Pages

Jan 17, 2014

The 6 Pieces of the Customer Experience Puzzle

customer puzzle.jpgHow do you define customer experience — and, more importantly, how do you create the best customer experience model? I started wondering about both concepts while working on an assignment to increase sales from the digital channel of a hospitality giant.

It seems like everyone is interested in the idea of “great customer experiences." But both businesses and scholars have struggled to understand what that really means, and have fared even worse at attempts to measure the outcomes of the "Customer Experience."

My suggestion: Divide the customer experience into six dimensions that can work cohesively to improve the requisite "experience" to customers, provide competitive differentiation and even affect the bottom line.

6dimensionsofcxm.png

The diagram above visualizes the six dimensions of customer experiences, a few factors that characterize those dimensions (inner circle) and the enablers for succeeding in those dimensions (outer circle).

Knowing the Customer

Knowing the customer cannot be limited to just collecting personal and demographic data about the customer as it has traditionally been done. Increased varieties of touch points, particularly the digital touch points, help in collecting advanced data such as transaction history and behavior across multiple channels.

This is amplified by advantages of big data analytics in synthesizing the collected data and understanding more about customers, their individual behaviors as well as preferences. Similarly, speech analytics helps in understanding customer behavior and problems in the interactive voice response (IVR). All of these together, using data from all channels, provides a consolidated view of the customer by creating customer profiles.

Personalization

Imagine calling the IVR of a hotel booking agency and hearing “Hi, I am Martha, can I help you?“ versus “Good Morning Mr. Wong. I am Martha” and offering to book a room based on your previous preferences such as type of room, amenities, etc. A key step in personalization is customer identification. Techniques such as recognizing automatic number identification, cookies, email ID, Facebook handle and more can help in identifying customers. A few touch points by their very nature help in customer identification — for instance mobile apps.  

The next step would be to provide a personalized service to the identified customer. Previous point about knowing the customer combined with interaction design methodologies help in ensuring that the customer feels valued. Advanced statistical techniques coupled with big data help in micro segmentation of customer and thus in targeting effectively. Traditional loyalty programs also aid in personalization. Some well known examples of personalization in action are Amazon’s dynamic recommendations and Zite’s story/news selection.

Contextualization

Every customer wants to be treated according to their individual needs and does not like generalized interactions. This necessitates a clear understanding of customer needs and the intent of transactions. Advanced predictive analytical techniques using machine learning algorithms such as regression models or Bayesian Models help in intent prediction and thus in designing customer journey, particularly in digital channels.

For instance, predicting the intents of the callers of a nationwide directory assistance service helped us increase the self-service rate by nearly 5 percent and also reduce the time taken for completing a transaction. Similarly, my colleagues could predict the intents and problems of web visitors using Naïve Bayesian model for a telecom giant and thus designed optimal interventions to increase the sales.

Recent research from Google shows that 90 percent of the customers use multiple screens sequentially to accomplish a task over time and 98 percent of them move between devices on the same day. Also, 67 percent of customers start shopping on one device and continue on another. Retaining context across multiple touch points and transactions further facilitates predicting the exact intent of the caller so you can provide seamless service. How nice would it be to start making an airline reservation on the web, pause and continue in the IVR or your mobile app without duplicating any steps!

Ease of Transactions

Imagine you are talking to an airline agent using your smartphone to book a ticket. She offers you 10 different choices, but you've forgotten the first choice after she completes the tenth. What if instead you could simultaneously see the flight choices on your smartphone screen while talking to the agent? Research by Google shows that 66 percent of customers use their smartphone and laptop simultaneously and 22 percent use both simultaneously usage for the same transaction. Innovative multichannel solutions greatly simplify and ease transactions.

 

Continue reading this article:

 
 
 

Source : cmswire[dot]com
No comments:

Marketers Fail to Align Customer Experience, Branding

customer experience, Marketers Failing to Align Customer Experience, Branding

Customer experience (CX) is all the buzz in marketing and business today. But not enough, according to Forrester Research's Cory Munchbach.

"CX needs to have a bigger role over marketing and other operations functions," Munchbach told CMSWire this week.

Why Brand and Customer Experience?

munch.jpg

Munchbach surveyed customer experience and marketing professionals about the relationship between brands and customer experience. She interviewed CMOs and senior customer experience folks about the dynamics.

She produced a subsequent report, published this week, "The Convergence of Brand, Customer Experience, And Marketing."

"Brand and customer experience strategies are rarely talked about in the same context, and there are many mis-perceptions about what each means and the role they play in the business," Munchbach told CMSWire.

She is calling the report the first research that "explicitly defined a relationship between brand, customer experience and marketing, and makes the call that CX needs to have a bigger role over marketing and other operations functions."

Naturally, there have been other reports that discuss brands and customer experience, and link chief marketing officers to customer experience, but Munchbach said the link between all three — branding, customer experience and marketing and her conclusions — is unique.

Branding vs. Marketing vs. CX

Knowing the difference between the three is crucial for chief marketing officers (CMOs).

The brand sets the stage and acts as the foundation for the company’s promise and decisions, the Forrester researcher told us. Customer experience, she said, tackles the implementation of the brand promise for customers, while marketing is the voice of the brand both in and outside of the organization.

Start with a strong brand strategy to guide the customer experience, she wrote in her report. This, she said, can help identify gaps that create confusion or dissatisfaction.

Who's at the center of this transformation, according to Munchbach? The CMO.

"Whether the leader of the brand, CX and marketing or a co-leader with a chief customer officer peer," she wrote, "the CMO must lead the customer experience imperative in order to remain the credible voice of the customer and brand steward for the enterprise."

So what should be included in a CMO's job description? 

"The CMO should report into the CEO or COO and be responsible for being both brand steward and customer experience arbiter," Munchbach told CMSWire. "This means having knowledge and skills in both areas, as well as being a master orchestrator to ensure all of the various functions required to execute successfully against this brand/CX paradigm are doing so in a synchronized and measurable way."

Not Enough Alignment

Munchbach told us she was surprised by how few companies have aligned brand with CX at this point. "It’s one of those things that seems very logical once I laid it all out, but isn’t common," she said.

Why? Customer experience folks don’t have the influence or brand marketing experience to make the connection, and/or the marketing side of the house doesn’t understand customer experience or its principles.

So what are good CMOs doing behind the scenes to make it all happen? How do the good ones make it all jell?

"The good campaigns do what they always have done: create awareness and move consumers further through their purchase path," Munchbach told us. "Good CMOs, however, are moving beyond campaigns and thinking much more holistically about their consumers’ entire life cycles and how to facilitate a great, consistent experience that drives transactions, builds loyalty and generates advocacy. Campaigns have a role in that life cycle, but it’s not the best way forward."

CMOs are making improvements in targeting and measurement to optimize campaigns for the audience and the context.

"Though there’s a long way to go," Munchbach told CMSWire. "Cross-channel campaign management vendors are constantly improving their offerings and working hard to help clients add channels and measure performance to be more effective."

Anything holding CMOs back — forces beyond their control?

"A CMO needs more leeway to make decisions that serve the customer first and foremost," Munchbach said. "A CMO needs less pressure to do more of the same tactics but with fewer resources."

Title image by Leszek Glasner (Shutterstock).

 
 
 

Source : cmswire[dot]com
No comments:

Jan 16, 2014

Cisco: Misplaced Trust the Biggest Threat to Enterprise Security

enterprise trust.jpg

The current forecast for cyber security in 2014 is “grim” and has the potential to get even worse, according to new research from Cisco. The report concludes that if technologies like cloud computing and the growth in the use of mobile technologies are creating a wider landscape for hackers to work on, then trust is the open door letting hackers into systems.  

Doing it to Themselves

The report, which was only released this morning, demonstrates how hackers and their malware exploit and attack enterprise systems. But it also notes that users themselves are making the job of hackers a whole lot easier.

But let’s have a deeper look at the issue of trust. According to the Cisco 2014 Annual Security Report, one of the biggest threats to enterprises is the trust users place in their IT systems, applications and personal networks.

Instead of having healthy caution about offering access to networks and infrastructure, users are placing too much trust in the systems designed to protect them. This is opening the door to cybercriminals, whose increasingly sophisticated attacks are damaging both enterprise systems and reputations.

The report also points out that this is aggravated by the emergence of new forms of embedded malware, which can remain undetected for long periods while it steals information and disrupts critical systems.

The final ingredient in this unhealthy mix is a worldwide shortage of nearly one million skilled security professionals, which is affecting the ability of organizations to protect themselves against current and emerging threats — creating a toxic recipe for IT mayhem over 2014.

Cisco_where threats occur.jpg

Malware Threats

Threats include the socially engineered theft of passwords and credentials, hide-in-plain sight infiltrations and the ongoing exploitation of trust that can compromise economic transactions, public services and social interactions online.

The result is that the overall vulnerability level is at the highest it has been since 2000. Every day:

  • 4.5 billion emails are blocked
  • 80 million web requests are blocked
  • 6450 endpoint file detections occur in FireAMP
  • 3186 endpoint file detections occur in FireAMP
  • 50,000 network intrusions are detected

It's a vicious cycle. People are too trusting, allowing threats into the enterprise. But that exploitation of their trust causes erosion of the remaining trust. The key, the report suggests, is better awareness and defense against attacks. Enterprise IT departments must understand the attackers, their motivations and their methods – before, during and after an attack, noted John Stewart, chief security officer at Threat Response Intelligence and Development in Cisco.

Specific Threats

The 81-page report covers the full threat landscape, including threats to infrastructure, security issues around cloud computing, the vulnerabilities created by mobile devices and of course misplaced trust. Among the highlights:

  • Java is the most frequently exploited programming language targeted by online criminals
  • Android devices are the target of 99 percent of all attacks with malware called Andr/Qdplugin-A the most common offender that enters systems as legitimate apps sold in unofficial marketplaces
  • In terms of verticals targeted, in 2012 and 2013, there was a notable growth in malware attacks in the agriculture and mining industry
  • Cyber criminals are increasingly targeting infrastructure "with the goal of proliferating attacks across legions of individual assets served by these resources."

Cisco_the most vulnerable applications.jpg

One final figure here that is telling and worth keeping in mind is that 100 percent of a sample of 30 of the world’s largest multinational companies generated visitor traffic to web sites that were found to host malware. A further 96 percent of networks surveyed communicated traffic to hijacked servers.

If you think you’re safe from these attacks, keep in mind some of the attacks that occurred over 2013, the most notable of which are the Adobe attack, in which millions of passwords and identifiers were stolen, or the recent data breach at Target. Think about the damage such an attack could do to your company and then start revising your security policies.

Title image by empics (Shutterstock).

 
 
 

Source : cmswire[dot]com
No comments:

Internet of Things Name: Stupid or Brilliant?

internet of things, Internet of Things Name -- Stupid or Brilliant?

What’s in a name? 

Not much — if you’re referring to the Internet of Things, said Benny Placido, business development director for Edinburgh, Scotland-based Bluemungus, an app and Web developer.

“I’ve been around the industry a long time, and these phrases become meaningless after a while,” Placido said. “The concept behind the Internet of Things isn’t bad. But when I first heard the name, it made me laugh. I thought, ‘What the hell is the Internet of Things?’”

So what’s in this name, we ask? Internet of Things. IoT. Cisco even deemed it the Internet of Everything.

Workable? Another tiring buzzword that will just cause confusion and eventually slip away? We know Google’s answer. It put up $3.2 billion toward it this week.

MIT Lab Founder: Necessary Evil

Sanjay Sarma.jpg

How does the creator of the phrase feel? We tried  Kevin Ashton, first credited with coming up with the Internet of Things. He was a tad busy this week, his assistant, Paige Russell, told us.

We did, however, pick the brain of Sanjay Sarma, professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the MIT Auto-ID Labs, part of a network of academic research labs that develop new technologies for global commerce.

In the late 1990s, Sarma and Ashton helped create those labs out of MIT, and 15 years later, the labs run the Internet of Things Conference coming this October on MIT’s home turf in Cambridge, Mass.

Admitting that names expand and lose meaning over time, Sarma stressed the IoT phrase is hot.

“And you need to give it a name,” he told CMSWire. “Names are a necessary evil. But a name doesn’t solve a problem. You still need a vision of what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do.”

So what is it NOT? Even Sarma said there is a struggle to fully understand IoT.

“What does it mean? What does it not?” said Sarma. He surmised IoT this way: “Just a way to explain connecting inanimate objects to the Internet.”

How About ‘The Internet’

Benny Placido.jpg

To that point, however, Placido suggested calling the phenomenon of connected devices the “Internet.”

Is there really a need, he said, to change things up with the addition of “of things” to the moniker?

Although he’s a big supporter of the concept and movement behind it — he cited a museum’s effort to connect devices to paintings for a better visitor customer experience — Placido has used terms like “horrible,” “stupid” and “ridiculous” when it comes to the actual “Internet of Things” name.

The concept, though? That's "both interesting and motivating but also worrisome around security and privacy.”

“All the big companies like IBM and Cisco will make of the Internet of Things as they will, and rightly so. I don’t blame them for that,” Placido said. “The industry — different parts, different companies and organizations — will define the Internet of Things however it wishes and that will be the confusing aspect.”

People know what the Internet is — and that’s enough for them, he added. “Therefore, on balance,” Placido told CMSWire, “it should just be the Internet.”

The good news? The IoT is putting more of a focus on physical things, Placido said, and maybe that’s a good thing for manufacturing.

“The Internet of Things is starting to talk more about physical devices rather than just software,” he said.

Scott Strawn, senior analyst who covers Google and Amazon for the International Data Corporation (IDC), said he understands people may have trouble with the phrase. He described the Internet of Things as a means of connecting and transmitting information for purposes beyond smartphones and tablets.

“It’s fundamentally different than how the Internet has always been,” he said.

What’s Next?

Sarma, like Placido, expects companies to put their own point of view on the Internet of Things anyway, following in the footsteps of Cisco. Name spinoffs in general are quite common, he said, referencing how e-commerce formed from the web.

“These words evolve over time,” said Sarma, whose MIT team Auto-Id team developed the Electronic Product Code (EPC), a universal identifier that provides a unique identity for every physical object anywhere in the world. “For people who complain about the Internet of Things I say come up with something.”

As for what it is now, Sarma pointed to Nest Labs as a prime example. Rather than following a peer-to-peer model, Nest technology and devices talk to the cloud. That approach, he said, is the future.

“We are surrounded by things we depend on,” Sarma said of the Internet of Things. “It’s a huge market.”

Title image by YuryZap (Shutterstock). 

 
 
 

Source : cmswire[dot]com
No comments:

Jumping on the Internet of Things Bandwagon

Smartphone Apps will Drive the Internet of Things BandwagonIf big data, social media and cloud were the darlings of the buzzword world in recent times, the latest to join the bandwagon is the Internet of Things (IoT).  

What do I mean when I say the IoT? A network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and interact on behalf of humans.

Some interesting statistics: According to Gartner, the Internet of Things installed base will grow to 26 billion units by 2020. McKinsey found that the Internet of things has the potential to create economic impact of up to $6.2 trillion annually by 2025. As the predicted numbers are quite staggering, let me give a brief roundup of its evolution, how apps are becoming an indispensable aspect of IoT and what the future holds.

Changing Faces of IoT – The Era of Mobile Apps Development

The Internet of Things term was coined in 1999 and with companies like Walmart and Tesco using the concept to tag their products. After a decade of evolution, the IoT 's presence can start to be felt in our daily lives through smartphone apps, which are fast becoming the control points of IoT in today’s world.

Every day a new smartphone app pops up with innovative features and unimaginable abilities. From a mosquito repellant app that produces a sonic sound to scare mosquitoes away or Smarthings’ smart home apps connecting your rooms, doors, kettle, refrigerators to Nike's wearable sports gear, tightly integrated with your fitness routine or Google’s driver glasses — the flurry of killer apps are reshaping our daily habits.

At an industry level, IoT-based smart and innovative apps are being used to monitor remote site assets, manage Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and device connectivity across healthcare, manufacturing or supply chain domains. McKinsey estimates by 2025, 80 percent to 100 percent of all manufacturing could be using IoT applications to improve productivity, leading to a potential economic impact of up to $2.3 trillion.

The Internet of Things Effect in 2014

Productivity gains, ease of use and timesaving are key drivers for the IoT, yet it's still the nascent stage. The IoT suffers low penetration largely due to lack of customer awareness and solid proof of concepts in both consumer and business market. Nothing groundbreaking can be expected in the near future, but one thing is sure: the Internet of Things will continue to enter our daily lives.

Drawing from recent developments in the IoT space, six things stand out:

Technology Fragmentation and Rise of Start-ups

According to Gartner by 2020, IoT product and service suppliers will generate $19 trillion in global economic value-add through sales into diverse markets. Considering this market, 2014 will see the emergence of niche start-ups, outsourced app development companies slogging it out for bigger projects. SmartThings funding of $12.5M last November and Thinfilm Electronics raising $24M indicate investors’ increasing interest in this market.

Year of Acquisitions and Innovative Business Models

IBM’s acquisition of Libelium, a wireless sensor network hardware provider; or PTC’s acquiring ThingWorx to cater to manufacturing industry; or ARM acquiring Sensinode — acquisitions in this area will be the new normal in 2014 (as we've already seen from Google's $3.2B Nest acquisition). Big players’ acquisition sprees and launch of new business models such as Intel’s Internet of Things Solutions group, will make 2014 an interesting year for IoT.

Increased Cloud Adoption

Cloud will definitely compete head on with standalone apps and play an increasingly important role than ever given the price advantage and its ability to provide central access to all connected devices. Telematics products and surveillance technologies transitioning towards cloud-based apps will largely dominate the retail and government sector.

Big Data: Growth of Hadoop and Kinesis

Where there’s apps, there’s going to be data with more data generated every minute. The demands for real time data has become even more pressing due to competitive dynamics. Apps like Amazon’s Kinesis will leverage its capabilities to harness the advantage of big data. Due to sophisticated connectivity, speed and high volumes of data generation, storage will be a major problem. This will be an opportunity for big data vendors like Hadoop to tap into the opportunity.

Opportunity for Wireless/Telecommunication Vendors

As connectivity will be one of the most critical aspects of IoT, it will pose a greater challenge as well as opportunity to design products to meet diverse end user micro-needs. The challenge will be to build smarter wireless and blue tooth technology that will consume less energy to facilitate better usage.

Challenges and Pitfalls

Time to market will undermine security concerns

As the competition heats up, companies large and small, will fight for market supremacy. Given the short maturity period of contemporary apps, companies will focus on reducing time to market, consequently leaving security at risk.

Criminalization and e-Security

As more and more devices connect to our daily lives, it would be easy to intrude in any of these devices and get access to private information. Enterprises will definitely seek tighter access and smarter security around their private information. On the other hand, it is a massive opportunity for vulnerable management companies to capitalize on these concerns.

Title image by lineartestpilot (Shutterstock)

About the Author

Himanshu Sharma handles Marketing Communications at Trigent. He is a Google certified professional. His specific interest areas are collaboration tools, CRM, web analytics and search engine optimization, digital marketing. He helps clients with content management and collaboration solutions based on SharePoint technology, and is currently involved in implementing social strategies to leverage knowledge workers in his organization.

 
 
 

Source : cmswire[dot]com
No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)