The Customer Experience

According to Walker’s Customers 2020 study, the role of the CX professional is changing. (This study is focused on how the customer experience industry will look in the year 2020.) Several emerging leadership roles on the customer experience management team are identified. New roles will evolve, all roles will change, and the expertise, requirements, and responsibilities will be a bit different from what they are today.

For example, the role of customer intelligence advocate will require even more in the future. These professionals will be responsible for supporting the use of customer intelligence within their part of the business which will be increasingly broad – internal operations, such as HR and Finance, Product groups, such as R&D and Product Development, and client-facing roles, such as Sales and Account Management.

What does this mean for customer intelligence advocates?

• They will be key communicators within the organization. They will need to understand, socialize and “sell” customer insights to help make change happen.
• They will work cross functionally, communicating both internally and externally.
• In addition to understanding customer feedback & insights, other critical skills will include: establishing credibility, exerting influence, and of course being great communicators.

Based on a conversation with a group of customer strategists, my take is that the customer intelligence advocate role of the future builds on what is happening today - yet kicks it up several notches. More focus and dedicated attention will be needed, along with additional skills and experience. To be successful, our VoC teams will require executive support & buy-in, along with a culture of being customer centric.

Do you have what it takes?

Kitty Radcliff
Vice President

During Walker’s recent Customer Experience summit in San Diego, we focused on two major releases from Walker experts –  Customers 2020 which looks into the future of B-to-B customer experience, and Driving Results which provides a practical guide for using CX to drive action, real change and business results.  Along the way, I heard many people talking about CULTURE.  Some are just plain lucky – CX professionals that inherit a true customer-oriented culture find it to be one of their most important accelerators.  For those who aren’t so fortunate, of course, they want to know how to take steps to get there.  Usually, the place to start is leadership and securing genuine awareness and support.  But there are grassroots efforts that can change the landscape too.  Here is one such story I was fortunate to witness:

The setting…   New Voice of Customer program, with inside sales teams being asked to approach “hot alert” follow-ups with customers for the first time in a formal way

What happened?…   One particular person came on strong as an early adopter – his name is Corey.  Within a matter of days, he single-handedly contacted dozens of customers, and was able to pull from some of his roots in customer service to engage in a very positive and natural way with customers.   This activity was a natural fit for Corey and he got the job done.   Later, when Corey was asked to share his experiences at a monthly CX leadership team meeting, what started as a good thing turned into something bigger - something that could actually ignite a culture change.

So what happened next?…   Corey stood up and shared his story with 25 leaders newly charged with CX responsibilities.  With great confidence and pride, he went on to share his viewpoint:

• This was an amazing move for the company – most customers wanted to tell a story, and through this process they had the opportunity to do just that. 
• Customers were truly impressed that someone actually reached out to them about their feedback, especially this quickly.
• Despite the complexity of the business, many issues could easily be diffused within the first contact.  For some, there was simply a disconnect, and now a chance to be able to educate those customers a little bit more. 
• With great enthusiasm he said he was “very proud to be part of a company that does this and honored to be involved in this capacity by being the first touch back with customers.”  

For his efforts and probably most of all his renewed and positive attitude, he was given a big round of applause from the team.  As CX professionals, we know that closing the loop with customers can have a direct positive impact on both loyalty and future response rates, but sometimes we forget what effect it can have on the staff that participates in the process.  This type of attitude and willingness to engage with the customer is what is needed for employees to transform an organization’s culture to truly be customer focused. 

Krista Roseberry

Vice President, Consulting Services

At the recent Walker B-to-B Customer Experience Summit, we asked over 100 Customer Experience professionals what business strategies will have the greatest impact on their business in the year 2020. Attendees were given cards representing the following strategies (all color coded) and picked the top three for their business.

• Making Better Mergers and Aquisitions (Smarter, more accretive acquisitions)
• Better Targeting of Prospects (Closing more new sales and more efficient sales cycles)
• Improving Customer Retention (More growth from existing customers)
• Building a Strong Channel Network (Identification of the best partners that prefer your products)
• Entering New Markets (More efficient market penetration)
• Innovating Faster (Anticipation of customer wants and needs)
• Providing Superior Service (Proactive approach to anticipate and address issues)
• Improving Quality (Early detection and prevention of problems)
• Becoming Easier to do Business WIth (Streamlined procedures that are more profitable)

We collected the cards and created a wall display. All of the strategies were picked, but the top three winners were:

1. Providing Superior Service
2. Becoming Easier to do Business With
3. Innovating Faster

The year 2020 will be upon us in the blink of an eye and Customer Experience professionals must consider how they contribute and align with the corporate strategy.

Which customer strategy will you support?

Customer-focused initiatives should be all about generating results for your company. Of course, like many things, it is much easier said than done. Achieving results is a bit like going on a journey - there important stops along the way and there can be lots of twists and turns that make the trip more challenging. 

For customer experience professionals I envision five primary stops on the road to customer-focused results - culture, strategy, intelligence, action, and change. Within each of these there are many other details - any one of which can be an obstacle that can slow down your journey or send you off course.

Click on the infographic to view a detailed look at nearly 100 elements that are important for customer experience professionals to navigate along the road to results. 

Patrick Gibbons
Principal/SVP
Walker

A few weeks ago I had a truly extraordinary customer experience. The Chris Tomlin Burning Lights Tour came to town. The concert was fabulous and we had a wonderful time!  But, that wasn’t the extraordinary part. My story is actually about the process of getting tickets.

Wanting to surprise my husband, I went online to the Ticketmaster website in search of tickets.

• They make everything easy to do yourself online. But that wasn’t the extraordinary part.
• Having a question, I called customer service and spoke with a representative who was able to help me and ensure everything was taken care of. But that wasn’t the extraordinary part.
• The tickets were sent electronically, just as promised. But that wasn’t the extraordinary part.
• Then I received something in the mail from ticketmaster. Here it is...the extraordinary part.

The customer service representative had sent a handwritten note thanking me for my patronage and saying to have fun at the concert. Wow! That note was above and beyond anything I expected. Because of that experience I have an extremely favorable impression of Ticketmaster and I want to tell everyone I know about it. That doesn’t just happen.

So, how does an extraordinary experience happen?  One place to start for your customer strategy is with creating a journey map of the customer experience. By investing time in understanding the path a customer takes, the people and functions they interact with along the way, and enablers and obstacles, a journey map will provide a complete picture of the customer experience. Insights from your customer feedback program will help you in this process. The next step is to identify the opportunities and changes needed to provide an extraordinary customer experience. 

What are you waiting for? According to Kerry Bodine at Forrester Research, one prediction for 2013 is that emotional insights will take center stage. “The idea that happy customers are more likely to remain loyal, try new products and services, and spread good news about their experiences, has started to catch on.” 

Kitty Radcliff
Vice President
 

Customer experience professionals are often called upon to share customer insights and recommendations. Consider these four must-haves for your next presentation:

1. Compelling & Relatable: Your audience is looking to learn something new; something they don't already know. Highlighting an unexpected insight will grab (and keep) the attention of your audience.
2. Concise & Relevant: The recommendations must be well thought out. Focus on the elements that tie to your customer retention & growth strategies and the activities that are important to the audience. Be on-point and specific with your recommendations.
3. Balanced:  Try to avoid using customer survey research terms and use terms your executives uses. This will help make the information relevant for the audience.
4. Actionable:   Frame your recommendations with the Call to Action(s) clearly stated, prioritized and obtainable.

Julie is a strategic account manager. She manages a number of complex business accounts and each one of them involves multiple relationships that all are important to maintain. She is focused on the performance of her accounts and her activity is aimed at driving growth within each of those accounts. It’s personal too – her income is directly connected to the performance of her customers. She is busy, aggressive, and determined.

YOU are in charge of customer experience initiatives. It's your job to provide Julie and other strategic account managers with customer intelligence to help them retain and grow their accounts. While Julie cares about her customers, she doesn't really care much about the reports and information you provide. Here are five reasons why Julie isn't very customer-focused and why it's your fault:

• It's a hassle. Instead of viewing your information as helpful, Julie sees it as more work. 
• It's too hard to access. It's a pain to log into another system, so customer intelligence is often overlooked.
• It's too complex. You provide great information, but it's too much. She doesn't have time to wade through it all.
• It's not relevant. Too much of the information doesn't really relate directly to her work with her accounts.
• It's not actionable. You haven't provided any training, so there is no clear instruction on how to put it to use.

Simple, fast, and relevant – those are the keys to driving results through strategic account managers like Julie. She already has more tools to access, more reports to file, and more company emails to read than she desires. Giving her one more thing to do, will not help. To get Julie on-board the customer intelligence you provide must help her retain and grow her accounts, which of course will help her be more successful.

Patrick Gibbons
Principal/SVP
Walker

Here are three common reasons why customer experience initiatives fail:

1. Companies don’t start with the end in mind – Journey maps can be an effective planning tool. With a solid understanding of customer moments of truth and internal stakeholders engaged, customer experience professionals can create a plan that is focused on collecting the right information from the right customers.  
2. No action, no impact – Taking action implies change, which often encounters resistance. Be prepared for this resistance with executive support, a network of advocates, communication plans that reach a broad audience, and engagement workshops to ensure people understand their role.
3. Documented success – Once action is underway it is easy to change priorities and move on to the next topic. In doing so, companies lose sight of the initiatives’ outcomes and don’t document success. Avoid this pitfall by creating regular status updates and a dashboard that will demonstrate the business outcomes that are being achieved. 

We have coined a phrase around our company:

Be Customer Intelligent

For years we have studied customer relationships and now, probably more than ever, customer continue to change. They are more demanding and they expect you to know them and deliver products and services in a manner tailored to their wants and needs. More options are available. Switching is easier. Companies you never saw as competitors may now be your biggest threat. 

Companies must rise to the challenge. They must know each of their customer's next moves. They will need to be sophisticated at monitoring what their customers are saying and doing, and they must have a big appetite for using customer insights to make better decisions. 

So what does it mean to be customer intelligent?

My colleagues and I came up with a list of ten things. In fact, we even set up a website and printed  cool posters of them! You can order free copies here. 

It means ...

You can never know too much about your customers. 

You know your customers' business objectives -- you are informed.

You listen intently to your customers in many different ways.

Big data about your customers is a big deal. 

You know your customers well enough to predict their next move.

You take action on customer insights -- right now!

Your company is completely aligned with customer needs. 

You understand your customers through the supply chain. 

You use insights to personalize your customers' experiences. 

Your success depends on the success of your customers. 

Patrick Gibbons
Principal/SVP
Walker

This blog series focuses on some trends and themes that I predict will have a great impact on the discipline of customer experience in 2013. In my last blog, I forecasted that we will continue to see great volatility in customer sentiment in 2013; this time, I want to focus my attention on a topic that is getting immense attention – big data.

“Big data” has become the buzz word du jour; like many buzz words, there seem to be different definitions of what this means, which results in different expectations on its impact. For purposes of this discussion, I would posit that “big data” relates to the collection and synchronization of disparate data sources with the intent of having a more holistic view of a system and its component parts. When looked at from this perspective, big data does not seem like such a radically new notion – after all, companies have always had customer lists, financial data, employee data, etc. The key point is on the notion of synchronization – in the past, most of these data sources were not able to talk to one another.

Big data reflects the realization of the promises of CRM – that is, firms can now not only look across a wide variety of data that is organized and linked in an efficient (if not complex) manner, but they can also begin to mine this data to reveal the underlying relationships that may not be evident to the casual observer. While I would offer that the full realization of CRM’s promise is yet to be achieved, we have certainly made great strides over the last decade.

How does this relate to the work of customer strategists? I would offer a few observations:

• As more behavioral data become available, we have the ability to identify meaningful customer segments; this will be especially valuable in identifying cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
• Linking survey-based data with behavioral data will become more the norm, not the exception. More emphasis will be placed on linking customer listening exercises to hard financial outcomes.
• Having a mechanism and process by which we can understand the inter-relationships of various data provides greater opportunities – and more imperative – to take a more action-oriented analytic approach. Stated differently – analyses that do not focus on action (and business outcomes) will have little value in organizations.
• The complexity of the data systems will require that customer strategists be skilled (or at least conversant) in the theory of data structures.
• As the volume of transactional data grows, the opportunity (and demand) for sophisticated longitudinal analysis and/or complex predictive analytics will increase. Customer strategists will need to be not only more data-savvy, but also will need to be more skilled in the use of complex predictive analytics.

Big data represents a great opportunity for the customer experience industry; however, it will require customer experience professionals to evolve. Here are my recommendations for staying ahead of the curve:

Continue to learn – Being conversant in data structures and analytics are a must. Even more important is to be more comfortable and capable in dealing with financial concepts and models in order to link customer experience work back to business outcomes.

Build new relationships – Learning new skills does not necessarily mean going back to school; expanding your business network beyond the boundaries of customer experience to include IT and financial resources will provide go-to resources who can aid in your ongoing learning.

Be proactive – Look for ways to embrace big data before you are asked; doing so shows initiative, and will speak to your ability to think strategically.

How is big data impacting your organization? What advice would you offer to customer strategists? As always, I welcome your comments.

Mark A. Ratekin
Senior Vice President, Consulting Services

Have you considered the importance of having an extended team focused on the customer experience? It takes way more people than simply the Customer Strategy owner or even the Customer Experience Team to fully embed a commitment to customers throughout all parts of your organization. 

No one is that good that they can do it themselves. We need a team working together to ensure customer feedback is understood and acted on.  At Walker, we believe having the right team is an essential element of a world class customer listening program. 

Here are a few tips: 

• The steering team should be represented by all cross-functional and front line groups.
• All team members should be proactively engaged in customer-related activities.
• Your highest level executives should see customer focused initiatives as part of their job and be actively involved in steering team activities.

See this blog for more information about the characteristics of effective teams. 

But, it goes beyond the team. A company I work with understands the importance of communicating with others throughout the organization. They recognize that acting on customer feedback is critical in conveying their commitment to customers. Everyone in the organization needs to be aware of the customer initiative; they need to understand it, believe it, and act on it. As a result, customer insights are being shared at their “All Hands Meeting” because they realize the importance of having all employees involved.

Do you have all hands on deck to act on customer insights from your VoC initiative? 

Kitty Radcliff
Vice President, Consulting Services

Journey mapping is a relatively recent term – one that’s generating a lot of buzz in the market.  This activity, in all its previous names, is something that Walker has conducted for companies for decades.  Journey Mapping engages both customers and cross-fuctional internal teams in exercises to illustrate the customer interaction points, critical moments of truth, unique strengths, and common challenges present in relationships between companies and their customers.  Customer relationships are complex, particularly in business-to-business – Walker’s “sweet spot” – and this process helps to make sense of these complicated relationships.  At its core, it harnesses three types of critical intelligence:  company/operational, customer, and competitive/marketplace.

The primary benefits to the companies we serve are:

• to advise the design (or redesign) of a customer listening strategy, including current or new operating metrics related to customer experience,
• to identify, understand, and align other critical (i.e. non-survey) sources of customer input,
• to engage audiences to create alignment on the areas that are most important to customers,
• to optimize resources in launching new initiatives or allocating towards existing initiatives,
• to define both current and ideal customer relationship elements,
• to create a ongoing living training tool to orient and educate employees and customers on the nature of their mutual relationships

In each engagement, Walker and the client collaborate in the process that includes defining customer strategy goals, identifying initial hypotheses around customer interactions, conducting cross-functional customer-facing workshops or role shadowing (complemented with select external customer interviews), identifying internal key metrics (KPI’s) to align with external perspectives, creating a visual depiction of the key relational elements, and developing a recommended customer experience roadmap to pursue.

Please share your own thoughts or experiences related to Journey Mapping and its benefits.

Brad Linville

Walker Information

The last business book I was reading took a familiar path when it came to the discussion of customer experience. They raved about Zappos, Southwest Airlines, and Apple. Yawn.

Don't get me wrong - they are great companies to hold up as role models. It's just that they seem to be cited all the time. Zappos' great service, Southwest Airlines' no-nonsense approach, and Apple's awesome products. I get it and I'm impressed. I'm just tired of hearing about it. 

So what do I find interesting? B-to-B examples!

B-to-B seems to go under the radar, but I love the way the way they are more down to earth. They are not focused on a slick brand or a rock star CEO. Instead, B-to-B examples are often more practical and bottom-line focused. My favorites include:

• An account manager that salvaged a customer account when he he read their feedback and jumped into action.
• A company that cut costs by diagnosing a process improvement from a stream of customer comments.
• A channel partner that boosted sales by following up with customers that shared their interest in a new solution.

Without a doubt, B-to-B CX is different and it's time we focus more on its unique characteristics. Toward that end my organization is even planning a customer experience summit specifically for B-to-B companies. 

So please - make my day! Share your stories of B-to-B customer experience success. 

Patrick Gibbons
Principal/SVP
Walker

Through our employee loyalty program here at Walker this year, a priority that was identified was an increased focus on mentoring.  As such, we have charged an internal team to re-energize our mentoring program.  There are three primary objectives for this:

1. Stay Competitive: increased competition drives the need for continuous learning, and talent development can yield competitive differentiation in a crowded market.
2. Stay Connected: increasing remote/virtual communications, social media, etc. are decreasing human connections and relationships, and mentoring offers proven ways to share our knowledge, experiences, and best practices (often in face-to-face, personal methods).
3. Stay Ahead: mentoring is shown to improve leadership elements such as retention rates, employee morale, individual self-confidence, trust, organizational commitment, job satisfaction, accelerated leadership development, reduced stress, stronger/more cohesive teams, and heightened learning.

A 2011 Sun Microsystems survey (a study conducted over 5 years) cited additional statistics to support the advantages of mentoring:

• Mentors are promoted 6x faster than those not in a program of this type
• Mentees are promoted 5x faster than those not in a program of this type
• Retention rates for both mentees (72%) and mentors (69%) are significantly higher than those who did not participate in mentoring (49%)

In addition, our own exit interviews and employee survey results show people want to stay when they are invested in relationships within the company.  With its impact on employee satisfaction and loyalty, mentoring contributes to the Service Profit Chain linking internal development investments to business success:

As the diagram depicts, mentoring can be a contributor to higher Employee Loyalty, which translates to better customer service and customer experiences, which influence stronger Customer Loyalty, which aligns with and impacts a company’s improved financial performance leading to success of the business.

Bottom line, not only is the decision to invest in mentoring reap internal benefits (such as retention, morale, trust, stronger teams, and deeper talent), but it also is strongly related to external advantages that give a company a competitive edge and a leadership advantage.

Please share your own experiences where being mentored or mentoring someone else led to a positive outcome for you in your career.

Brad Linville,

Walker Information

In my last post I made the case that the future of business will require more reliance on powerful, computer-based analytics that interact with (not supplant) skilled data scientists who bring both analytic and business context knowledge into the process. Modern, effective customer insight analysis requires this kind of efficient cooperation between the analyst and the analytic engine to meet the business objectives of our customer insight function.

While this cooperation between analyst and the analytic tools is critical to effectively producing useful customer insights, it is equally critical to getting those insights implemented within the business. This is especially true when attempting to apply predictive analytics to the way we manage and interact with our customers. We need a system that is designed around the people for whom the insight is produced - a system that allows the insights to support the decision-making of the people and processes that directly impact your customers.

I have been part of many predictive analytics projects over the last 5 years. Nearly all of them have successfully extracted a set of useful insights that have impacted the way companies think about or interact with their customers. However, very few of them have made an impact on the specific actions taken toward specific customers, which is necessary to experience the full power of predictive analytics. For instance, I once built a model that predicted whether or not a channel partner's revenue to the OEM was going to decrease in the following year. It was a very accurate model, and it highlighted a number of key reasons behind declining revenue. The drivers of decline were immediately seized upon by channel management, and task forces were put in place to better understand and fix them. However, no one was able to find a use for the ability of the model to identify specific partners who were likely to decline in the coming year.

There are many reasons that customer (or partner) focused predictive analytics fail to impact specific decisions made about specific customers. A majority of the reasons I've encountered can be attributed to an excessive gap between the point of insight production and the point where the insights result in actions toward specific customers. In the pioneering book on enterprise decision management - Smart (Enough) Systems - Neil Raden and James Taylor dub this phenomenon the 'insight-to-action gap.'    

In my experience, there are two critical reasons that this gap exists for customer-focused predictive analysis projects:

1. The analysis project was not focused on a specific, customer-focused decision-point. Many insight projects start with the goal to see what we can find that will predict an increase in revenue. This is not a bad thing. Sometimes we need to start this way to understand where to dig further. Just don't expect these projects to yield quick and specific action.

2. There was no forethought or buy-in to the process by which insights will be delivered to the front-line employee for action. This often happens when a customer strategy group gets access to previously unintegrated datasets about the customer and has been tasked with providing insights about a particular issue like low renewal rates. They, rightly, decide that predicting who will and will not renew is more actionable than just looking for drivers of renewal, and a predictive project is launched. I fully support this thinking except there is no definition around getting the 'actionable' insight into the hands of those who will act.

The reason both these situations yield a gap between the insight and action is illustrated in the figure above. After an insight is developed, the next defined step is developing a report and presenting it to group of managers or executives. We bring our amazing project and results, and lay it out for them to approve or disapprove of. The best case is that they approve and say, "We need to use this information to intervene and stop the predicted bad things from happening while capitalizing on the predicted good things!" Then what? Then a group of people, which may now include at least a manager of those who will take the action, is convened to create a strategy for operationalizing the insight. By the time the insight actually impacts a customer it could be months later.

Thankfully, there is a better way, and it's all about beginning with the end in mind. Start by defining the specific customer outcome you want to predict - not something broad like customer revenue, but a specific aspect like customer spend on new products. The next step involves identifying the decision or interaction point at which you will intervene. This requires involving the group who will be responsible for the intervention and designing the process/system to do it. Then we move on to identifying and integrating data, running analysis, putting the insights into action, via the pre-defined and agreed-upon process, and validating the impact. An upcoming post will discuss this process in more detail, but the most important step is knowing exactly what to predict and what you will do with that prediction when it comes. Without that, your well-crafted insights are likely to stagnate. We need to mind the gap.

As January comes to a close, I thought it might be beneficial to pause for a moment and provide some thoughts on what trends we see emerging in the science of customer listening. Over the next several blogs, I will comment on a key trend and discuss the implications for customer strategists. Before delving into our first prediction, we need to discuss what we saw in 2012 from a customer loyalty perspective.

Loyalty in 2012: More of the Same

Source: Walker calculations based on data from http://finance.yahoo.com

It may go without saying that 2012 was a volatile year – the chart above shows the progression of a $100 investment on 1/3/2012 in each of the major stock indices – the Dow 30, S&P 500 and the NASDAQ Composite. The values are not as important as the shape of the curves – it demonstrates that 2012 had many ups and downs in the market. There are a number of reasons for this – the broader global economy, geopolitical unrest, the year-end drama related to the fiscal cliff, and so on. In this period of volatility, the impact on customer loyalty is not surprising – among Walker’s client base, the percentage of customers who are Truly Loyal was flat between 2011 and 2012; on a quarterly basis, we saw more variance in the loyalty scores with a drop in the last quarter of the year.  This is not isolated to Walker; many of the other industry benchmarks suggest that customer sentiment was flat at best in 2012 (and some have not yet published Q4 results).

Source: Walker Benchmark Database, B2B-Oriented Programs

Is Loyalty Dead (or Even Achievable)?

Despite some claims that customer loyalty is dead (or dying), I would offer that loyalty is still achievable – however, the bar is higher. The underlying reason for this relates to the divergence of expectations vs. reality – that is, as the economy has tightened, funds have become more scarce; this scarcity means that buyers are more selective in how they use their funds. This results in customers not only being more price-sensitive, but they also have heightened expectations on what they will receive. At the same time, providers have been forced to scale back on resources (as a result of constrained growth and/or uncertainty in the market), which ultimately means that they are ill-equipped to deliver on these expectations. This creates a “perfect storm” of dissatisfaction, which means that customer loyalty is harder to achieve.

So, this brings me to my first prediction/forecast for the coming year:

Quarterly loyalty scores will remain volatile as long as there is excessive uncertainty in the markets and/or the economy continues to be challenged.

What can we do about this? I would offer the following strategies for consideration:

1. Review your workflows to ensure an “outside-in” perspective – Conducting a review of the experience that your customers have with your organization can be quite revealing. Conducting a customer journey mapping exercise can help to highlight where gaps exist and can assist you in re-tooling processes to ensure an optimal customer experience. This is particularly critical among companies that have recently merged with or acquired another company.
    
2. Communicate – both externally and internally – During periods of economic turbulence, it is better to over-communicate. From a customer perspective, seek to gain an understanding of not only their expectations, but also what drives those expectations. Understand how their business works and how your products and services can help them to achieve their goals.
   
   From an internal perspective, reinforce the role that customer centricity plays in your strategy; on the front line, managers should spend time with their direct reports to identify how to integrate customer perspective into their day-to-day operations. Above all else, though, leaders must walk the talk – leading by example communicates better (and louder) than words.
    
3. Control what you can control – Much (if not most) of the volatility in the markets are outside our control; it is tempting, then, to throw our hands up and surrender – that is, just let the chips fall where they will.

Rather than take a sit-and-wait approach, we would recommend that you identify (from the steps noted above) what aspects you do control – for example, you control how your organization approaches the customer experience, you control how you choose to innovate, and you control how you respond to competitive threats. Focusing on what you control – and then acting on it – can be much more empowering that waiting for the winds of change to blow in your favor.

Even though customer loyalty is more difficult to achieve in these economic times, those firms who successfully crack the code will find that they have one of the few sources of long-term sustainable competitive advantage in their strategic arsenal. I would argue that the payoff is worth the effort necessary to realize customer loyalty.

Over the next few blogs, we will review the other factors that I am forecasting will be the trends and themes that customer strategists should be thinking about in the coming year. In the meantime, I would be eager to hear your thoughts – what are the themes and trends that you are tracking?

Mark A. Ratekin
Senior Vice President, Consulting Services

This McAfee blog recently caught my attention as I realized that although our businesses are very different, the premise is the same as you think about securing your organization. 

From McAfee’s perspective:  “While traditional antivirus technology continues to hold value for consumers and enterprises, it is only one layer in what needs to be a multi-layered defense.”

From Walker’s perspective: While gathering customer feedback through traditional Voice of the Customer programs continues to hold value for your organization, it is only one layer in what needs to be a multi-tiered customer strategy. 

It’s not enough to simply “do surveys” – which can backfire by setting an expectation that customer feedback will result in action. (Reminder: Customer relationships may actually become less secure if you don’t act on the customer feedback.) 

Instead, you need a multi-tiered customer strategy to enhance the customer experience and their relationship with your organization. Here are just a few examples:   

• Customer-Focused Culture: Build customer-centricity into the fabric of your organization
• Predictive Analytics: Use predictive analytics to predict customer behaviors and anticipate customer need
• Customer Insights: Deliver customer information that prompts action and results.
• Securing Buy-in: Get the necessary support and resources for customer intelligence initiatives.
• Engaging Employees: Promote customer strategies within the company
• ROI of Customer Intelligence: Validate the impact of customer initiatives

What are you doing to go beyond customer listening to improve the customer experience?  How are you driving business success through customer insights and understanding?

Kitty Radcliff
Vice President, Consulting Services

Here are six guiding principles to follow that will help you build on or enhance your customer strategies:

1. Vocal and visible executive engagement:  gotta have it, hard to get it.
2. Employees are a powerful influence – internally and externally, ambassadors are key.
3. Broad communications, internally and externally, embed thinking about the customer experience into corporate culture.
4. Complex analysis adds value, but must be distilled to simple messages that drive action.
5. Roadmaps help stakeholders understand that customer experience improvement is a journey, not a one-time effort.
6. Small steps and quick wins build momentum.

If you aren't already adding unstructured data as a part of your customer strategy program, consider the following benefits:

• Combining the unstructured data with the structured data, such as financial information, operational metrics, and customer survey responses allows an organization to prioritize the areas that drive customer behaviors. Without it, a company might be tempted to act on the loudest voice, which might not influence future purchase decisions.
• Most business decisions require evidence and validation before resources are allocated. Leveraging all sources of customer information builds confidence that the organization is dedicating resources wisely and allows them to take action on issues that may otherwise have been dismissed as "anecdotal."
• The words customers use to describe a company, product, problem, or positive experience adds context and can be helpful in developing customer communications.

For the past few weeks, it seems as though all people are talking about in the US is the potential for going over the “Fiscal Cliff”.  However, I would like to suggest taking time to reflect on another topic.  This is when we traditionally reflect on the year past and look forward to the year ahead - so it is also a good time to reflect on your customer strategy. 

Take stock of what went well and what was accomplished in 2012. And, identify obstacles and root causes for those things that didn’t quite go as planned.  Ask yourself: What were our goals?  Which goals did we achieve and why?  Armed with that information, you will be better equipped to determine what to do differently this next year.

As a customer strategist, you might consider the input from others when answering those questions and in helping to guide what you will do differently (aka “new year’s resolutions”) for 2013.  A great example is a customer experience manager who is focused on bringing the voice of the customer into all areas of her organization. She is in the process of actively soliciting feedback from key stakeholders, as well as reviewing progress on action plans that have been implemented based on customer feedback.  Her goal is to ensure awareness and understanding of the information and insights, how it is being used, and to identify ways to have even more impact next year.

Spending time to reflect on 2012 will help you to refine your VoC strategy and set the direction to achieve 2013 goals.  

"When obstacles arise, you change your direction to reach your goal; you do not change your decision to get there.”  ― Zig Ziglar

Kitty Radcliff
Vice President, Consulting Services