The Corporate Woman » Loyalty

The iPad as an e-reader

Tabitha — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:02:52 +0000

I love the ability to make successful recommendations. When I love a product or a service or an idea, I can’t wait to share it with my friends, family and colleagues. And when that recommendation is equally well liked and received, then I feel great. Surely I can’t be alone in that, right?

Where am I going with all this? Well, I am an avid reader, when I say avid, I mean that in actual definition of the word – I have read pretty much every day of my life since I was seven. A day that goes without reading a book is a sad, sad day for me. I read at least two to three books a week, sometimes more. I am also the queen (self-proclaimed) of reading multi-tasking. Some examples - while eating (easy), while blow drying my hair (a little harder but easy with practice) and while watching TV (harder but still possible). My family has many stories of the unsuccessful attempts I have made over the years to combine reading with other activities but that should be a different post, I think.

So I thought that I would never convert from the comfort of the paper in hand to an e-reader. But I have converted and done it wholeheartedly. I received a Kindle for Christmas and fell in love with it. I have shared it with dozens of people (even numerous strangers who have asked after it out in public). I rave about it because it turned out to be perfect for me. See… there I go again, recommending. Can’t help it.

Being a fan of Apple and being married to an Apple fanatic, I was looking forward to the iPad. I thought to myself, “Wow, will this be even better than the Kindle and my iPod Touch combined?” I’m sorry to say but from all I have seen, I just can’t feel the love on this one. This from a woman who has a Kindle, an iPod, an iPod Touch and a Flip in my purse at all times. I’d have an iPhone too if I didn’t have a company Blackberry instead. I wanted to like it, really I did. I think it could be great but I don’t think it’s there yet. Certainly not as an e-reader. I am not getting the “magic” or the “revolution”. Maybe I will when it improves in future generations. What do you think?

2009 – Kicking off the new year

Tabitha — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:33:34 +0000

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?

Understanding your customer

Tabitha — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:47:38 +0000

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?

Proving the value of NPS

Tabitha — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:26:59 +0000

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…

Customer loyalty – how do you define it?

Tabitha — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:01:35 +0000

It’s been an interesting year for those of us in the customer experience realm. Lots of passion on both sides of the fence regarding the Net Promoter Score has resulted in positive good overall – it has raised awareness of the era of customer choice. The more aware a company and its leaders are regarding their customers and their customer needs, the better opportunity that company has to grow organically. Having used a number of the methods espoused by the various experts, I can see the pros and cons of each of the methods. What I find the most interesting is not what method but why they choose the method. Surprisingly, many times that choice is made without actually looking at how their market works and how their customers behave. Looking their first really helps narrow down the field of what methods will work best for measuring and driving customer loyalty.