background preloader

CXM

Facebook Twitter

The Four Roots of Engagement | Culture University. Haven’t we talked about employee engagement enough? Nope! Because despite the amount of time, energy and effort that organizations around the globe are investing in helping engage people in work, things aren’t improving much. Weekly pizza socials, guest speakers and telecommuting options are certainly appealing. I like pizza as much as the next guy. And, sure, a monetary bonus and summer hours will certainly put a smile on someone’s face. These tactics don’t drive people’s discretionary efforts, passion or dedication. . #1: People Want to Be a Part of Something Bigger Than Themselves People want to be a part of something big.

The something big that you can offer is your business. Your organization’s culture is key here – helping your people feel a part of the big picture – helping them understand what that big picture is for them and the business. . #2: People Want to Feel a Sense of Belonging People want to feel a sense of belonging. . #3: People Want to Go on a Meaningful Journey. How Micromapping Can Save Your Business. I had what I thought was a simple request. Let me explain. One of the nice perks of being on a certain level with American Express is gaining access to Regus business lounges throughout the world. A Regus card shows up in the mail and I use it!

Not only is it a good co-working space, but they have offices everywhere. I’ve taken advantage of this perk when traveling, most recently in New York City. So I was pleased when the perk was extended to my 360Connext teammate, Ryan. Being helpful is great, but not enough. First, I called American Express. I, like everyone else, do a lot of my business online. So when I called the number listed on the back of the card for service, I was perturbed to hear the recording greet me with instructions to email regarding any service at all.

What does this have to do with micromapping? There’s a specific detail I find incredibly telling. We’ve been discussing micromapping a lot lately. I do want to stress my experiences with Regus have been good. Follow Me: Understanding Patterns of Customer Engagement | TIBCO Engage Blog. WTF of Business at Saddleback Leather Co. InShare40 Guest post by John Bergquist (@JohnFlurry), who leads Content and Communications at Saddleback Leather Co. So much has changed in business in the past 20 years. And it continues to change daily. As Brian has said before, today a business has to engage… or die. A year ago el Presidente Dave Munson asked me to build a relationship team for his Saddleback Leather Company. The best way to describe a relationship team would be to first look at the core mission of Saddleback, “to love people around the world by making excessively high quality, tough and functional leather designs.”

Love is the key ingredient to any good relationship. Luckily, Saddleback had connectedness and social built right into their DNA. As the company grew, so too did our thriving Facebook community. Looking back, one of the greatest resources I had in my quiver was Brian’s book “WTF (What is the Future of Business)”. Engaging Our Customer So, what is the future of business? Ditch your annual staff survey: Here's a better way to find out what your employees think - The Business Journals. “You know that haunting feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when your best employee gives you her two weeks notice? Annual employee surveys just let that happen — they do nothing to empower managers to fix issues before they become major problems.” That’s feedback from David Niu, founder and CEO of TINYhr, the company behind the innovative employee sentiment tool TINYpulse. Annual employee surveys are at the core of HR practices at many major companies.

The assumption is that managers will glean valuable insights that will help them create happier, more engaged employees. And admittedly, this is a prudent purpose: Companies with engaged employees enjoy more than 50 percent revenue growth compared to their industry peers , and engaged employees are 87 percent less likely to leave a job, saving hefty recruitment costs. But from Niu’s perspective, the problem is actually misguided execution of those surveys. The solution TINYpulse targets that problem with short weekly surveys. What’s the Difference: Journey Map or Lifecycle Map? Today's post is inspired by a couple of different conversations that happened over the past week or so. What's the difference between a customer experience lifecycle map and a customer journey map?

I thought it was worthwhile to clarify because the difference is in the details! Literally. I'll start with the customer experience lifecycle map. The lifecycle map shows the phases of the customer's relationship with your company. It's high level and is good for understanding the overall relationship the customer has with the organization, from before he's even considered a customer through when he is no longer a customer. It typically includes these stages: Need, Awareness, Consideration, Selection/Purchase, Experience, Loyalty, Advocacy, Engagement, Raving Fans. Lifecycle maps have their place and are important to nurturing the overall customer relationship, but to get to the heart of the matter, to really design a better customer experience, you must map the customer journey.

3 companies responding well to customer empowerment. New times demand new strategies. Thanks to the widespread adoption of social, mobile, cloud and other technologies, your customers have more power today. More choices and information are available to them, and they can easily say what's on their mind. In his latest post for CMO.com, Vision Critical CMO Tyler Douglas encourages his fellow CMOs to reevaluate their marketing approach in the age of the empowered customer. Providing tips for tapping into the power of the customer, Tyler shares specific examples of how companies are responding to the customer revolution. Here are three examples mentioned in Tyler's article: 1. Companies need to be teachable. By turning to its customers to help Mountain Dew create the “Voltage” flavor, PepsiCo embraced the potential of the empowered customer.

Mountain Dew listens to customers 2. Information is abundant in the age of the empowered customer. 3. The beauty of customer empowerment is that people will willingly share content that resonates with them. Hey, Laaaaady! What is a touchpoint? And why am I asking that now? Well, you know by now that I tend to have a story or a situation almost every week that inspires me to write a blog post. Today is no different. So, back to my question: What is a touchpoint? There are many different ways that people define it, but in a nutshell, it is a place or point that a customer touches, or interacts, with your brand; those interactions can be in-your-face obvious or they can be those little things that may be less obvious or not as visible.

And that is what brings me to today's inspiration. Friday night is pizza night with my boys. When the pizza was ready, another employee walked out and handed us the pizza, and we were on our way. "Lady. " Well, I guess it could've been worse. Contrast that with another experience. Sunday is bagel morning with my boys.

No doubt in my mind whose order this is! Domino's has a lot to learn. Isn't the human touch much better than being a number or a "Hey Laaaady! " Cultivating Fantastic Customer Experiences. Originally posted on August 15, 2014 I regret to announce my retirement from recreational gardening. It is a sad decision, considering my fledgling age, but a fairly easy one given the fact that everything I plant dies. Even my suburban office cactus perished prematurely. It only takes one of about a hundred factors to go wrong and my horticultural ambitions are ruined. I admire the successful caretakers – those who are patient enough to perform the required prep and are knowledgeable enough to create perfect growing conditions.

A Customer Experience (CX) Professional and a master gardener have a lot in common. It requires similar skill and patience to cultivate customer loyalty. And what is the cornerstone for a great employee experience? This is challenging news. The Shallow Soil – Getting Back to Human “The Parable of the Sower” in Matthew 13 talks about a farmer planting his seed in shallow soil.

CAUTION! Are these resources bad? Customer Journeys Trump the Traditional Sales Cycle. While pointless debate continues in organizations as to who “owns” the customer experience (the customer, of course!) , the responsibility for nurturing and shepherding the continuous customer experience belongs to all teams that impact customers. At the core, much of the work should be accomplished by strong, continuously evolving collaborations between marketing and sales. Unfortunately in many companies there are still ridiculous and harmful walls between sales and marketing — and a lot of political nonsense, mainly tied to the "blame game" when forecasts aren’t met and deals aren’t closed. In reality marketing and sales have intertwined roles for engendering positive outcomes from customer journeys, whether they realize it or not. All too often the efforts of these roles are disjointed. Both groups should work together to serve customers in every sense. To connect authentically to what customers need and want, customer journeys trump the traditional sales cycle.

Source: Gary Magnone. Intelligent information activation: customer and outcomes first. Traditional information management framework via Wikipedia Intelligent information management is a term we’ve been using for a long time. However, the focus is changing. Originally, the intelligent part of intelligent information management, was at least as much about the actual management of information, as it was about processes enabling organizations to understand all data formats and types, today increasingly unstructured. Just as data as such are meaningless – hence the need for actionable data – information doesn’t lead to actions or improvements. Unstructured data is the dominant form of communication but also by far the fastest growing. In the ‘i’ of information The role of information technology is changing, just as the role of the CIO in the organization evolves. It’s a well-known fact that the “i” in IT and of CIO, information indeed, is crucial in a connected and increasingly digital business and customer reality.

Intelligent information activation and the customer experience. The Top 4 Essentials for Exceptional Customer Experience. Popular Today in Business: All Popular Articles In a recent blog post we discussed the importance of brands understanding their customers’ individual journeys, and being there for customers during their make-or-break moments in a way that is personal and memorable. Some might even say that providing an individual customer experience will quickly become a strategic advantage in an otherwise identical service market.

So, what do organizations need to do in order to provide a personal customer experience and win over their customers? Here’s our checklist for providing exceptional customer experience. Make Them Feel Unique: Focus on Each Individual Customer Journey There is no denying that each customer has the need to feel special. Customers will take notice of enhancements in products and services and will greatly appreciate the more personalized experience that they are receiving because it speaks to them as individuals. Seize the Moment: Leverage Real-Time Analytics for Real-Time Actions. Use Purpose-Driven Content to Create Buyer Experiences. It’s no secret that the information pools that buyers can tap are overflowing. It’s time, however, that we start looking at the customer buying process with a different perspective and begin focusing on purpose-driven content that creates distinguishing experiences for audiences.

Chasing Minutiae For the past few years, we've belabored the point that marketers need to map the customer buying journey. It’s true, but in many cases the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Instead of not knowing anything about our audience, what they want and how they make decisions, we’ve tried to document the decision-making process to the Nth degree.

That’s not much help either. Just because we have the tools and technology to see every digital body language movement doesn’t mean that we’re able to develop something valuable from that information. Think Customer Problems, Not Marketing Processes I recently spent two days with sales and marketing teams that sell into the oil and gas industry. Four brands storming the world of fashion and technology | Media Network | Guardian Professional. Once again the fashionistas are descending for London fashion week. With Somerset House and central London transforming for their arrival, it’s fascinating to see the way in which we the consumer can now access the sometime previously rarified air of the fashion world. Fashion’s evolving – not just into more and more extreme sights on the catwalk – but behind the scenes too, as brands adapt to new consumer expectations around how, when and why they want to interact. From the in-store experience and utilising individual shopper data for mobile and flexible delivery options, brands have an overwhelming number of ways to innovate and disrupt the retail space.

However, without a strategic approach or a long-term vision, retailers run the risk of creating experiences that don’t support their overall brand vision. Its critical retailers understand the relationship between the physical and digital worlds so they can deliver a consistent customer journey. Victoria’s Secret Ralph Lauren Nordstrom. Why Buyer Persona Development Should Be a Team Effort.

High quality buyer personas enable marketing teams to create content that is compatible with the wants and needs of a business' ideal customer. They serve as a foundation for great content strategies, informing everything from blog titles to proper distribution. We know this. However, marketers aren't the only ones who should have a say in the development. While buyer personas certainly enable marketers to create targeted content, it's that targeted content that attracts high quality leads for sales to close and client services to work with.

It's a linear path to growth and success that starts with knowing (in great detail) who your ideal customers are. If your personas don't reflect a collaborative effort between all departments, it's going to influence everyone's ability to do their job correctly. Are you picking up what I'm putting down here? If so, we've outlined how to go about collecting the company-wide insights you need to transform your buyer personas from vague to invaluable. Going Off-Road with Your Customer’s Journey. Today I'm pleased to share a guest post by Fred McClimans, Partner, McClimans Group. In this post, Fred addresses the challenges faced today in aligning your operations to the way your customers discover, engage, purchase, use, and discard your product, and outlines five steps you can take to stay in the same lane as your customer. INTRODUCTION Understanding the journey that a customer takes when dealing with a business or brand can be an incredibly valuable asset, allowing a brand to map their customer’s journey throughout the life of their relationship.

This is true for both B2C and B2B (and potentially C2C) markets. When used properly, this helps a brand understand, and align itself, with the process that a customer follows when discovering, purchasing, and ultimately discarding, a product or service. But when there is a problem, and expectations are not met, or even established, the customer journey can quickly go off the path, becoming more of an off-road rally. 1. 4. 5. The Rise of the Business Moment | Gartner Inc. | Technology Research News - Optimizing processes or improving the customer experience? HOW TO: Use Social Media to Create Better Customer Experiences. Connecting the customer experience. Customer Experience Optimization: a holistic approach.