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.

Idea Gathering: Worst Company in America

Not just hearing but translating innovations and insights is a huge part of the value of the Total Customer Experience Leaders; Our unique idea gathering wrap-ups between sessions facilitate alignment of customer strategy inspirations with business relevant actions and have been one of our most highly rated features in the past

Here on the blog, we'll be presenting weekly idea gathering wrap ups of some of our favorite customer experience strategy, design and alignment news and views.

Consumerist worst companies in America

Consumerist.com performs an annual ranking of the worstcompany in America with the winner (or really the loser) taking home the “golden poo” award.  Companies are sorted into a March-Madness like bracket where they go head to head with another company. Whichever company receives more votes  advances to the next round, just to clarify: getting votes is a bad thing.

Many names on the list are somewhat predictable: Comcast, Carnival, and Bank of America just to name a few. Others are a little more surprising such as Apple, who was voted worse then Microsoft in the first round.

So who was voted by consumers to be the worst company? For the second year in a row, EA took the crown. EA, the massive video game producer, is known for suffering flop after flop due largely to a business plan that tries to squeeze every penny out of their customers.  EA has a reputation for rushing out incomplete games and then charging their customers for downloadable content that customers feel should’ve been a part of the game in the first place.

Their recent highly anticipated game “Sim City” performed such miserable sales and reviews that it had to be temporarily removed from Amazon and now ranks as one of the worst rated products from the retail giant.  The game performed so poorly because they designed it to be “always on” meaning that the only way to play the game was online.  This move made little sense as none  of the previous Sim City games required this, and in fact there very few games at all require this. Many speculate this move was strictly for DRM or digital rights management and a way for EA to have complete control over the game

However Paul Tassi of Forbes magazines speculates about EA’s ranking saying,  “Is it deserved? No. If we’re being honest, it’s not.” Tassi believes this rating is just a snapshot of “how annoyed the internet is with a certain brand at the moment”.  Tassi could certainly be right, but that doesn’t mean EA or Bank of America, Comcast, and Ticketmaster who rounded out the final four, shouldn’t all take it to heart.

The entire ranking is an example of why customer experience and customer experience management is such a crucial factor to all businesses. Tassi is correct in pointing out that there are certainly worse companies in the world. Some might argue that the environmental damage energy companies create or the borderline inhumane practices at many large food companies are far worse then what EA has ever done. But provide customers with a poor experience and this is the way you are going to be received by consumers, and this is what’s going to happen to your brand.

Jeffrey Marino is a contributing writer concentrating his focus on Business Administration, Management Information Systems, and Tech Innovations. He blogs at Fordham Nights and can be reached at JMarino@iirusa.com.

Idea Gathering: T-Mobile Stops Selling Contracts

"The Uncarrier" no longer offers contracts

Not just hearing but translating innovations and insights is a huge part of the value of the Total Customer Experience Leaders. Our unique idea gathering wrap-ups between sessions facilitate alignment of customer strategy inspiration with business relevant actions and have been one of our most highly rated features in the past.

Here on the blog, we'll be presenting weekly idea gathering wrap ups of some of our favorite customer experience strategy, design and alignment news and views.

T-Mobile recently announced that it would stop selling traditional two year contracts with its phones, a move setting them apart from the other big names in the cell phone industry. In a public event T-Mobile CEO John Legere blasted these carriers including the company that just months ago almost acquired T-Mobile, AT&T. Legre stated that "Customers don't need another AT&T, customers need someone to stop acting like AT&T”.

It’s no secret that people don’t like the long term contracts big carriers make you sign. Many people do it just to have access to the latest phone, as Legere said “Customers love smartphones, everyone hates contracts”.  These two year contracts originally came around for carriers to subsidize the cost of the phone upfront but customers are beginning to wonder if they’re really worth it.

Cellphone contracts are something which many consumers have begun to grow wary of and according to the New York Times the percentage of no-contract phones is expected to increase from 18% in 2008 to 30% by 2015. What’s the driving force behind this change? The biggest issue is definitely cost. 

Consumer Reports compared the costs of owning a 16gb iPhone 5 on a two year contract with big carriers or pre-paid with no contract and month to month charges. The winner of the competition was Smart Talk, a company which specializes in pre-paid, no contract cellphones. The initial cost of the phone was a whopping $650 but with two years of unlimited data at $45 a month the total cost was $1,730. 

Sound like a lot? 

It’s actually a savings of $1,110 compared to AT&T, who also caps data at 4 GB per month instead of providing unlimited data like Smart Talk. For a Verizon plan which would cap data at 2 GB per month the cost is still a little less then a thousand dollars more over two years.

Also just the idea of being locked into the same phone and company for two years is something difficult to get excited about.  Logan Abbot, president of MyRatePlan.com explained that in a no-contract system the carrier knows you can easily be gone the next month making you more valuable as a customer which (should) make customer service better.

It will be interesting to see how T-Mobile fares and if more customers begin to take Mr. Legere’s words to heart and end their contracts for the freedom and flexibility of pre-paid phones.

Jeffrey Marino is a contributing writer concentrating his focus on Business Administration, Management Information Systems, and Tech Innovations. He blogs atFordham Nights and can be reached at JMarino@iirusa.com.

Customer Experience Experts Podcast: Jeff McKenna of Chadwick Martin Bailey

In anticipation of our 2013 event, I recently spoke to Jeff McKenna of Chadwick Martin Bailey about his involvement and experience with the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit.

We discussed the what Jeff is looking forward to in the program, what case studies he will present and what is key to building a successful customer experience program.




Jeff McKenna of Chadwick Martin Bailey by IIRUSA

Join Jeff as he presents our Idea Gathering sessions at the 2013 Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit. As a reader of this blog, we’d like to offer you a 15% discount off the standard registration rates, use code TCEL13BLOG.

Visit our website to download the 2013 brochure, learn more about the event, or register.

Looking at Leaders: Thomas Feeney, Safelite AutoGlass

In anticipation of his upcoming keynote address on Driving Good Profits by Building a Customer-Centric Culture, Thomas Feeney, President & CEO, Safelite AutoGlass, sent us these insights below:

Thomas' Story

I began at Safelite AutoGlass®, which is the nation’s largest provider of vehicle glass repair and replacement, services 25 years ago and have served in a number of roles ranging from operations to sales. When I was named president and CEO in 2008, I recognized the company had great potential for growth.

To seize the opportunity to become the only true national auto glass brand in the industry, I worked with other senior leaders to introduce a new vision for Safelite® supported by two core principles: People First and Customer Delight.

No matter what is happening in my day, I will always take a call from an employee or a customer.

On Customer-Centric Culture

During the Total Customer Experience Leaders’ Summit, guests will learn a little bit about the journey Safelite has embarked upon to become a customer-centric journey. Are we 100% where we want to be? Not yet. Were there growing pains along the way? You bet.

Our hope is that by sharing our leadership and communications efforts to evolve our company, others will learn how to make a vision a reality.

I’ll talk about how we’re moving from good to great… how the Net Promoter Score has been a key driver in our change, and how important PEOPLE are to the customer experience.

Inspiration

The customer experience has always been important to me. What keeps me inspired are the thousands of letters we receive each year from customers praising our technicians, our customer service representatives, and our store managers for providing a customer experience that went above and beyond.

I contact each of those technicians, CSRs, and managers and personally thank them for representing Safelite® and our vision. Hearing their stories inspires me to keep moving in the direction we are.

The Future of Customer Experience

The use of better data analytics will help us improve the customer experience. For example, in late 2012, Safelite® added the Customer Effort Score to our Service Recovery survey to better understand what it’s like to be in the customer shoes. Are we easy to work with or not so easy? This new question sounds simple but it help Safelite® understand if future customer programs really add value and if they are appreciated by our customers.

We are also focused on learning more from the data customers provide to Safelite® and are developing analytical models that tell us what makes a measurable difference in the customers experience and what drives that result. Is quality priority #1? Speed of service? Friendliness? Reliability? The more we learn from the information the customer has already provided us, the better Safelite® and the customer experience will be.

Both of these are initiatives under Safelite’s next cultural transformation, which involves moving from our “People First” principle to “People Powered,” and also continuing our journey to be customer-driven.

Customer Experience Experts Podcast: Dan Hill, What's the Emotional Story?

In anticipation of our 2013 event, I recently spoke to Dan Hill, Ph.D., President, Sensory Logic and Author, Emotionomics about his involvement and experience with the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit.

We discussed the science behind gauging both verbal and nonverbal, subconscious reactions to advertising, store environments, and product design, packaging and presentation, understanding the emotional story and forecasting engagement and experience based on that emotional connection.


Customer Experience Experts Podcast: Dan Hill, What's the Emotional Story? by IIRUSA
Join Dan Hill as he delivers a keynote address See, Touch, Buy: What's the Emotional Story? The Sensory-Emotional Experience that Lifts the Customer Experience and Profit Margin at the 2013 Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit. As a reader of this blog, we’d like to offer you a 15% discount off the standard registration rates, use code TCEL13BLOG.

Visit our website to download the 2013 brochure, learn more about the event, or register.

About the Author

Valerie M. Russo, Social Media Innovation Lead, Senior Strategist at IIR USA, has a background in technology, anthropology, marketing and publishing.  Russo has worked in a variety of digital media roles at Hachette Book Group, Aol, and Thomson Reuters. She is a published poet and maintains a literary blog. She may be reached at vrusso@iirusa.com. Follow her @Literanista.  

How to get a free pass to the 2013 Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit

Be our official TCEL Scribe!

We’re offering an exclusive all-access complimentary pass (a $3,690 value) to the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit taking place on April 8-10, 2013 in Boston, MA!

We’re looking for an experienced blogger with an interest or background in customer strategy to live blog at this year’s TCEL event and contribute several posts afterwards.

In return for your posts, you’ll be able to connect with TCEL speakers and fellow attendees, attend summits and workshops delivered by industry thought-leaders and corporate practitioners on the hottest content areas of customer experience. The pass does not cover travel expenses and hotel.

How to apply:

To apply to be a guest blogger, simply send your name, title, company and a writing sample (a link to your blog posts is recommended) to vrusso@iirusa.com no later than April 3, 2013.

We will review your submissions and contact you directly with more details, if we decide you are a great match.

This opportunity doesn't come often and we encourage you to apply and join us at TCEL next month!

Individual Voters, Individual Customers. A Paradigm Shift for our Industry?

The MIT Technology Review recently published an article by Sasha Issenberg on how the Obama Campaign used big data to profile, target, influence and rally voters in the 2012 campaign.  Titled “A More Perfect Union: How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters”, I highly recommend it for anyone interested in politics or data analytics.  I love both, but what most interests me here are the potential analogies to the measurement and management of customer experience.

Much of the article focuses on Dan Wagner, the chief analytics officer for Obama 2012 and the work he and his team did to fuel the campaign.  In particular, it notes:

The significance of Wagner’s achievement went far beyond his ability to declare winners months before Election Day. His approach amounted to a decisive break with 20th-century tools for tracking public opinion, which revolved around quarantining small samples that could be treated as representative of the whole. Wagner had emerged from a cadre of analysts who thought of voters as individuals and worked to aggregate projections about their opinions and behavior until they revealed a composite picture of everyone. His techniques marked the fulfillment of a new way of thinking, a decade in the making, in which voters were no longer trapped in old political geographies or tethered to traditional demographic categories, such as age or gender, depending on which attributes pollsters asked about or how consumer marketers classified them for commercial purposes. Instead, the electorate could be seen as a collection of individual citizens who could each be measured and assessed on their own terms. (italics added.)

The article contrasts the Obama approach to Romney campaign’s, which was much more rooted in the “20th century tools for tracking public opinion”.  How much Wagner’s team contributed to the surprising (to many) margin of victory will undoubtedly be debated for years to come, but I will be very surprised if the “collection of individuals” approach doesn’t quickly become the new standard for any political campaign.

I want to highlight one other quote from the article before turning to our own industry.  In his conclusion, Issenberg writes:

In many respects, analytics had made it possible for the Obama campaign to recapture [the small town] style of politics. … They enabled a presidential candidate to view the electorate the way local candidates do: as a collection of people who make up a more perfect union, each of them approachable on his or her terms… “What that gave us was the ability to run a national presidential campaign the way you’d do a local ward campaign,” [David Simas, the director of opinion research] says. “You know the people on your block. People have relationships with one another, and you leverage them so you know the way they talk about issues, what they’re discussing at the coffee shop.”

As I write this, I am reminded of a 1990 United Airlines Commercial where a boss addresses his staff after getting fired by a long time account and tells them they are going to have a “face-to-face chat with every customer we have.”  They’d lost touch with the individual and replaced personal relationships with a dependency on modern technology – faxes in this era.  This boss was going to use the airline to get back to his customers.

Technology, the very thing that got this fictitious company out of touch with its customers, is what the Obama campaign used to get in touch with 65 million of its “customers”.

Customer experience research came of age in the 1990’s and is very much rooted in the social science thinking of the time.  We survey individual customers in order to learn about the group, not about that individual.  The “group” could be the business unit (usually a branch or a region) or the brand itself, but that is the focus rather than the customer.  Yes, most programs incorporate hot alerts and other customer recovery tools into the process and we rarely ignore a customer in need, but our methods and processes are all based on understanding the group, not the individual.  Advocates of the Net Promoter approach will say the 2-question survey is more customer friendly, but it is still a methodology designed to understand the group.  And, while some technology-based companies or even industries claim to be doing things differently, the reality is that they have all adopted the prevailing mindset and are just as dependent upon 20th century social science thinking as the market research industry.  Whether you call it market research or Enterprise Feedback Management, any program that treats all customers as essentially the same and has a one-size-fits-all approach to survey construction and administration is still based on the old social science model.  Anytime the feedback process has been designed for the user of the information rather than the provider of that information, the customer, the program is based on the old social science paradigm.  If there are truly individualized programs out there, I would love to see them.

Note that advocating for an individual approach is not abandoning the need to understand the branch or the brand.  After all, brands and branches are built one customer at a time; they are collections of individuals.  But systemic progress is very difficult when all you have are the individual responses.  Even when you design a program from the customer back, you still need to be able to analyze the aggregated data and use that understanding to improve the overall functioning of the unit.  The MIT article makes it very clear that the Obama campaign relied on the combination of individual voter information and data from traditional research.  And, while I do think moving to an individually-based approach will create measurement challenges, it is worth noting that according to the MIT article, the Obama team was able to predict individual elections outcomes with “improbable accuracy”; not with polls, but by counting votes “one by one.”

Regardless of what you think about President Obama, the reality is that his 2012 campaign has changed politics.  The use of modern data analytics to understand the electorate through a focus on the individual voter will be with us for the foreseeable future.  The question is: when will these same techniques drive the next generation of customer experience measurement?

* Republished with permission from the original at Maritz Research's Blog: Sound Check

By: Jim Stone

After a 35+ year career in marketing research, I have developed some definite ideas about this industry of ours. In particular, I am passionate about customer experience research and how this is, or at least should be, different from other forms of marketing research. My blogs will generally focus on these issues, although I reserve the right to play “Grumpy Old Researcher” from time to time and comment on other aspects of our industry.

The above-mentioned 35 years includes 27 years with Maritz, 2 years with Chilton Research, 3 years doing mental health research for the NJ Department of Human Services and various other academic and non-academic positions. I started my career as an analyst and along the way have held various positions at Maritz, including leading what was then our largest business unit, setting up what is now Maritz Research Europe, and heading up our new product development. Today, as EVP Innovation and Marketing Science, I still have a connection into the analytic side of our business, along with being what I call our company’s “Chief Tea Leaf Reader”: watching industry and societal trends and designing strategies to ensure we are properly anticipating and preparing for our clients’ needs. In this capacity, I’ve been our internal champion for leading edge developments like data integration and text analysis and had overall responsibility for leading the effort that led to the development of CE3D, our Customer Experience Evolution Framework and for the acquisition of evolve24, our social media aggregation and intelligence business.

When I am not in the office or with one of our clients, you can usually find me on the golf course, driving my 1966 Sunbeam Alpine (which I have owned since it was just a used car), or in the garage up to my elbows in Alpine grease.

Idea Gathering: 2013 Customer Experience Report

Not just hearing but translating innovations and insights is a huge part of the value of the Total Customer Experience Leaders. Our unique idea gathering wrap-ups between sessions facilitate alignment of customer strategy inspiration with business relevant actions and have been one of our most highly rated features in the past.

Here on the blog, we'll be presenting weekly idea gathering wrap ups of some of our favorite customer experience strategy, design and alignment news and views.

This week we’ll be discussing a recent customer experience report published by the Temkin Group.

The Temkin Group is a customer experience research and consulting firm just outside of Boston. The firm provides insights for some of the largest brands and aids companies in transforming their customer journeys. Besides their consulting work they also release an annual report which rates industries and companies customer experience. The report uses feedback from 10,000 consumers to rank 246 companies across 19 different industries. The guidelines for evaluation were these three questions:
    

1. Functional: How well do experiences meet customers’ needs?
2. Accessible: How easy is it for customers to do what they want to do?
3. Emotional: How do customers feel about the experiences?

The top five customer experience firms this year according the report were Publix, Trader Joes, Aldi, Chick-fil-A, Sam’s Club and Amazon (tied for 5). It’s interesting to note that not only did Grocery store chains take spots one, two, and three, but as a whole the grocery industry was rated the highest and scored well above the rest. There are definitely lessons to be learned in customer experience from grocery chains.

On the other end of the spectrum, according to the Temkin Group, the worst customer experience in America can be found at US Airways who were given a measly 46% in the report (compared to 84% at Publix). The Airline industry as a whole scored very poorly, not a big surprise considering a recent study ranked Airlines more hated by consumers then the IRS. Other low ranking industrie4s include TV/Internet Service providers and Health Plans.

Notable variance occurred in the Hotel industry where the leader, Mariott, scored a 75% while the worst hotel for customer experience, Days Inn, scored a paltry 48%. Significant variance was also reported in the Insurance industry where consumers ranked USAA an impressive 77% but scored 21^st century at just 49%.

The report as a whole gives a great look at customer experience trends and how companies are universally putting a greater emphasis on their customer’s experiences. According to the Temkin Group the number of companies with at least a “good” rating increased has increased 9% in the last year, and 21% in the last two years, and 57% of firms had at least a modest increase.

Where would your company be on this list?

 

Jeffrey Marino is a contributing writer concentrating his focus on Business Administration, Management Information Systems, and Tech Innovations. He blogs atFordham Nights and can be reached at JMarino@iirusa.com.

Why You Can’t Miss the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit

There is just one question you have to ask yourself. And it's not why should you attend the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit in 2013. It's what you will miss if you don't.

1. A Holistic Approach to Customer Experience from a Diverse Cross-Industry Speaker Roster. There is no other event that brings together higher-level thinking around the alignment of customer strategy with business relevant aspirations. Gain perspectives and cross-industry learnings from financial services, government, automotive, travel, retail, healthcare, hospitality companies and more.

2. Inspiring Keynotes. Hear from client-side experts and award winning authors on the power of listening and valuing customer feedback (Nationwide), understanding the emotional story (Sensory Logic), the impact of Big Data (American Express), optimize customer experience through social media (Facebook), transforming company culture (Safelite AutoGlass), how ethnographic methods are applied to design research (Pacific Ethnography Company), VOC integration (Maritz Research) and more.

3. Innovative Case Study Presentations. Customer-focused leaders share their insights-rich stories on designing a mobile app that motivates (JetBlue), developing a total customer experience metric (Toyota Financial Services), behavioral economics (GfK), creating unparalleled customer experiences (Eli Lilly & Company), optimize customer panels for instant VOC (CVS Caremark), Emart: global retail perspectives (Prophet) and more.

4. One Collaborative Congress. This high-engagement three-day experience focuses on expertise and interactivity with an integrated experience of all main stage presenters. Developing a balanced agenda on topics to help you advance your organization with a sound customer plan.

Customer Experience Design - Explore how VOC data and design principles can be used to engineer experiences across your organization.

Strategy - Interpret, analyze and evaluate your customer strategy to ensure business relevance

Measurement & Feedback - Drive change and optimize your sales force by measuring customer feedback through the entire customer journey.

Alignment - Integrate and leverage your customer touchpoints - measurement & ROI, linkage, VOC, social media, technology, design principles, operational metrics and senior leadership.

5. Executive Summary. Delivered to you after the event summarizing the key session highlights and game changing trends - a valuable resources as you craft your insights-rich customer story.

6. Interactive Forums. Back by popular demand, Idea Gathering Sessions provide more time to collaborate with conference speakers and attendees on important topics. We invite you to challenge your peers to push boundaries. Companies already signed on to attend include:

Allstate
Bellomy Research
Boston Symphony Orchestra
BP Fuels Value Chain Marketing
Burke
Cafe Britt
Caterpillar Financial
CEC
Chadwick Martin Bailey
Chalhoub Group
City of Ottawa
Crested Butte Mountain Resort
CUNA Mutual Group
CVS Caremark
eBay
Eli Lilly & Company
EMC
Enterprise Storage Division
Florida Blue
Forrester
GfK
Graduate Management Admission Council
Harris Interactive
Highmark
Hunter Douglas
Janet LeBlanc + Associates
Janssen Biotech
JetBlue Airways
Johnsonville Sausage
Le Capitale General Insurance
Leadership Learning Systems
MAKO Surgical Corp.
Maritz Research
Medical Packaging Inc.
Meijer
Merck
Okemo Mountain Resort
Pacific Ethnography Company
Prophet
Questback Inc.
RBS Citizens Financial Group
Sensory Logic
Station Casinos
Telerik
TNS
Toyota Financial Services
Triple Peaks
Two Men and a Truck
Working Solutions
ZS Associates

Plus, see what others have had to say about the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit:

"This conference is an excellent environment for gaining insight into the customer experience. From the best practices to overcoming challenges, each speaker brings a viewpoint worth considering."- Scott Swift, Vice President, Customer Information, Hunter Douglas

"This event is about leveraging great customer research by linking and aligning it with key organizational issues."- Bill Barnes, Senior Vice President, Burke, Inc.

The Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit will give you the insights and skills necessary to make your customer programs a success. Find out how creating a customer-centric culture within your organization, through expanded leadership and employee engagement can drive business results.

Mention your Blog VIP code to save 15% off the standard registration rate today: TCEL13BLOG

http://bit.ly/ZPtnoN
Email: register@iirusa.com
Phone: 888.670.8200

Idea Gathering: Customer Congruency

Not just hearing, but translating innovations and insights is a huge part of the value of the Total Customer Experience Leaders. Our unique idea gathering wrap-ups between sessions facilitate alignment of customer strategy inspiration with business relevant actions and have been one of our most highly rated features in the past.

Here on the blog, we'll be presenting weekly idea gathering wrap ups of some of our favorite customer experience strategy, design and alignment news and views.

This week our focus is on Customer Congruency.

Steph Hyken defines customer congruency in a Business Exchange article saying describing it as “When what we promise and what the customer receives are thought to be the same”. Does your business deliver what it promises to deliver? When you say you have a commitment to great customer service are you really delivering that?

Customer congruency is an important part of any business and particularly their customer experience. Calculate customer congruency by evaluating what you offer to the customer, or claim to offer, then compare that to the actual customer experience. The difference (or lack of) reflects your customer congruency, great businesses strive to keep this difference as minimal as possible.

Customer congruency can come as a shock to some companies because it often reveals how little companies actually know about their customers and their customer’s experiences. This was highlighted in a study by the Stravity Group who polled company executives on the customer experiences at their respective companies. The poll consisted of three key questions which got pretty shocking results:

   1.) Do you know the average annual value of a customer to your business?

12.9% yes.  87.1% no

2.) Do you know the cost of a customer complaint to your business?

9.7% yes  90.3% no

3.) Do you know the cost of acquiring a new customer?

8.6% yes 91.4% no

Are you able to answer these questions about your own business? If you don’t even understand the value or experiences which customers are having with your business then it is impossible to determine your customer congruency. Even beyond customer congruency, understanding the value of your customers to your business is important to determining how you will be treating them.

If you found yourself unable to answer some of these questions, and/or know that others in your business would be unable then start with an intnernal survey. Find out exactly how much your employees know about the customer incudling their experiences and value. Compare that to external sureys or focus groups with actual customers and see just where your business stacks up.

Jeffrey Marino is a contributing writer concentrating his focus on Business Administration, Management Information Systems, and Tech Innovations. He blogs atFordham Nights and can be reached at JMarino@iirusa.com.

Driving Business Results through Expanded Leadership and Employee Engagement

Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit Chairman, Scott Swift, says that a good customer experience or VOC program must have a well-known, identifiable goal. An organization must understand why they're creating and executing a customer experience program and know the benefits and outcomes that are expected from the program.

The Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit will give you the insights and skills necessary to make your customer programs a success. Find out how creating a customer-centric culture within your organization, through expanded leadership and employee engagement can drive business results.

Sessions focused on the Customer Culture include: 

• Driving Good Profits by Building a Customer-Centric Culture, Safelite AutoGlass
• How Can Customer Centricity be Profitable? The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
• Outside In: The Power of Putting Your Customers at the Center of Your Business, Forrester
• Leadership Engagement Strategies, Janet LeBlanc + Associates
• Creating Culture: Driving Business Results through Expanded Leadership and Employee Engagement, Crested Butte Mountain Resort, Leadership Learning Systems, Okemo Mountain Resort, Triple Peaks

Trends in Customer Experience...from Conference Chair, Scott Swift: 

According to Scott Swift, Vice President, Customer Information, Hunter Douglas, social media is one of the biggest trends in customer experience today.

While social media may complicate the customer experience process, and be seen as a challenge, the opportunities are endless. Organizations can take this time to focus on their customer's experience through every touch point, to simplify and streamline their customer approach.

Hear more about customer experience and social media from Scott here.

Join customer-focused leaders from CVS Caremark, eBay, Eli Lilly and Company, Facebook, JetBlue, Nationwide, Toyota Financial Services and more as they share best practices with their own customer programs that drive business results.

Registration Information:
Please mention your Blog priority code: TCEL13BLOG to save 15% off the standard rate.
http://bit.ly/149naTZ
Email: register@iirusa.com
Phone: 888.670.8200

Related articles

• Delivering the right customer experience (eptica.wordpress.com)
• Is It Time to Hire a Customer Experience Director or Chief Customer Officer? (douglasjacksonrecruitment.wordpress.com)
• You've Got to Fight...for Your Right...to Service Excellence (infocus.emc.com)
• 13 Customer Experience Trends to Watch in 2013 (experiencematters.wordpress.com)

Idea Gathering: Automated Marketing

Not just hearing, but translating innovations and insights is a huge part of the value of the Total Customer Experience Leaders. Our unique idea gathering wrap-ups between sessions facilitate alignment of customer strategy inspiration with business relevant actions and have been one of our most highly rated features in the past.

Here on the blog, we'll be presenting weekly idea gathering wrap ups of some of our favorite customer experience strategy, design and alignment news and views.

This week our focus is on Automated Marketing.

Wikipedia defines automated marketing as the name given to software platforms designed for marketing departments and organizations to automate repetitive tasks. Automated marketing’s intention is to save time, improve efficiency, and reduce human errors. But what kind of impact does it have on the customer? We’ll discuss the pros and cons of implementing an automated marketing system at your business.

First the pros: According to the web magazine CMSwire.com, campaigns running automated marketing software that utilize automated e-mail  responses enjoy a 200% higher conversion rate. Automatic response e-mails are the most common forms of automated marketing, and are generally triggered by an action that a visitor makes such as asking a question or downloading a form.   CMSwire also suggests including a personal signature at the bottom of your automated e-mails increases open rates by 500%

Furthermore automated marketing can be utilized for phones as well. CMSwire repots that a staggering 50% of consumers who received a text message from a retailer reported making a purchase as a result. It’s in this category where the ROI of automated marketing seems to be the most significant.

Others argue that automated marketing actually does more harm then good to customer experience and that automatic replies and service can not (yet) be effectively replaced by actual people. Hubspot.com ridicules current automated reply e-mail software explaining that the available filters on most e-mail clients easily blocks or de-prioritizes automated e-mails. So while the delivery stats may remain high on automated e-mail, the actual readership does not.

Hubspot also goes on to explain how automated marketing often lacks the valuable content that customers want to be receiving whether it be in an e-mail, text, or blog post. As automated marketing programs develop larger and larger contact lists they end up mass marketing to potentially unique segments of clients.

Is automated marketing right for your business? Factors to consider are number of customers and the uniqueness of their needs. If your business has a limited number of customers who all want the same thing then automated marketing will definitely save you time and money. If not, then you shouldn’t rush into the decision and take some time to think about how your customers will feel getting e-mails or texts from a machine instead of a person.

About the Author

Jeffrey Marino is a contributing writer concentrating his focus on Business Administration, Management Information Systems, and Tech Innovations. He blogs at Fordham Nights and can bereached at JMarino@iirusa.com.