Why do we as Customers prefer to buy branded products or obtain services from already known places. The answer seems very simple that these products or services could meet our perceived expectations. On the flip side of this question to Producer ask them what makes them tick with their customer, the answer is definitely not so simple.
Today most companies are trying to answer this question and also stay ahead of it by trying to understand their Customers with emphasis on 4C's paradigm besides their age old 4P's approach.
The 4C's approach keeps the Consumer at the center of the sphere with "Outside in" approach rather than the "Inside out" which was more evident in 4P's approach. In fact even 6 decades ago, Peter Drucker the Management Guru in his "The Practice of Management(1954)" has said "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: To create a Customer."
The Customer centric approach emphasizes that Value creation is a bidirectional and enterprises have to create a mindset to listen to their Customers from as many touch-points as possible and to collect their interactions of experiences expressed by them across many of their channels.
The Social media and Enterprise multi-channels needs to be tapped into 360 Customer view to enable and see a holistic picture as well at a granular level of their Customer with different lens/views created with # of Customer profiles for their different functional business departments.
The task of building a Customer 360 Experiences Engagement hub is not an easy project. The major challenges for any enterprise needs to be addressed not from a technology perspective but rather first clearly understand what is the objective, goal of building one.
In a siloed state of many Business functional units of an Enterprise, the first and foremost act is to undertake an assessment exercise to identify the state of Customer Journey identifying concerns, issues and processes in play across their multi-channels. Second align the assessment findings with Corporate's objective which could be either Cost containment, Improve Revenue or Improve Satisfaction or even meet regulatory compliance requirements.
Customers in any large organization come in various hues and colors of their expectations and requirements. Identifying the personas of these customer with proper segmentation to bring the granularity level of understanding to individual customer level would enable enterprises to align with Customer expectations.
Involving, engaging, training and motivating employees who man the front office of these multi-channels is also crucial in building and improving customer experience. Forrester Research in their 2011 has indicated that CXPi (Customer Experience Index) in some large global brands companies who have moved their needle up from below average to above average CXPi have seen an increase of $1.3 billions, I mean billions in their revenue bucket.
From a technology side, depending upon their level of maturity and IT support, there are some good options. One could embrace CRM + Social media suite of Products or engage Consulting vendor who have already built similar hub on a Big Data platform.
However the former may not provide a Complete and True Customer 360 Engagement hub for the following reasons. It may not be able create data piping from all your traditional multi-channel sources and second, it may not able to beef up with 3rd party data with appropriate connectors and build different hierarchical views required by different functional business units. One of the other significant drawback also appears to be in their analytical platform offerings with embedded engines to process Unstructured & Semi structured of Text & Speech data sources and contextualize them. This option may not also meet your demanding and individual specific requirements for comprehensive Predictive Analytics in Real-time to monitor and provide better experience.
Nevertheless it does provide a good first step to move in the right direction for companies who currently don't have common Customer Center platform to bring in Customer interactions to club with transactional data overlaid with common denominator analytics.
The Vendor option does not go without its own challenges and problems. The major challenges appears to be articulating clearly what is to be delivered or what will be delivered that meets your requirements in a phased manner with a clear Road-map.
One needs to understand that you are actually building a System of Systems as Gartner calls it for building Customer Engagement hub. In the paper on "The Top 10 Strategic Technologies for Customer Experience" Gartner indicates that there are more than 50 Technologies that can be used to build a good orchestrated Customer Engagement platform.
Here is the conceptual view of a Customer 360 Engagement
Objective of the Blog:
The objective of this blog is to emphasize the importance of alignment of Customer Experience. Enterprises could build an expensive and real-time platform in-house or in cloud, but if the Customer's experiences are not aligned, then we are trying to knock at doors which may open and pave way to a myopic solution.
Identifying and laying out the efforts for a greater benefits for Customer and Business needs to be the ultimate goal. There are Strategic and Operational steps that needs to be undertaken to convert a Discrete Customer into a Trust based relationship Customer.
Building a Customer relationship should be the utmost important one and this need to build as continuous process. Here is how we can visualize it in converting a Discrete Transaction to Relational one with relationship maturing from Symmetry to Trust relationship
Second, building a Value-Centered design by taking all Customer interactions in the Organization and trying to realize the benefits out of them. These mapping can be built either by using Service Blueprints, Customer Journey Maps, Experience Maps, Mental Model and Spatial Map diagrams.
These maps irrespective of the choices provide Chronological, Hierarchical, Spatial story line with their interactions to show case actions of individuals and appropriate process involvement of the Organization. Care must be taken that these visual diagrams are not meant as colorful wall posters but important diagrams to bring in right conversation about creating values.
Thirdly, bringing in Employees into the center stage by training, engaging them for insights and keeping them motivated because they represent the front office folks in the Customer Engagement in building progressive and positive relationship.
Fourthly, frequently, enterprises should be able to unearth Voice of the Customer (VoC) using Surveys, Feedback or employing 3rd parties to gather such information.
Lastly, building appropriate analytical models and utilizing them their Analytical engines to contextualize the interactions to view as connected pieces rather than as isolated measures.
But here is a common approach followed and advised by all: Start Small, but aim Big or Sweat the Small Stuff
Today most companies are trying to answer this question and also stay ahead of it by trying to understand their Customers with emphasis on 4C's paradigm besides their age old 4P's approach.
The 4C's approach keeps the Consumer at the center of the sphere with "Outside in" approach rather than the "Inside out" which was more evident in 4P's approach. In fact even 6 decades ago, Peter Drucker the Management Guru in his "The Practice of Management(1954)" has said "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: To create a Customer."
The Customer centric approach emphasizes that Value creation is a bidirectional and enterprises have to create a mindset to listen to their Customers from as many touch-points as possible and to collect their interactions of experiences expressed by them across many of their channels.
The Social media and Enterprise multi-channels needs to be tapped into 360 Customer view to enable and see a holistic picture as well at a granular level of their Customer with different lens/views created with # of Customer profiles for their different functional business departments.
The task of building a Customer 360 Experiences Engagement hub is not an easy project. The major challenges for any enterprise needs to be addressed not from a technology perspective but rather first clearly understand what is the objective, goal of building one.
In a siloed state of many Business functional units of an Enterprise, the first and foremost act is to undertake an assessment exercise to identify the state of Customer Journey identifying concerns, issues and processes in play across their multi-channels. Second align the assessment findings with Corporate's objective which could be either Cost containment, Improve Revenue or Improve Satisfaction or even meet regulatory compliance requirements.
Customers in any large organization come in various hues and colors of their expectations and requirements. Identifying the personas of these customer with proper segmentation to bring the granularity level of understanding to individual customer level would enable enterprises to align with Customer expectations.
Involving, engaging, training and motivating employees who man the front office of these multi-channels is also crucial in building and improving customer experience. Forrester Research in their 2011 has indicated that CXPi (Customer Experience Index) in some large global brands companies who have moved their needle up from below average to above average CXPi have seen an increase of $1.3 billions, I mean billions in their revenue bucket.
From a technology side, depending upon their level of maturity and IT support, there are some good options. One could embrace CRM + Social media suite of Products or engage Consulting vendor who have already built similar hub on a Big Data platform.
However the former may not provide a Complete and True Customer 360 Engagement hub for the following reasons. It may not be able create data piping from all your traditional multi-channel sources and second, it may not able to beef up with 3rd party data with appropriate connectors and build different hierarchical views required by different functional business units. One of the other significant drawback also appears to be in their analytical platform offerings with embedded engines to process Unstructured & Semi structured of Text & Speech data sources and contextualize them. This option may not also meet your demanding and individual specific requirements for comprehensive Predictive Analytics in Real-time to monitor and provide better experience.
Nevertheless it does provide a good first step to move in the right direction for companies who currently don't have common Customer Center platform to bring in Customer interactions to club with transactional data overlaid with common denominator analytics.
The Vendor option does not go without its own challenges and problems. The major challenges appears to be articulating clearly what is to be delivered or what will be delivered that meets your requirements in a phased manner with a clear Road-map.
One needs to understand that you are actually building a System of Systems as Gartner calls it for building Customer Engagement hub. In the paper on "The Top 10 Strategic Technologies for Customer Experience" Gartner indicates that there are more than 50 Technologies that can be used to build a good orchestrated Customer Engagement platform.
Here is the conceptual view of a Customer 360 Engagement
The objective of this blog is to emphasize the importance of alignment of Customer Experience. Enterprises could build an expensive and real-time platform in-house or in cloud, but if the Customer's experiences are not aligned, then we are trying to knock at doors which may open and pave way to a myopic solution.
Identifying and laying out the efforts for a greater benefits for Customer and Business needs to be the ultimate goal. There are Strategic and Operational steps that needs to be undertaken to convert a Discrete Customer into a Trust based relationship Customer.
Building a Customer relationship should be the utmost important one and this need to build as continuous process. Here is how we can visualize it in converting a Discrete Transaction to Relational one with relationship maturing from Symmetry to Trust relationship
Second, building a Value-Centered design by taking all Customer interactions in the Organization and trying to realize the benefits out of them. These mapping can be built either by using Service Blueprints, Customer Journey Maps, Experience Maps, Mental Model and Spatial Map diagrams.
These maps irrespective of the choices provide Chronological, Hierarchical, Spatial story line with their interactions to show case actions of individuals and appropriate process involvement of the Organization. Care must be taken that these visual diagrams are not meant as colorful wall posters but important diagrams to bring in right conversation about creating values.
Thirdly, bringing in Employees into the center stage by training, engaging them for insights and keeping them motivated because they represent the front office folks in the Customer Engagement in building progressive and positive relationship.
Fourthly, frequently, enterprises should be able to unearth Voice of the Customer (VoC) using Surveys, Feedback or employing 3rd parties to gather such information.
Lastly, building appropriate analytical models and utilizing them their Analytical engines to contextualize the interactions to view as connected pieces rather than as isolated measures.
But here is a common approach followed and advised by all: Start Small, but aim Big or Sweat the Small Stuff
