The Corporate Woman

In discussing a customer touchpoint mapping project recently, I was asked this question, “Have you formulated your ROI for this project yet?”  Well, no… at the beginning stages of this type of project (touchpoint mapping, customer expectations capture, gap analysis) you simply don’t know what your ROI is going to be, mostly because you have no idea what problems you’ll identify.  All of the ROI glory goes to the projects that come out of a customer touchpoint mapping project. 

I think this is the reason why so many companies don’t make the effort to do it.  Because it’s hard to quantify up front.  Because some people have that little voice sing-songing “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, never realizing that we might not think it is broken, but our customers might.

Having done these types of projects before, I know they can have tremendous positive impact (increase revenue, improve cusotmer loyalty, even attract more customers).  But the patience and willingness to invest (time, resources and money) for the currently unquantifiable gain, that’s hard to find.  What do you think holds companies back from doing these types of projects?

Tags: barriers to success, Customer Experience, projects, ROI, touchpoints

Customer experience is a growing specialty field.  It goes by many names and titles but the disciplines are quite similar.  As a member of this growing group of practitioners, I’m fascinated with the backgrounds where my colleagues come from.  Many are from market research backgrounds (since getting the customer feedback  is where you start a program) but mine is a different path.  I come from an improvement background (project management, Lean Six sigma, program development, etc).  I believe the heart of a customer experience program is identifying and driving customer fed improvements.

Measure – analyze – act – measure.

I’ve had the pleasure to work in this specialty for ten years now.  I continue to be fascinated and challenged.  I wonder where this career path will go.  I’ve heard some say that it doesn’t have “legs to grow with” as a career path or that it is limited in executive potential but I don’t agree.  I believe that the growth of social media highlights the potential need for even more people to participate in this discipline and more companies to adopt it.  Customers are demanding to be heard.  Customer experience professionals are here to listen and learn, using that customer voice to help companies grow and make customers happier at the same time.  What do you think?  Where is this field going?

Tags: Act, Analyze, best practices, Customer Experience, Customer Insights, customer satisfaction, Improvement, Measure

The holidays are over and I am back to work after my longest vacation off in my working history.  It was lovely but it will come as no surprise to those close to me when I mention that I managed to snag an awful virus and was sick for the whole two weeks.  I am still dragging through the dregs of it…  All of that aside, it was a lovely and quiet holiday, filled with family time and I treasure the opportunity I had.

And now, it is time to work with my team to put definition to the strategy elements for 2009.  This is always such a great time of year for work, in my opinion.  I love looking at the long term plan, figuring out what needs to be done this year to get to fulfill that vision and breaking it down to quarterly chunks.  This is the year for retention and customer focus, no doubt about that.  Any company not thinking in those terms are going to have an even tougher year.  

Step one – find our retention version of the angled measuring cup.  If you haven’t heard the President of Oxo International talk about this invention and how it fulfills their principles, you missed out (http://gelconference.com/videos/).  In short, it’s time to find a clearer way of looking at the information to better understand what our challenges are.

Step two – use that information to make the customer experience even better, so we are able to deliver more value to our customers and they want to stay with us longer.

Which brings me back to the beginning – it’s time to plan!  Is that what you are doing this month?

Tags: Balance, Customer Experience, Loyalty, Vacation, Work

I have a lovely, long holiday planned with my husband and daughter.  Sixteen days off.  A rare thing in my life.  Normally, I only have a week off at a time (total of nine days), so this rarity will be something to treasure.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time the past few weeks encouraging my team to do the same.  For a Customer Insights organization, the end of the year is not a crazy one like some parts of the org, more a time to wrap up projects. 

I believe in setting a goal to try to get to zero by the end of the year when it comes to vacation time.  There is a reason we get that time off – it’s for balance, for health – both physcial and mental.  And it’s important to take time off.  This year, I won’t quite make zero – I’ll be short by a day and a half but that’s pretty darn close.  And it’s important to remember that there’s no award or recognition for not taking time off.  So if you are one of those types – you know the ones, the hoarders of time (I am a reformed hoarder, so I know what it’s like) – then try it for just one year.  Make it your goal in 2009 to get to zero vacation days by the end of the year.  You never know, if you try it once, you might find you’ll never go back to hoarding again.

Tags: Balance, Customer Experience, Family, Health, Vacation, Wholeness, Work

There isn’t one best way to best understand your customers but whatever you choose, it really needs to start with understanding their behaviors.  For example, your customer has decided to leave and you have a way to capture the reason why.  When they say price… do you accept that?  Or do you realize that price really means something else – such as “Budget – something in my life has changed and I need more money in my budget, so this has to go or I need a cheaper price” or “Value – I just don’t see the value in this vs. what I have to pay”.  Neither of those are actually price – they are root causes of the price top level statement. 

So being able to dig into the behaviors of your customers and understand why they do what they do is incredibly valuable.  In this way, you can really flesh out customer segmentation and work on developing personas or mental models that can actually give you actionable customer insights to drive decision making and strategy development.  And this part of a customer experience program can be very fun – I always enjoying digging in and understanding customers.  How about you?

Tags: Customer Experience, Customers, Loyalty

I was recently asked the question about how do you prove that measuring NPS is worthwhile (or any other loyalty metric).  It was an interesting and good question but it is sort of like asking how do I prove that love is better than not having love.  I know, I know… an odd example perhaps but also ephemeral to prove or disprove.  Here is what I think about that (NPS not love – I’ll save that for another post):

Customer loyalty (or even the power of recommendation) itself is not what needs to be proven, we know it exists and operate on it many times when we make purchasing descisions, whether they are business or personal choices.  What needs to be proven is how you can use measuring customer loyalty to actually drive positive change that not only results in growing your business but also in an improved customer experience.  This actually comes down to the ability to monetize the value of score because money really does talk in this case.  You have to be able to link the lifetime value, likelihood to recommend, frequency of recommendations and repurchase together to build a financial and customer focused picture of how your customers behave and what engages their loyal behavior.  It can be done and I have done it, so I know it works.  The interesting thing to me is how many times companies don’t take it this extra step, which enables you to make actionable business cases for change that benefits both customers and the business.  Food for thought…

Tags: Communication, Customer Experience, Loyalty, Net Promoter Score

I’ve been reading a great deal on customer satisfaction this and customer loyalty that here lately.  Working on a reimagining (so to speak) of my function and purpose within the customer experience realm.  Here is a challenge for you – how do you inspire a company to become more customer centric?  It’s the holy grail right now – a new version of the field of dreams.  I see it as two things – inspiration and engagement.  You can inspire but if action doesn’t follow (and shortly) then engagement drops off and you have less credit than when you started the whole thing.  I say… let’s break the mold and stop worrying so much about the numbers and start worrying far more about the people – our people and our customers as people.

Tags: Customer Experience, Customers