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

Brain Games Company Lumosity Is Business Up Front, Experiment In The Back End

With its large database of human cognitive performance, Lumosity has become a small but significant force in the science surrounding its products.

As a neuroscience PhD candidate at Stanford, Michael Scanlon explored the effects of cognitive training through small-scale experiments on fish and rats. Now, seven years after dropping out to start a company that makes brain games, he can base his research on anonymized data from 25 million people.

Lumosity, the company Scanlon co-founded, makes games that promise to sharpen memory, focus attention, enhance creativity and improve attention. At least by Silicon-Valley terms, it’s been successful. The startup announced a $31.5 million investment from Discovery Communications last week, bringing its total amount of funding to $70 million. Its mobile app has reached the coveted No. 1 spot in the App Store, and its userbase has swelled to 25 million.

Studies about whether playing games like Lumosity's can indeed make people smarter have produced conflicting results. One study, for instance, found subjects who trained in cognitive tasks improved only at those specific tasks. Others, meanwhile, have showed improvement in fluid intelligence among those who played a brain game.

Lumosity's research branch, Lumos Labs, runs its own studies about how the games impact intelligence. But it also lends assessment tools and, in a few cases, its massive data set to independent researchers who are studying cognitive training. It's running an experiment and a company at the same time and has thus become a small but significant force in the science surrounding its products.

As new understandings emerge about how cognitive training works, it's a good bet that Lumosity will be the first to arrive with updated games.

According to a paper the company published in the MENSA Research Journal, after 10 hours of training, subjects improved 10% in memory and 20% in divided attention. At the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in October, it will present further research on the transfer of cognitive training to core underlying cognitive capacities and whether older adults need to train more frequently than younger adults to receive equivalent benefits.

With the exception of the research published in MENSA Research, however, none of its findings have been submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

“We know it’s possible,” Scanlon says. “We haven’t submitted enough times to know if we we have a high rate of success or a low rate of success.”

Regardless of whether Lumos Labs successfully publishes more studies, Scanlon acknowledges that research produced by organizations without revenue at stake are more likely to be trusted. Which is one reason Lumosity has helped supply about 100 independent researchers with brain games their subjects can play at home instead of at the lab.

Researchers from Stanford, the University of New South Wales and other schools have used Lumosisty brain games in published studies, many of which support Lumosisty's findings, and scientists at Harvard and UC Berkeley are among the 25 researchers that are currently incorporating the games into experiments.By default, testing their subjects on Lumosity games also helps cement the company’s position as the most data-equipped researcher in the space.

That's the business genius in Lumosity's research programs: As new understandings emerge about how cognitive training works and in what ways it is or is not effective, it's a good bet that Lumosity will be the first to arrive with updated games.

“The product is informing the science, which then turns back into the product,” Scanlon says. “Not all companies have the option of having their R&D and business models in such alignment.”

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

InsideSales.com Raises $4M to Hone Predictive Analytics for Sales Force Automation

InsideSales.com, a provider of a Saas-based sales force automation platform, has completed a round of funding totaling US$ 4 million. The company says it will put the money toward accelerating growth into enterprise markets and developing predictive analytics capabilities.

The InsideSales.com platform takes what the company calls the “high velocity sales model,” which it says is a data-driven approach to sales. Using cloud-based technology, InsideSales.com seeks to improve productivity, visibility and analytics with a metrics-based “preferred inside sales model.”

This sales model leverages rapid lead response qualification and cold-calling teams paired with experienced closers who conduct sales using the phone and Internet, as opposed to the traditional face-to-face outside sales model that InsideSales.com says is more expensive and less efficient.

Engaging Modern Consumers

InsideSales.com is attempting to tackle what is becoming a widely-recognized challenge for today’s sales professionals — engaging a much savvier and more connected consumer. Dan Schleifer, EVP of sales enablement for enterprise sales collaboration software provider SAVO Group, recently explained in an interview with CMSWire how he sees Web-based communication technology as holding the potential to revolutionize sales in today’s environment.

Schleifer said by automatically collecting data in real time while a sales rep is making a presentation or pitch, via mobile device, sales enablement tools can eliminate organizational silos and fill the gaps in B2B sales data quickly enough for sales strategies to be altered as soon as problems can be identified. “The clinical moment of truth in any sales process is when the rep is sitting with the customer. Sales enablement allows you to understand that moment of truth.”

While InsideSales.com is geared more toward identifying leads for real-time sales calls than for increasing the personalization of site visits, the underlying strategy of automating a process and improving its effectiveness with real-time data and predictive analytics is the same. InsideSales.com generates and stores quantitative call data linked directly with qualitative lead process and flow information.

Some Days are Better than Others

As an example of how InsideSales.com’ technology can be applied, LeadResponseManagement.org used data from the InsideSales.com system to conduct a study into telephone sales issues such as what day of the week is best to call back a web-generated lead for optimal contact and qualification rates. The study determined Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call for making contact with and qualifying leads (with Tuesdays the worst day for making contact and Fridays the worst day for qualifying).

This type of feedback can be invaluable for companies trying to successfully reach prospective customers who have become adept at both filtering out information and conducting extensive research on products, brands and services.

Hummer Winblad Venture Partners led the funding round, with co-investors including Josh James, founder and CEO of Domo and cofounder and former CEO of Omniture.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com