I have been reading a lot of recent articles(Consumer Expectations For Customer Service Don't Match What Companies Deliver) on the need for building world-class customer experience and how companies need to become customer-centric. But, when I searched for  professionals who could engage in this area - a customer coach, if I  may call them , I did not find a perfect fit at all - not too many of them! Quite strange, I must say.

Most of them restricted themselves to customer service, customer experience - more from training inputs for interactions online, call centre, customer care etc. etc. It almost looks like sales, marketing, R&D & other functions/departments  don't need customer coaching! 

But, there are a lot of professionals who call themselves - Executive Coaches- who are coaching execs 1-to-1 on how to improve themselves but none who could help execs individually or in very small groups holistically to address the customer needs across an enterprise or a company. This needs to be done to only a few executives at a time - that's what I call customer coaching! Also, customer privacy is becoming a huge issue too.

In my view, this is critical if companies need to really transform their customer experience. The real, hard difference lies with each and every employee who deals with  customers. No amount of software, SOPs, KRAs can help drive this change as the situation of the ground is dynamic. It needs to be internalized and practiced as a discipline by every employee in the company. It is an uncompromising attitude towards the customer and creating their own self-discipline to positively engage customers.

It needs far more customization,intensity, consistency and energy in companies than what we see today!

There has been a lot written, tweeted, blogged about the importance of being a customer-centric company. So, what are the habits of a customer centric company?

Here's an interesting infographic that articulates their habits. I loved the digital-physical point here. Most often there is a lot currently being written & talked about on digital but the physical components of the interactions and processes are often overlooked in the hype associated with digital. That must be a key area of focus.

But, in my view this infographic only tells half the story. The other half of the story is organizational alignment across businesses units which is an important habit that I have observed in such companies. There is a top-down ownership of the customer, departmental silos are often missing or broken to keep the customer at the centre of these relationships and there are common metrics that are measured to make customer-centricity a reality. You may want to check if there are common customer-focussed performance measures in your organization across sales, marketing, customer service and IT. It should not be confused with sales satisfaction, service satisfaction but are you differentiating & measuring the experience of your existing customers vs new customers? Do you measure incremental sales share from existing customers? Do you measure channels against these existing customer experience measures vs new customer experience measures? Are your customer service measures also measured the same way as the channel? 

 The key question is - do you put your existing customers first and measure it relative to your new customers? That's the secret sause according to me.

On the other day in a meeting, one of my clients was asking me what do I think is the future of emailing or direct mail or telemarketing or SMSes for prospecting or building relationships with customers? He was telling me how a lot of data may be available in the form of lists or transactional data within companies but companies today cannot contact many of these customers because customers are fed-up with the constant badgering by companies for more business using all these channels or they use the word   "relationship managers" ( who have access to data) in the garb of getting more business from them.

I couldn't agree with him more but here were my answers for these questions:

• Dynamic Data: Businesses today are dealing with customer data the same way they would have treated it a decade or two ago - Treating data as a static information versus seeing data as a dynamic element.  Therefore, they continue to use data for a  "business benefit".The customers of today are asking  businesses to reverse this approach - "Continuously allow me to connect to the 'data trail'  I leave behind". And businesses are struggling to cope-up with this change. Hence, they are still using 20th century marketing methods for 21st century customers which gives them diminishing returns.

• Adding data to products: Companies still treat products and data as siloes. Today, every product needs to have a data-component  as one of its ingredients.Just as a  body lotion has aloe-vera, banking products has internet/phone banking as new features, many products need to find ways to embed data into the product development framework.Then, up-selling & cross-selling happens automatically thro' customer participation and data triggers.

• Pre-sales service: Businesses have still not accepted that they are dealing with increasingly well-informed customers unlike the past. They still believe customers need to be "sold" but customers are constantly telling companies - " Help me buy!". They are becoming a part of different communities(offline & online) and also information-sharing among prospective customers today is far more easier then ever before. Hence, "being present"  well ahead of the sale is an important factor in pre-sales situations for companies. Helping in the pre-sales process is today a data-centric activity and this has not been recognized by businesses. Hence, the traditional methods of prospecting will only get more difficult in the future.

Welcome to the world of personal informatics

Using personal data will be the new competitive advantage, businesses have to prepare themselves for. It will create a new generation of products &  prospect or customer experiences that will capture data about us in ways we could never have imagined. Matt Jones & Tom Coates have a great presentation on this topic. Personal informatics will be an area that will see great growth in the future.

Take a look:

Offlate I have been observing the "entry by invitation only" bug that has hit a lot of  web service sites. It seems to be cool to do it on the web now! I had this experience just a few seconds back at profitlinker. I think someone has to call the bluff. I find it very unfriendly as I know all I have to do is to register and  get a confirmatory mail in a few seconds! Why then have it at all?

It was a fad at one time when google mail required me to get an invitation to access the service and sure there was a lot of buzz around it. But, now I think this is getting a bit boring and I find it adding no value at all.

If am interested and find the product/service interesting, I am sure I will anyway register myself for that service. Or send me an invitational emailer and/or make it really look like a privileged invitational offer that I will really miss. For example, allow me to access  certain services in that site that I will not otherwise be able to access.

One needs to get customer friendly or let them come-up with something more interesting!

I often see people in a state of intertia and inaction because they are afraid to make mistakes. They don't want to look stupid and ignorant. I don't see anything wrong if one makes a mistake. Organizations suffer from poor customer interactions because of such people. They neither take action nor learn from others. Hence, they leave a lot of customers dissatisifed.  Jeffery Philips has an interesting post on the same:

When you are right no one remembers, and when you are wrong no one forgets.  There is so much fear in many organizations about being wrong - on the wrong side of a decision, backing the wrong manager, making a big mistake - that often any action that does happen happens either automatically (transactional stuff) or because we've back ourselves into a wall from a time or budget standpoint and just have to make a decision.

Some of this thinking springs from the mythos that really smart people don't make mistakes.  I think that's wrong.  I think really smart people make mistakes, they just learn and adapt a lot more quickly than others do, and they find ways to mitigate the outcomes of those mistakes.  It has been frequently said that Edison knew 1000 ways not to make a lightbulb.  Edison didn't invent the bulb, or the electric light.  He actually dramatically improved the longevity of the bulb and how the bulb and the electrical socket (and eventually electrical distribution) would work.  But only after trying thousands of combinations of filaments and bulbs.  This record of experimentation and failure gave him a great base of knowledge and helped increase the odds of success.  What's not so well known is that Edison championed direct current (DC) power rather than alternating current (AC) and so lost the advantage to others in the long run on electricity distribution.

Being wrong isn't the problem.  Being wrong consistently is a problem....

Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba write in their new book Citizen Marketers about 4 types of Citizen Marketers:

....we think there are four ways to classify user-created sites: Filters, Fanatics, Facilitators and Firecrackers. They are the 4 F's of citizen marketing.

1. Filters

The Filters are human wire services. They collect traditional media stories, bloggers’ rants and raves, podcasts, or fan creations about a specific company or brand and then package this information into a daily or near-daily stream of links, story summaries, and observations.

2. Fanatics

The Fanatics are true believers and evangelists. They love to analyze the daily or weekly progress of a brand, product, organization, or person and prescribe courses of action. They are, essentially, volunteer coaches.

2. Fanatics

The Fanatics are true believers and evangelists. They love to analyze the daily or weekly progress of a brand, product, organization, or person and prescribe courses of action. They are, essentially, volunteer coaches.

4. Firecrackers

Firecrackers are the one-hit wonders of citizen marketers. They can attract considerable attention because they have created a song, animation, video, or novelty that generates a lot of interest but tends to die out quickly as the creators go on with their other work.

Read more

In an era of sharing and collaboration mania, when anything  that is "User Generated" or "Shareable" gets everybody's attention, a presentation on marketing got my attention. The content looked interesting to me and I clicked.

I found this was a corporate presentation by Salesforce.com. It was put-up in slideshare and one could share the presentation with others. But as I read through the presentation, I really started questioning if I would share it with others. Let me tell you why:

• First, it was company speak. So, why would I want to share it all?
• The logic of the presentation(though relevant) was very biased towards the company's mission, goals and products. Would I pass it on? Never
• It lacked a customer point of view or a customer voice. Hence, did not look interesting enough to be shared
• It had a "talking down" feeling in terms of the messaging in the slides. So, it left me a little cold for it to be shared.

To be shareable, I believe the content must

1. Be interesting
2. Have a tone of voice that's peer-to-peer
3. Have a "Build-On" feature. Imagine if one were able to add-on to the content and make it richer - Collaborative content generation is critical.
4. Differentiate Viewership( ability to just read and know) vs Ownership( ability to add and develop)
5. Buy-in vs Selling - Can't afford to jump the process as people first "buy-in" into the belief and benefits first. Selling starts a little later in the chain.

Take a look at the Presentation. Would you share it at all?

So after much speculation about which city would be WiMax’ed first - Pune or Bangalore, it seems Chennai has stolen the show: Aircel launched WiMAX and aims to make Chennai wire-free and provide coverage across the commercial areas of Chennai. They’ve used “802.16d standards at a speed range of 2 to 10 Mbps”. There are already ‘hotspots’ in other cities and Aircel plans to expand WiMax to 26 other cities, with complete coverage being achieved bit by bit. Payment systems will be enabled around hotspots via prepaid cards. No word on how much it’ll cost… Read more

thro' contentsutra

India is a hot bed for mobile services. It is one of the fastest growing mobile markets in the world. Last month, 5.9 million customers got added according to TRAI.

Keeping with this trend, US based Trilogy has launched a new service yourbillbuddy.com. It helps Indian mobile customers select the 'best-fit' tariff plans.  Some of the benefits include:

• Recommendations
• Helping optimize usage
• Get more savings

Here's my take:

It is a nice idea but the real growth in this category is coming from the pre-paid market which is a low unit-value of talk time. These consumers don't have access to the net and hence I guess this service will only have niche usage amongst high ARPU customers.

I guess what Trilogy is attempting to do is to capture some customer information/profile and use it for churn & cross-sell programs or business services that they will be providing in the Indian market.

Would be interesting to keep a track of this service!

Wired News reports:

Add another category to India's intensifying regional competition with China: online gaming.

Tangible progress will be marked by the first Indian participation in the Electronic Sports World Cup, which kicks off June 30 in Paris. Earlier this month, 162 regional qualifiers from nine Indian cities came to New Delhi -- including 8-year-old Rohan Karir, a TrackMania prodigy -- to compete for 10 tickets to Paris and a shot at some of the $400,000 ESWC prize money. All told, more than 20,000 Indians competed, making it one the biggest national gaming tournaments ever.

The number of connections increased by more than half between 2004 and 2005, from 25 million to 39 million. Sanjay Trehan, head of broadband at Indiatimes Online, predicts that by next year the numbers will more than double, possibly climbing as high as 100 million. Crucial for the growth of online gaming, 60 percent of these new connections will be broadband (defined in India as 256 Kbps and higher).

Not a few of these new broadband links are found in India's 100,000 internet cafes, which now derive between 30 percent and 40 percent of their revenues from online gamers. The growing appetite for gaming has led one internet cafe chain, Sify, to launch a broadband-only, gaming-oriented cafe brand called Game Drome, which both hosts and promotes local and national competitions.

Read more