Rethink CRM to be CEM

by Thomas Wieberneit | Mar 14, 2018 | Blog |

Businesses are in a difficult situation. Today’s customers demand more experiences and contextually relevant engagements than they are equipped to deliver. The secret behind the abbreviation CEM is more important than ever. This places the businesses on a difficult and challenging trail that they need to carefully navigate in order to be and stay successful. The business challenge is that technology helps everyone, especially customers. This is because to the increasing proliferation of consumer technology, it is far easier and cheaper for customers to implement and use technology to their advantage as it is for businesses. A director of merchandising of a 1 Bn+ retailer put like this: “By the time we catch up to technology it will have moved past us again.” Examples for the truth of this statement in the past decade include the meteoric rise of messaging services and, before that, social media, powered by smartphones that made the Internet ubiquitous. As a consequence of this today’s customer is less depending on company marketing- or sales organizations and has a far higher reach when it comes to satisfying an information need. Consequently, Google finds that a whopping 99.8 per cent of all online ads are simply … ignored. Sales representatives are on the verge of becoming irrelevant. An increasing number of studies find that customers contact a sales representative only after a product decision has been made. Other studies determine that customers are abandoning shopping carts already following a single poor service experience. While these studies often are commissioned by vendors there still are too many of them to not indicate that there is a problem....

Trust in Crisis – Customer Experience is the Way Out

by Thomas Wieberneit | Feb 27, 2017 | Blog |

Trust is eroding. Not only in governments and media as we could clearly observe but also in independent organizations like NGOs and businesses. And in business leaders, experts, even into the famed ‘people like me’. According to the recently published 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer NGOs and businesses are barely not distrusted. Especially businesses are now on the brink of distrust. They are often seen as part of the problem: While Automation may be good on a society level there are vital job concerns for individuals. Wealth distribution becomes increasingly unequal. While societies improve economically this is not felt on an individual level. In fact, amongst those who think that the current social-economic system is failing only NGOs are not actively distrusted. On the other hand amongst those who are uncertain about the current system businesses are the most trusted entities. So there is a way! Source: Edelman Trust Barometer 2017 A Focus on Customer Experience Guides on the Way The trust barometer lists as the 5 most important actions that businesses can take: Treat your employees well Offer high-quality products/services Listen to your customers Pay your fair share of taxes Engage into ethical business best practices Although one doesn’t need to fully agree with these findings, which are partly overlapping, the points have two things in common: They are key ingredients of a positive brand image and of good customer experience. These five points are also about company values and the culture lived by the company – as opposed to the one that is written down. A positive brand image is a result of good customer experience. And here...

Apple Pay holds Banks in Stranglehold! Really? Poor Banks

by Thomas Wieberneit | Feb 15, 2017 | Blog |

In the past days two interesting articles around banks and banking innovation found their ways into my browser. One by Knowledge@Wharton on “How Banks Can Keep Up With Digital Disruptors” and the second one by Mobile Commerce Daily on “How four Australian banks are challenging Apple’s stranglehold on mobile payments”. The first article is essentially stating that banks are not using the “essential assets need to turn aside many of the assaults on their business now underway from fintech”, while the second one seems to sing the song of the poor banks that are held at a disadvantage by evil Apple. The four banks that challenge Apple are Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank, and Westpac. Another large bank, ANZ Bank, cooperates with Apple by offering their customers to import cards into the Apple Wallet and using Apple Pay, and is not involved. But what do the banks want? According to the article they want access to “Apple’s Apple Pay system as well as access to the NFC capabilities of the iPhone”, being narrowed down to “require Apple to only disclose access to the NFC capabilities of the iPhone to the banks and therefore their customers.” Essentially they want to be able to build their own mobile payment system and not go through Apple’s wallet and still be present on “one of the most popular smartphones in the world” And yes, it is true that Google’s Android operating system allows more access to the phone’s NFC capabilities than iOS. On the other hand banks are seeing disruption coming. Fintech companies are coming up left,...

Customer Experience Management and Customer Expectations

by Thomas Wieberneit | Aug 9, 2016 | Blog |

In the past weeks I found more and more articles like  this one that talk about the importance of continually exceeding customer expectations to be able to deliver a positive customer experience. Only this way, companies get advised, will they achieve customer loyalty and advocacy. I, frankly, find this more than a bit disconcerting. To me this seems to be a very wrong objective to put the sole focus of customer experience management on. Minimally it is a very short sighted objective. Not to be misunderstood. As a customer I like my expectations exceeded, too. Why is the objective wrong, then? Where we are at … For a starter, and that may be true for many other customers, consumers as well as business customers, we have grown to expect very little. This is probably following many disappointing encounters where already the basics go very wrong. I am talking about basics customer experience failures like: Being ‘targeted’ by and served with irrelevant marketing e-mails, or plainly with too many of them Complicated onboarding processes Unavailable, uninterested, or plainly overly busy in-store personnel, or the personnel not having information at their hands Long wait times in the customer service lines, even in chats Inadequate solutions to problems Different experiences when using different channels, like the necessity to repeat information Delivery windows that span a whole day Information about delays not being provided Confirmations that differ from the agreement Privacy policies that almost need a law degree, are very long and that put the customer on the back foot Loyalty programs that clearly rather serve the company than offering value to the...