Creating a Customer-Centric Culture

John Cushman of AT&T spoke Tuesday at the Total Customer Experience Leadership Conference about creating a company culture centered around the customer. His steps for finding how to best serve your customer: watch your customers, understand their differences, set the foundation to building a roadmap to customer-centric success, make each player’s role clear, encourage employees to work together toward a common goal, rethink empowerment, track diverse success metrics, and prepare for the unexpected.

Pay attention to feedback and market analysis. This will show you what your customers truly want. Divide your customers into segments and find what requirements each needs. Make sure employees know what part they have in ensuring the right experience and encourage them to work together. Give authority to the right people in the right situations. Compile systems-provided data, structured feedback, and unstructured feedback to assess your current situation, then improve it. And always prepare for the unexpected.

Build for the end user. Sweat the little details of the user experience to solve pain points. All this will help you know your customers and discover what they want and what they don’t know they want.

Breaking the Barriers in Total Customer Experience

[Full disclosure – You might want to take this with a grain of salt since he’s my dad.]

Joe Pine kicked off Tuesday with an introduction to how experiences are the new offering in this economy.

We have progressed from the commodities market, to an industrial economy focused on goods, to a service economy, and now to a market that values experiences. The value of an experiential offering is based off how much time consumers are willing to spend with you.

The recession isn’t slowing down this progress; instead, it is accelerating the shift to experiences being what consumers truly want. With limited spending money, people are realizing they don’t value “stuff.” They value shared experiences with loved ones. Soon, experiences will become the predominant economic offering and even generate more jobs.

Experiences aren’t always experiences in real time and space. Companies like Layar use digital technology to enhance experiences. There’s been an explosion of this technology – it’s a migration from reality to virtuality. We need to figure out how to use technology to enhance experiences by fusing the real and the virtual and exploring the “Multiverse” (explained in his book, “Infinite Possibility”).

Here are Joe’s tips on designing experiences:

- Make the experience cohesive

o Use the design principle of THEME:

§ Theme

§ Harmonize impressions with positive cues

§ Eliminate negative cues

§ Mix in memorabilia

§ Evoke all five sense

- Make the experience rich – hit the sweet spot of the experience

- Make your experience individual – experiences happen inside of us

- Make your experience authentic – be true to self

- Make your experience compelling

o Embrace dramatic structure of Exposition, Inciting Incident, Rising Action, Crisis, Climax, Falling Action, and Denouement

Measure the success of an experience by how much time a customer is willing to spend with you – whether in real life or in the virtual world.

“With technology it’s limited only by our imagination, and to that there is no end.”

Become a Company Customers Love and Can’t Live Without: The Five Decisions of Beloved and Prosperous Companies

How do you get customers to advocate for your brand? Teach them to love your company.

Jeanne Bliss of CustomerBliss spoke this morning about creating a prosperous company by rallying customers behind it. Customers look to one another to make buying decisions 78 percent of the time. These customers who believe in your company are assets; relationships you need to honor. These customers will become an army for your company, so leverage that by becoming a beloved company with Jeanne’s five steps:

1. 1. Believe

2. 2. Clarity

3. 3. Real

4. 4. Be There

5. 5. Say Sorry

To get customers to believe in your company, you must understand that they are assets. Make sure to hire people who live your core values. Stop letting rules and policies drive a wedge between you and your customers.

Enhance clarity by being reliable. How clear are you on the memories you want to deliver? What story are you trying to share? Have clarity on what you will and will not be.

Be real with your customers and walk in their shoes. Train your new hires to also be a customer of your company, and make sure everyone throughout the company knows what the lives of your customers are like.

Be there for your customers at every touch point. Be deliberate on experience and create differentiating moments. Earn the right for customers to return.

With these steps you can become a beloved company and make sure customers are telling your story.