How to Thrive in the Age of the Customer
Returning from an interesting SAP Now event in Berlin with a strong attendee focus on customer experience is the perfect opportunity to start thinking about how to thrive as a company in the age of the customer. Being busy with and at our own valantic booth and an exciting IoT-Chatbot showcase I sincerely could not attend as many presentations as I wanted to. First let’s establish what the age of the customer means. What is the age of the customer? A few years ago the term ‚the customer is in control’ was coined. This was back in the first hype around social media, around the same time the term ‚social CRM’ got created. Some companies, for example Microsoft, are still using it. In the beginning ‚the customer is in control’ referred to the idea that social media put customers in a far more powerful position vs. businesses, because the higher reach that social media offered, changed the balance of powers between customers and vendors. Or so vendors of enterprise software argued. The ‚customer being in control’ is certainly one way to describe an age of the customer, even a very strong one. Forrester Research is somewhat more balanced. Forrester describes the age of the customer as the combination of a shift of power from institutions to customers and the disruptive forces of digitalization. This combination would “alter market fundamentals and force companies to change strategic direction and rethink operating models”. As part of the vivid discussion following my post Ten Questions you always wanted to ask about CX on CustomerThink, Harley Manning, VP and Research Director covering customer experience...
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...
The Secret Sauce of Success – Recipe unveiled by the DC Office of Unified Communications
Back in 2015 the Washington D.C. Office of Unified Communications (OUC) started a re-platforming exercise of their backbone from an on premise system to a cloud based customer service solution. The Washington, D.C. Office of Unified Communications manages non-emergency services for 311 callers across the District of Columbia, supporting 17 different agencies, including the Department of Transportation, the Department of Public Works, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and more. The OUC also manages emergency services for 911 callers. One of the main reasons for this re-platforming was the downtime challenge inherent to all on premise platforms: They need to be upgraded regularly, which causes service degradation or even unavailability. Other reasons included insufficient and slow reporting capabilities as well as the need to add more self-service channels. Having strong reporting and analytics capabilities are crucially important for call centers. The biggest thing for them is the answer and solution rate, which needs to be as high as possible. Additional self-service channels were necessary to be able to cope with the influx of requests and to both, improve customer satisfaction and modernize the customer experience. To further achieve the latter, a chat service and social media channels like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have been added to the 311 services. All of these challenges have been addressed by migrating to a software solution based upon the Salesforce Service Cloud, along with some organizational measures. Being a main KPI, the answer wait time has been drastically reduced from 7 minutes to a mere 31 seconds. Doesn’t sound good to you? Consider that the service still serves 1.8 million calls per year with...