Great Customer Experience Starts with Change Management

Delivering customer experiences that are engaging, relevant and persuasive is a key competitive advantage in today’s business environment. Recognizing that employees are the driving force that can make or break a great customer experience is the first step. An effective change management initiative is the second step necessary to ensure that employees have the knowledge and structure to deliver.

According to a recent Forrester Research study, 86 percent of respondents saw customer experience as a strategic priority. In a five-year study comparing customer experience scores to stock performance, there was a 70 percent differential between leaders and laggards.  

There are many factors that determine the success and influence the implementation of a robust customer experience management program (CXM). Technology has become a primary enabler. It allows you to target the right audiences with sophisticated campaign management tools, publish content with complex management systems, and measure and optimize the results using analytics. Combined, these capabilities make up an enterprise marketing platform or EMP.

The true potential of EMPs is often not realized. One aspect that is often overlooked or underestimated when it comes to deploying EMPs is the organizational readiness. From the onset, a CXM/EMP rollout requires various groups such as product, channel, brand, operations and analytics, to work across silos, share a common vision and leverage shared processes and tools.

Getting everyone to work together, share common goals and agree on metrics for success within this new model inevitably results in drastic changes to individuals, groups, teams and entire organizations. Change management can help organizations to control the potential implications (such as resistance and concerns) of such changes.

The Need for Organizational Change Management

Real and lasting change only occurs when employees alter their thinking, beliefs and habits. While it may be easy to recognize the need for change, putting it into practice is an entirely different story.

Humans are, by nature, resistant to change. Resistance takes many forms: unwillingness to learn a new system, disagreement with management decisions and uncertainty over changing job requirements including job security. It is the primary reason enterprise initiatives fail. 

Uncertainty can grow when management hires external "experts" to support the organization as can not being "selected" to participate in the project team. Secrecy and lack of communication further contribute to dissent, as employees immediately become fearful when they perceive management withholding information.

Organizational Change Management Fundamentals

Leadership and change authority John P. Kotter defines change management as a set of basic tools or structures intended to keep any change effort under control . The goal is to minimize the distractions and impacts of the change, while maximizing the potential the change intends to bring.

During the initial phase of a rollout, the following areas need to be addressed as a part of the change management process.

Roles & Responsibilities

Internal roles and responsibilities will change. Team structure, employee interaction and workload will all be affected. It is necessary to define where one employee’s responsibilities end and another’s begin. A "RACI" chart is a great tool to drive and provide clarity across the organization.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Forrester: Global Proceses for a Local Customer Experience

Managing customer experiences for any enterprise is a difficult task — and when customers are spread globally across numerous countries and languages, the difficulties are even greater. However, according to a new report from Forrester and sponsored by SDL, these problems can be resolved.

Planning is the Key to Successful Strategy

Like everything in IT, the key to resolving these issues is planning: first, identifying exactly what the problems are and second, developing a strategy to resolve those issues without too much disruption.

The paper's starting point is that because of the rapid development of new and (literally) far-reaching technologies, enterprises are facing the problem of having to manage customer experience in places and cultures that are unfamiliar to them.

This is clearly a problem. But it would be possible to argue that it is one that has always existed — and the real issue is that customers expect a lot more these days due to the development of CXM technologies.

But that’s a discussion for another day. According to the Forrester white paper  "Global Processes Help To Deliver Local Customer Experiences,"  the globalization of products and the increasing difficulty in distinguishing different brands of the same product has led to one real differentiator for enterprises — the quality of the customer experience they deliver.

The report also states that distinguishing different brands will be even harder in the future, as the widespread use of digital technologies will make customers more aware of the global landscape and give them higher expectations.

Connecting with Global, Local Customers

The development of global markets now requires that enterprises not only make physical in-roads into each market, but also that they provide a relevant customer experience in each market.

Localization has been an IT discipline for years, but the wider the market — and the further the reach of the company — the more difficult it is to do. Forrester suggests a framework for putting a plan into place:

1. Local brands, local CXM strategy: Recognize that customer experience is the customers' perception of the way they see themselves interacting with a company. It is local by definition.
2. Developing clear understanding of the local customer base: This is almost Marketing 101, but it basically means getting to know your local markets by understanding what the customers are thinking. Social media analysis might be considered a good example of this.
3. Experiences relevant to local market: From the research into customer wants and needs, enterprises should develop local solutions — and translate insights into local action.
4. Governance: Companies need to develop the best processes and practices, and apply them to local markets.
5. Metrics: Enterprises need to have a collection of global metrics to compare results of initiatives across markets, and measuring the success of regional and local campaigns.
6. Customer-centric culture: The key to a successful customer experience strategy and culture is putting the customer at the center of it. This can be achieved by hiring practices, socialization of customer experience strategies and a rewards system.

While the report suggests that companies need to rethink their approach, it would probably be more accurate to suggest that companies need to check that their approach has not deviated from the right path.

Many companies already have mature and developed global CXM strategies. But there is always room for improvement, especially as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries are generally regarded as displaying the most growth potential in the medium term.

In all five BRICS countries there are radically different regional considerations that need to be taken into account. But it is important to remember that each country has within it distinct local markets to be considered as well.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

ForeSee Study Ranks Retail Mobile Experiences, No Surprises on the Best

Retail mobile experiences are rated in a ForSee Study. Bet you don't know who made the top of the list. Okay, maybe you do.

According to the Mobile Satisfaction Index: Retail Edition, released Thursday by customer experience analysis firm ForeSee, Net retailer Amazon took top place for customer satisfaction with the retail mobile experience. Avon and Apple took the next two top spots. The report utilized 4500 customer surveys conducted last month. About three-quarters of those surveyed used phones, and the rest used tablets.

The Mobile Experience Is Different

ForeSee President and CEO Larry Freed said in a statement that “customers experience the web differently on mobile devices, and companies that do not measure the mobile experience miss an opportunity to solidify customer loyalty and risk losing customers to companies that do so.” (Editor's note: Check out: Adobe 2012 Mobile Survey Highlights the Rise of Mobile and the Demise of the User Experience).

On the Index’s 100 point scale, scores ranged from 84 to 76. ForeSee said that it considered a score of 80 or above to be a “benchmark of excellence,” and half of the measured retailers did so. Amazon scored 84, Avon 83 and Apple 82, but overall, satisfaction with the top retailers was only 79.

Following Apple were, in order, Victoria’s Secret, Barnes and Noble, eBay, Netflix, Staples, Walgreens, Best Buy, Groupon, J.C. Penney, Dell, Home Depot, Living Social, Macy’s, Walmart, Sears and Target.

The mobile retail experience is still a work in progress. ForeSee found that mobile retail experience lags behind the web-based retail experience, which, by now, is fairly uniform across desktops and laptops.

Mobile Matters

But mobile devices have to contend with a variety of screen sizes, OSs, hardware specs and transmission speeds, all of which make a consistent experience across devices difficult to achieve.

Comparing mobile satisfaction scores to web satisfaction — based on ForeSee’s Spring 2012 Online Satisfaction Index — the research firm said that “nearly all of the top retailers perform better on traditional websites.”

All of this matters, ForeSee said. Satisfied customers are 69 percent more likely to make a purchase on their mobile device, 72 percent more likely to suggest a retailer to someone else, and 58 percent more likely to come back.

Even with the challenges presented by mobile, retailers are increasing their bets — bigtime. According to a new report by Shop.org (available for its members), retailers will spend an average investment of US$ 207,000 on mobile this year. Last year, it was US$ 55,000.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Can You Move Your Intranet to the Cloud ?

A recent set of experiences at work has led me to ponder the question: can you move your intranet to the cloud?

The answer it would appear is that often given by consultants: "yes, but it depends!"  

So what does it depend on? Well, let's investigate some of the variables.

What and Why ?

The first thing to consider is what is your definition of "cloud"? I am not going to be purist about this. Whether it's a "true" multi-tenant public cloud, hosted managed services or even a corporate private cloud, what I am really looking for here is removing the technology stack from my data center / LAN and thus potentially supporting the stack, and even developing for it using staff who aren't on my organization's core payroll.

      
This diagram is courtesy of Sam Johnston via Wikipedia (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike V3.0)

I will be a little more proscriptive in defining the technology stack. In essence, what I am looking for is a Web CMS for the core information publishing function on an intranet. Whether you prefer the term Digital Workplace, Intranet Ecosystem or some other label, when it comes down to it there are many cloud based solutions for content centric collaboration or social collaboration.

However, apparently there are far fewer alternatives for that good old fashioned core intranet use case of content publishing, or portal development and not every organization is culturally mature enough yet to move to a social platform (e.g. Jive) as their intranet solution.

Organizational Size

Oh yes, size does indeed appear to count! There are some excellent cloud-based or hosted intranet solutions that unfortunately just do scale to 5,000 users. For example ThoughtFarmer is an excellent "social intranet" platform which can run on site or in the cloud, but either way, the ThoughtFarmer team doesn't recommend it for more than 5,000 users.

There are other alternatives, which may serve you in the Small to Medium Enterprise space, with many “intranet in a box” offerings moving to a cloud model, and even heavy duty intranet focused CMS platforms like Ektron are doing interesting things which can include hybrid models via their Cloud Manager product.

Organizational Readiness

So how mature is your organizational culture with respect to moving data into the cloud in general? Do you have standards in place? Or do your Info Sec and Enterprise Architecture colleagues have apoplexy when you mention moving content off your network and outside of your trusty firewall?

This is potentially where the variations of public versus private cloud, versus managed hosting services etc. come into play. Risk assessment is of course the broadly scoped answer to this conundrum, for which there are many corporate or public methodologies which are beyond the scope of this article.

Potential Paths to Investigate

If you're a SharePoint house for portal, WCM and other Intranet functionality, then you can investigate their cloud offering under the Office 365 brand. There will of course be plenty of potential partners to advise you on advantages and warn you of pitfalls, but I am no Office 365 expert, and I don't like SharePoint as a Web CMS !

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com