Archive for the ‘Organization Design’ Category
Saturday Morning Reads: Planning for the Customer Experience
“Unengaged Employees Don’t Create Engaged Customers” - Bruce Temkin
For the past week I have spent considerable thought on how and why marketing is broken (more on that later this week) and why it’s imperative to understand the challenges so that we, as marketing and communications employees, can fix what ails business today. Many businesses and their employees often have misperceived notions that they know what is best for their customers, even when case study after case study show why that philosophy is broken. In reality what they think is best for their customers is really just a short-term plan for what is best for them—their bottom line. Then, there are companies that truly understand why customers need to be at the center of their organization and they use that philosophy steadfastly to prosper year-after-year. Do these companies possess a magic bullet? Of course not. They succeed because they plan to provide the best customer experience—repeatedly. And that planning starts with their employees.
Customer Experience Snack: Is your trusting cup half full, or half empty? Why believing your employees fuels your prosperity engine.
“Wegmans trusts their employees because they select them with diligence and with clear success factors in mind. Then they prepare them for success – so that they can trust both their judgment and the skills that Wegmans has to develop. To enable employee belief, Wegmans invests up to 40 hours a year per person in training and career development. This enables this company to “throw out the rule book” and believe in employees’ ability to make judgment calls that are right for each customized customer situation. The only “rule” there: ‘No customer can walk away unhappy.’”
“Employees love this kind of environment—and their numbers show it. Within their industry, Wegmans has dramatically lower employee turnover rates, higher operating margins and 50% higher sales per square foot.”
(I can tell you as a Wegmans customer this philosophy has made me come to love food shopping! Seriously.)
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Customer-Centric: An Operational Practice, Not a Marketing Buzzword
This past weekend I had the pleasure of being introduced to Ron Shevlin, his blog Marketing Tea Party, and his recent post “The Problem With Customer-Centricity.” (Hat tip: Valeria Maltoni.)
Given that I am a proponent for customer-centricity, I could not help but add my thoughts to Ron’s post since it is at the heart of what I practice and believe as a marketer. As well, I am seeing the trend for customer-centric becoming destined for buzzword bingo and I would hate for it to become meaningless well before its benefits are recognized and experienced.
Ron offers a well thought-out case for what customer-centric is and why it may not in the best interest of an organization (be sure to read all of the comments, too). After thoughtful analysis, Ron arrives at this bottom-line:
“… All this talk of customer-centricity is an utter and complete waste of time. The term means nothing. There’s no common definition, no definitive way to measure it, and therefore, no real proof that a company that claims to be customer-centric is any better (for any of the stakeholders) than any other firm.”
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Social Media from the Inside Out
On January 18th I had the opportunity to spend some time with the Philadelphia Chapter of The International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) to discuss social media from an inside out perspective.
In preparing my slides, I recalled a time when I was trying to implement social media and the process I used to do so. It was about 2006 and to my surprise, I received full management and legal support for a blog—a challenge for most even today. Looking back, I was lucky that our CMO had foresight and that our management and legal teams trusted me enough to do something that most Fortune 500 companies were not doing at the time (I handled our PR, too, which probably had something to do with it).
I was worried about a change of mindset as the word of a blog spread, so I dove in as quickly as I could. I had the blog set up (with the CMO’s help), wrote a bunch of posts (legal and marketing approved, of course), and tapped into our industry thought leaders (who were all for it) for on-going content. With all of that work, you would my efforts would have been a success, right? Nope. The content was ready, but the blog sat empty. While I understood the cultural limitations of a large company and I knew the goals of our management team, I did not account for some internal resistance or the final gatekeepers who put the brakes on my hopes for being social with our customers. A big lesson learned.
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Saturday Morning Reads: Caveat Venditor (Let the Seller Beware)
Let the seller beware. Quite the opposite of what gets flinged around when customers have a bad buying experience, isn’t it? While this context is not the normal definition of caveat venditor, the point is that at any time customers (or potential customers) can—and will—walk away from a sale if the product or service doesn’t meet not only their needs and wants, but their ethics as well. And, often, technology is helping them to do just that.
It’s a fine line that needs to be balanced between being profitable, being customer-focused (or, better yet, customer-centric) and being good enough at every given moment to not provide an experience that turns a customer away from the brand faster than your Wile E Coyote tactical mindset can grasp.
MIT Sloan Management Review: The Change Leadership Sustainability Demands
“Three teenage girls are at a shopping mall looking for sunscreen. It’s an impulse purchase, and it has to be an all-natural choice. They think they’ve found what they’re looking for at one store, but on the way to the register one of the girls takes out her phone and swipes it by the barcode of the product they’ve selected. Moments later, as she’s pulling out a credit card at the register, her iPhone announces an incoming e-mail. It’s a short message informing her that the item she is about to purchase contains compounds that are linked to the decimation of coral reefs. Moreover, the plastic container is difficult to recycle. Because her phone has pinpointed her location via GPS, she also learns that another store in the mall carries a “greener” sunscreen that has neither of those two problems. The girls leave the register and make a beeline for the other store.”
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: Customer Relationship Marketing, Customer-Centric, Leadership, Pragmatic | 
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Customer-Focused versus Customer-Centric, Which Are You?
[Originally posted on Serengeti's Endless Plain blog on 9/16/10. I have edited some of the contents for this post.]
A post by Dawn Westerberg, “Social Media, Customer-Centric, and #IMCchat,” prompted a long response from me, so I thought I’d share my thoughts here too.
If you read THoM, you might already know that every Wednesday night I co-moderate a chat on Twitter called #IMCchat (that’s the Twitter hashtag, if you want to search Twitter), which stands for integrated marketing communications chat. If you are new to Twitter or if you haven’t been on a Twitter chat yet, I highly recommend checking them out (here’s a list of Twitter chats that Meryl Evans keeps up-to-date). Chats are a wonderful way to ask questions or engage in conversation around a topic that is of interest. It’s also great to learn, get advice and share information.
On the September 15th #IMCchat we discussed customer-centric organizations, what defines an organization that is customer-centric and examples (Best Buy, FedEx, Fiskars).
Keep Reading, There’s More Goodness!
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: Anna Barcelos, Audience Research, Customer-Centric, Customer-Focused, IMC, integrated marketing communications, Marketing, Product Development, Service Development |
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