All Posts Tagged With: "customer engagement"
Does Your Company Create Real Value?
According to a recent survey of 50,000 consumers in 14 countries including the US, 70% of the brands we interact with could disappear entirely and we wouldn’t notice it.
The survey also found that 20% of the brands we interact with have a positive impact on our lives.
Which list would your company make? (You can see two Top 10 brand lists at the end of this article.)
Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Labs, explains the difference: “Did this brand make you fitter, wiser, smarter, closer? Did it improve your personal outcomes? Did it improve your community outcomes? Did it pollute the environment? We’re trying to get beyond ‘did this company make a slightly better product’ to the more resonant, meaningful question: Did this brand actually impact your life in a tangible, lasting, and positive way?”
I’ve written before about corporate social responsibility and how companies are embracing it to gain a competitive advantage (here and here), which is one part of the conclusions drawn by the Meaningful Brands survey and Haque. The other part is that companies are creating enduring brands by creating value for their customers, making them “fitter, wiser, smarter, closer,” to use Haque’s description.
This is where integrating the Baldrige model…
10Nov2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA Baldrige View of Customer Experience
The Baldrige Criteria ask: How do you create an organizational culture that ensures a consistently positive customer experience and contributes to customer engagement?
Adam Richardson defines “customer experience” as the sum-totality of how customers engage with your organization and brand through the entire arc of being a customer. In “Understanding Customer Experience” (HBR, October 28, 2010), he suggests three layers of customer experience to consider:
- Customer Journey. The journey a customer takes with your organization from first contact to providing a product or service to supporting that product or service and extending the relationship with the customer.
- Touchpoints. All of the points where the customer interacts with your organization.
- Ecosystems. By Richardson’s definition, the integrated ecosystems of products, software, and services that offer more than isolated touchpoints.
Have you ever used Zipcar? It’s the largest car-sharing company in the United States (it’s also in Vancouver, Toronto, and London). Here in the Twin Cities, the Zipcar locations are all in or near the University of Minnesota; college students are big Zipcar customers. Richardson touts Zipcar as a great example of a company that used its understanding of the entire arc of the customer car-renting experience to turn car-sharing into a mainstream business—and help the environment in the…
1Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBest Practice in Measuring Customer Satisfaction
This is a best practice in the measurement of customer satisfaction courtesy of CDW, one of America’s largest private companies with technology sales of more than eight billion dollars in its most recent fiscal year.
CDW had been using Net Promoter to measure customer satisfaction and brand health. You get a Net Promoter Score by asking one question of your customers—How likely is it that you would recommend your company to a friend or colleague?—and then grouping the responses by promoters (those who answer the question with a 9 or 10), passives (7-8), and detractors (0-6). You subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to get your Net Promoter score.
This has been a leading edge measure for many companies because it helps them identify opportunities to improve customer satisfaction. CDW decided that Net Promoter was too one-dimensional so, with the help of the person who developed Net Promoter, it went to a three-question approach that, according to Calvin Vass, CDW’s senior manager of research, looks at “different dimensions of the relationship; what the customer plans to purchase with us, if they are committed, and what they would do if we went away.” Vass is quoted in “Is Net…
21Oct2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedPlaying to Win Customers
It’s an old question—“What will help us attract and retain customers?”—with a very new answer: gaming. In “Play to win: The game-based economy” (Fortune, September 3, 2010), JP Mangalindan describes companies that “study and identify natural human tendencies and employ game-like mechanisms to give customers a sense that they’re having fun while working towards a rewards-based goal.” Companies don’t do this because they want their customers to have fun; they do it because it helps them attract and retain customers, which increases their revenues.
If you’re wondering how “gamification” might apply to your company, consider Mangalindan’s examples:
- Mint.com made personal finance a game. You can set a financial goal online and track your performance toward achieving it. You can check out your total financial score, which encourages financially responsible behavior. You can even compete with other members who have similar goals. If you think that sounds lame, think again: Mint.com claims more than 1.5 million active users.
- Nike sells a pedometer (Nike +) that you put in your sneakers. It monitors distance, pace, and calories burned and transmits the data to your iPod. The Nike software on your iPod “rewards” you if you reach a milestone. For example, if you run and you best…
Kano Satisfaction Model
A few years ago, I met Noriaki Kano at a hotel restaurant in St. Paul to talk about his famous satisfaction model that helped earn him a Deming Prize and ASQ Medals of Distinction. A retired professor, Kano still spoke about the evolution of his model with intensity and curiosity.
The point of the Kano Satisfaction Model is that organizations need a profound understanding of their customers’ requirements to increase satisfaction and secure loyalty. Not all customer requirements are equal. The Baldrige Criteria ask: “How do you use customer, market, and product offering information to identify and anticipate key customer requirements and changing expectations and their relative importance to customers’ purchasing or relationship decisions?”According to Kano, “relative importance” can be characterized as basic, performance, and excitement.
Basic services or features do little to improve satisfaction unless they fail, in which case they can cause serious dissatisfaction. We expect the checkout lane in a store to move relatively quickly and without any problems. When it does, we don’t feel more satisfied with the store because that is what we expected. When it doesn’t, we feel frustrated and dissatisfied.
Performance services or features are those that produce customer satisfaction. If the store you are visiting…
30Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhen Customer Satisfaction Is Irrelevant
“Has there ever before been an industry that’s so actively tried to piss off their entire customer base?”
Guess which industry Kevin Drum was talking about in his column?
No, it’s not credit card companies since they probably have a few wealthy customers who aren’t getting gouged by 29% interest rates.
The answer is: the airline industry.
Drum does an excellent job of summarizing how the airlines have behaved:
- First, they hassled customers about carry-on bags and convinced them to check their luggage instead.
- Next, they started charging for checked bags.
- As a result, customers stopped checking their bags and started fighting for space in overhead bins.
- American Airlines saw a new opportunity, not to improve customer service and alleviate the bin shortage on planes, but to make a few bucks by charging for “select” coach seats that gives those passengers willing to pay for it dibs on the bin space.
Same crappy seats. Same lack of any amenities. Just peace of mind that your bag will travel with you.
It won’t be long before other airlines follow American’s lead, and it won’t be long after that before airlines start charging for every bag whether you check it or not. And we’ll pay it because we don’t have a choice…
23Aug2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedWhat Differentiates Baldrige Award Winners (Part 2)
In the first article in this series, I described two of the seven characteristics of organizations with sound management systems: (1) they think process and (2) they act on data. By winning the Baldrige Award, organizations demonstrate the effectiveness of their management systems through world-class results, a sampling of which you will find in the links at the end of this article.
Here, then, are the next three characteristics of these role-model organizations:
3. They know where they’re going. Yeah, I know, you’ve got a vision and a mission. Do you measure progress on them? Great companies know that what they’re doing today takes them further along the path to what they wish to become, and they don’t know it intuitively, they know it measurably. Today’s actions meet objectives that support strategies that realize the vision.
This interlinked structure is the product of careful research, thoughtful analyses, and ambitious goals. Dozens of people—sometimes hundreds of people—participate in the process of discovering what their company is, where it must go, how it can get there, and what will obstruct its progress. They repeat this process annually. When they’re done, they know individually and collectively where they are going. Even better, they know what they must…
27Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
