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...

Concur and Uber Partnership – Four Winners and one Loser?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jul 21, 2016 | Blog |

Yesterday the controversial ride share/taxi company Uber and the leading travel- and expense management company Concur announced an expansion of their relationship. With their “first-of-its-kind partnership and technology integration” Concur-connected businesses “will gain visibility into [their] Uber usage while increasing traveler productivity and satisfaction”. As part of the deal Uber will exclusively (for the moment, I guess) make its business features available to Concur customers available for free. This includes automated employee onboarding, policy controls, savings performance, and trip summary dashboards only available by the combination of  data collected in the systems of the two companies. My Take – a Quadruple Win There are five involved parties. Concur Uber Concur customers Traveling employees It is conceivable that this partnership does good to all of them. On the fifth one – later … Concur wins The exclusivity of this partnership gives concur a nice edge over its competition. The travel management market is pretty contested. As you can see in the G2Crowd Grid for Expense Management Concur is not an uncontested leader. There is some scope left in both directions. Which leads us to the next two possible winners Concur Customers win Companies using Concur win by improved efficiencies, better overview and lower cost for taxi expenses – assuming that Concur doesn’t cream off the benefits – as the announcement states. There are basically five areas in which companies benefit: Companies can expect savings on taxi cost due to Uber instantly becoming a preferred provider A centralized account management connects employees to an account; this gives visibility into rides taken, including pick up, drop off, time of day, and route. Employees can use a central payment account or request reimbursement for...

Measure Customer Experience – But Don’t Over-Engineer

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 6, 2016 | Blog |

You have determined for your SME business that you want to improve your customers’ experience.But you do not know how to measure it. And you want tangible results fast. And you want to contain the risk.  After all there is nothing more risky than a big venture that promises results only in the far away future… You have heard about this Internet of Things thing, beacons, customer journeys, sentiment analysis, and predictive, even intent driven analysis. But this all seems a bit big and daunting. You ask yourself: How to go ahead? And how do I measure success? Many companies, especially bigger ones, already have a voice of the customer (VoC) program, which is a good start. Not to be gotten wrong, there are all sorts of challenges with VoC programs. Getting insufficient replies, data that doesn’t really help, data that covers only one single channel, etc. etc. But then a VoC program is a very good start, if kept simple, and also consistently available across channels. It again is about thinking big while acting small. Key is to Ask the questions immediately in context with the activity you refer to, e.g. on exiting the store or the web site Keep the number of questions for your customers very low and to make answering them extremely easy. Correlate the customer replies with information that you get from your employees. Lastly: Act on the results. Nothing is worse than asking customers and employees for feedback and then doing nothing with it. Keeping the numbers very low while retaining the ability to get meaningful data is a stretch. There should not be more than 4, in...

Digital Transformation. Heck, YES! But why?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 27, 2016 | Blog |

Digital Transformation, much like customer journey mapping, customer engagement, customer experience management, is all the rage at the moment. Everybody – and their dog – talks about it. Including me … but then I think the term is widely overused. The other ones, too. Many companies strive to ‘digitally transform’ themselves. Because this is what one does. Everybody does it. But why? How? What does digital transformation deliver? Does it deliver? And what is digital transformation at all? Lets start with the last question. A transformation is a wholesales change of an organisation, e.g. a business. A transformation touches all departments of the business, its whole value chain. Digital, in its broadest sense, refers to anything computer. So, in combination ‘digital transformation’ means to change a business in order to take more advantage of computers and software, in all departments, along the whole value chain. It can even mean a change of the whole business model. Quite a tall order. Nothing that one just does just for the sake of it, one would think. This is an endeavour that an established business embarks on only if it faces the risk of failing, and one that usually takes quite some time. What are possible triggers? I see three, two of them relate to the market place, one to technology. Changing customer demands New or changed competition Technological advances OK, now we are talking. These days many businesses realise that all three of these triggers are set. Technology surely leapt forward in the past few years. E.g. the adaptation of mobiles on the consumer side is unprecedented. This got followed by drastically, and ever faster, changing...

Customer Experience and Design

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 18, 2016 | Blog |

A brief while ago I had a talk with Ian Hodge, a very established Australia based consultant. One of the topics we talked about was what customer experience is and how to measure it. This led to following brief conversation on LinkedIn. Hi Ian, you told me that you are thinking about what customer experience is about. Have a look at below article by Paul Greenberg. The main topic is something else but in the second half there are some very good thoughts. http://www.zdnet.com/article/adobe-doubles-down-but-it-cant-stay-in-vegas/ Cheers Thomas Thx Thomas – interesting. I like the “catch 22” problem that delighting a customer runs the risk of increasing expectations etc. An interesting challenge I perceive is the integration of data analysis with creativity in design. This was always an important aspect of “marketing” and now applies more intensively and broadly with designing “customer experiences”. Look forward to keeping in touch. Rgds Ian yes, this challenge is what I tried to voice. It is not always a technology approach. But then once could have the idea of using marketing approaches to it – at least in a B2C world something like the following could work in the digital world: Try different approaches (designs) and roll them out to different target groups. Let it run parallel to current state while gathering data. This can be usages, usage patterns, abandoned carts, changes to cross-, upselling behaviour, recommendations, endorsements, etc. Apparently this needs to be planned. bugger – hitting enter to send should be forbidden 😉 Combine this with sentiment analysis and all of the sudden you have an approach that can cover both: The consumable experience...