Ten questions you always wanted to ask about Customer Experience
This is a slightly enhanced (and translated) transcript of an interview about customer experience I did for valantic. The interview challenge was to stay short and concise, and to keep it within two minutes. In order to not lose the spirit of this 120 second challenge, I kept the transcript short. This might raise a question or two. Happy to discuss, as always. So, interviewer, let’s get going! What’s the meaning of the claim ‘The Age of the Customer’? ‘The Age of the Customer’ is a term that is roughly synonymous with ‘The Customer is in Control’. Both terms basically express the notion that today’s customers have far better access to information than they had a decade ago, before the social media and mobile revolution. An important consequence of this revolution is that customers’ trust business statements about their products and solution is far lower than in earlier times. What does this mean for businesses? That is simple. The knowledge advantage that businesses have has decreased considerably. With that the possibility of businesses to distinguish themselves based upon their products and services shrinks. Therefore businesses must appear far more authentic and focus on an engagement model that fits their brand; this in a way that results in a positive perception by customers. Customer Experience Management – What do you think of this term? I do not like the term customer experience management as the customer experience is solely in the realm of the customer. What a business can do is engage with customers in a way that with a high likelihood results in a positive experience. I prefer the...
What the heck is Customer Centricity?
Reading the very interesting post Customer Centricity is MORE than Customer Experience by Joseph Michelli I engaged into a discussion about things centricity. The discussion basically is about answering the question “What the heck is customer centricity?” – this elusive thing. And how does it relate to customer experience and other ‘centricities’, like price centricity, product centricity, or service centricity? When do we call a company customer centric? Of course there are some usual suspects that can be used as examples to make one point or another. Is Ryanair customer centric? Aldi? Amazon? Apple? Google? Starbucks? Jiro’s sushi restaurant? Luckily all participating disputants have a different view, so there is a vivid discussion going on, from which one can learn a LOT. But first things first. Let’s get the issue of customer centricity vs. customer experience out of the way. Joseph states, that “customer centricity is a commitment or a strategy to assure the success of your customer. Whereas, customer experience is a set of customer perceptions forged across all their interactions with your brand.” (emphasis by Joseph Michelli). In brief: customer centricity is a strategy and customer experience is an outcome. This distinction is important, as not only a customer centric strategy leads to customer experiences (plural, every interaction with your brand results in an experience), which accumulate to customer experience (singular, the weighted sum total of all customer experiences over time). So, let’s assume there are four possible pure strategies: customer centric, price centric, product centric, service centric, and put a stake into the ground by briefly defining them. I call a strategy service centric if all...
Salesforce, Service, AI and … IoT
AI, IoT, and CRM, three acronyms. However, these three belong together and should not be treated or looked at separately. One important reason for this is that companies and organizations can provide significantly better service experiences and, more importantly, results, by combining the capabilities behind these acronyms. Good field service not only gets dispatched smartly but also equipped with the right parts and, ideally, in a proactive manner. This can get delivered by the combination of Field Service, AI, and IoT data. That’s why I found Salesforce’s early December announcement of having added a component “IoT insights” to its Field Service Lightning product quite interesting. As the press release said, this capability enables service agents and representatives to see IoT signals together with other CRM data, so that the triple p of personalized, proactive, even predictive service is possible. After all, Einstein is embedded into Field Service Lightning for quite some time now. Doing so, Salesforce wisely did not implement yet another IoT platform but enabled its system to ingest data from existing IoT platforms, thus sticking to the core competencies of the company. The solution helps in three areas: Enabling of early issue anticipation (rather than detection, which is responsive) and remote diagnosis Providing agents with more relevant information, to speed up issue resolution And automation via rules and workflows. Says Paolo Bergamo, SVP and GM, Salesforce Field Service Lightning: Let me first clarify that we’re not competing with IoT platforms from the likes of AWS IoT or Azure IoT. Our solution extends the value of these platforms – they provide streams of device data that then flow...