the face of a person for females. Everyone is looking at faces, and the logos are in the background, but that’s the story. People Magazine will always survive because of the fact that they can continue showing the faces.

Facial Coding: It’s universal. It’s worldwide, culture through. The face is the only place in the body where the muscles attach to the skin. Dan Hill has shared his views on televistion and judged facial expressions of individuals involved with presidential races, on ESPN and ARod, when playing poker.

Our core emotions are happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, contempt, Sadness, fear, and deceit. We have two smiles, which are the true smile and tbe social smile.

Gauge personality properly by using the Big 5: Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism

Openness – exploratory and not afraid
Conscientiousness- detail oriented, responsible
Extroverted – Aggressive, friendly, funny,
Agreeableness – warmth, kindness
Neuroticism – adaptability, equanimity, maturity

When you’re in a short meeting, you can only pick up on conscientiousness and neuroticism.

Summary:
1)Hire and train the right people. We all read other peoples faces.
2) Better survey question.
Like: What makes you stay with us? Or What do we do to help you the most?
3) Customer service as offer, it should nto be the afterthought. It’s huge and the heart and center of business.

If you can create a sensory service with customer service, you can then leverage your relationships.

Make customer service a good romantic dance, continually court them show them the equity of your brand.

NACCM 2009 LIVE: Designing and Developing Performance-Support Learning Programs

Understanding the difference between training and learning is absolutely critical to developing Performance-Support Learning Programs, according to Kathleen Peterson, Chief Vision Officer, Powerhouse Consulting.

Kathleen opened her session with a funny song about the solution to all call center woes is to add “more staffing on the line.” Of course, more staffing is not the answer. More educated staff is likely a better solution.

But be careful not to educate your people the wrong way. If you “train” them, you’re focusing on instruction that is basically trainer focused. A better way is to focus on “learning.” Training is education and instruction. Learning is the act of acquiring knowledge, and it’s focused on the learner.

Another way to put it: Training is an event…learning lasts forever.

Kathleen encourages us to adopt an “ask and tell” training philosophy. The trainer should always be the person asking the questions of the learner. It forces the learner into a situation where they recognize what the learning is doing for them…and how it will apply to their interactions with their customers.

In a performance-support model:

• Training represents knowledge, skills, and feelings needed to perform critical and complex tasks.
• Training is part of a much bigger picture.
• Training does not teach everything – it helps learners become independent, efficient workers.
• Transactions are taught around real-life job situations.
• The training teaches the tools that support learners on the job.

When people dread training, it’s usually partly because it’s not performance-based. Nobody likes to be told what to do. They’d much rather be taught how to do their job well.

Performance-support training all boils down to three simple questions

1. What do they need to know?

• Products
• Policies
• Procedures
• Exceptions
• Where to look for needed information

2. What do they need to do?

• What actions do they need to take to do their job?

3. What do they need to feel? And make other people feel?

• Empathy
• Enthusiasm
• Positivity
• Empowerment
• Appreciated
• Connected

An effective training program should always be guided by several elements:

• Customer experience
• Company mission
• Business Goals
• Brand Elements
• Values Proposition

Kathleen was passionate about following the proper methodology when designing a training program. The great thing about following proper methodology is that it can fit any program, course, or module and ensure the right kind of training every time. But the most important steps in the process are to always make sure you properly analyze needs and spend time designing training. If you don’t do these first two steps, the best delivery in the world won’t save your training program.

Want to make sure your training is fully supported and absolutely effective? Kathleen suggests creating a multi-disciplinary design team with representatives from any area of your business that might be affected by the training or have important insight into what the program should look like.

NACCM 2009 LIVE: Global Culture Transformation; Changing The Behavior of Leaders at Levels

You’ve got to love somebody who calls themselves a “quality geek” like Gloria Roberts does. She’s the Staff Vice President of Service Experience at FedEx Corporation. Having a quality geek in charge of the service experience is definitely a good move.

Gloria stated her most important point right up front: Customer centricity is about aptitude, attitude, and action.

It’s imperative for a company founded on a quality promise (“Absolutely, Positively”) to create a culture of service. But, FedEx is not one company. It’s actually four operating companies servicing over 220 countries/territories.

Can you imagine trying to effectively communicate how to deliver their infamous “Purple Promise” to make every customer’s experience outstanding to 275,000 employees worldwide? That’s exactly what they do.

All companies must compete on price or experience. Customer experience is the superior way to compete. It results in higher overall value and a lasting competitive advantage. When you focus on experience, price may still be important, but falls to a secondary consideration.

For FedEx, the rallying point is the quality of their service. They have to make sure the service to the customer, at every touchpoint, is more than the customer expects.

Drivers of Customer Loyalty for FedEx include:

• Customer perceptions of the brand
• Overall customer experience
• Value for the price

To make sure they can deliver, FedEx makes tremendous efforts to:

• Gather information to know what their customers expectations are.
• Focus on performance every single day.
• Make sure the employees are engaged and the customer’s interaction is superior.
• Measure, measure, measure the quality of everything!

Quality at FedEx:

• is a shared call to action.
• is shared understanding of “best”.
• is a fact-driven philosophy for decision making.
• involves a common process improvement methodology.
• is an integral component of Customer Loyalty and Operational Excellence Strategies.

In fact, quality is so important FedEx says, “Quality management is not a thing we do, it’s the way we do things.”

To communicate FedEx’s QDM (Quality Driven Management) plan, Gloria’s team created a multi-phase approach that included building awareness and alignment, preparing leadership to lead, and finally deploying, implementing, and ensuring the longevity of the plan.

One of the communication vehicles they created was a high-quality video that was shared with the entire company several times. The video was 6 minutes: that’s all the time they have at the beginning of each shift for their “management” meetings. They normally squeeze 15 topics into those meetings, but they focused on the video instead in order to get a consistent message across to the entire company.

One memorable line from the video stated that a1% increase in loyalty results in $100 million in revenue for the company. That’s a pretty staggering statistic to convey the impact of increasing customer loyalty.

The initiative strives to communicate three themes to employees: Customers, Excellence, and We are One FedEx.

So, how did they get 275,000 people to learn the same thing?

They focused on making “local” stories “global”

They employed omprehensive, consistent messaging

They built on existing learning and competency base

They created a learning approach employable across target audiences

They used a “non-traditional”, multi-media learning platform

They incorporated it into their business plan

One key element to speed up the adoption of QDM was to get key influencers on board early in the process, effectively creating influential cheerleaders of the program. These influencers were giving a "sneak preview" of the program before they rolled it out to the company at large. And FedEx realized that influencers are not necessarily the people at the top. These hand-picked people came from all levels throughout the company.

NACCM 2009: I Want To Tweet You Up

I Want To Tweet You Up: What Emerging Customer Trends Mean for Your Business
Michael Tchong, Trend Analyst & Founder, Ubercool

We should begin by discriminating trends from fads. Trends are consumer value changes. The best way to predict consumer behavior

Ubertrend – major movement, pattern or wave, emerging in the consumer lifestyle

Digital lifestyle – marriage between man and machine
The Compression – the acceleration of life
Unwired – The unhooked generation

Captin Sully’s situation reporting coverage was changed by Twitter. The first image was from Janis Krums from Sarasota, Florida from an iPhone. Comedians are the ones who best observe trends. The youths are on the front of this trend. The majority of Twitter users are abroad. Twendz lets you see Twitter trends as they are cascading down. Michael Tchong said Twitter will make or break swine flu.

Multitasking too much makes it harder for humans to remember things. The Wii now responds people to rehabilitate faster. Have you gone to “Wii”hab yet?

Tchong looks to microwaves for introducing Americans to instant gratification. Our state of mind has become a state of time. Culture has created a fast society, because we have a fear of being left behind.

Everyone is looking for innovation. In 1999, 95% of people stated that they wanted to be a leader. This is up from 37% in 1991.



We’re all facing the GPS Generation. We can get anywhere like a native, and leaving maps behind. Same can be said for speed dial and remembering phone numbers. Sit or Squat to find the restroom.

Time Compression. Food, photos, instant energy, etc. We are all trigger happy. Epic fail – Frequently used term in the video game community that means you really messed up and/or something/someone is an utter failure. This is video game culture seeping into life.

Digital lifestyle: We’ve gotten an unknown president into office. Twilight and New Moon made a mom from Phoenix a multimillionaire.

Download free Uberternds map at ubercool.com.

NACCM 2009: High Performance Work at Home reps, a Building Block for Creating a Customer-Centric Environment

Ricardo Weld, Director HSN, Performance Support Services, Home Shopping Network


The web complements the television channel. They have emerging channels, what a customer wants, when she wants. They’re also on video on demand to find the products you want for your remote control.

Mission: The delivery the joy and excitement of new discoveries every day. HSN today isn’t about hard sales, it’s about education and information. When Emril is on, it’s about the dish he’s cooking, not just the pots and pans he’s using to cook the meal in.

The start of the experience is the brands. A customer is looking for uniqueness, ideas, accessible aspiration, fun, connections and validations.

HSN handles 45 million calls an 480,000 emails processed annually. They look at the volume that their products are going to drive in calls, and they have found a way to use a work at home model to employees who take calls. They’ve moved away from off shoring, and brought shores back home. Their work at home model has allowed them to grow, and let their employees grow in their career.

Show hosts, reps, online reps, all of the voices are representing HSN. Voices should not be different across the different platforms. That’s why they brought the CSRs back from the Philippines, the voices didn’t translate.

HSN has a reward yourself program for their employees. HSN sets up a program with an account, they get in store credits or expendable cash. This never expires, even if the employees leave HSN.

HSN has a quality evaluation process. They have a Tier process – 1 – Reps who are tenured, solid jobs, 2 – doing well, Tier 3 – Those who are struggling. They receive 3x the number of evaluations compared to Tier 1.

The expectation of HSN for their call center reps is to connect with their customer. This is their brand, and they expect it from their call center representatives. A friendly, connected work at home agent is the HSN brand.

NACCM 2009: From Toronto to Trinidad: Measuring Scotiabank's Brand and Service across international Boundaries

Cathy Daniels, Director, Customer Insights and Measurement, ScotiaBank International Banking & Joseph E. Toole, Vice President, Client Services, Burke, Inc.



ScotiaBank is in 48 countries and 5.5 milion customers. They are currently expanding into Latin America to reach those who are unbanked in the Caribbean. Their core purpose is to help customers become better off. In Canada, their motto is “You’re richer than you think.” This doesn’t translate correctly across regions. They’ve looked to change this in Latin America.

When you’re doing research to make your company cross borders, and create a new brand based on one that exists, you must start with a huge opening for your funnel. No one can be left out of the process.

First, one must determine the key brand attributes. What are the generalities, and also look at the little thinks that make the brand. Burke wanted to then figure out what was driving the brand, what’s differentiating ScotiaBank, and what are the key constituencies.

Concentrate on what would differentiate the bank based on missions, goals and identity. This is different from building an identity from scratch.

Lessons learned from ScotiaBank and Burke:
-The brand attribute “research funnel” should have a wide opening and a narrow outlet
-Use multiple evaluation criteria for determining optimal brand elements
-Readiness assessment requires both operational and marketing components
-It is possible to arrive at common brand strengths across multiple geographies
-Well-communicated research findings can influence thinking among diverse stakeholders
-Competitive bank comparisons overcome cross country measurement concerns

NACCM 2009: A message from Kathleen Peterson

Kathleen Peterson, the 2009 NACCM: Customers 1st Conference Chair met with us this morning to let us know how the conference was going and what she's looking forward to over the next few days.

NACCM 2009: Profiting from Customer Churn

Profiting from Customer Churn
Ken Powaga, Senior Vice President, GfK Customer Research-North America

Is profiting from customer churn an oxymoron? The only good churn Ken’s heard from involves milk churning into butter.

Customers as assets. They’re the most important asset. They contribute to company success, employee motivation, quality, customer satisfaction and more. Each stage needs a metric to determine how well the business is going. The problem is that customers aren’t static. We’re getting new customers in and current customers are leaving. What are the profits from new customers versus the profits from leaving customers.

There are bad customers. They may not have lifetime value for you. With some customers, the top 20% of your customers may account for 80% of your profits. The bottom half of your customers eat up 30 of your profit.

-Define customer value
-Quantify reasons for churn
-Set strategic priorities

NACCM 2009: Going for Gold: Living Up to Olympic Size Expectations

Going for Gold: Living Up to Olympic Size Expectations
Rick Burton, CMO, United States Olympic Committee 2008, David Falk Professor of Sport Management, Syracuse University and Co-founder of Sportgiving

Most of the attendees know more about service customers than Mr. Burton. But he will share a few stories that challenge our thoughts and return the messages back to our businesses.
Burton has had many roles in his careers, including beer, football, college kids, the Olympics and college kids. He’s willing to challenge authority and challenge the rules.

He once worked with the NFL. The NFL gave the fans what they wanted. More scoring, this includes bringing in the uprights for limiting field goals. The NFL was listening to the customers and brought in more touchdown.

Customers need to come first. Burton has always been inspired by sports. How can the Nike video below inspire your company? Nike gives athletes the chance to keep on going, challenge their borders and go farther than they’re able to. The company started by athletes for athletes. They want to give them better products and a better chance to thrill them.

He was able to be the Chief Marketing Officer going into the 2008 Olympic Games. His companies involved were Coca Cola, Budweiser, Bank of America, and Kellogg’s. These business are the best at what they do, but no one person can take credit for the greatness of the Olympics. He was a part of the team, and they needed the ability to sell their products and make sure their customers were satisfied, whether if it was Corn Flakers or a bank account. AT&T put on a program where each night a song was featured. When users downloaded the song, the proceeds went back to the athletes. The ratings were very, very high, and it was also available across many platforms.

The thing about the Olympics, do your employees see themselves as champions? Athletes have to become champions by going on step at a time. In great leadership, you must be able to bring more out of the people around you.

You must trust: vision, staff, peers, product, organization, faith, view of the world, and yourself.
Are you sacrificing your creativity by not taking enough time for vacation and letting yourself relax? “Change or die” is crucial for how you live and interact with the world around you.
Children’s books and movies can be a source of inspiration.

What are three things your customers need? What are three things that your customers want and you’re not giving them? How often do you dream ahead 6 months in your business, in your career and in your customers. What would you like to see? If you don’t see anything, what does this mean for your creativity? Are you searching for excellence or settling for mediocrity?
Wow. What’s your definition? What’s your new outlook for your business?

NACCM LIVE 2009: KEYNOTE: The Ultimate in Customer Centricity: Chief Customer Officers Describe How Everyone Can Be A Loyalty Leader

Moderator:

Curtis Bingham, Author, The Key to Customer Strategy: The Rise of the Chief Customer Officer, and President, Predictive Consulting Group.

Panelists:

Rudy Vidal (RV), former Chief Customer Officer, InContact

Tammy McLeod, ™ Chief Customer Officer, Arizona Public Service

Bob Olson (BO), Chief Customer Officer, Homestead Technologies, an Intuit Company

Curtis warmed up our thoughts with a story about the hotel. When he arrived, he was greeted with a room upgrade, extra water in his room (because they know he likes that), and taken to his room in a golf cart by a bellman who told him all about the hotel. Upon arriving in his room, the bellman put all of his bags in the right place and offered to get drink, food, or whatever Curtis desired. The bellman clearly loves his job. He also got a big tip.

Then Curtis asked us to imagine if there had a problem with the TV (there hadn't, by the way). Imagine calling for service and being promised service in 5 minutes. After a much longer time, service shows up, a smelly repairman who complains about his job. Imagine how you’d fill out the satisfaction survey IN SPITE after dealing with this imaginary service tech, even after the great experience up front.

The actions of many can be offset by the actions of one.

You can’t afford to be the only champion of customer loyalty. You can't tackle it alone.

How many in the audience have a chief customer officer?

Answer: 1.

What is a Chief Customer Officer?

The CCO uses customer insight to affect corporate & customer strategy and align deliverables to customer values, thereby maximizing customer acquisition, retention, and profitability.

Rudy, what is loyalty?

RV - It has a lot to do with where you’re standing. Loyalty is a commitment to repurchase or recommend a product or a brand that resists normal market pressures. What loyalty is NOT in my mind is getting a customer to have repeat purchases. I can have repeat purchasers for a whole bunch of reasons.

I contend that you cannot buy loyalty. It’s an emotional issue.

TM – A lot of those loyalty programs that require me to use a certain card to get my points, it’s not as fun to be a part of those with all the conditions, etc.

BO – I believe you can get a good sense of customer loyalty and engagment by looking at employee loyalty and engagment. When I walk into a new company, I observe employee engagement. It’s amazing the correlation you find inside and outside the company.

RV – There are metrics that very much support Bob’s view. Engaged employees DOUBLES loyalty. If your employees are not engaged, you have half the loyalty that you could have.

How do you think loyalty is changing?

RV – I think the drivers of loyalty are changing. The morning speaker talked aobut consistency. 20 years ago, consistency was difficult to get. You couldn’t train people well enough. Consistency created emotion in customers. Consistency is easier to obtain now. Computers help make consistency happen. What makes us emotional now is changing.

TM – I agree. We see tremendous changes in the drivers of loyalty. The current economic conditions are causing a lot of this. I see that we’re creating a tremendous increase in distrust. We’re also seeing a “return to local.” Every dollar that’s spend with a locally owned business drives 43 cents back into the community. That’s higher than if you spent money with a nationally owned company.

BO – With the local side, there’s a big push to bring jobs back onshore. I think it’s driven by the customer. It’s been so easy to make money in the past, now you have to earn the money in a different way.

Rudy, how do some of the loyalty programs adapt to an emotional experience?

It’s not easy to do, but it’s easy to understand. The issue is to know your customer. This used to be a product & service economy. Not anymore. It’s an experience economy. People are spending money for experiences. Why? Because products are commoditized. If we’re an experience economy, we shouldn’t be surprised when people just want a lower price for a commoditized product. You have to understand your customer. Frankly nobody cares about your product. If you know your customer, and you can lay out a customer’s experience across your customer, and you know the emotional requirements of your customer, you can provide for those emotional needs. And it’s relatively cheap to do.

AUDIENCE QUESTION – It’s easy to create the emotional experience, how do you maintain that focus?

RV – When I greet you, I need to create delight. That’s not so easy to commoditize. Don’t’worry so much about the process, as much as the emotional results.

BO – Instead of using the word focus, I’d use the word purpose. When you describe the outcomes you want, people will find a way. Who wants a job where you have to follow a big manual that tells you exactly what to do. When you define purpose and outcome, people will surprise you.

AUDIENCE QUESTION – How do you manage them to do that day after day?

RV – It’s a culture issue. If management understands why they get up in the morning, and they were to instill this purpose, this mission, and create an environment where everyone knows why they’re here, they’ll watch out for each other and learn from each other.

The moment you believe a culture is strategic, go back to the drawing board. Culture is all about the FRONT LINE. What does a customer need at the front line? That’s what culture should focus on.

BO – Jack Welch talks about getting tired of saying the same thing over and over, but it’s important. Do you people go home at night knowing what’s important? It’s all the little things you do that make a difference. That’s why culture is tactical, not strategic.

Tammy, how have you helped everyone take ownership for loyalty?

TM – It’s a never ending task. It’s never done. We’re a large, regulated “monopoly,” so our approach is often a little different. We have to publicly go before a commission to change pricing, etc. If our service, satisfaction, loyalty isn’t good, it makes that process much more difficult.

Walking the walk is what I’s all about. Alan mentioned this morning UPS and how they’ve caught up to FEDEX. Part of how they’ve done that is by measuring everything. We measure, too. One thing we measure is satisfaction. My task is to inform my company that we’re all in this together. For instance, if you’re a tech and your shirt is untucked or you show up late, you’ve affected the customer experience.

Let people see their part of the picture. How do they fit into this? Create unlikely allies. Go out and pick an unlikely ally. I picked the person who runs the fleet. Then I went to our legal department and made them customer advocates. Find people that others wouldn’t necessarily expect to talk the customer loyalty.

The next step is to sit down with the other groups and have them discover how they impact the customer.

Our CEO made customer satisfaction a measurement across the board, which has helped our efforts tremendously, but like I said, it’s a job that’s never done.

The message I put out there is that the CFO doesn’t sign your paycheck, it’s the customer! Think about that every time you get your check.

Are there metrics that help drive some of the behavior?

TM -We measure a lot of stuff. Web interactions, calls, etc. We look at those on a weekly basis.

BO – At GoDaddy, I would bring in people from different departments and talk to them about the customers and how the different areas affect them. When you can get different groups and make it so they see the interrelatedness of the outcome, that’s when you get good results. It ultimately starts with defining jobs by outcomes and interdependencies and bringing the face of the customer into the building.

RV – I got a letter from a customer who outlined a horrible experience with an electronics company over a month and a half. We literally could not have done a worse job at pretty much every touchpoint. I started thinking “If customers only understood…” which is the wrong approach.

So what I did was invite this customer to come to NY and tell his story to my managers. We offered to cover expenses and provide a stipend for him. It was a beautiful moment. Management got it. They understood. And for every one of these letters, there are 30 customers who felt like this who DIDN’T write.

It was so compelling, managers actually approached him afterward because they felt compelled to say they were sorry.

For us, it became a tradition. We started inviting dissatisfied customers to come visit.

AUDIENCE COMMENT – As we recruit, it’s essential to make sure we know exactly the kind of person to hire.

BO – We all know that chapter one of the book is always “Hire the right people,” but we rarely do it, or share best practices.

RV – There are places where profiling is a good thing! There are different attudes required for different roles.

AUDIENCE QUESTION – Which types of incentives are the best drivers?

BO – For most people it’s not money, it’s recognition. We throw money at it, but nobody’s thought of how detrimental that can be.

TM – We’ve been advocates of Gallup’s Q12 from First Break All The Rules. One of the questions is about getting feedback every seven days. After you get to know your people, you figure out how they like to get that feedback. Have those interactions weekly. Commuication is undrrated and it shouldn’t be.

We have found it highly motivating to set people up in their homes to work if they meet a certain level of performance.

RV – How many of you would like to receive a gift from somebody who doesn’t mean it as opposed to from someone who does mean it. It is key that the employees understand that you mean it. The acknowledgement, the emotional, the human reward has to happen before the currency reward (points, cash, product, etc.). If you do the currency first, they will tend to think they got something for doing something, If you do the human recognition first, you get the attitude you’re looking for.

How do you sell loyalty to the C-Suite?

BO – At the C-level, we’ve been looking for the “diet” approach instead of the “lifestyle” approach. How do you balance short term with long term? CEOs are trying to do the right thing, but it doesn’t always match up with the right need.

It starts with building trust, good debate, and unfiltered freeflowing communication from the customers and the employees.

You also can’t be afraid to lose your job. You’re going to be respectful, but it’s going to be painful for them to hear. You’re going to thell them things they don’t necessisarily want to hear.

AUDIENCE QUESTION – How do you sell it as a strategic initiative when it’s one of the “soft” numbers that easily gets cut first?

TM – By having measurements, I can tweak the service model to see where we can make cuts without losing too much service level.

RV – Have KPIs that are leading to results. If you have actionable KPIs that lead to results, they very rarely want to cut that.

BO – All companies have a brain, heart, and soul. You can’t just focus on the brain.

At the conclusion of the session, the audience shared it's most valuable takeaways:

• Support local establishments
• Find unlikely allies
• Have dissatisfied customers talk to management
• Understand what emotions I want to drive, rather than what process to follow
• You cannot separate employee engagement and customer loyalty
• Make it everyone’s job

NACCM LIVE 2009: Opening Remarks

The main conference kicked off with energetic and encouraging opening remarks from Kathleen M. Peterson, Chief Vision Officer, Powerhouse Consulting.

What a fantastic way to open a conference! Kathleen challenged us to not just think about what we’re hearing, but more importantly, how we can put it into action.

This conference is full of amazing and useful information, delivered by some of the best and brightest thought leaders in customer service. Kathleen's short, but powerful message could be summarized with this thought: don't just sit there, do something. We're going to get out of this conference whatever we put into it. We're going to experience what we decide to experience out of it.

One way to get the most out of this event it to start taking action immediately. Don't wait to get back to your office to start creating an action plan or writing your report about the conference. Start it today.

Kathleen's advice also included mixing it up. If you came with co-workers or colleagues, sit with other people. Don't all go to the same sessions. Spread your talent around and absorb as much of the content as you can.

Before leaving the stage, Kathleen gave a phenomenal introduction to the first keynote speaker of the day, Alan Deutschman, author of Walk the Talk.

NACCM 2009: Summit Day in Photos

Summit Day at NACCM: Customers 1st closed with a keynote session from Disney. Here is the day in photos:

NACCM 2009: Answering the Social Phone – Listening, Measuring, and Engaging in Social Media.

Your social media phone is ringing. But are you answering it? Do the right thing by listening and engaging with your customers says David Alston, VP of Marketing & Community for Radian6.

What should we be listening for? Alston says that he listens for ideas, compliments, memes, crisis, complaints, competition, crowds, campaign buzz, and needs. Treat the conversations as if you are at a cocktail party. Don’t just jump in but look for the point of need from a customer. Listening first and then engage has been the common theme throughout many of the NACCM presentations today.

Alston shared the 5 C’s for engaging in social media. They include:

Content – give content because people don’t want your promotions.
Community – you want to create a place where your fans, customers and even critics can live together.
Conversation – they build the relationships that build your business.
Collaboration – because the consumer is more and more in control, it’s best to collaborate with your community than try to control it.
Connections – you can’t be a hermit. You must actively and consistently connect with your community.

What do you do if there are no conversations about you? Find people who share your passion and join their conversations. Eventually these relationships will evolve and bring you more exposure. The ultimate is to have customers share their positive testimonials about your business using tools like Twitter. Alston shared how he files positive tweets about Radian6 as “favorites” which he calls “twestimonials”.

Alston listed several reasons why some companies hold back from using social media to engage customers. They include restrictive policies, culture, bureaucracy, lack of momentum, concerns over window dressing, lack of top level support and lack of resources. When it comes to your culture, Alston says “if you suck in real life, you will suck on social media.” Make sure it’s right first.

In his Social Media Maturity Model, Alton talks about the various levels of engagement. We all should begin at the bottom and work our way up. That way you build credibility with each step.

Contributing - Contributing value through content and helping customers achieve goals
Sharing - Tell your own story. Share your brand’s passion & personality
Participating - Adding on and sharing your knowledge
Responding - Answering the “social phone”
Listening - Monitoring and analysis

For those still hesitant about getting engaged in social media, Alston says “find your path, and get started NOW!” Consumers want to connect with your brand. You’ll make mistakes but you will survive. Alston’s advice is to “have fun”. With over 11,000 followers on Twitter, you can bet that he is having tons of fun!

NACCM 2009: TELUS Case Study

TELUS is the largest telecommunications company in Western Canada, and the second largest in all of Canada. Krista Sheridan presented a case study of TELUS’ journey to delivering the optimal, executive supported experience blueprint for their small business market segment.

TELUS realized it had the opportunity to:

• Develop cross functional support for Customer Experience Management
• Align customer and business definitions of success
• Create an experience plan that everyone could understand, articulate, action, and measure
• Effectively allocate resources – time, money & people
• Win in their markets

To give you an idea of how ambitious this project was, they had to “renegotiate” their budget four different times and the project took several months longer than anticipated. Here’s what they did to achieve this ambitious effort:

They Stuck Their Neck Out

• They started asking“How can we improve” instead of just “how are we doing?"

They Sold The Dream

• They asked stakeholders, “What if we could help you be successful? What if we could help you understand metrics? Helped our customers stop going through a trial & error process.” That got tremendous buy-in.

They Got Specific

• They constantly measured what worked and what didn’t.

They Made the Rounds

• The team talked to stakeholders and customers, formally and informally, to find out what their issues were.

They Kept it Relevant

• When speaking with the various stakeholders, they had to show them the WIIFM: what’s in it for them. They explained why is loyalty important and how it contributes to the success of the company and all it’s parts.

They Leveraged The Buzz

• When the positive buzz started to happen, they spread it around to create energy and excitement about the project.

In addition to learning what made their internal teams tick, they also spent a great deal of time learning as much as they could about their customers. One innovated initiative was taking four days talking to customers ONLINE, then evaluating and prioritizing what was important to them.

Through that process, they learned how important the emotional connection is for their customers. They further realized how important it is for them to treat their customers as people.

Armed with a great deal of information, they rated each touchpoint (12 total) and ranked them in a “Triage Triangle” – which is a way to prioritize by how much impact a touchpoint has.

Some AHAs they learned:

• They were right about which touchpoints were important, but not how they were important or how to deliver.
• They didn’t need to differentiate their touchpoint strategy among Small Business groups
• They did not have to adjust their touchpoints to the maximum level in most cases.
• They could actually increase customer satisfaction AND reduce costs. For instance, they found that 25% of interactions were desired to be online – a way to increase satisfaction for those that want that service which is less expensive for the company to manage.
• Communicating their commitments and carefully managing customer’s expectations throughout each interaction enhances the experience at little to no cost.

The results of their efforts have been success in creating:

• A cross functional team – sales, marketing, operations
• Customer centric scorecarding
• Outcomes linked to compensations
• Improvements to business processes on track
• On-track customer feedback and showing improvement
• A coveted “seat at the table” with business unit partners

Krista’s final tips included:

Borrow from marketers – WIIFM Rules!

• Each stakeholder as his own needs and wants. Answer WIIFM to gain their support.

Sell the dream

• Customer experience improvement can be a long road – get them excited!
• Build the Emotional Business Case.
• Don’t just think about dollars and cents.
• Help stakeholders realize the outcomes of working with you.

Go Grass Roots

• Get others to help you sell your idea across the organization.

It’s a 3-legged marathon

• It's a marathon, not a sprint. A 3-legged race requires you to be in step with each stakeholder and go at the right pace.
• Slow down, listen. Address concerns.

Great Service & Cost Savings are Possible

• Focus on the right things, not everything.
• Figure out what makes the most difference.
• Realize that what’s important to your customers may not always make sense to you.