How to stand out from the crowd, capture attention, and forge a relationship. A city bus driver in Brisbane promised — and delivered — a happy, safe trip by engaging his riders with a surprising announcement.
Transforming the Enterprise through Innovative Customer Experiences
… brought to you by IBM Services and Research
CTO Telecom Research Paul Bloom
GBS Digital Front Office Leader Peter Korsten
March 14. Last week, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty announced the company’s vision for what will differentiate enterprises from their competitors in the new “Era of Smart.” One of the major shifts she described is that in order to create value, organizations need to serve their customers not as a mass audience, but as individuals with personalized needs.
As the proliferation of mobile and social technologies continue to change the way we create, consume and share information, CEOs, CMOs and heads of sales are recognizing the data generated from these same applications can help them transform their organizations and interactions with their customers.
To address these opportunities, IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services have opened the IBM Customer Experience Lab that brings together the brightest and best minds from both organizations to help our clients capitalize on the proliferation of „, Continued on page 2
New IBM Customer Experience Lab focuses on CEO priorities
Yesterday IBM announced the creation of the IBM Customer Experience Lab, an exclusive Research and GBS capability aimed at the front-office agenda of clients in the world of Big Data. One hundred Research scientists worldwide will work with thousands of GBS business consultants to address the emerging C-Suite Front Office Digitization priorities.
Banorte-lxe, one of the leading banks in Latin America, and Nationwide, the world’s largest building society, are among clients already engaged with the Research and consulting experts of the new lab. During its start-up phase, the Lab will focus on six priority industries — Banking, Insurance, Retail, Consumer Products, Telco and Energy & Utilities — and we are going to select and manage the engagements coming into the Lab through GBS Global Industry Leaders and partners.
IBM Research: IBM Customer Experience Lab
To help its clients successfully navigate these changes, IBM has established the IBM Customer Experience Lab to invent new ways for them to provide best-in-class customer experiences across their many channels. Located at the T.J. Watson Research Center, with additional virtual collaborators around the world, the IBM Customer Experience Lab is a partnership between IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services. A dedicated team of researchers and consultants will work with clients on customer insights, customer engagement, and employee engagement through the use of mobile, social, cloud and analytics technologies.
Going from social to digital engagement. This customer journey map outlines the steps digitally connected customers take during and following decision-making. Various channels (mobile, social, web, “real-life”) all contribute to experiences that influence customers’ level of engagement, purchase and loyalty. Business leaders are currently defining new roles and responsibilities to unify and optimize the customer journey.
(via The Imminent Evolution from Social to Digital Engagement | AT&T Networking Exchange Blog - Image source)
Bringing the customer experience into the organization
It’s the mindset of the social world, where everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and perhaps even thinking, that may very well be the hardest to adapt to and instill in our corporate culture. It’s a world where those who know how to tap into global knowledge flows in social networks on the “edge” of our businesses will succeed.
(via Rethinking the Customer Journey in a Social World - Forbes)
Hire the will, train the skill
You can teach people how to perform tasks, whether it’s stocking shelves or doing the books. And you can teach them enough about your products and services to be able to help your customers. But if they’re people who don’t want to help customers, you’re not going to teach them to be different people.
Are there really that many people out there who just don’t want to help customers? Yes. That’s a lesson Kevin Peters, the president of Office Depot North America, learned several years ago.
Kevin asked all 22,500 store associates to take a personality assessment test designed to evaluate employees‘ skills, behaviors, and aptitudes as they related to serving customers. To his surprise and disappointment, a significant percentage agreed with statements like “If the job requires me to interface with customers, I‘d rather not do the job.”
How do you avoid falling into the trap of hiring people who not only won’t help you deliver a great customer experience, they might even prevent you from delivering one? The advice we hear over and over from customer-centric companies is to “hire the will, train the skill.” That starts with creating profiles of ideal candidates, profiles that emphasize customer-centric behavior and character traits. Then during the interview process, asking candidates to describe a time when they helped a customer. If they can’t come up with an example, or if their example sounds contrived, they’re probably not someone you want.
Excerpted from Forrester blog by Harley Manning
How CMOs and CIOs can work together
With new tools from IBM CMOs can become more responsive to changing business conditions without waiting for IT to implement requests. Marketers can now:
- Post rich media assets like images, videos, podcasts on the web, engaging with a variety of content to capture attention and drive further awareness/interest.
- Change content on the fly without having to engage IT. That will save time and enable Marketing to adapt to customer needs quickly.
- Track and monitor activity on a website. IBM makes websites adaptive, so that companies can customize offers, messaging, and content to increase traffic and convert visitors to customers.
- Synchronize information with all channels seamlessly, whether it’s a remote device, social media site such as Facebook or organization’s internet website.
Relationships skew how consumers judge brands. Consumers form connections with brands in ways that mirror social relationships. How consumers evaluate a brand depends heavily on whether the brand adheres to—or violates—the implicit relationship agreement.
The results of one experiment depended heavily on whether the consumer was in an exchange relationship with the brand—for example, a relationship based primarily on economic factors, or in a communal relationship based on caring, trust, and partnership (State Farm, for example, sells itself as a “Good Neighbor.”) When the brand made a mistake, good treatment didn’t improve a negative evaluation by “transactional” consumers. But when these same consumers got what they paid for, respectful treatment raised their estimation of the brand — as though adding to the vale of the deal. The reverse held for consumers in a more social, or communal, relationship. Via Futurity.org
What does branding mean now?
There are differences in execution when we build brand relationships with individuals versus communities. More mportantly, how do we even think about the nature of branding itself and the role it plays in designing a customer relevant, connected business. Is it realistic to design products and services for individuals not segments? What is the right level of relationship for a brand? The demographics/psychographic level is too big, and the individual level is too small. So communities of interests and affinity are more the scale you want. Via Rawn Shaw, Forbes.
