Business

Engagement is the early buzzword at DF13. More than 100k people are packed into San Francisco and we’re all looking to cozy up to one person – the customer.

How about engaging with your customers so they can help you get the right products to market faster and cheaper? Oh, and when you do it right, they tend to spend more and buy more frequently.

Salesforce’s Reena Bhatia and James Taranto announced this morning the crucial role of open innovation in keeping your organization lean and profitable.

What is Open Innovation?

“Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.”

That’s Henry Chesbrough’s take.

In layman’s terms – use the power of your community to get ideas, solutions and services to the market quicker. Listen to your market. If you ask the right questions or look in the right places, they can tell you how to do things better, faster and leaner.

As a business leader, why should you care about open innovation?

Because not only is the inability to change a death knell for any company, but the inability to do it smart and quick will destroy your chances of serving your customers and beating competitors to market.

There were 250k new products introduced in 2010 – 66% failed in two years and 96% failed to return cost of capital.

According to Salesforce’s Bhatia, Director of Value Consulting and Taranto, Director of Solution Engagement, companies that employed open innovation when launching new products or services enjoyed twice the net present value than those that did not.

Examples of Successful Open Innovation Campaign

Dell IdeaStorm – pushing products to market with input from customers through hyper-connected networks.

• 15k submissions;
• 490 ideas implemented;
• revenue from IdeaStorm members is 50% higher;
• purchase frequency is 33% higher.

Proctor & Gamble – Swiffer came from an open innovation experience, as did the coating on Tide Pods (each from external developers, rather than customers)

Government Services Administration – “Great Ideas Hunt” – 600 ideas from employees. Five were implemented and saved $5.5 million and another 40 are in consideration.

Corning – B2B – They actually did B2B2C – using Radian6 they listened to people complaining about dropping phones and breaking glass. They approached manufacturers with stronger glass (Gorilla Glass) and successfully sold a product they had shelved years earlier (and helped cell phone manufacturers decrease R&D cycle time).

Bottom Line – You Have Product Experts Out There…Your Customers

Don’t just engage with your customers – engage with them in a meaningful way; throw the doors of innovation wide open; and gain better products and more profitable customers.

Too much content, too little time? No worries, I’ve gathered some of the latest and greatest resources from industry top performers. This week, it’s all about customer engagement and we’ve found some gems from McKinsey Quarterly, IBM, Marketo, and more.

IBM Report: C-Suite Establishing More Direct Customer Engagement

Good read, great graphic, and video. CXOs have plenty of tasks on their plate and they are still rushing to pile on more. Namely in directly engaging with customers to influence the company business plan. In fact, more than half of today’s CEOs cite customers as having the most importance in business strategy development.

“If you’re a C-Suite executive, it may be time to join in on those key customer interactions and consider shaving time and resources off other organizational investments not involving customers.”

The Pitfalls of Customer Engagement in a Digital World 

Great use cases on Twitter and Facebook to show why digital can’t replace real-world interaction and vice versa.

“You’ve heard the critique that digital cannot completely replace face to face human engagement, well here are two examples that back it up….”

The New Rules of Customer Engagement

There is no formula for how many touch points is right, so stop counting!

“Goodbye, customer touch-points. Hello, ongoing, meaningful contact that actually drives revenue. Here’s what you need to know to be more engaging right now.”

The Art of Social Sharing: 5 Social Campaign Ideas to Get Your Audience Engaged

A Ralph Waldo Emerson quote + customer engagement advice? Always a win.

“As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it “our best thoughts come from others”. An excellent way to get your audience engaged, is to provide them with a reason to share your message on their social networks.”

Five ‘no regrets’ moves for superior customer engagement

McKinsey & Company dive into 5 strategies to get your company on the right track before you develop your full set of processes manage customer engagement across the whole organization.

“The biggest [significant organizational challenge] is that all of us have become marketers: the critical moments of interaction, or touch points, between companies and customers are increasingly spread across different parts of the organization, so customer engagement is now everyone’s responsibility.”

The principles behind building profitable customer relationships will never go out of style. From the days of the corner store to today’s most agile multichannel enterprises, these 12 principles remain the backbone of cultivating successful relationships.

1. Continuously learn about your customers

This is the first principle of managing customer relationships because it is the most fundamental. From this everything else follows. When you know your customers, you can make sound business decisions about how to develop your relationships with them. Maintain your knowledge in customer profiles that are available to all who need them.

2. Anticipate customer needs

Knowledge of your customers presents new opportunities for making the right offer or delivering the right service to the right person at the right time. Analysis of customer profiles, especially using today’s analytics tools, can provide powerful insight about needs and how to best serve them.

3. Handle different customers differently

The power of this principle lies in the potential for optimizing the value of each customer relationship through differential treatment. Based on customer segmentation, contact centers can provide user-appropriate Web and IVR interfaces, routing routines, the best-suited agents, and appropriate content.

4. Interact with customers

No matter how sophisticated the technology that organizations and customers use to communicate, your customers are human, and people appreciate being recognized, listened to and understood. Relationships tend to develop when you interact.

5. Focus on revenue and retention more than on reducing costs

Yes, a renewed focus on building relationships can require so many organization-wide process changes that operational cost savings may well be realized. But keep your eyes on value, overall revenue and retention first.

6. Increase value for your customers and of your customers

It is precisely because building customer relationships increases value both for customers and the organization that it is such a compelling strategy. When executed properly, the focus on building relationships and brand loyalty is a win-win for customers and the organization alike.

7. Present a single face to your customers to make their experiences with your organization seamless

Seek to simplify the experience for your customers. Take a holistic view of your customers and consolidate information from across the organization, regardless of geography, department, function, contact channel, social community, or product line.

8. Enable information sharing and interaction across the organization

It is both a requirement and a benefit of customer relationship management that organizations improve their internal communication processes. The only way to develop a comprehensive view of each customer’s relationship with the organization is with the full participation of every functional part of the company.

9. Create business rules to drive all customer relationship management decisions and automation

Business rules codify and automate processes, specifying what should happen in specific situations, thus enabling both differentiated customer treatment and automation.

10. Empower agents with information and training

Just as the cockpit of an airplane displays all the information a pilot needs to fly in any conditions, the contact management screen should pull together cleanly and clearly all that the organization knows about its relationship with that customer. Empowerment is a complementary principle because no set of business rules can or should fully anticipate every conceivable situation.

11. Retain the right customers

Customer knowledge and the capability for differentiated customer treatment significantly improve many organizations’ capabilities to retain customers.

12. Remember that the effective management of customer relationships is a way of doing business

Technology is an important enabler, but as these 12 key principles demonstrate, cultivating customer relationships requires much more. Customer strategy must be a way of doing business.

You can trust these principles. Build them into your strategy and operational plans, and you will be well positioned for the changes ahead.

by Brad Cleveland, Senior Advisor, ICMI

Customer communities are the foundation for any customer experience strategy. 

To understand that statement though, it’s useful to first explore what I mean by CX and how a company can build the necessary culture and implement the underlying technologies that can truly impact customers and provide an engaging experience.

CX is a broad term used to refer to a strategy that is designed to orchestrate a positive experience or interaction for customers at any and all touch points. The definition extends to the systems, processes and employees that impact that experience as well, which in reality could be all employees and any technology. This probably seems exceptionally broad to many of you, especially since most companies define “customer facing” employees as a small subset of employees that interact directly with prospects and customers. I’d suggest though, that in the spirit of evolving a full CX strategy that companies must change that definition and include all employees, as

even the most remote activities of an employee has the potential to impact the customer.

For example, you probably don’t think of the employee tasked with locating a specific product in a warehouse to fill an order as customer facing, but I’d submit that in fact, that employee might own one of the most important pieces of a CX strategy…getting the right product to the customer in the promised timeframe. Let that part of the process go wrong and see how many happy customers you have.

Customer Communities – The Evolution

Customer communities are quickly evolving and companies are finding that they can be used across many functions very effectively. Many communities are initially deployed as a way to encourage peer to peer support and interaction as a means of deflecting some of the customer service calls. These customer support communities are proving very valuable to companies but if that’s the only focus for the community I think you’re selling it’s potential short. That same community is generating useful content that can be harvested and reused in the companies knowledge base and also for training and documentation, for example. The community also provides a fertile ground for marketing and sales. Word of mouth advertising is a very powerful marketing tool and can be driven through the community by providing a positive experience and by nurturing influencers in the community.

Customer Communities for Content Marketing

We hear the terms “content marketing” and “inbound marketing” a lot these days and for many marketing organizations the concepts are very different from the traditional approach to marketing. Outbound marketing in a world filled with individuals that are overwhelmed by information and numb to most broadcast ads, email marketing, telemarketing, etc. is just not as effective anymore. The customer community is a facilitator of content marketing, or getting prospects to view relevant content at critical education and evaluation phases of their buying activity. The community is also a vehicle for ongoing conversation, which is a key function of inbound marketing; listening, responding and nurturing a relationship.

Customer Communities for Sales Intelligence: Socialytics

The customer community is a great source of sales intelligence as well. By using socialytic listening tools and analyzing the collected social data in the community, buyer needs, potential and even direct intent can be determined. The extension of the use cases for communities doesn’t stop with marketing and sales though. Communities are a integral part of an innovation management process and can provide product marketing and product designers with a source of ideas for improving current offerings and for new products and services. Using the broad customer community as a source for product and service ideas not only provides much better and broader input to the innovation process but also increases customer engagement by involving them more intimately in defining and improving the company’s products and services.

Who Are You?

In building a CX strategy that encompasses multiple touch points across online and off, one of the biggest challenges is effectively answering the simple question of who are you? On the surface this seems pretty straight forward but it is not, in fact it can be extremely difficult. Knowing you as “you” on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, the company’s eCommerce site, in the company’s loyalty program, and in the actual store all require some way to link you to multiple identities. How many email addresses and usernames do you have? The customer community platform may hold the key to this identity problem, or at least be an important part of the solution. Most communities start with a simple sign up process, maybe even offering to use a public social network as the vehicle for signup like Facebook connect or Twitter. That is the first link in putting the complete identity picture together. The next step is the community profile itself. If you can establish a trust relationship with the customer, demonstrate value and draw customers into providing a more complete profile then you fill in the puzzle pieces even more. This is incremental trust building of course, much like the concepts that were developed in the 1990’s around permission based marketing by Seth Godin and others. In other words, the more you demonstrate responsible use of personal data and the more value I can get from the community by adding personal details, the more likely I am to help clean up the identity questions. The community is the most natural place to do this.

Companies are using customer communities for many things and seeing very good returns for the investment of management time and in the underlying technology platform to simplify community management. What unique use cases have you developed for your customer community?

By Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President, Software Business Solutions, IDC