Category: CRM

State of Customer: What I Learned During 2016

Some years I find myself working on matters of strategy. Other years I find myself with ‘dirty hands’ working at the coalface – helping organisations build capabilities, and deal with operational challenges in the areas of marketing, sales, service, and CRM.  2016 has been a year where I have worked both on strategy and operations. What have I learned?

Customer Strategy

Either organisations do not have a clearly defined customer strategy or the folks working at large organisations are inept at articulating it. At best, I have found the customer strategy to be something like retain existing customers and get more new customers. That is not strategy. That is talking about desired outcomes without articulating how the organisation intends to generate those outcomes.  Maybe, I just don’t get strategy.

Customer Loyalty

I have found that the hard work of engendering customer loyalty has been bypassed by putting in place some kind of customer loyalty programme: do X and get Y points. The challenge with these loyalty programmes is that there is no heart in them. Mostly they are marketing gimmicks. Enough customers realise this and drop out of the loyalty programme – too much effort to win the points, and it takes forever to earn enough points to buy anything of value with the points. A sizeable number of customer loyalty members are inactive.

Then there are folks who see customer loyalty as a one way street. These folks see customer loyalty in terms of monetising the customer base. So they are busy figuring out which kind of marketing tricks will entice loyal customers / fans to spend more. Their heart is transactional – through and through. Why do I say that? Because what is missing is commitment to generate superior value for loyal customers and earn a suitable reward for creating that value. It is like noticing that someone is into you and then using that to get your way with that person just because you know you can.

Customer Experience

Without doubt Customer Experience is the latest buzzword. It is everywhere. Anything and everything is being linked to or brought under the umbrella of Customer Experience. Just about anything and everything is being justified on the basis of improving the Customer Experience.

What isn’t happening is this: real substantive efforts to actually improve the Customer Experience not just at specific touchpoints but also across the entire customer lifecycle. Further almost all organisations are thinking in a blinkered manner when it comes to CX. What do I mean by that? Think Amazon Echo.  What an improvement in the customer’s experience. How many organisations are working on new products that create entirely new, delightful, customer experiences?

Why so much talk but so little real action?  Because for many it involves the equivalent of turning the caterpillar into the butterfly. Just about everybody prefers the butterfly to the caterpillar. Yet, rare it is to find an organisation where the folks are up for the effort, pain, time, and risk involved in the transformation process.  There are easier-safer things to do like embracing ‘best practices’ and the latest channel or fad.

Digital Marketing / Marketing Automation

There is real shortage of skills when it comes to digital marketing / marketing automation.    It is easier to buy digital marketing / marketing automation systems than it is to operate these systems with skill.  There are folks with sophisticated content management systems yet the sophisticated features, like personalisation, are not being used.

Or you have organisations with digital marketing hubs that are not being used well. One organisation that I came across was sending out welcome emails, birthday emails, anniversary (of signing up) emails, and weekly/monthly newsletters. Why just these? Because only these emails came out of the box!  No event driven marketing communications. No dynamic content / personalisation. No predictive content… Yet, all of this functionality is there in the marketing automation suite.

Single View of The Customer / CRM

The biggest challenge / hurdle many organisations are facing is that of constructing that much desired yet elusive single view of the customer. The theory was that CRM systems would make that challenge easier by bringing more and more customer-centred data into one system. This hasn’t actually happened. What has happened is that there are more and more systems holding customer related data – each disconnected from the rest.  If anything cloud based vendors have driven fragmentation as it is easy for marketing folks to buy a marketing system ignoring rest of the organisation. What goes for marketing goes for sales, for the call-centre, for field service……

The Core Challenge is That of Integration

My experience is that the core challenge is that of integration. There is the challenge of integrating the various systems (data sources) to provide the single view of the customer. Then there is the challenge of integrating the organisation players around a well defined, coherent, clearly articulated customer strategy. And a clearly defined customer experience across touchpoints / interaction channels, for the entire customer journey.  It occurs to me that it is only worth gluing up the systems if the folks that run the organisation are willing to glue up the organisation itself. In the absence of that commitment, money spent gluing up systems is likely to be wasted.

Until the next time I thank you for your listening and I wish you the very best.

 

 

 

 

What Is The Single Most Critical Factor in CRM / CX / Digital Success?

Recently I was pitching for new work and the question that keeps coming up came up. This question is alway some form of “What is the single most critical factor in ……..?”   Examples include:

  • What is the single most critical factor in coming up with a great strategy?
  • What is the single most critical factor in CRM / marketing automation success?
  • What is the single most critical factor in customer experience success?
  • What is the single most critical factor in making a success transition into a digital business?
  • What is the single most critical factor in effecting organisational change?
  • What is the single most critical factor in managing CRM projects and programmes?
  • What is the single most critical factor in getting folks to adopt new systems?

You get the idea.  No matter the domain, sooner or later a client will want to know what is the single most critical factor to success.

If find it interesting how it is that intelligent folks ask such a stupid question – with no awareness as to what makes this a stupid question. Do you get what it is that makes this question stupid?

The assumption behind this question is that the world, in which we find ourselves, is simple, silo’d, and linear.  It assumes that the when it comes to dealing with challenges (and creating new futures) you can identify, isolate, work on one key factor – and this will ensure the desired outcome.  It assumes that this factor is invariant across time – that it is always the same one thing that matters most irrespective of time, situation, context…

What if the challenge that we face is similar to the challenge that the juggler faces? The very nature of juggling involves juggling many balls at the same time. As such, does it not involve competence in using a wide angle lens to keep track of all the balls? And at the same time, focusing on the one or two balls which are at the forefront at the moment in time? And at the same time keeping one’s attention over the environment in which one finds oneself in: the audience, the surroundings, the weather….?

I say to you that what makes CRM, customer experience, digital marketing, digital business, marketing-sales-service effectiveness challenging is that there is no single factor that is critical to success!  I say to you that no ‘guru’, no consultancy, no vendor has the magical recipe that takes the messiness out of life and guarantees a quick-easy journey to success.

So what is it that you have to put into the CRM, CX, Digital game?  You have to start working on that which needs work. You have to attract the right folks to work with you on your challenge / desired outcome. You have to get hold of the necessary resources. You have to be attuned to that which is going on within and around you. You have to accept-embrace failures. You have to fail your way to success by keenly attuned to the visible and the invisible and making the necessary corrections as and when these are called for.  You have to give up the stupid notion that there is one single most critical factor to success. And you have to continuously free yourself (and others) from the addiction to the short-cut.

I say to you that it is foolish to search for and focus on that one most critical success factor. I say to you even more foolish than this foolishness, is the foolishness of searching for and fixating on some magical potion: approach, methodology, technique, technology… I say to you that any person that offers you a single most critical success factor or magical potion is either a fool or a charlatan.

I invite you to consider that there is no single most critical factor in CRM / CX / Digital success!  Enough for today, I thank you for listening.

Customer / Leadership: What Is The Access To Cultivating Greatness?

It is the time of the year that many are pushing out their predictions for 2015. I am not in that business: I lack a crystal ball.  Further, I say that the future is not already made. The future is unborn and how you/i/we show up and operate in this world will shape how 2015 turns out.  So in this final conversation of 2014, I want to share with you my thoughts on what it takes to become great; greatness necessarily involves effecting significant and substantial change.

Let’s assume that you wish to reshape your organisation – to effect significant, substantial, change in the way that the organisation operates.  Perhaps, you wish to transition your organisation from a product-centred orientation towards  customer-centred orientation. And/or shift the fundamental stance of your organisation from ‘extracting value’ from your customers to being generously rewarded (by customers) for simplifying-enriching the lives of your customers. It could be that you want to move from treating your employees as resources (things) to treating them with dignity as fellow human beings…..

What is the access to that?  Is there an organisational equivalent to Ali Baba’s “Open, Sesame!”? You know some kind of hidden magical recipe that provides you access to untold riches, instantly, without significant effort, discipline, and/or sacrifice?  I invite you to answer that for yourself. How has all the strategy stuff worked out? What about all the process change / six sigma stuff? Or the customer journey mapping? What about your investments in CRM systems and other technologies (e.g. IVR) have they taken you to the heights of sales effectiveness and/or customer service delight?  Let’s not forget the VoC feedback- has that unlocked the door to customer loyalty riches?

Greatness does not lie on the road well travelled, greatness lies on the road less travelled. Greatness requires dedication – the kind of dedication that flows from total commitment; this kind of commitment arises in response to a possibility-call that resonates with the very core of your being. Greatness requires the ultimate sacrifice: yourself – your way of showing up in the world and the manner of your travel in this world.  Allow me to give life to this through a story (bolding mine):

There was an artist who was so devoted to her art; nothing else in the world had any attraction for her. She had a studio, and whenever she had a moment to spare her first thought was to go to that studio and work on the statue she was making. People could not understand her, for it is not everybody who is devoted to one thing like this. For a time a person interests himself in art, at other times in something else, at other times in the home, at other times in the theatre. But she did not mind; she went every day to her studio and spent most of her time in making this work of art, the only work of art that she made in her life.

The more the work progressed, the more she began to feel delighted with it, attracted by that beauty to which she was devoting her time. It began to manifest to her eyes, and she began to communicate with that beauty. It was no longer a statue for her, it was a living being. The moment that statue was finished she could not believe her eyes – that it had been made by her….. She felt exalted by the beauty of the statue.

She was so overcome by the impression that this statue made on her that she knelt down before this vision of perfect beauty, with all humility, she asked the statue to speak, forgetting entirely that it was her own work…… there came a voice from the statue: “If you love me, there is only one condition, and that is to take the bowl of this poison from my hand. If you wish me to be living, you no more will live. Is it acceptable?” “Yes,” she said, “You are beauty, you are the beloved, you are the one to whom I give all my thought, my admiration, my worship; even my life I will give to you.” ….. She took the bowl of poison, and fell dead. The statue lifted her and kissed her by giving her its own life, the life of beauty and sacredness …..

– Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Art of Being and Becoming

Let me end this conversation by posing this question: What possibility (or cause) matters to you such that you are willing to be and do as the artist (in the story above)?  It occurs to me that this is question worth pondering and answering as you/i head into 2015. I wish you a great beginning and the very best for 2015.

Customer Experience: Summing Up 2014

I Find Myself Hurt, In Pain, With Sprained Ankle At Paddington Station

In an earlier conversation I shared the following:

I arrived at Paddington Station and made my way hurriedly toward the underground. Suddenly, I found my feet sliding, no control, left knee smacks into the hard tile floor, right leg twists awkwardly, the right ankle is in some pain. A helpful gentlemen helps me up. I recover and get that the floor has become an ice rink in some places (food for a future post). I walk slowly, in pain, towards the underground….

I hurt myself. Why? Because, the ‘vehicle’ for enabling-facilitating walking at Paddington Station was not fit for purpose. What do I mean by that? That one of the primary functions of a floor is to make it easy for folks to move around, at normal walking speeds, safely.  Before, I get further into this, I want you to get that Paddington Station is one of the main railway stations coming into and out of London. There are always plenty of people standing around and walking about. It is especially heavily trafficked at peak time (early mornings, after work). And there are all kinds of people using this station: older couples, middle aged folks, youth, male, female, business folks, leisure travellers etc.

Customer Experience: What Is The Default Setting?

Why is that the floor at Paddington Station did not facilitate one of its primary roles: enable passengers (customers) to walk about easily, freely, quickly (if need be) around the railway station?  Because it was raining. Some of the rain ended up on the smooth, good looking, tiled floor. The rain on the smooth floor, reduced the already reduced friction/traction – to the point where it is really easy to be walking one second, sliding the next, and then finding oneself in pain, hurt, on the floor, dazed, wondering what happened.

Let’s stop. I invite you to ask yourself, how is it that intelligent business folks did not put the various elements together to foresee (smooth floor, rain, floor as ice rink) and thus prevent the annoyance and/or harm to the passengers? My hypothesis, is that insufficient attention-consideration was given to the customer. Did anyone even put the ease/safety of walking as a key decision criteria when the floor was being selected?  It is easy to be smart with the benefit of hindsight. So let’s accept that with the best of intentions we are fallible creatures and make mistakes.

Before we move ahead, I do wish to make one general point: the default is that of poor customer experience  and this is so because the world has been setup without adequate consideration of experience based customer needs. In my view, this is particularly so in nations-cultures with a strong Protestant-Calvinist influence. Incidentally, the lack of consideration of the end users experience based needs is the reason that most CRM systems fail to be adequately adopted and thus fail to generate the promised benefits.

Summing Up The State of Customer Experience As At 2014

Let’s get back to Paddington station and sum up the challenge:

What is so: the floor becomes a potential safety hazard for customers (passengers) when it rains;

Desired outcome: make it easy and safe for all the usual customers to walk around the station, given many obstacles (usually fellow travellers), in all the usual weather conditions – rain is usual in the UK.

Imagine that you are the person responsible for Paddington Railway station. You are the person confronted with coming up a course of action to deal with what is so and bring about the desired outcome. What is the course of action that you’d take? What would the end solution look like?  Would you fix the roof so that no rain got through to the floor? Would you fix the floor to ensure that the floor is rougher thus providing more traction? Would you put some kind of drainage solution to drain water from the floor?  What would you do if you were truly customer-centric and committed to putting the right customer experience (of walking) in place?

Here’s the answer that the folks that manage Paddington Station have put in place:

caution cone paddington stationLet’s stop and consider this. Has the challenge been addressed?  Has management got rid of the potential hazard to customer safety?  Has management improved the customer experience?  No!  What has management done? Management have provided some useful information to the customer: “caution wet floor”. What else has management done?  They have placed the burden of responsibility on to the customer – now if the customer slips and hurts himself he can blame himself for being careless. And management has mitigated its liability under the health and safety legislation. Why have I shared this with you? Because it occurs to me that this concrete example illustrates the course of action that many have taken regarding Customer Experience challenges-opportunities.

Looking at 2014, based on my personal experience, the experience of fellow consultants, and reading the relevant articles/posts, I am of the view that I can sum up the state of Customer Experience in 2014 as follows:

  1. There are only a handful of organisations that compete on the basis of the Customer Experience and excel at it. These organisations continue to do well. For the folks in these organisations Customer Experience is a way of life – like speaking English is a way of life for me.

  2. The vast majority of Tops and Middles toying with Customer Experience lack the courage to take bold action.  In the absence of courage, a ‘burning platform’ is necessary to trigger bold action. For most organisations and management teams such a burning platform is not present.  Look beyond the fear mongering and ask yourself how many organisations are in the shape IBM was when Lou Gerstner took over and kind of totally reshaped IBM?

  3. Where work has been done on Customer Experience, Tops and Middles have taken the easy way out, tinkering on the edges. The stuff that really matters has been kept intact. The business model remains intact. Management practices including those that yield ‘bad profits’ – profits made at the expense of the customers – remain intact.

  4. The Tops and Middles have, once again, resorted to the same old tools and techniques: business process changes and implementation of information technologies whether labelled as CRM, CX, marketing automation, or big data…

  5. Many claim to be Customer Experience experts and/or gurus, almost none of them are. Before you accept this claim I ask you to consider how you would determine if a carpenter is a great carpenter. Would you do so by listening to him speaking? Would you do so by reading his book where he share his tales and tales of others – stories which make you feel good?  Or would you go and see for yourself that which the carpenter has created with his own hands? This has to follow logically and necessarily from point 1 above – there is only a handful of organisations that compete on the basis of the Customer Experience and excel at it.

  6. One reason that so many can get away with claiming to be Customer Experience experts and/or gurus is that the term Customer Experience has been turned into an empty and usually misleading idea. For example Customer Experience is became another fashionable, higher status, label for Customer Service; many folks of significance in Customer Services (including call-centres) have customer experience in their titles. On the other hand some marketing folks – especially digital marketing folks – are using and abusing this fashionable label. Then there are folks who oversee the execution and compilation of customer surveys – they have also chosen to sit under and claim the Customer Experience label.

 

 

Customer Experience As Idea, Not Methodology Nor Technology

As a thinker, I am struck by how rare original thinking is in the organisational world. As a thinker, I am struck by how little thinking – as in stopping and reflecting on that which is occurring and the pattern of this occurrence – occurs in organisations. As a thinker, I am struck by how little space exists within organisational life for ideas to be entertained and grappled with before the mindless rush to implement these ideas usually through some off the shelf methodologies, methods, tools and techniques.

I say that the idea of Customer Loyalty had power.  And this power vanished when we rushed to turn this idea into practical customer loyalty programmes: loyalty cards, databases, offers and points.

I say that the idea of Relationship Marketing had power. And this power was drained and Relationship Marketing turned lifeless when the idea of Relationship Marketing was turned into the technology of CRM: systems that enslave human beings in data capture and script/process following slaves.

I say that the idea of Customer Experience has awesome power. And many are bleeding this idea dry, void of power, by turning it into the methodology of customer journey / touchpoint mapping, the blind worship at the voice of the customers, and the technology of Customer Experience.

What is it that I am getting at?  Let’s see if I can communicate that which I am seeking to communicate to the practical people that dominate organisational life.  I invite you to read the following words of wisdom (bolding is my work):

The word idea supposedly originates in the Greek word eidos, which means something seen like a form and a way of seeing like an eye, a perspective. So, ideas are not only things you can pick up and ponder. They also give you eyes, new ways of seeing things. Ideas are already operating in our perspectives, the way we look at things. We take our usual ideas for granted, and so, ideas have us rather than we have them….

Is the idea fertile, fecund? Does it make you think? Is it surprising, shocking? Does it stop you from habits and bring a spark of reflection? Is it delightful to think it? Does it seem deep? Important? …. This requires you to ponder it, which means weight it, feel its weight…. Pondering is an action of its own and keeps you holding the idea, from letting it go into other kinds of action before it is fully appreciated. Meanwhile you get a better feel of the idea….

You know, to have an idea and thinking about the idea are two different things, and being practical often means skipping over the hard thinking part…

For ideas to be therapeutic, that is, beneficial to the soul and body politic, they must gather into themselves, garnering force, building strength, like great movers of the mind’s furniture, so that the space we inhabit is rearranged. Your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories have to be moved around in new ways, because the furniture has been moved.

A long lasting idea, like a good poem or a strong character in a movie or a novel, continues to affect your practical life without ever having been put there. Ideas that live, live in us and through us into the world. Viable ideas have their own innate heat, their own vitality. They are living things too.

But first they have to move your furniture, else it is the same old you, with you same old habits, trying to apply a new idea in the same old way. Then nothing happens at all except the loss of the idea as “impractical” in your haste to make it “practical”.

– James Hillman, We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy And The World’s Getting Worse

It occurs to me that the conversations that take place here, at The Customer & Leadership Blog, are simply an ongoing exploration and pondering of the ideas of customer relationships, relationship marketing, customer service, customer loyalty, customer experience, customer-centricity, and leadership.

I am no expert, no guru,  in customer relationships (CRM), relationship marketing, customer service, customer loyalty, customer experience, customer-centricity, nor in leadership. Yet, it occurs to me, that it might just be that I have grappled with these ideas at a deeper level than many.  Therefore, any value that i create for you – the person who listens to my speaking – arises out of my willingness to stay with the idea rather than rushing to provide you with a silver bullet for your organisational ills.

Why I have shared this with you?  To provoke thought: to provoke you into doing deeper thinking into the Customer realm before you go and buy the latest snake oil from gurus, experts, consultancies, and IT vendors.  Incidentally, don’t reach for the dictionary to look up definitions of all things customer: customer service, customer relationship management, customer experience etc. Why? Definitions only provide the illusion of knowledge and understanding. There is no replacement for original thinking. A good start would be the following questions:

  • What world of possibility does the idea of Customer Experience open up for us and our customers?

  • What might Customer Experience Leadership look like, feel like, sound like, taste like – for us, for our customers? 

  • What is the first step on the journey of Customer Experience Leadership for us? Is it really getting access to the voice of the customer? Or is it doing that which we know needs to be done for our actions to be in tune with our words?

And finally, I invite you to consider that many if not most organisations have failed to make a success of relationship marketing, CRM, customer loyalty, customer experience etc because these ideas have failed to ‘move your furniture’ leaving the same old you, with the same old habits, trying to apply these radically new ideas in the same old way. 

If you have made it this far into the conversation, I say thanks for listening. These conversations are not easy, not simple. This is deliberate – these conversations are designed to provoke thought from the thoughtful. They are not for the impatient looking for the ten steps to customer success.