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CMO´s were hit by Tornado
Marketing departments in many companies are currently losing their importance and budgets. The world of commerce and marketing is truly in great turbulence right now.. Tornado really. The change is like force of nature and it is so fierce, because several megatrends are colliding simultaneously:
- Customer Experience design and metrics mania (NPS)
- Corporate Identity as a holistic concept, not just brandbook but experience
- Integration of service & marketing = Business Process Design & LEAN process requirement for efficiency
- Design thinking breakout for innovation and business model generation
- CRM and automation capabilities increase: Increase CIO’s, Sales director’s and business management’s involvement in marketing
- Social brand and open dialogue with customers (rating and feedback is ever present issue + the rise of Open Innovation as part of customer relationships)
- Revenue Performance Management requirement and Analytics
- Decline in traditional marketing & Own media’s tremendous influence increase
- Organisational changes – Torn Silo walls makes marketing everyone’s business > “We are all marketeers now” said McKinsey’s article
- Requirement to deliver better results with lower budgets
What I’ve heard and observed is, that business management has already got used to thinking in terms of processes due to ERP and CRM technology development and implementation. They are also very familiar with cost/performance analysis and practical implementation to processes. It is easier for them to think about Customer Journey and CX design pragmatically and apply the ideas in practice. Sadly, CMO’s in many companies are strangers to such consideration and thinking. Branding used to be about doing things according to the brand book and design guidelines. Now brand is both an idea about something great that stands for something and something that you can experience with all your senses. The Corporate brand identity is more about such holistic experience than images, jingle’s or tone of voice. They are still important, but the other factors are increasing their influence exponentially.
This community was created because we wanted CMO’s to take advantage of the turbulence that would enable major increase in their influence and improve productivity in organisations. Now it feels like marketing departments influence and capacity to deliver results is dividing in two and this change is escalating as two roadmaps: a) Marketing becomes the driving force for corporate business development (= CMO’s take the driver’s seat leading the change) or b) Marketing becomes second grade support organisation without power (= CMO’s continue their work as they have done before). I wish more companies and CMO’s would choose the roadmap A.
I participated in DMA event in 2004. There Nectar’s (Loyalty Management UK’s) CEO Robert Giergink presented his case about coalition loyalty management program and their results for the first couple of years. His co-speaker was a University Professor whose name I can’t recall anymore, but he said that loyalty programs might represent the future of Marketing in general. I was deeply impressed, enlightened really, about Nectar’s case and find it still very inspiring. In my opinion that professor hit the point exactly. Currently all marketing is about Customer Journey and Experience management, individualized dialogue and event based, triggered and service oriented communications. That is exactly what loyalty programs are supposed to do. However, until recently such approach was ridiculously expensive or impossible. Right now, the technology is very cost efficient and the ROI capacity is absolutely amazing. While this is true with all recognized customers it’s now becoming possible also for customer’s that have left no identification about them.
Naturally the online revolution and social media storm have made everything above even more important and possible and that is why these things have become management imperatives. I’m looking at the CMO’s position in the light of generic Must Win Battles shared by many companies:
TOPLINE GROWTH:
- Best customer experience (Goals: loyalty, LTV, cross & upsell, high NPS)
- Continuous and cost-efficient new business (Goals: new customers, demand generation and stronger conversion)
BOTTOM LINE STRENGHT:
- Lean and effective operations and processes – strong bottom line (Goals: highly productive organisation capable of delivering superb customer experience at comparatively low expences by using new technologies, self service and help, Social customer service, online environments and automation)
ENERGIZING SUSTAINABILITY:
- Creation of winning corporate culture: Inspirational and very satisfying workplace capable of understanding and driving development and change. Recognition as very prominent employer for hungry and innovative new talent, Topline growth energize the company’s employees and partners focusing their minds on opportunities, innovation and growth
Such MWB considerations should become the heart of marketing strategy development. I’m currently involved in such cases and I’m witnessing the great change and impact such consideration has on the organisations. Creation of new and exploration of unknown are naturally inspiring and when they also deliver financially measurable success it is certainly worthy of your undivided attention.
Word of encouragement: Very few people are truly experienced in this game. Go ahead and learn by doing. I can promise you it is great!
Also check out:
Managing brand – the most profound kpi’s and measures
Marketing has an identity crisis
Author: Toni Keskinen, Change Catalyst & Executive as a Service
http://www.linkedin.com/in/tonikeskinen
Join FutureCMO Movement LinkedIn Group here
Definition for Customer Experience
Customer Experience is so obvious and yet so complex subject that has multitude of perceptions and views to consider. I try to put it very objectively. What do you think about this definition about:
“Customers approach their experience subjectively and holistically and they form their view of customer experience based on one or multiple engagements with the company’s services, products and interfaces. The company could build great customer experience with multiple engagements and crush the customer’s view with one. The customer has very different approach and expectations for the company along their purchase and customer relationship process and their expectations change along the way. The key to their view on experience is customer’s subjective expectations that the company intentionally or by chance set with advertising, promises, engagements across touch points and via other customer’s shared experiences. This is why same service level deliver’s very different customer experience and Net Promoter Score results from one company to another.”
You can create brand without engagements and the brand is the key to the expectations. The customer experience though is based on personal engagements with the company, it’s products and services.
I recently wrote the article “Beyond HBR’s truth about customer experience” and “Irina” asked what kind of definition I would use for Customer Experience. I wrote that definition before checking other’s opinions. I now listed them below. I often struggle with definitions, because generalizing them to the max reduce other’s capacity to fully understand how many meanings there are behind very few words and suppressed sentence. It’s often true, that we use the same words, but connect very different contexts and views to them. Effectively we could discuss about the same subject and think about completely different issues. This is such a fundamental question, that I’d love to come up with a definition everyone could share from CEO to customer service, marketing, CTO, CFO and well ..The Customer. What is your view on this subject? Have you come across events, in which people have had completely different perception about the issues and events influencing Customer Experience?
Here are some definitions from other thought leaders and players:
Beyond Philosophy: A customer experience is an interaction between an organization and a customer as perceived through a customer’s conscious and subconscious mind. It is a blend of an organization’s rational performance, the senses stimulated and the emotions evoked and intuitively measured against customer expectations across all moments of contact. – See more here
Wikipedia: Customer experience (CX) is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier. This can include awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation and advocacy. It can also be used to mean an individual experience over one transaction; the distinction is usually clear in context. – See more here
Adam Richardson, Frog Design: It is the sum-totality of how customers engage with your company and brand, not just in a snapshot in time, but throughout the entire arc of being a customer. – See Mr. Richardson’s article about the subject in HBR blog network here
SAS: Customer experience is defined as your customers’ perceptions – both conscious and subconscious – of their relationship with your brand resulting from all their interactions with your brand during the customer life cycle. – Article available here
Forrester Research: “How customers perceive their interactions with your company.” In Mr. Harley Manning’s blog post is available here
In Forrester’s article, there was also great picture about how expectations and meeting them influence customer’s subjective experience about the company.
The truth about Customer Experience has a lot to do with our emotional systems. This Infograph by Forbes makes a great point:
I just found a company “Touchpoint Dashboard” Do you have any experiences about using this tool?
Author: Toni Keskinen, Marketing Architect & Customer Journey Designer
http://www.linkedin.com/in/tonikeskinen
Join FutureCMO Movement LinkedIn Group here
Beyond HBR’s “truth about customer experience”
Harward Business Review just published a great article about Customer Experience and Journey. See here. The main point of the article is, that managing single touchpoint engagements doesn’t provide sufficient customer experience.
My advice is: Don’t design just touchpoints – Design chain of events, proactive and reactive. Development and measurement is often done engagement by engagement. The service design approach also highlight such emphasis. I’ve done Customer Journey mapping and methodology development since 2004 and agree with the article, only it’s lacking tools and methods how you should approach the challenge. I can help with that.
I’ve written an article series about customer journey management and you can choose and pick, which areas you are interested in or read them as a series of articles:
- Customer Journey FLOW
- How to map and study Customer Journey
- Customer Journey stage 1: Brand as a platform
- Customer Journey stage 2: Initiation
- Customer Journey stag 3: Choosing and buying – cross-channel influence
In order to really do Service and CX design for the entire customer relationship, you need to understand that there are very different journeys to begin with.
- Purchase journey (From awareness to consideration and transaction, Acquisition)
- Service journeys post purchasing (Using the product or service, value-in-use)
- Planned (e.g. Address change, regular maintenance etc.)
- Unpredictable (e.g. Product failure, reclamation, insurance coverage, etc.)
- Delivering a service as a customer journey (taking a cruise or flight, restaurant, using media, etc.)
- Retail customer journeys (e.g. IKEA store experience)
Once you have both Insight and Topsight level understanding about customer journey in full, you need to take a look inside the company. What organisation bodies are involved with customers, what kind of technical environment direct their operation and what kind of data steers their actions. The reality is, that management reporting practices represent management understanding and decisions. The systems and technical infra on the other hand define how the corporate body acts. In case you need to change the way how the corporate body in total behave, you need to define required technical changes, change management and manage change. In my experience, creating Service Blueprints has been quite effective tool for both challenge recognition at current status mapping and Customer Experience planning.
The potential is absolutely amazing. The customer’s expectations are constantly growing harder to fulfill and companies that are agile enough to cure “Corporate Autism” and take the steps required to move from “inconsideration marketing” and mass mailings to service automation, Customer Experience and Journey design at total relationship level, can win marketshare and increase profits considerably. The business-as-usual approach is no longer sufficient, you need to free the full potential an organisation can offer and tear down silos in order to take advantage of synergies available.
In the big picture, your company must act professionally and fulfill minimum requirement perfectly. Failing these requirements cause criticism and decrease your NPS results. Acting human, being considerate, thoughtful and proactive on the other hand increase the number of people willing to recommend you and increase you NPS score. Succeeding in both cumulate earned trust, which is the foundation for long-lasting and profitable customer relationships and strong brand.
In case you do well, the process will enable you to design lean processes and define the best possible value your business processes can possibly deliver. In my opinion this is the Future for CMO’s position inside the company. It’s not the job for CMO’s to define business process management, but it’s the CMO’s responsibility to make certain that everything the company does, delivers maximum customer value and experience across all customer interfaces
In case you can capture customer contacts, you can start servicing and inspiring customers individually and simultaneously your capacity to influence increases. The bigger share of the customers buying in a certain category you have in your database, the more effective means you have to influence their behavior and market dynamics. The ultimate goal is to synchronize customer portfolio with product and service portfolio across all touchpoints and marketing interfaces.
In my experience the only way to do successful customer journey and experience design and create sustainable management model for it is to do the work upside-down. You start from the actual interfaces, motives, contexts and people. From there you continue inside the company culture, practices and technology and design the strategy level after you understand everything else. Like this:
The Holy Grail of customer value is Symbiosis. Check Symbiosis Strategy – creating the ultimate value -article here.
This is a video by McKinsey Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum on Sep 12, 2013, It’s All About the Customer Journey
Author: Toni Keskinen, Marketing Architect & Customer Journey Designer, Toinen PHD
http://www.linkedin.com/in/tonikeskinen
Join The Future CMO Movement LinkedIn Group here
Managing Social reputation – Brand is a verb
BRAND IS A VERB AND SOCIAL BY NATURE
Brands cannot be “created” one way – it’s the people’s perception of a company or product. Brand is no longer a noun; it has turned in to a verb. You could actually think brand as an agreement between a customer, customer’s peers (society) and company. Customers can agree or disagree with the agreement. As an outcome reputation and brand perception emerge, which could be good or bad. However, a brand cannot exist without the other parties. Brand is social by nature. However, a brand has never been as social as it has now become because of social media and online influence channels that customers are now very effectively and actively using. Customers have real power now that is global, not just local peers. No doubt that customer behavior has changed. It has completely changed in many areas and will continue doing so. Digital influence is the most important disruptive force along the customer journey.
Customers are actively using their power and they are getting more and more effective tools at their disposal to leverage this power to the most. For example WOT, Web Of Trust, crowd sourced rating of websites and brands has currently apr. 90 million people rating brands and websites. Any people who have WOT application in their browser has reputation score visually presented after every single link available online. WOT is a wonderful example of customers’ currencies becoming more and more influential. WOT is an ultimate rating tool. If some company acts unethically, spam, or in any way prove not to be trustworthy, apr. 90 million people in WOT start giving red to the brand. As an outcome, company’s online reputation score will become lower and eventually red. Red means, that if you try to enter the company’s website, you get a full-page size warning stating that other people have rated this site to be dangerous and not trust worthy. Would you do business with such a company?
Not only does WOT influence it’s users, but also everyone else online. WOT is also delivering reputation data to Google, which can then use it for any given purpose like Google AdWords or (safe) search. It’s not difficult to imagine, that Google might prefer to take people to brands and services that are trustworthy. Also, WOT made a deal with Facebook, which is using reputation data to make Facebook safer for it’s users. This picture will appear, if you are trying to enter un-trustworthy website from Facebook: It is quite remarkable how much people currently have ways and tools to influence brands business. WOT is just one of many tools available.
COMPANY’S REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
The mechanism of social reputation management has a strong emphasis on own touch points and encounters with customers. In case customer is dissatisfied, in every 1/10 cases the customer contacts call center and seek justice, making things right. The large majority apr. 9/10 doesn’t call, they are just silently dissatisfied. The more likely channel for making their point is customer satisfaction questionnaire, except companies only research small sample in order to get feedback suitable for their purposes – not all customers. However, the customer contacting actively is the fever meter and represent major urgency. The customer satisfaction questionnaire and especially customer’s open text answers represent confirmation to that urgency. These people are the most active social players because they have a personal story to tell and strong emotional commitment to the matter. In case they feel neglected they will become your brand destroyers and the 9/10 will join the choir. Here’s how the interfaces work:
What ever emerge from your own customer interface sources will spread all over social networks in case these matters are not taken seriously.
I’d love to hear about your social media analysis experiences. Which tools are you using? What kind of insights and phenomena have you observed?
I find Etuma to be an excellent tool for such analysis. Whitevector, Meltwater and other tools only help you analyze the outcome, what is already being discussed in public forums. Etuma enable you to analyze internal interfaces separately: call center logs, customer satisfaction questionnaires, customer forums & your own Facebook community. Looking at the fever meter results in own touch points and comparing that to the impact on discussions in public social mediums allow you to monitor the impact and velocity of change in the brand perception.
Toni Keskinen
http://www.linkedin.com/in/tonikeskinen/
Twitter: @toni_keskinen
Blog: http://futurecmo.org