Customer Experience requires attention to the whole value chain

Tags

#customerexperience, #Forrester Research Summits on Customer Experience, CX

I am in Sydney this week to attend the Forrester Research Summits on Customer Experience for CMOs and CIOs.

I caught the bus into the city this morning. Since my last visit they have withdrawn the option to pay for a ticket on the bus. I was warned that I needed to go to the corner store to buy a 10 trip ticket. It was raining so time spent mucking about is not good. The first shop I visited said they had stopped selling tickets because 10c profit on a $27 sale was not worth the effort. Only by chance was there another corner store.

This got me thinking that the chain of customer experience is only as strong as the weakest link. If the margin you offer your retailers is so dismal they decide not to bother, all the rest of your efforts are could be thrown upside down and become a bit of a waste of time. Usually I am writing about the importance of employee experience now I am on the look out for examples of ecosystem failures in Sydney.

Generally I write mean things about Vodafone, but today for a change something nice. The new roaming deal means I am in a cafe typing and not worrying about the $600 roaming charge when I get home. Thanks for fixing a bit of the ecosystem.

Viewing the ecosystem from a customer’s perspective sometimes requires you to look at things in a different way. And….the good news is that it has stopped raining.

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The bigger story around the Facebook Manipulation Project is that prestigious universities allowed it

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#Facebookmanipulation, #negativecommentsonline, #onlineethics, #socialmedia

I love social media but have low expectations of it from an ethical perspective. I see it as my responsibility to manage my use of social media so that I can live with the consequences.

Reading about the Facebook Manipulation project saddened, but did not surprise me. The big surprise? That prestigious universities’ ethics committees allowed psychological manipulation of people who were not given the option of participation.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-30/facebooks-emotional-manipulation-test-was-unethical-and-so-is-the-rest-of-social-media and http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pdf

Makes you wonder how many wives were beaten, dogs kicked or employees fired, because of additional negative thoughts in troubled people’s minds? Conversely, were bad choices made by people who were manipulated to feel more positive than their circumstances warranted? The fact that these unintended consequences cannot be identified and blamed on the research, does not make it right.

Facebook behaved as we might have expected but sadly and of greater concern, a group of university researchers seem to have missed the real point around data privacy. Personal information is protected by privacy laws because sharing our information with others can touch and negatively impact our lives. Just because Facebook used data without using names, does not make it right and does not mean it did not impact on lives.

Makes me wonder what next?

Does your industry jargon annoy your customers and mess with delivering customer experience?

Tags

#business, #customerexperience, #digital, #internet, #jargon, #terminology, CX, technology

Over the last couple of months we have been looking at the easiest options and approaches to setting up new websites and blogs for the business. Last week I also thought it was time to update my profile and send it out to the people who have my details on file.

I then spent the weekend pondering on why, in a world appreciating the importance of delivering great customer experiences, companies still use their jargon with customers who do not speak their language and then fail to provide meaningful context to their words.

The prize for worst jargonist this week, goes to people involved in the world of web. I am pretty tech savvy but web jargon abounds, made worse by the absence of context to give clues. As an example, we looked at transferring domain name registrations from one ownership in one registry to another owner in a different registry. We looked at many sites for clues and kept finding reference to transfers but… very few thought to say transfers in or transfers out, which is pretty material to the context and so easy to clarify.

In the world of people search, why do they still invite people in for the first time to be “interviewed”. To my reading that is language that denotes differential power and a predominately one way conversation. Inviting me in for a meet and greet or a meeting or a conversation would signal a desire to talk not interrogate.

Delivering great customer experiences requires a rethink of every stage of the customer’s journey. Why annoy them unnecessarily at step 1?

Cartoon by Frances Hazard for http://www.zeopard.com

Mind the Gap – how you treat your employees and what you say you do

Tags

#customerexperience, #customertrust, #employees, #employer, CX

Nothing gets me more frustrated as a customer than witnessing gaps between stated corporate cultures/values and the reality. I find I do not trust businesses that spout about nirvana but deliver Justin Bieber.

In January each year Edelman.com publishes its trustbarometer Annual Global Study. Now we are nearly half way through 2014, it seemed timely to look again at the 2014 findings around employees’ roles in creating and maintaining the public’s trust in their business. www.edelman.com

“In 5 years, the credibility of regular employees has increased dramatically, ahead of that of the CEO.” “Employees are the most credible voices on multiple topics, including the company’s work environment, integrity, innovation and business practices.”

My question for business is ” Do you have a strategy around building trust in your brand that give employees scope and opportunity to play the fullest role possible? or is your organisation one of those with a CEO figurehead, a brutal and controlling social media policy or worse still, stated values and culture which are merely rhetoric?”

The good news coming from the 2014 Edelman trustbarometer is that there are actions businesses can take that will increase the levels of trust in their organisation. I particularly like their final recommendation that is:

“Foster a culture of “speaking out” and advocating for the company, especially on topics where employees are highly credible, such as working conditions, integrity and business practices, and technical experts on innovation.”

With all that in mind, there is time in 2014 to revisit your brand strategies to see if more could be done to put the employees front and centre, where they belong, and to close the gap between the rhetoric used around cultures and values and the reality. The evidence is that it is worth closing the gap. Businesses that are trusted make more money. Need I say more?