Noesium | Integrative Digital Thinking

You have worked so hard to launch that awareness campaign. Customers flooding in.

Now what?

I have a weak spot for ingenious commercials; they got my attention.  I hugely admire creative minds behind campaigns and frequently check out hot campaigns and award winners. I am utterly impressed with stories where X number of sales is generated through Y weeks of running a successful campaign.

That’s probably the professional part of my brain working.

But on a daily basis, I am also just like any good old consumers out there, carefully deciding where to spend my hard-earned money, who deserves my loyalty, and what to recommend to friends and family.

In fact, I typically describe the Customer Experience Journey in 5 steps, including Awareness, Inquiry, Acquisition, Interaction and Support.

My conclusion is, what got people notice, buy and use a product/service in the first place has nothing to do with how they later feel as a customer. And how they feel is really what counts.

As a customer, I feel good, I stay; I feel bad, I leave.

So let’s do a reality check:

what’s your company’s budget on designing and executing campaigns
versus that spent on operating and improving your customer support system?

This is #1 post of the “Social Communication Ecosystem” series.
As a starter, I am focusing on “Communication Ecosystem”, without the “Social” element.

Customers interact with a company in a variety of ways -
an organization’s different functional units must work together to
deliver a synchronized brand experience.

When it comes to communication, it is common for companies to have separate teams/people who handle website, print, phone, email, events, and the latest addition, Social Media.  All these work together to support core business activities including R &D, product development, sales, customer service and more.

Such functional structure and the corresponding roles, responsibilities and accountability, are pivotal for operational efficiency and resource management. If you are a small company, one person may wear a few hats; if you are a corporation, you have teams plus third party suppliers on a larger scale. Regardless, functional units make up the engine and connect the company with their customers via various channels, both online and offline.

Unfortunately, this siloed structure can also translate into a broken experience in the eyes of customers. Think of the frustration of being bounced from one department to the next during a customer support call, floor sales assistants who are unaware of web-based promotions, or product feedback that fell on deaf ears….and you get the idea of how a broken Social Communication Ecosystem can instantly result in a negative customer experience (I’d like to call this “schizophrenic brand experience”.

So how to balance the need for silo-based efficiency and the “holistic” experience demanded by the audience?  How to string together different pieces across the ecosystem?

It starts with a Collaborative Customer-Centric Culture
Would an assembly line work if units compete to produce the largest volume of their individual parts?  Of course not. When functional units are designed or encouraged to work separately and in competition, customers know, customers suffer and customers leave.

Successful leaders understand that businesses are fundamentally a value exchange between a company and its customers, and the company culture is reflected in the communication ecosystem as experienced by the customers. Let’s face it, customers don’t care where a brand is, as long as they receive values, get what they want and benefit from the interactions.

To sum up this very broad topic in a sentence: customer-centricity is founded on a collective mindset that constantly asks, especially at decision-making points, “Are we delivering the values customers need, want and expect? What can we do together to build, nurture and thereby benefit from our relationships with our customers?”.

Cliché?  True, as I have yet met a company who does not say they are “customer-centric” and have “collaborative spirit”. The reality? Many are paying lip service, lost in what it actually means, or, with good intention, do a few “customer-focused” things with little results.

As a company’s bottom line ultimately based on this – can anyone afford not to pay attention?

Developing the Culture
It is easy to talk about having the right culture, it is difficult – make it very difficult – to build, grow and encourage one that supports, motivates and rewards collaboration. The larger and older the organization, or the higher the turnover rate, the more likely units operate in silos, hence the more difficult to turn the culture around. A common employee sentiment? “I will worry about collaboration and being customer-focused and what not…if it affects my job, my pay, and my promotion”.

Top executive support matters. It is the leader’s responsibility to instill the right mindset till it becomes the norm across the board. But don’t confuse it with scare tactics or “orders from the big boss” – it is really about steering a clear vision, establishing a mandate and implementing the right tools, thereby ensuring employees see beyond what’s in front of their own desks.

Mobilizing the culture
Employees need to be shown the joint efforts of their work as experienced by the final customers; they need to be proud of their individual contributions to the bigger picture. Successful leaders ensure individuals see why their area of work is instrumental in the overall success.  One common mistake, from my observation, is to congratulate the “obvious” but forget those who play “smaller” roles.  It hurts, it deepens inter-silo gaps, it creates a toxic environment where no one will win in the long run.

Leaders are busy, you say, and they cannot be there 24/7 to cheerlead. That’s where evangelists come in. Some people have the evangelist genes and you are very lucky to have them in an organization. Evangelists are strategic, creative and hardworking trail-blazers who take the collaborative customer-centric vision into actions from top down, across and then back up. They can come from any department and they may not even need a  job description to guide their passion.

Empower them, please.

Operationalizing the Culture
Without the proper tools, collaboration remains a “neat concept”. A carefully engineered process put the Who, When, What, How cross-silos engine in motion. Poor processes create red tapes  but Smart processes add to speed, accuracy and results.

The point is, this ecosystem is not about a collection of departments or channels;
it is a whole experience that is far bigger than the sum of its parts.

Coming up next, why “Social” is key to the customer-centric ecosystem.

Businesses survive and prosper if they consistently track, analyze and respond to the  needs of their target customers. Wouldn’t it be fantistic to have answers to questions like “What is the percentage of customers who complain about XYZ?  How exactly do they use the products? What’s their experience when they interact with the brand/product? How and why do customers encounter difficulties?”

It just makes sense to tap into the frontline customer-facing department. Surely the Call Centre representatives have heard it all, right? So why spend time and money on additional research when the information is – or should be – already there?

I am not an expert in Call Centre operation so this post is based on my experience and observation in digital strategy consulting. What I have learned though is that many Call Centres seem to capture statistical information – such as number of sales or returns – that is not detailed enough to feed into the strategy or product improvement cycles.  Yes, statistics are extremely important, but “Why” is equally critical for decision-making.

I had the pleasure of including some Call Centre representatives in my consumer research for a large telco. What blew me away was their deep and well-articulated knowledge about how customers experience the company’s products and brand. Down to what customers click on the interface,  how they navigate the system, to what technical terms they understand.  If I could get that much information from a handful of people, imagine the wealth of collective insights from the entire Call Centre crew.

Granted, Call Centres must focus on support and sales. In addition, many are offshore, third-party operations. Still…

• Can a Call Centre system capture and categorize customer experience details?
• Can a Call Centre panel be established to provide insights to the product managers, marketing primes and strategy teams?
• Can an organization’s operation support a constant flow of customer data to relevant departments?

I would say yes, yes and yes.

And I am eager to hear from Call Centre experts who can enlighten me.

Previously in “How to Thrive in 2009? Love your customers“, I wrote about the importance of customer retention during the economic downtown. Price sensitivity rules purchase decisions, unless there are some very good reasons to persuade customers otherwise. And the first step in persuading people is to get to know them very, very well.

Back in Feb/March 2008, when the “R word” was not officially used yet, Harvard Business School professor John Quelch (Marketing KnowHow and Harvard Business School Working Knowledge) wrote Marketing Your Way Through a Recession.

His first advice? Get to know your customers.

Research the customer. Instead of cutting the market research budget, you need to know more than ever how consumers are redefining value and responding to the recession. Price elasticity curves are changing. Consumers take more time searching for durable goods and negotiate harder at the point of sale. They are more willing to postpone purchases, trade down, or buy less. Must-have features of yesterday are today’s can-live-withouts. Trusted brands are especially valued and they can still launch new products successfully, but interest in new brands and new categories fades. Conspicuous consumption becomes less prevalent.

Does this mean more market research? Maybe, maybe not. In my experience, many organizations possess more data than they are aware of, often spred across different functions.  An inventory check is invaluable in discovering what’s already there and what may be missing hence require further research.   Call Centre, for instance, is one of the best resources for consumer insights. They track the number of customers who sign up or cancel. Yet sadly the operation is not always set up to capture the most important information – the WHY behind the decisions.

2009 will be a year of reduced, strategic spending. I hope we will be all emerge from this belt-tightening period with more insights and applicable knowledge about our customers.