Posts Tagged ‘customer experience’
Your “Industry Experience Only” Requirement Is Hurting Customers, Employees and Shareholders
“Industry only experience” is not a new requirement, of course, and exceptions have always been made for talented candidates. However, in a down economy, it seems industry experience becomes a highly enforced criterion used to close the door on marketing talent.
I am not in Human Resources (HR), so I cannot tell you why it happens (I have my suspicions though). However, I have been a hiring manager and will say industry experience is something I avoid like the plague when reviewing resumes. Why? Because industry experience has absolutely NOTHING to do with the level of experience, talent, drive, problem-solving skills, enthusiasm and passion a candidate has to offer, which should always be the benchmark when hiring. A smart employee can learn any industry. It isn’t rocket science—unless you are handling marketing and PR for NASA.
[Sidebar: Please do not use the ‘regulations excuse.’ Again, a smart employee can learn regulations. An exceptional employee, however, learns them and then figures out how to stay within mandatory regulations without allowing them to chokehold company goals and objectives (Read: Growth).]
According to Executive Staffing Solutions’ latest newsletter, there is good news and bad news when it comes to filling open positions. The good news is that there are many good positions opening up for candidates. The bad news is companies are not recognizing top talent when it comes through the door.
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Tags: communications, customer experience, Customer-Centric, Customer-Focused, Marketing, Marketing Management, PR | 
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What Integrated Marketing Is Not (Hint: It’s Not Integrated Tactics)
I just received an interesting comment on my “For Hire” post that asked:
“Are there really any leading authorities – aside from published authors – on integrated marketing and communications? There are a lot of self-promoters who claim expertise in what is usually “the obvious”.
This comment, while obviously an attempt to discredit my experience, made me realized that there are probably many marketing professionals out there that have the same misunderstanding and misperception when it comes to understanding the theory and benefits of true integration.
I want to help fix that.
From the dawn of its time, which would be about 1993, when the “Fathers of Integration” Schultz, Tannenbaum and Lauterborn wrote The New Marketing Paradigm: Integrated Marketing Communications, integration has always been based in customer-centric (putting the customer at the center of the organization) and data-driven marketing. Unfortunately, marketers conveniently ignored the customer-centric, data-driven part of integration. We’ll get to that in a bit…
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Tags: customer experience, Customer-Centric, don schultz, IMC, integrated marketing, integrated marketing communications, Jay Galbraith, Ranjay Gulati |
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Do Your Stakeholders Find You Enchanting?
Enchant. Enchanting. Enchantment. Words we don’t hear in the business world, but I think that is about to change with Guy Kawasaki’s latest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.
Can you recall a time when a stakeholder said your brand was enchanting? If you thought had to think about that question for more than 30 seconds, you are probably not enchanting to your customers, shareholders, partners, community and employees.
I know what you’re thinking… No one uses that word, so your question is pointless. Okay. Let me re-ask it another way. When was the last time your stakeholders compared your brand to Apple or Zappos?
Need more time to think on that or do you know the answer?
What is Enchantment, When Is It Necessary & How Do We Achieve It?
According to Guy, “enchantment [is] the process of delighting people with a product, service, organization or idea. The outcome of enchantment is voluntary and long-lasting support that is mutually beneficial.”
If that sounds like something you want for your brand, Enchantment will get you there but only if you take it seriously, roll up your sleeves and get down to business. Being enchanting is not easy, even if Apple and Zappos make it appear so.
What could possibly make enchantment necessary? Isn’t it enough to sell a good product or service? Not always, unfortunately.
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Designing An Organization from the Outside-In
“No company will tell you, ‘I don’t want to be customer centric,’ but do you know the difference between taking an inside-out versus an outside-in approach?”
-Ranjay Gulati
Most companies (small to Fortune 500 and everything in between) are not customer-centric—even if they think they might be (market-oriented or customer-focused isn’t the same, but they are a great start!). Driven by revenue generation, product and service development (i.e. profit centers) usually takes the lead and determines the hierarchy, culture and power within the organization. While products and services may be innovative, creative, and useful often the complete inward focus creates a fundamental disconnect between function and actually solving a customer’s challenges—from the customer’s perspective—and therefore companies only gain a temporary brand loyalty foothold. It’s why products and services (whether B2B or B2C) continue to face the challenge of commoditization. Even if customers force fit a product or service that alleviates short-term pain, there is still the hurdle of solving long-term challenges. If they are not focused on or solved, the next company that comes along with a solution and complete focus on achieving loyalty will win. Because companies focus on short-term gains, they lose 50% of their customers every five years or so. Ironically, it is more costly to acquire new customers than it is to make existing customers satisfied.
Breaking the Cycle
There is a reason why companies are not customer-centric. It is an operational practice, which can be difficult, challenging and downright painful especially considering it requires a hard look at what—and who—is wrong when it comes to focusing on the customer. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible, however. There are examples of B2C and B2B companies that get it like Zappos, Southwest, Target, Best Buy, Carnival Cruise Lines, Cisco, Jones Lang LaSalle, and Lafarge.
So then, how does one break the cycle of being solely hierarchical and product-driven?
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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.)
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The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.theharteofmarketing.com. [If you have a question about what you can use from this blog, click on the above Creative Commons link to learn more.]
