Adding Disruptive Technologies to Advance the Game - The Customer Experience Edge

Adding Disruptive Technologies to Advance the Game

In 2009, there were 174 million smartphone users

worldwide; there will be one billion by 2015.

—IN-STAT, 2010

Mobility will be the top business/technology trend

impacting customer experience in the next three

years, according to more than half of businesses

surveyed.

—BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK RESEARCH SERVICES, 2010

Reza Soudagar, Vinay Iyer, and Dr. Volker G. Hildebrand

ALL BUSINESSES ARE COMING TO GRIPS with “the new consumer.” Customers simply don’t behave the way they used to. In their personal and professional lives, the way people expect to consume information, interact with suppliers, make purchase decisions, and conduct transactions are all in a continual state of flux, thanks to the Web, pervasive use of mobile devices and social media, and other emerging technologies. 

Via their mobile devices, consumers today can engage in a wide variety of activities. They can read product reviews and receive receipts and coupons; check in for a flight and use their smartphone as a boarding pass; receive shipping updates and mobile coupons via short messaging service (SMS); make feature and price comparisons; get recommendations and advice from online forums and social shopping sites; check the latest deals offered by websites that offer discounts through collective buying; and tweet about bad experiences as soon as they happen or share them on Facebook. 

You need only look at the numbers to get a clearer view of today’s customer. In 2009, there were 174 million smartphone users worldwide, and that number is forecast to grow to one billion by 2015, according to InStat. And according to Insight Express, 82 percent of adult mobile users used their device in the store, while shopping. 

Meanwhile, the social networking scene is booming: as of early 2011, there were 200 million Twitter users and 500 million active Facebook users, with half of the latter logging onto the site on any given day and all of them accounting for 700 billion minutes per month spent on the site. Even e-mail is becoming old-fashioned, as Twitter, social media messaging, SMS, and other forms of messaging continue to ramp up in popularity. According to ABI Research, consumers worldwide will send more than seven trillion SMS messages in 2011, inspiring companies to use this channel for marketing messages, such as coupons and product promotions. 

The mentality of consumers has infiltrated the workplace as well. Young professionals have grown up with the Web, mobile devices, and social media and see these technologies as essential for doing their jobs effectively. Sometimes referred to as “millennials,” younger workers may not be drawn to employers who do not make innovative use of mobile applications, social networking, and other emerging technologies, and they will grow frustrated when their workplace technology lags behind the tools they use at home. 

And so, while companies cannot abandon traditional channels such as the call center, television programming, and newspapers, they can no longer rely on these venues to reach customers, as customers have moved online, taking their attention—and their wallets—with them. Increasingly, customers expect a rich choice of technology capabilities that are targeted specifically at their needs. For instance:

• Rich Internet applications (RIAs) that enable personalization, Amazon-like navigation and cart capabilities, multiple search and display options, and product-comparison tools 
• An online community for troubleshooting problems, sharing advice, and networking with people who have similar concerns 
• Information delivery to mobile devices, such as catalogs, receipts, and order status 
• Integration with social media tools, such as blogs, forums, and chats, to help with buying decisions 
• Real-time marketing and location-based services that deliver information or special offers at the exact time the customer needs them

In this chapter, we turn to what we think of as game-changing technologies—social media monitoring and engagement, mobile applications, rich Internet applications, and unified communications, to name a few. These technologies are often considered “disruptive” because they can launch companies into unfamiliar, and ultimately highly valuable, terrain, allowing you to move up the curve of customer experience and meet or exceed the expectations of increasingly networked customers.

Meet the New Consumer

Best Buy exemplifies a retailer that is striving to provide the type of multichannel customer experience that the “new consumer” is looking for, with the aid of disruptive technologies. The consumer electronics retailer plans to double its current $2 billion in annual online sales within five years by introducing a broader selection of merchandise on the Web and adding more Web-based services and digital content. 

Best Buy customers will be able to get more product information, customer reviews, and ratings through their mobile devices, as well as instore pickup for mobile orders. The retailer is increasing its SMS initiatives and has made its weekly circular interactive by incorporating SMS “calls to action” and mobile scannable QR (quick response) codes, which are twodimensional codes intended to be scanned by the camera in a mobile device that is equipped with a specialized reader application. The code can transfer information to the mobile device, including rich product information, recommendations, reviews, and URLs for mobile websites. Best Buy is also incorporating QR codes into the product fact tags in its stores to provide shoppers with more product information in the aisle via their mobile devices. The company also uses SMS as an opt-in service, sending subscribers such information as the “deal of the day.”

WHAT IS: QR Code?

QR codes are two-dimensional codes that are intended to be scanned by the camera in a mobile device that is equipped with a specialized reader application. The code can transfer information to the mobile device, including rich product information, recommendations, reviews, and URLs for mobile websites. The codes can be placed on a product tag, in advertising text, on store signs, and in numerous other places.

Best Buy is also rolling out a multichannel network, called Best Buy On, that is intended to inform and entertain. It will feature how-to videos and information on a new technology topic every month. The messages will also be broadcast on screens throughout its stores. 

These moves are in response to what consumers today want from retailers. “There’s a new definition of convenience: the ability to interact with a company on your terms,” Shari Ballard, executive vice president at Best Buy, told analysts at the corporate announcement of the plan.

Under the Hood

We should note that while emerging technologies are essential to the customer experience, they are ultimately most effective once the basics are in place. The integrated technology foundation discussed in the previous chapter provides you with a simple, robust, and cost-effective way to consistently and reliably deliver orders as promised, send out invoices, take customer calls, fulfill service requisitions, and carry out other basic business processes. It enables all four customer experience (CE) essentials (reliability, relevance, consistency, and responsiveness) and all three CE pillars (operational, interaction, and decision excellence). The addition of emerging technologies heightens effectiveness in all these areas, changing the game and allowing you to obtain the much-sought-after customer experience edge. 

To see why, let’s take another look at the Swiss grocery retailer Coop, first mentioned in "The Four Essentials of a Profitable Customer Experience ". Like many large companies, Coop ran its back-office operations on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which it integrated with its customer relationship management (CRM) front-office application. Coop’s @home division had launched a successful online store based on cutting-edge Web technology, but it did not stop there. The company quickly realized that it could leverage its e-commerce platform to add an iPhone shopping app that the time-pressed, tech-savvy Swiss would love.

Coop was able to do this quickly, effectively, and affordably only because it had a solid foundation upon which to build. The shopping application was up and running in two months, well before the grocer’s biggest competitor was able to launch a mobile app. What is more, because Coop’s application connects to its integrated core, shoppers can see a realtime view of product availability, reserve 60-minute delivery windows while shopping, and get consistent pricing across the physical and virtual channels. These capabilities provide Coop with a competitive advantage and eliminate the source of much frustration for customers. The shopping app also enables Coop to fulfill all four of the customer experience essentials, as well as the pillars of interaction and operational excellence. (For a full description of Coop’s iPhone application and the benefits the company is realizing, see the case study in "The Four Essentials of a Profitable Customer Experience".)

Being Selective

Which technologies you ultimately choose to leverage for the customer experience edge, and how you do so, will depend on your customers and their preferences and needs. For instance, Forrester Research data show that customers still generally prefer to contact vendors by phone, closely followed by e-mail and Web self-service. The younger generation, however, is showing us the way of the future as it leans toward peer-to-peer communication, social networking, and instant service channels such as chat. 

This is why companies that are doing a good job with the customer experience first work to understand what channels of communication their customers are using, whether they’re interacting via phone, online chat, social media, or e-mail. Then they design the experience based on that. For instance, a customer who makes a phone call has different expectations from one who engages in chat or e-mail, and, often, the same person expects a different response when interacting by phone rather than by chat or e-mail. Denis Pombriant, founder of CRM consultancy Beagle Research Group, LLC, in Stoughton, Massachusetts, explains this further. Someone who is calling the call center may have first tried and failed with other channels, and so when he makes the call, he’s feeling frazzled and maybe not very friendly. Simpler issues tend to be resolved through other channels, so you get a higher percentage of complex or difficult problems coming in to the call center. The callers’ experience reaching you has changed, and the experience that they’re expecting is different, as there’s more frustration and thus urgency. “Designing the customer experience comes with the understanding that the ideal experience in one channel is not ideal in another channel,” Pombriant says. 

As you consider the range of disruptive technologies available in the marketplace, your investment decision should also be guided by the CE pillars: How does this technology turn data into actionable insights and better decisions? How does it make every interaction count? Does it make my operations run more smoothly? 

With all of this in mind, here are a few of the key technologies and capabilities that can help you achieve the four essentials and the three pillars of customer experience.

Rich Web Capabilities

Nearly every company today has a Web presence, but many companies’ websites are based on custom-built, outdated, and ultimately costly technologies. 

The mother of all disruptive technologies, the Web is a lowcost, high-impact channel through which you can market, sell, and provide services to customers. Customers today expect to be able to interact with vendors online 24/7, and they increasingly desire the rich and personalized experience they have with many retail websites. Vendor websites provide real opportunity for innovation, as the possibilities for creating a closer, more intimate relationship with customers are endless: interactive catalogs, enhanced product galleries, embedded product ratings and reviews, and user-focused online self-services. As in the Coop example, the richest online customer experience is one that leverages integrated back-end systems and processes. 

The central role of the Internet for future growth is as pertinent for business-to-business (B2B) companies as it is for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. In ThomasNet’s September 2010 Industry Market Barometer, respondents named “increased online marketing” as one of their top four strategies for continued success. They also cited developing business in new U.S. geographies, creating innovative products and services, and pursuing business in new industries. In all, 60 percent of the 3,243 manufacturers, distributors, and service companies surveyed said that having an online strategy was either critical or important to their growth in the second half of 2010. As one survey respondent said, “Our sales are up 37 percent over the same period last year, and we’ve set four successive months of sales records. More attention to online marketing and sales has allowed us to penetrate new markets and seed demand for new products.” 

The ThomasNet survey also points to Keats Manufacturing Co. as an example of a company that is fueling growth through its online strategy. This custom job shop manufactures metal parts used in such products as automotive fuel injection systems, hearing aids, and appliance timer controls. To make up for losses incurred during the recession, Keats pursued an online strategy to showcase its capabilities, equipment, and projects to help market its business and expand worldwide. The result: a 30 percent increase in the company’s net income. 

Cognizant Technology Solutions is also looking at the Internet as a huge opportunity for industrial manufacturers, even though adoption has so far been slow. Cognizant sees this changing as manufacturers realize that they can increase sales through functions such as online product recommendations and customer-specific promotions. To do this, the consulting firm says, industrial manufacturers will need to revamp their websites with rich Internet application technologies, provide easy access to data to help with buying decisions, and enable ample online postpurchase support. Among other things, RIA technologies provide customers with a more visually guided experience as they perform actions such as product comparison and product search. 

Industrial manufacturers need to shift from websites that rely on multiple stand-alone applications catering to functions such as “search,” “order,” and “cart processing” to a single RIA technology–based portal, according to Cognizant. One manufacturer that did this increased parts sales by 150 percent and online order volume by 300 percent within a year, according to Cognizant.

Mobility

Combined with the Web, mobility is far and away the world’s most prominent and influential megatrend. The rapid adoption and dissemination of mobile phones and other mobile computing devices (including tablets and smartphones) to even the most remote places on earth is without precedent in the history of technology. 

Consider that in the first 74 days after its launch in 2007, Apple sold one million iPhones. Less than three years later, when the iPad was introduced, it took just 80 days to sell three million units. Beyond Apple’s devices, there were as many as 174 million smart-phones worldwide by 2009; that number is forecast to grow to one billion by 2015, according to In-Stat. With this ongoing revolution, mobility, connectivity, and the democratization of information have reached entirely new levels that organizations must leverage in order to gain a competitive advantage. 

It is not surprising, then, that in the Bloomberg Businessweek Research Services (BBRS) survey, mobility was named as the top business/technology trend affecting the customer experience in the next three years (see Figure 8.1). 

Additionally, according to a Yankee Group survey, the number one reason that CIOs are investing in mobility solutions is to improve responsiveness to customers and foster collaboration with customers and partners. To that end, as mentioned in "B2B Customer Experience: Different Animal, Same Spots", companies are increasing plans to provide key applications and data to employees via their handheld devices in the next two years, including customer order status, inventory levels, and other operational data. This can be seen as moving one step closer to providing this information directly to end customers. With more customers holding what they consider to be a world of information in the palms of their hands, it will become increasingly intolerable to them that they cannot get real-time data on orders, inventory, pricing, deliveries, and more whenever and however they choose. 

From a service standpoint, the increase in mobility emphasizes the importance of enabling a consistent multichannel approach for customers. Many times, customers choose many channels for one transaction. A service request may start via a smartphone and then go to an online chat or e-mail. We see more transactions being conducted via smartphone. The proliferation of channels adds to the complexity. Companies need to establish a mobile platform that can accommodate applications for any device and integrate those applications with their back-office systems.

FIGURE 8.1: Mobile to Affect the Customer Experience

Respondents were asked to rank the three business or technology trends they believe will have the most impact on customer experience, positive or negative, in their industry over the next three years.

Base: 307 director-level and above executives at midsize and large companies.

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek Research Services, 2010.

Companies need to get even more creative about how they think of mobility, according to Diamond Advisory Services’ Paul D’Alessandro. In addition to thinking of mobile devices in “communications” and “application” terms, he says, consider their ability to act as a sensing platform. For instance, mobile devices can sense and transmit real-time information, such as your geographic location and medical information (heart rate, glucose levels, and the like). When you combine these three capabilities (communications, applications, and sensing), he says, you can create a customer experience around mobile that will motivate customers to increase their frequency of interaction with you, one for which they might even be willing to pay a premium.

TIP

Mobile coupons are taking off. According to Burrell Associates, a research and consulting firm that tracks advertising, redemption rates of mobile coupons are 10 times those of coupons distributed by mail or through newspapers. And according to a Mobile Marketing Association/Luth Research survey, 10 percent of cell phone owners surveyed use mobile location services at least once a week, and nearly half of people who noticed an ad while using location-based services took at least some action, a significantly higher rate than for those who noticed ads while sending or receiving text messages (37 percent) and almost twice the rate of those who saw an ad while browsing the Web (28 percent).

For instance, D’Alessandro is working with health-care clients that are embedding biometric sensors in smartphones to enable physicians to better manage patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes, helping them take prescription medications properly and monitor health indicators captured by medical devices.

Another example is combining real-time marketing with location-based services, so that you can leverage the location-sensing technology inside a smartphone in order to push out specific offers like discounts and coupons. So, for instance, a shopper arriving in a retailer’s parking lot could receive a text message about special offers that are available just as she walks through the door. With some real-time offer management systems, these services can grow more and more personalized over time, with the ability to learn from customers’ responses to offers. For instance, if a customer refuses an offer, the engine learns from the rejection for subsequent offers. As a result, customers get a more personalized experience, because the vendor avoids sending offers that they are not likely to accept.

Online Communities and Social Media Sites

As we said earlier, it’s one thing to put up a Facebook page or start a Twitter account and quite another to strategically engage in social networking. Social networking technologies and online communities are now mainstream, and companies are seriously investing in these means of customer engagement. In a recent survey by the CMO Council and Deloitte, respondents named social media and online communities as the top investment for their digital marketing dollars (see Figure 8.2).

FIGURE 8.2: Social Media Is Top Investment Area

Q: Where are digital marketing dollars likely to be directed?

Base: More than 500 senior marketers worldwide.

Source: CMO Council/Deloitte Consulting LLP.

It’s important to heed the distinction between social media sites and online communities. With the former, a key is to listen more than you engage in order to learn about your customers and how they interact on the various channels. Beagle’s Pombriant offers the 80/20 rule, where you listen 80 percent of the time and engage the other 20 percent. “Then you can respond with a rifle shot instead of with buckshot,” he says. 

Frank Eliason, who famously helped move Comcast’s customer service operations onto social media and is now senior vice president of social media at Citi, agrees. In 2007, Eliason started calling customers on the phone when he noticed them mentioning problems with Comcast in their blogs. This led to Eliason’s moving into a new role for the firm as director of digital care. In this capacity, he began monitoring customers’ tweets on Twitter and eventually began tweeting back, providing his phone number and encouraging people to call him directly for help. 

Soon, Eliason had a staff of people who were monitoring and responding to customer tweets and even discovering and resolving widespread problems before the call center received a deluge of complaints. Still, Eliason contends that social media should be viewed not as a marketing channel or even as a service channel, but as a communication channel owned by the customer: “A lot of companies don’t respect that the customer owns the community, and if they want to, they can turn you off in a second. They don’t need to listen to you.” 

In fact, when Eliason started responding to tweets, he would propose solutions right away, but he could see that this was a turn-off for the Twitter customer community: “From their reaction, I sensed they saw that as intrusive and presumptuous.” He quickly switched to responding simply, “Can I help?” 

Comcast, Eliason says, created a well-rounded approach to social media by defining its goals. “We didn’t want to go out selling,” he says. “We needed to improve our customer experience, and one of the keys was listening to customers, no matter where they were.” 

Once you begin to understand the various communities’ motivations and quirks, you can enter discussions, lobbing a few salvos to see what you get back. In the B2C environment, many customers will be sensitive about and even hostile to vendor involvement in online communities. You will need to show ultimate respect for the participants before you will be accepted into the group. Even then, tread lightly. Eliason says, “You’re there to listen, not preach or even answer questions.” 

When it’s your own Facebook page or your own branded online community, the dynamics are different. Talbots, for instance, strikes a playful note with its Facebook page, encouraging fans to post stories about their favorite outfits or the worst present they ever received. Since shoppers seek out the site, there is no danger that they will perceive Talbots as intruding when company agents make suggestions about chic new outfits or alert the group to a flash sale that is available only for the next hour. 

Online communities can be particularly useful in the B2B space. For example, the SAP Community Network (SCN) is a community of more than 2 million members. SCN is where SAP developers, analysts, consultants, integrators, and administrators connect and co-innovate with their peers, using a combination of active discussion forums, blogs, and wikis. SCN provides an environment in which members can collaborate, find answers to technical questions, get expert advice on handling day-today technical issues, follow up on business opportunities, and learn about leading-edge technologies. Members have access to a technical library of articles, white papers, and documentation, as well as software downloads and code samples. They can help themselves to relevant education via an extensive e-learning catalog and participate in active, moderated forums and Web logs. SCN is an invaluable resource for customers, while at the same time driving value to SAP by reducing incoming support requests and support costs. It is also much faster than SAP’s support organization in responding to and resolving many issues, with complex technical questions being answered by community members in a matter of minutes. Think about the power of two million support people compared with the service and support team of a company like SAP.

Just-in-Time Information

A variety of technologies are converging to provide customers with information or offers that not only are valuable to them but are valuable to them at a very specific point in time. An example is real-time marketing. Seen mostly in the B2C world, real-time marketing involves harvesting unique, specialized information on consumers, allowing companies to present them with tailored offers while interacting with them in real time. Amazon is a prominent example of this technique, with its “customers who bought this also bought that” functionality at the point of purchase. The field is open for B2Bs to leverage real-time marketing technology; as long as the offers are relevant and engaging, customers will respond. 

In both B2B and B2C, companies are becoming more attuned to offering customers just-in-time information through text messaging, with the idea that they’re delivering valuable information before customers even know they need it. The concept is what TARP’s John Goodman calls the “psychic pizza.” It refers to anticipating and delivering education and/or service to customers “just in time,” or even before they know they need it, as in a pizza deliveryman saying as he approaches your door, “This is the pizza you were about to order.” 

One client that Goodman has worked with, a chemical terminal company, offers customers updates on delivery time, which can fluctuate as a result of congestion in the Houston Ship Channel. “The minute they get an update, they send that to the customer to say it’s on time or late or going to show up early,” Goodman says. “We’re finding just-in-time information transfer works especially well in the B2B environment.” 

Another example is CEMEX USA. It installed cameras in its loading docks so that people located at headquarters could see (literally) if there were any backups that would cause cement deliveries to be delayed. CEMEX has discovered that customers can deal with almost any contingency—even delays in their shipments—as long as they are notified early and told the truth. 

Companies are also engaging in just-in-time marketing, which PricewaterhouseCoopers/Diamond Advisory Services’ D’Alessandro says increases the value of the services because they are seen within a framework of need. He cites the example of Southwest Airlines’ “early-bird check-in” offering, where customers can pay extra to move to the front of the check-in line. The company framed this offering in such a way that customers could understand its value, in addition to offering it at strategic moments, he says. So, while traditional ticket purchasers would automatically go for the lowest-price offering, the system now looks for certain behaviors, demographics, or situations—tickets purchased close to departure time, complex routes, business travelers—and pops up the offering in the moment.

Unified Communications

Unified communications (UC) is the convergence of communication channels—phone, cell phone, e-mail, instant messaging, text—so that the call (or other type of communication) “follows” the intended recipient no matter where he is. For instance, if you call your cable provider or satellite TV company, it often has different call centers, with different phone numbers, depending on whether you have a technology, billing, or program issue. If it’s discovered that you dialed the wrong number (after 15 minutes on hold and after providing your name, your account number, and a description of your problem), you will be transferred to the correct call center, at which point you’ll need to go through the entire process again. 

With UC, that frustrating experience is eliminated. No matter which number the customer calls, the information is passed to the correct service representative who can help. If an engineer is needed for a more complex support scenario, this resource is available, as well. Even if the engineer isn’t in the call center and is working remotely, UC enables a virtual customer support center. The more specialized resource might be working at her desk checking e-mail, and she can get an alert that her expertise is needed for second-level support. If she’s working on a mission-critical project, she can suppress alerts so that the request is sent to someone else. 

With skills-based routing and presence information, companies can make every employee in the organization a technology support person. This is particularly helpful when customers call with two issues—say, their cable doesn’t work and their last month’s bill was too high. With two separate support centers, it’s difficult to handle such a scenario. But with a virtual call center, companies can be prepared, since all the context and customer data can be passed on to another resource. 

Another example is CEMEX, which uses the incoming number to route customer calls to the person in the support organization who is most suited to handle the call. Customers who are known to speak Spanish, for instance, are seamlessly routed to bilingual agents, which is much more satisfying than having to “Marque dos por Español.” 

With unified communication, the call has a much higher chance of reaching the target agent, even if that person is on the go. This can be significant in B2B environments, where customers require help from someone with specialized expertise.

Voice Analytics

Call centers are now using voice analytics technology to monitor customer phone conversations, both recorded and in real time. The purpose is to analyze the discussion to spot particular words and phrases, and also to detect nuances and levels of emotion that indicate a need for escalation or closer attention. For instance, the system might alert a more experienced service representative if it detects a customer becoming frustrated concerning the resolution on a problem. Mining of recorded calls can pick up on repeated references to a competitor’s offering or a particular process problem that many customers are experiencing. 

Further analysis could help companies train employees to help customers more effectively. For instance, searching all conversations for the words “thank you” could reveal the type of service that is particularly helpful to customers. Conversely, analyzing calls for negative words and phrases (“close my account”) or pejoratives could help companies identify broken processes, poor-quality products, or service representatives who need more training. 

Voice analytics can also help companies identify the speech patterns of high-value customers, so that reps can be alerted to offer these customers special offers and bonuses.

Collaborative Technologies

In their personal lives, many people (particularly the millennial generation) have grown accustomed to having continual access to technologies that enable them to communicate and collaborate with one another, including Twitter, instant messaging through social media, SMS texting, blogging, and data feeds. This expectation of natural and easy collaboration has now entered the workplace as well, where both employees and customers expect collaborative capabilities to be built into any interface or application with which they interact. 

In fact, according to a global survey by Accenture, millennials today consider e-mail—the traditional mode of office collaboration—to be archaic. Younger employees today favor more real-time and interactive ways of communicating, such as text messages, social networks, and blogs. 

When businesses incorporate collaborative capabilities into their business and customer-facing systems, there are three key capabilities that they need to build in: helping people identify whom they need to contact (who has the information they are seeking and his availability); enabling people to come together to keep one another up to date, understand what each is responsible for, when they need to deliver on what, and so on; and providing a way to disseminate critical information to everyone who needs it, on a timely basis. 

Although this may happen today through e-mail, document management systems, one-to-one conversations, and the like, these modes are all quite disconnected. Now, technologies are available that make collaboration more efficient and effective. For instance, Facebook-like platforms bring people together in a dynamic way that helps them collaborate and share content in a by-now-familiar context, enabling communities to be defined and relevant news to be communicated rapidly. 

Imagine a semiconductor company, for instance, embedding collaborative capabilities into its core development processes to enable quick and easy collaboration among its design engineers, the customer’s engineers, the sales team, and the distributor. Or think of an insurer embedding collaborative capabilities into its business transactions and processes, enabling salespeople to collaborate with the claims department, customer support, and the repair shops and share any information that’s relevant to a customer’s claim to enable speedy resolution. 

These types of collaborative capabilities can also be extended to customers. Typically, when customers need support, they might visit the vendor’s website and search the FAQs, support documentation, or some other knowledge base for help. Alternatively, they might call the call center or use a live chat feature to get an answer to their question. But today, there are also online support communities that can offer fast, real-time advice on solving problems. Companies such as giffgaff are taking this concept to a whole new level, bringing the concept of collaboration into the context of the call center, leveraging the many-to-many model for customer support and service. Rather than one company supporting thousands of customers, the model is thousands of customers supporting thousands of other customers.

Social Media Monitoring

We talked already about listening to and engaging with social media, and now we’ll talk more specifically about social media monitoring tools, also called sentiment analysis. This technology tracks online customer sentiment in an automated fashion. Although some companies start by assigning a team to keep tabs on public opinion, realistically, there is too much information available today for manual monitoring to be effective. There are so many places for your customers and prospects to talk about you (and to talk about themselves) that there is no way to keep up without using a tool. 

An automated sentiment analysis tool will read tweets and postings in online forums and on social media, analyze them, and formulate a sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) based on business rules. These tools can provide information on the ratio of positive to negative sentiments, trends in keyword mentions, number of views, number of brand mentions, and so on. When you integrate these results with CRM and other core applications, you can reach goals such as finding new market opportunities, developing more relevant and highly valued products and services, and responding quickly to negative trends. 

These tools will alert you immediately if the tide has turned (in either direction), so that you can be much more proactive in your response. As companies from Nestlé to Wendy’s have discovered, this can be particularly helpful in getting ahead of a brewing public relations crisis. 

For many companies, the Web can be the beginning and end of all customer-related business processes. For example, let’s say one of your customers has an issue with your product. She tweets about the problem. One of your customer service representatives spots the tweet and turns it into a service request. The affected department researches the problem and comes back with an answer for the customer. The agent then posts the answer on Twitter, on relevant blogs, and on the company’s own ecommunity. A process that started on the Web thus ends there. The process starts where the customer is and thus can finish where the customer is.

Predictive Analytics and Business Intelligence

Generally speaking, analytics is software that combines a high-speed database capable of storing lots of data with software and algorithms that detect patterns in the data. This is how Amazon is able to recommend other books to buy when someone buys a book—it tracks what other buyers have bought and uses that history to predict the future. Leveraging analytics is one of the quickest and most effective ways to gain a deep understanding of your customers, their different permutations, and their propensity to act in a certain way. 

Predictive analytics can leverage sophisticated algorithms that yield critical insights concerning not only which are your most profitable customers today, but also which customers have the greatest lifetime value —and what is likely to keep them happy and in the fold. Analytics can also point to the best times to make an offer to a specific customer. For example, a financial services company might use analytics to determine the best time to offer a new credit line to a customer, such as just after the customer secures mortgage financing, as many purchases are associated with buying a new home. Analytics can also be used for real-time decision support, such as granting credit on the spot (in a store, for example) to someone who passes some basic tests. 

Done properly, the use of analytics results in faster decision making. Organizations can achieve fast results by leveraging the transactional data that they most likely already have but rarely analyze. By doing this, they can obtain insights into customer needs and wants and turn these insights into action. An example is operational dashboards for frontline employees who need to access information in real time. With a dashboard, the call center operators, telesales teams, and other customer-facing representatives can better serve customers by making decisions in real time. 

You can also analyze data from customer interactions on your website to discover new insights into the customer experience. “Sometimes the information you get from sentiment analysis is not intuitive—you discover what you didn’t know,” says Beagle Research’s Pombriant. For instance, Pombriant tells of a vice president of global analytics and optimization who discovered a glitch in the company’s website navigation that was causing a loss of revenue from a subset of high-revenue-potential customers. These customers had filled out all the forms required to buy the company’s services, but before they hit the purchase button, a field popped up, asking one last question that these customers misunderstood. As a consequence, the purchase wasn’t consummated, even though the customers believed it was. 

This problem would have been invisible to the company if it had not used analytics to find out which customers were falling out of the purchase process and where. When the company discovered what was wrong, it could easily fix the problematic field; in fact, it determined that the field was unimportant and removed it. According to Pombriant, that one deletion was worth $12 million in revenue per year, all thanks to using analytics to analyze the customer experience. He adds, “You only know what you know —you can’t predict how the customer is going to use your website.” 

There are many other technologies that companies are using—or that are just emerging—to enable operational, interaction, and decision excellence. Companies that are working to enrich their customer experience would do well to stay abreast of these technologies, try them on a small scale, develop new skill sets around them, and craft a strategy for enterprisewide implementation. 

However, it’s also important to understand that while some of these systems and tools can work without the existence of an integrated application foundation, their transformative power is apparent when it all comes together. It is when you establish your foundational core capabilities and then select disruptive technologies that enable all three of the CE pillars —operational, interaction, and decision excellence—that you can realize the customer experience edge.

CASE STUDY: CEMEX

Cementing Customer Bonds

Leading building materials maker CEMEX USA

uses an award-winning customer experience to

overcome the pitfalls of commoditization.

It is often said that cement is the most widely used substance on earth, after water. Without cement (the basis of concrete), there would be no tall buildings or interstate highways. Given its ubiquity, cement is the ultimate commodity. So when Houston-based CEMEX USA Inc. took stock of its business in 2003, executives realized that simply providing a good product at a fair price was not enough to yield differentiation in the marketplace. 

“Anyone can make cement or concrete. Any of our competitors can do that,” says Ven Bontha, customer experience management director for CEMEX USA, a business unit of CEMEX S.A.B. de C.V. of Monterrey, Mexico. “We were looking for a differentiating factor. In the end, cement is a commodity. We wondered, How can we decommoditize this? How can we make it easier for our customers to do business with us?”

CE ESSENTIALS

• Reliability. CEMEX boosted order accuracy from 92 percent to 99.9 percent. 
• Convenience. Customers who prefer self-service via the Web can see exactly the same information that customer care agents see. 
• Relevance. Agents can identify incoming customer calls by their cell phone, home phone, and work phone. Customers are routed automatically to the same agent that they spoke with in their last call. 
• Responsiveness. CEMEX notifies customers proactively of delays and how it intends to resolve them.

Long before “customer experience” became an imperative, or even a formal concept, CEMEX USA reorganized its operations and customer service, implementing a state-of-the-art CRM system to better focus on customers. The multiyear effort paid off handsomely in terms of better order accuracy and shipment visibility, leading to improved customer satisfaction. In March 2011, CEMEX USA won a Gartner and 1to1 Media CRM Excellence Award in the category of Customer Experience. Ginger Conlon, editor of 1to1 Magazine and a judge for the CRM Excellence Awards, says that CEMEX was ahead of the curve. 

“CEMEX USA was able to get buy-in in an industry that is not known for customer-centricity. The CEMEX team asked what their customers wanted and then aligned around that,” she says. 

The customer experience team at CEMEX USA achieved more than just order accuracy and customer satisfaction with the new system. Integrated with financial, operational, and other applications, it enables a host of other business benefits, according to company officials. 

Multimillion-dollar paybacks from an integrated enterprise application suite supporting customer experience like that of CEMEX USA are not unusual. A Bloomberg Businessweek Research Services global survey of 1,004 respondents in late 2010 found a host of benefits (see Figure 8.3).

FIGURE 8.3: Top Realized Benefits from Application Integration

Q: Pick up to five benefits of an integrated suite of enterprise applications.

(Percent of respondents who indicated a benefit)

Base: 1,004 director-level or above executives at large or midsize companies worldwide.

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek Research Services, 2010.

Getting to Know You

CEMEX USA’s journey to a better customer experience begins in 2003, when its customer experience initiative was little more than a brainstorming session within CEMEX USA’s management team. When Bontha joined CEMEX USA in 1995, the company had one cement plant. Over the next decade or so, the company’s operations grew to 14 plants through acquisitions. CEMEX USA was able to consolidate its acquisitions’ backoffice systems rapidly, enabling aggressive growth. This was good for business, of course, but it also led to a sense of disconnection from customers. Frank Craddock, executive vice president of CEMEX USA’s commercial operations, and Bontha decided in 2003 to call in a marketing research firm to interview its customers—on the phone and in person—to discover what really motivated their cement purchasing practices. 

The research identified 41 attributes that were important to customers. At the top of the list was quality. On-time delivery was number two. The top 20 most important attributes fell into two general categories: service delivery and administrative functions. 

“Our primary challenge to overcome was limited visibility into our delivery operations,” says Bontha. “We relied on a third party to deliver most of our products, so obtaining accurate and timely information was an ongoing obstacle.” Another priority was reducing the time it took for employees to locate a bill of lading, which is created when a customer places an order. The bill of lading includes many critical details about the order, including its destination and delivery times. So, streamlining that process was also a top goal.

CE PILLARS

• Operational excellence. CEMEX has made on-time delivery a number one priority by increasing the visibility of its delivery operations, streamlining its bill of lading process, installing cameras on its truck loading docks, and setting system alerts when delays are likely. 
• Interaction excellence. Employees and customers have visibility into on-time delivery rates and other data, and CEMEX immediately communicates if a delay occurs. The contact center gives agents a 360 degree view of customers, and customers often speak to the same agent each time they call.

Supply Chain Challenges

In this industry, there is more to on-time delivery than meets the eye. Cement is a gray powder. As such, it has an indefinite shelf life. Once the additives and the cement are mixed with water to form concrete, however, the shelf life of the compound is less than two hours. You can accelerate or slow the setting time a bit, says Bontha, but the manufacturing process occurs on the road in the trucks. Time is of the essence. 

When a project is launched and the concrete begins to flow, it must be poured continuously until no more is needed. This quickly turns into a supply chain challenge. Much depends on how far the customer is from CEMEX’s cement terminals. Delivery times must be calculated with precision if the project is to go as planned. “We have to make sure we don’t run our customers out of cement while they are pouring,” Bontha says.

CEMEX USA AT A GLANCE

• Business description: A unit of $14.1 billion CEMEX S.A.B. de C.V., CEMEX USA supplies building materials
• Location: Houston
• Annual revenues: $2.8 billion (2010)
• Number of employees: 8,000
• Number of cement plants: 13
• Number of cement distribution terminals: 46
• Number of aggregate quarries: 100+
• Number of ready-mix concrete plants: 320

At the time the company launched its customer experience initiative, CEMEX USA did not track metrics like on-time delivery, as this information largely resided with third-party logistics providers. However, in 2009, the company implemented ERP and CRM systems from SAP, which created visibility into all of its processes. The company installed video cameras at its largest cement terminals, letting members of the CEMEX USA customer service team literally see in real time how things are going. “We can see the loading facilities. That is important because it takes about eight minutes to load a cement truck,” says Bontha. If there are 10 trucks in line, it will take 80 minutes or more for the last one to be loaded and ready to go. If, for example, that last truck needs to deliver at 10:00 a.m., the system will dictate that it should be loaded by 7:00 a.m., based on historical transit times and other data. 

“If 7:00 a.m. arrives and no ticket has been issued, the SAP system immediately sends alerts saying this load has not been loaded yet. In the next 15 minutes, we make calls to the customer and to dispatch. We may make the decision to divert a load to this customer or whatever is the best choice at the time,” says Bontha. 

As much as customers hate delays, they hate lack of information even more. “When we immediately inform the customer about a delay, they acknowledge our interest in their business,” says Bontha. This immediate alert works for other glitches, too. He recalls a recent incident in which the system flagged an error almost in real time, and the customer was notified of the error and how and when it would be fixed. “If we make a mistake, we own up to it,” says Bontha. 

That’s key, says Conlon. The irony is, she explains, that “if you resolve a problem, you wind up having more loyalty than if there never was a problem to begin with.” The experience of being notified proactively of an issue and its resolution creates a more memorable customer experience than if all had gone smoothly. Customers feel that the provider is on their side, working with them in their best interest. This drives real loyalty. 

A survey by Forrester Research validates Conlon’s point. According to a blog posted by Forrester analyst Andrew McInnes on December 6, 2010, “Customers’ Problems Are Companies’ Loyalty-Building Opportunities,” customers who had an exemplary problem resolution experience were far more likely to become repeat customers and major advocates of their suppliers (see Figure 8.4).

Broader Vision

Gaining insights about customers’ unspoken wants requires more than a consultant’s survey and discussions with existing clients. Innovation in any field frequently occurs when an idea in one industry is transplanted into another. CEMEX USA is a proponent of borrowing innovative and successful ideas about customer experience wherever they may be found. One early model of excellence came from a local branch of Bank of Texas in 2004, where Bontha and his wife applied for a loan.

FIGURE 8.4: Fix a Mistake Fast = Customer for Life

Source: Forrester Research.

A few days after completing the loan application, he was stunned to find the money sitting in his bank account without any fanfare. He went back to the bank and asked to speak to the manager to thank him for the hassle-free borrowing experience. “He said, ‘You’re a Bank of Texas preferred customer; we have to give you what you want,’” Bontha recalls. Then the bank manager shocked Bontha. “On his screen was my history with the bank for the last 15 years,” Bontha exclaims. “They knew everything about me. I’m so integrated with the bank, even if I get mad at them, I won’t change banks. The entanglement is for a lifetime.” 

Using the bank experience as a springboard, CEMEX USA decided to cast the net wider and look at companies in other industries that were considered standouts in customer experience: Continental Airlines, Fidelity, and Mellon Bank. 

This outreach effort is also a best practice, according to Conlon. “You need not just to stand out in your industry but to stand out as a company that is good at customer experience, period. A lot of companies have been shaken awake with social media. CEMEX USA got in ahead of that and saw the potential of borrowing from other industries. CEMEX USA notes how it can benefit by adopting similar practices.” 

All of these external experiences triggered a wave of ideas about how CEMEX USA should develop and use an extensive reservoir of knowledge about its customers. Consider CEMEX’s Smart Silo program, a vendormanaged inventory program for customers that want a seamless and continuous supply of cement by relying on CEMEX USA to monitor their inventory in real time. CEMEX installs sensors in each customer’s silo and links them to the CEMEX network to track consumption and dispatch additional supplies when inventory levels reach a reordering point. In addition, customers can view their current stock levels and orders received in the CEMEX Connect customer self-service online portal. The Smart Silo initiative also helps CEMEX USA optimize its fleet and asset utilization by dispersing demand outside the peak time. 

The Foundation of Excellence 

Another step in enhancing the CEMEX customer experience was the implementation of a new Customer Care Center at Houston headquarters in 2006. There is always a live operator to answer the call—no automated voice response system—since the personal touch is crucial. The customer care system brought to life the vision of complete customer information (the proverbial 360-degree view) on one screen. 

CEMEX USA agents can identify an incoming customer call by any number: cell phone, home phone, or work phone. For each interaction, the system records the conversation and the screens for quality assurance. Reviewing the order at the end of the call is crucial. “It is very important to recap the call; otherwise that’s where mistakes happen,” says Bontha. Before implementing the system, order accuracy ran about 92 percent. Today, that key metric of the customer experience is over 99 percent. 

Customers who prefer self-service via the Web see exactly the same information that the customer care agents see, including order status, invoice status, tickets issued, last 15 interactions, and pending support issues. “Continental Airlines was our model there,” says Bontha. “We bill every night, and the information is available to the customer in the morning.” If the data ever fail to be updated, customers will call to see what happened. They rely on CEMEX USA data to do their own planning. 

The system tracks abandoned calls, automatically generating a report that is routed to supervisors, who call the person who hung up to see if they can help. “We don’t like to see abandoned calls,” says Bontha. “At the beginning they used to say, ‘How did you know it was me?’ Now they are used to it.” 

The state-of-the-art customer care infrastructure has enabled CEMEX USA to launch other programs. Last year, for example, a small balances collection subgroup of agents started making outbound calls, checking in on overdue accounts. The agent asks if everything is OK, or whether there is a piece of paperwork missing. “We have collected $30 million on that program,” says Bontha. Today, that subgroup has spawned a permanent accounts receivable initiative. CEMEX USA initiated a lead generation program that gathers rich customer and prospect information and makes informed (as opposed to cold) calls. “Without the platform, we wouldn’t be able to do any of this,” he says. 

The CRM system also helps CEMEX USA provide customized service. Customers are often routed automatically to the same agent they spoke with in their last call. Known Spanish speakers are routed to Spanish-speaking agents, rather than being asked to press 2 for Spanish. This makes customers feel that the experience is about and for them on a personal level, says Bontha. “We want them to feel, ‘CEMEX is doing this for me.’” 

At the same time, CEMEX’s CRM deployment goes beyond traditional service center processes, as it easily connects with back-end processes, such as order management, the supply chain, dispatch, and truck management. 

That Personal Touch 

Technology is surely an enabler of the customer experience, but it takes a person to connect with another person. Employees play a major role in creating that sense of connection. Everyone is appraised and compensated on her degree of customer focus. Toward that end, it helps to start with people-oriented resources. Recently, the customer care team interviewed 200 candidates before hiring two new people. “We’re looking for that service attitude,” says Bontha. 

Of course, just being personable is not enough. Candidates are evaluated based on their résumés and proven skill sets, but also on less tangible things, such as curiosity and tenacity. “Not everyone can survive eight hours on the phone. It’s a tough job,” says Bontha. “We put a pencil and paper in front of the person and then watch—are they taking notes? If they are smart, they will write things down and ask questions.” With the raw materials in place, the CEMEX USA team pours as much knowledge as possible into its new hires. It takes three months of training before they are allowed to handle their first customer call. 

Meanwhile, he and his staff work hard to create an enjoyable work environment. It seems to be paying off: the retention rate for customer care agents (notoriously a high-turnover group) is higher than average, with some employees on board from more than four years ago. 

When Bontha received word that CEMEX USA had received the Gartner and 1to1 Media CRM Excellence award, he went to each person in the Customer Care Center and thanked them individually. “I could thank them in a group, but that’s not personal. Our people are very proud of this award. It belongs to them,” he says. 

With a major award in hand and key customer experience indicators looking good, CEMEX USA is nonetheless not resting on its laurels. It understands, better than most, that customer experience is an expedition rather than a destination. Says Bontha, “We are still on the journey.”

Notes

Quoted material that is not referenced is from personal interviews.

1. “More than Half of U.S. Handset Shipments Will Be Smartphones by 2012, Worldwide Smartphone Shipments Move toward One Billion by 2015,” In-Stat, June 24, 2011, 

http://www.instat.com/newmk.asp?ID=3012&SourceID=00000501000000000000.

2. “Best Buy Launches Multi-Channel Network,” Twin Cities Magazine blog, January 6, 2011,

http://tcbmag.blogs.com/daily_developments/2011/01/best-buylaunches-multi-channel-network.html.

3. Bill Briggs, “Best Buy Plans to Double Its E-Commerce Business,” Internet Retailer, April 14, 2011,

http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/04/14/best-buy-plans-double-itse- commerce-business.

4. Kate Leggett, “Nine Ways to Enhance the Customer Experience,” Baseline Magazine, January 28, 2011,

http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/CRM/Nine-Ways-to-Enhance-the-Customer-Experience-687244/.

5. Volker Hildebrand and Vinay Iyer, “Why a Traditional Siloed CRM Approach Is Doomed,” SAPInsider, Wellesley Information Services, January–March 2010 issue.

6. “Industry Market Barometer,” ThomasNet, September 2010. ThomasNet’s “Industry Market Barometer” (IMB) is a semiannual survey of buyers (engineers and purchasing agents) and sellers (owners, managers, and sales and marketing executives) at the manufacturers, distributors, and service companies that make up the industrial sector. The majority of respondents are from small and midsized companies, mirroring the makeup of the industrial/manufacturing segment. The IMB serves to measure companies’ performance, uncover the strategies they are employing to grow their businesses, and present an overall segment outlook. This is the third consecutive IMB. There were a total of 3,243 survey respondents, of which 95 percent were located in the United States. The majority were from the Midwest (20 percent) and Mid-Atlantic (19 percent), followed by the Pacific Northwest (15 percent) and Pacific (12 percent),

http://www.thomasnet.com/pressroom/Industry_Market_Barometer.html.

7. Ashwin Nayan Rai, “From Brick to Click: E-Commerce Trends in Industrial Manufacturing,” Cognizant Technology Solutions, 2010,

http://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/From-Brick-to-Click.pdf.

8. “Apple Sells One Millionth iPhone,” press release, Apple Computer, Inc., September 10, 2007,

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/09/10iphone.html.

9. “Apple Sells Three Million iPads in 80 Days,” press release, Apple Computer, Inc., June 22, 2010,

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/06/22ipad.html.

10. “More than Half of U.S. Handset Shipments Will be Smartphones by 2012.”

11. “Anywhere Enterprise: 2010 U.S. CIO Priorities FastView Survey Snapshot,” Yankee Group, December 2010.

12. Rimma Kats, “Mobile Coupon Redemption Rates to Rise This Year,” Mobile Commerce Daily, April 21, 2010,

http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/2010/04/21/mobile-couponredemption-rates-to-rise-this-year.

13. “U.S. Consumers Significantly More Likely to Respond to Location-Based Mobile Ads than Other Mobile Ad Types,” Mobile Marketing Association, April 21, 2010, 

http://mmaglobal.com/news/usconsumers-significantly-more-likely-respond-location-based-mobileads-other-mobile-ad-types.

14. “CMO Council State of Marketing,” CMO Council and Deloitte, 2010,

http://www.deloitte.com/assets/Dcom-UnitedStates/Local%20Assets/Documents/us_consulting_CMOCouncil_050510.pdf.

15. “Five Rules of Real-Time Marketing,” Retail Customer Experience.com, February 28, 2011,

http://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/article/179628/Five-rulesof-real-time-marketing.

16. John Goodman, Strategic Customer Service: Managing the Customer Experience to Increase Positive Word of Mouth, Build Loyalty and Maximize Profits (New York: AMACOM, 2009).

17. Gary Curtis, “Give Your Workplace a Millennial Makeover,” CIO Magazine, September 3, 2010,

http://www.cio.co.uk/article/3238071/give-your-workplace-amillennial-makeover.

18. Analytics is “the extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models to drive decisions and actions,” Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris, Competing on Analytics (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007).

19. Andrew McInnes, “Customers’ Problems Are Companies’ Loyalty- Building Opportunities,” December 6, 2010,

http://tinyurl.com/3bq8gxa. The survey base was North American consumers who had a problem while doing business with a company in the past three months and had it fully resolved.

Bibliography

1. Lior Arussy, Customer Experience Strategy: The Complete Guide from Innovation to Execution (Strativity Group, Inc., 2010). 

Arussy provides a practical soup-to-nuts blueprint for understanding what the customer experience is, determining how to measure current experiences, and coming up with an action plan for developing greater customer experiences.

2. Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler, Managing the Customer Experience: Turning Customers into Advocates (London: FT Press, 2002). 

The authors offer practical advice on how companies can build the power of the brand, not through advertising, but by the experience and value that they offer their customers. The book provides analysis and concrete methods for increasing loyalty and advocacy in customer experience in a targeted way.

3. Shaun Smith and Andy Milligan, Bold: How to Be Brave in Business and Win (Philadelphia: Kogan Page, 2011). 

This book highlights 14 businesses that illustrate what the authors say is necessary to stand out in business today: putting purpose before profit, going beyond what customers expect, and relentlessly differentiating.

4. John A. Goodman, Strategic Customer Service: Managing the Customer Experience to Increase Positive Word of Mouth, Build Loyalty and Maximize Profits (New York: AMACOM, 2009). 

This book focuses on the strategic alignment of customer service with overall corporate strategy. It draws on research from the author’s work with the likes of Chik-Fil-A, USAA, Coca-Cola, FedEx, GE, Cisco, Nieman Marcus, Toyota, and Cisco Systems. It includes both case studies and formal research. Many aspects of conventional wisdom are challenged with hard data that show how any company can increase loyalty, win customers, and improve the bottom line.

5. Patricia Seybold, Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). Seybold explores how businesses can unleash innovation by

inviting customers to co-design what they do and make.

6. Denis Pombriant, Hello Ladies: Dispatches from the Social CRM Frontier (lulu.com, 2010).

7. Paul Greenberg, CRM at the Speed of Light, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009). 

Greenberg reveals best practices for a successful social CRM implementation and provides examples of the new strategies for customer engagement and collaboration being used by cutting-edge companies, along with expert guidance on how your organization can and should adopt these innovations.

8. Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable (New York: Portfolio, 2009). 

Run-of-the-mill TV commercials and newspaper ads are no longer effective for reaching consumers because consumers are tuning them out. So you have to toss everything and do something remarkable, the way a purple cow in a field of Guernseys would be remarkable, according to Godin. He uses examples of companies including HBO, Starbucks, and JetBlue to illustrate new ways of doing standard business with measurable results.

9. Frederick Reichheld, The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006). 

Reichheld argues that customer satisfaction is more important than any other business criterion except profits and that the best measurement of customer satisfaction is whether you would recommend a business to a friend—the foundation of the widely used net promoter score.

10. Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Business Plus, 2010). 

The CEO of online shoe giant Zappos, Hsieh details his rise from Harvard student entrepreneur to the creator of a hugely successful brand. Customer service became the focus of the start-up retailer, even when funding dried up. The book recounts how Zappos survived, eventually being acquired by Amazon for more than $1.2 billion in 2009.

11. Jim Joseph, The Experience Effect (New York: AMACOM, 2010). 

Joseph focuses on how to create “the experience effect,” which is a combination of marketing message, advertising, sales approach, website, interaction with company personnel, and more.

12. Brian Solis, Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web, rev. & updated (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2011).

Solis’s updated primer focuses on how to use social media to succeed in business. Learn about the psychology, behavior, and influence of the new social consumer, and define and measure the success of your social media campaigns. It features a foreword by actor Ashton Kutcher, who has more than five million followers on Twitter.

13. Bernd H. Schmitt, Customer Experience Management: A Revolutionary Approach to Connecting with Your Customers, (New York: Wiley, 2003).

Schmitt examines how customer experience management increases growth and revenues and remakes companies’ image and brands. The book offers a five-step approach to customer experience to connect with customers at every touch point, and offers case studies in various B2B and consumer industries.

14. Gerald Zaltman, How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor, says that about 80 percent of all new products either fail within six months or fall short of their profit forecast. The reason? A disconnect between the customer experience and the way marketers collect information about how customers view their world. Analysis, success stories, and advice on rethinking marketing approaches are included.

15. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater and Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999).

The authors make a case for focusing on the service economy and learning “to stage a rich, compelling experience” by adding service to differentiate products.

16. Chip Bell and John R. Patterson, Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2009).

A comprehensive look at what it takes to keep customers in today’s market as well as gain new customers. The book provides real-world examples of how 12 brands create customer practices leading to “irrational loyalty,” and explains how these techniques work and how to implement them.

17. John R. DiJulius, What’s the Secret? To Providing a World-Class Customer Experience (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2008).

An inside look at world-class customer service strategies at top companies, such as Disney, Nordstrom, and Ritz-Carlton. The book provides steps, best practices, and service standards needed to build a customer service machine that consistently delivers.

18. Jeanne Bliss, Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).

The author offers advice to companies that think they’ve committed to customer experience but haven’t.

Resources

1. Ashwin Nayan Rai, “From Brick to Click: E-Commerce Trends in Industrial Manufacturing.” Cognizant Technology Solutions, 2010, http://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/From-Brick-to- Click.pdf.

2. “Customer Experience Boosts Revenue,” Forrester Research, Inc., June 22, 2009.

3. “The State of Customer Experience, 2010,” Forrester Research, Inc., February 19, 2010.

4. “Three Secrets of Success for Customer Experience Organizations,” Forrester Research, Inc., April 29, 2010.

5. “What Is the Right Customer Experience Strategy?” Forrester Research, Inc., September 28, 2010.

6. “The Six Laws of Customer Experience: The Fundamental Truths That Define How Organizations Treat Customers,” Temkin Group, July 2010.

7. “Profiling Customer Experience Leaders,” Temkin Group, September 2010.

8. “The Evolution of Voice of the Customer Programs,” Temkin Group, September 2010.

9. “2010 Consumer Experience Study,” Strativity Group, September 2010.

10. “2010 Customer Scorecard Series,” Convergys, 2010.

11. “Q1 2010 Customer Experience Tracker,” Beyond Philosophy, 2010.

12. “Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management,” Altimeter Group, March 5, 2010.

13. “Empathica Consumer Insights Panel: 2010 Year in Review,” Empathica, 2010.

14. “2010 State of Marketing,” CMO Council and Deloitte, 2010.

15. “Global Consumer Research Executive Summary 2010,” Accenture, 2010.

16. “Worldwide CRM Applications 2010–2014 Forecast: First Look at a Market in Recovery,” International Data Corp., May 2010.