Customer Strategy

In a series of meetings and conversations this week, there was much discussion about discomfort, and the notion that uncomfortable situations are often a signal of opportunity.  The topic reminded me of a past blog post, Can you feel your underwear?, in which I talked about the need to push out of our comfort zones from an account management perspective. 

The same thinking applies much more broadly – really to all aspects of our lives.  Situations that make us uncomfortable are typically situations that we are unfamiliar with – they require us to stretch, to learn, to try something new and risk failing. And let’s face it, as much as we can learn from failure, it’s not something anybody enjoys.

And yet we all know that there are levels of discomfort that need to be accepted and even welcomed in order to grow.  This is particularly true in business situations where we are looking to innovate, an activity that is not only necessary for long-term sustainability, but also one that companies are increasingly being pushed into by customers who are clamoring to introduce their voice to innovation processes.  In these cases, the discomfort extends beyond the personal, to a more organizational level of discomfort, but one that, if accepted, can lead to breakthrough developments in products, services, and processes, and ultimately to happier customers and growth.

To capture this upside, it helps to get proactive in identifying opportunities that, while they may be uncomfortable, come with the promise of significant and mutually beneficial rewards.  After all, if we all just keep doing exactly what we’re doing now, things will get pretty boring.

Image Source Page (and nice blog on extending the comfort zone to the eek zone:
http://vladdolezal.com/blog/2011/build-confidence-gradually/

One week from today, I will be co-presenting with EMC (a Walker client) at the Clarabridge Customer Connections conference in Miami (#C32012).  We’ll be showcasing the success EMC has achieved through their commitment to extract maximum value from the open-ended feedback generated by their customer listening programs, and reinforcing 3 tips that any organization can implement to get the most out of text analytics.

Over the last 18 months, EMC has been on the forefront of the movement to apply text analytic technologies to the open ended comments that customers are providing through transaction-triggered CSAT surveys. To date, we’ve partnered with them and used Clarabridge’s tool to categorize and assign sentiment scores to thousands of comments. The results have been integrated into broader reporting which has led to actions to address newly identified issues and issues that had previously been known only anecdotally.  And while it’s early going on many of these changes, their impact on the customer experience is becoming evident as we continue to monitor the analytics.

3 Tips to Capitalize on Text Analytics in VOC

As I write this, I am sitting in a plane.  High in the sky.  Over an ocean.  And I’ll be up here for five more hours.  And this plane I’m in… the thing is, it’s big.  Also – it’s heavy.  I don’t know exactly how heavy, but I know one thing for sure:  this plane is way too heavy to be able to stay up in the air. Quite simply, it shouldn’t be here. 

But here’s the other thing:  I’m wrong. (That admission took a lot out of me… let’s agree to never speak of it again.) At any given time, there are hundreds if not thousands of planes flying around.  And people who know more than I do about these things understand the why and the how of this.

And my point is this… for every one thing that we ourselves don’t understand or can’t believe is possible, there is somebody who does understand it.  So when I fly, I need to start from a position of trust:  trust that the experts have gone about this whole plane thing in the right way.  Trust that I will arrive safely at my destination.

The same concept applies to any area in which there are experts.  Including Voice of Customer programs – though here there often seems to be one notable difference: Voice of Customer is an area in which many people fancy themselves to be experts. They want to do it themselves, or poke holes in a methodology, or disbelieve the results because they don’t match up with what they were expecting.  But here again is a situation which requires starting from a position of trust: you need to trust in the expertise of those who know about these things, get beyond your doubts, and spend your energy thinking about how you are going to use the results to improve your relationships, help your customers, and drive business performance.  In other words, trust that the experts are going to get you to your destination.

Several weeks ago, I met with a client who had faced exactly this situation in prior presentations of Voice of Customer feedback.  At the end of last year, when it came time for her to share results, she met with the most influential person in her audience ahead of time and they had a candid discussion: either they could spend a day wasting everybody’s time debating and defending the methodology and merits of the research and recommendations, or they could accept that the program was well-designed and well-implemented by a team of experts, herself included, and spend their day productively, building action plans to address customer needs.  Can you guess what they did?

It’s official.  I’ve been spending too much time in the world of IT. 

How do I know?  Because several weeks ago I blogged about BIG DATA, and today… today I’m blogging about the cloud.

Now, it seems like everybody has their own definition of what the cloud is, but most can agree that as customers shift more of their operations to a cloud environment their behaviours and usage patterns will become more transparent to the suppliers of the chosen cloud solution.

For customer experience and strategy professionals, this is great news… because it means a host of customer-specific operational and usage data becomes available to us, and we can start to make the connections to customers’ perceptions of their experiences.

The benefits will be many, including:

• Better experience-based profiling of loyal and at risk customers
• Improved predictability of future behaviour based on usage patterns and evaluations of that usage
• More targeted identification of the weak points of the experience, enabling more focused improvement activity
• Proactive intervention in experiences profiled to become negative
• Identification, celebration, and cloning of the ‘bright spots’ – those profiles where experiences are most favourable

And ultimately, the ability to drive happier, more loyal customers, which means a more secure overall business even in the cloudy face of change.

This week, Walker hosted a group of channel partner leaders from 10 prominent high tech companies at a Customer-Focused Channels forum designed to dig in to the complexities of managing partner relationships.  While we know that there are many relationships that deserve attention in the customer-partner-company "triangle," this event focused on the partner–company relationship.

One of the many topics that were discussed was how to build strategic commitment to a partner-driven business model – commitment both internally and from the partner organizations themselves.  It was generally agreed that core to achieving this level of commitment is approaching the relationships with an attitude of "we" instead of "us vs them." True, partner relationships can be competitive at times, but that makes it all the more critical to establish clear ground rules for the part of the relationship that will be based on achieving mutually compatible business objectives. 

Further discussion concluded that the best relationships are enabled by elements such as coming to partners with a business proposition that is focused on their objectives, having executive-level conversations that elevate the partnership beyond "today’s deal,"and making the administrative side of the relationship as easy and "resource light" as possible.

Each one teach one.

[Full disclosure: I stole that phrase.  From somebody who borrowed the African proverb and tuned it into a philosophy.  That somebody is Stephen Leafloor, better known as Buddha, and I stole the phrase from his TEDxOttawa talk… and since those talks are about ideas worth spreading, let’s call this spreading, not stealing.]

At its core, “each one teach one” is about each of us having mentoring responsibility for another.  Now, Buddha applies this phrase in an environment where it literally changes peoples’ lives, and I encourage you to learn more about how he is improving the future of our youth through the power of hip hop by clicking on the image to the right.  But I want to talk about how this philosophy can help overcome one of the common challenges faced by those who lead customer listening systems: gaining initial buy-in then sustaining momentum for customer-focused action.

If we can embed “each one teach one” into our corporate cultures, we will develop an environment in which each employee feels a sense of responsibility to perform their job functions in a way that sets an example for other employees.  This can develop in an organic way, supported of course by communication of the message; but it can also be developed intentionally, by seeding the organization with employee champions who are trained to be advocates for the customer.  As their actions and attitude spread through the organization, they will be teaching other employees to think and behave in the same way.  And so on, and so on, and so on…  

At the recent CXPA Members Insight Exchange, Fidelity was highlighted for their customer ambassador program… proving that it IS possible to launch this type of mentoring initiative and have it be successful.  Perhaps each of us can be the ‘each one’ who starts the ball rolling in our organizations.

The volume and types of information available in today’s customer service organizations, while overwhelming at times, also offers a gateway to better customer experiences. 

It’s true; companies are tracking multitudes of operational metrics, customer perceptions, transaction measures, financial measures, employee perceptions, public perspectives, case histories, and on and on and on…  Instead of letting this data bury us, it can and should be put to use to build and support service strategies that are three things:

Predictive:  By applying advanced analytic techniques, models can be generated that will be predictive of future performance of key customer metrics, as driven by experiences and incidents. 

Proactive:  These models will enable service organizations to become more proactive in addressing service needs, by putting resources in the right places more quickly, and driving strategies to improve the areas predicted to be trouble spots.

Pre-emptive:  What we should be most excited about is the emerging ability to provide pre-emptive support - - - being able to identify which customers or cases are predicted to ‘turn bad,’ identifying them before they that happens, then intervening early to make sure it never does.

This level of service has the potential not just to surprise and delight customers, but also to drive internal efficiencies and the business performance of the service organization and the company as a whole.

In my previous post, I blogged about the art of doing.  In this post, I advocate for being selective about what it is you choose to do.

Last week, while I was at the first Members Insight Exchange of the CXPA (Customer Experience Professionals Association), panelist Joe Wheeler, Executive Director of The Service Profit Chain Institute, referenced Michael Porter (arguably the leading authority on company strategy and the competitiveness), boiling his theory down to this:  the essence of strategy is sacrifice.

In other words, strategy demands focus: it can’t be ten things; it needs to be one or two.  One or two that can be executed against to achieve success.  And choosing the one or two will require sacrificing the other eight, at least for the short term.

This notion of sacrifice is often overlooked at the intersection of customer feedback results and the determination of customer strategy.  Too often, the menu of areas for strategic focus and action is too long, and the result is that insufficient resources are applied to any one area, and none live up to their potential to actually make a difference to the customers’ experience and to the company’s bottom line performance and/or growth objectives. 

Leaders of customer strategy need to recognize the value of sacrifice, and guide executive teams to make tough, but informed, choices that will enable targeted improvement initiatives and result in advances in customer loyalty and business outcomes. 

Last weekend, I dedicated a day of my life to considering ideas… I was fortunate enough to have been selected as one of the 100 participants at TEDxOttawa.  On this day, Ottawa, so often pigeonholed as a boring government town, brought forth a slate of speakers around the theme of Creative Actions, and enriched that program with a diverse mix of open-minded and truly interesting local citizens as the audience.  (I know, I know… who let me in?!) 

The day kicked off with a talk from Steve St. Pierre... in my opinion, one of the best of the day, and a hard act to follow.  Steve’s idea?  The art of doing.

At the heart of his message:  Any idea becomes a bad idea if it’s wasted.

Or, in words familiar to everybody thanks to the power of Nike:  Just do it.

Steve’s advice is directly applicable to those of us working to bring the voice of the customer into strategic decision making.  All too often we get paralyzed by the sheer volume of information available to us, by the number of areas to which we could make improvements, or by the seeming immensity of the task at hand.  The result is that our ideas, which are probably good ideas, become bad ideas because we let them languish, rather than just resolving to choose one, and move forward with it, one step at a time until it becomes a reality and the benefits are realized.

So, still running on inspiration sourced by the many ideas shared at TEDxOttawa, I challenge each of you to choose an idea you believe in, and then choose to make it happen.  I look forward to hearing great things!

Click here for a full transcript of Steve’s talk, complete with his hummus joke.

Last week marked the inaugural Members Insight Exchange meeting of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA): more than 150 professionals, including practitioners and providers, came together for two days to talk about customer experience best practices, trends, and the emergence of this area as a recognized and fulfilling profession.

In an atmosphere of open sharing and dialogue, it became clear that many companies are making great progress in bringing the voice of their customers into the design of better customer experience and ultimately supporting corporate growth.  It also became clear that even the leading companies have struggled or still are struggling with familiar challenges as they work to evolve their programs. 

In this post, I highlight six themes that I heard over the course of the two days… things to think about as each us builds or enhances our own customer strategies.

“We don’t know who first discovered water,
  but we can be pretty sure it wasn’t the fish.”

This (possibly paraphrased) quote, from philosopher Marshall McLuhan, provides a keen reminder that our environment has a weighty but often unnoticed impact on our perceptions. 

This is true in all aspects of our lives, including business and the management of key accounts… how often do we hear from account leads that they just know what their customers need or are thinking? How often are we guilty of this ourselves?  And yet how often does an objective assessment of the perceptions of one of our key customers surprise us?

Almost without fail, any voice of customer feedback will include some new learning – perhaps opening our eyes to an issue or a new opportunity that we hadn’t been able to see clearly because we were simply too close to it.

Working with key account managers, I see this all the time.  My recommendation?  Be a fish out of water.  Open your minds to the power of customer feedback, and prepare yourself to discover something new… then take action on that something to build stronger relationships with your customers.

Over the past few months, I have been facilitating action planning workshops with a client who is in the first year of their customer listening program.  Much of our focus has been on educating local teams about the information that they now have at their disposal, and on teaching them how to use customer feedback to identify improvement areas within their business.

The thing is, customer feedback has almost unlimited use scenarios – for any business challenge that a company is facing, there can be a customer perspective.  And while the information collected through your voice of customer program may not have been specifically designed to answer the question of the day, it can often be mined for relevant insights.

I was reminded of this at one of the workshops I mentioned.  As we were sharing results and talking about opportunities, the country manager realized the information we were sharing might offer insight into a conversation the business was having around competitive strategy, specifically: should this company be more aggressively pursuing growth with a specific set of customers whose strength of relationship with a competitor was in question?  They had considered internal perspectives and anecdotes along with comparable situations in other countries, but up until the workshop, they had not had any objective measure of the customers’ willingness to switch. 

After learning more about the opportunity they were pursuing, we were able to dig in to their customer feedback and come back to them with a customer perspective.  In fact, much of the customer base they were considering targeting was very loyal to the competitive supplier --- but there was a pocket of opportunity where this loyalty was weaker.  Armed with this information, the team was able to refine their strategy and dedicate resources to the most likely "wins."  We're looking forward to hearing about their successes!

What questions are you grappling with, and how have you used customer insights to develop your strategy?

Last week I had the pleasure of reading a blog post by Bill Schmarzo of EMC, in which he talks about how BIG DATA can help answer the question Who are my Most Important Customers?  And if you can get past all the nerdish associations that come along with the term "big data," I’ll tell you why I was so excited to read the post…

Big data has the potential to open the minds of companies to a methodical way of identifying strategic accounts based on more than just pure revenue.

As more information becomes more readily available, companies will become able to allocate resources to a new set of "key accounts" – this time based on a combination of financial value, potential, and even anticipated partnership measures.  This means that companies who may be small in value, but high in collaborative potential or who are considered early adopters or high influencers will be in the running to receive resources and treatment that aligns with their total value.

At Walker we’ve been advocating this kind of value mapping strategy for years (including here and here), but we do run in to implementation challenges as companies try to systematically determine measures beyond just sales or profitability… challenges that big data analytics will help overcome.

So here’s to big data, and to the big growth that companies will have access to as a result of it!