Is Re-thinking the role of Marketing the Third Rail of Customer Experience Management?

By now all the Predictions and Prognostications are in. If you’re a customer experience professional like me you’re hoping that this year will finally be the year C-level executives make real commitments to transform their companies to focus on their customers.

Up until now there have been some stand out success stories, but mostly dominated by companies like Apple, Amazon and Zappos who had it in their DNA to begin with.

My favorite look into the future comes from Kerry Bodine, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research: http://bit.ly/zroLyC

Her three predictions for 2012 make me very hopeful about the future of Customer Experience Management (CEM):

1. C-level executives will officially name customer experience as a top strategic priority. 
2. Companies will focus on delivering unified customer experiences.
3. Consultants of every shape and size will develop educational programs. 

Let’s hope she’s right since, in Q3 2011, it seemed like many companies were “reprioritizing” CEM plans in favor of top-line revenue and cost-reduction initiatives. I’m betting that new CEM metrics will continue to reinforce and validate the long-term profitability of CEM investments.

But there is another crystal ball I’ve been gazing into triggered by a McKinsey report from July of 2011: http://bit.ly/nxyaRB

In this fascinating paper, the authors Tom French, Laura La Berge and Paul Magill assert that:

“Engaging Customers today requires commitment from the entire company – and a redefined marketing organization”

I’ve heard the first half of that sentence again and again from smart customer experience professionals, and I can’t agree more, but I’ve heard very little from anyone about the second half of that sentence.

Is rethinking the role of marketing and branding the third rail of customer experience management?

As the McKinsey paper points out, the responsibility for designing, building, operating and renewing ALL customer touch points needs to be a shared responsibility across many organizational functions. Where marketing used to “own” outbound communications with customers, new engagement options afforded by new technology are forcing a more collaborative organizational structure that challenges how marketers and other functions define their value as “specialists”. The clearly delineated functions of marketing, IT, sales, finance, customer service, etc are now all part of the customer’s ecosystem and customers don’t really care about who in the organization meets their needs, as long as their needs are met quickly and easily.

As the paper states:

Generating rich customer insights, always central to effective marketing efforts, is more challenging and important in today’s environment. Companies must listen constantly to consumers across all touch points, analyze and deduce patterns from their behavior, and respond quickly to signs of changing needs.

One implication is that the types of talent required to derive such insights will change. A premium will be placed on problem-solving and strategic-marketing skills, rather than on traditional market research capabilities such as designing surveys and commissioning focus groups.

Gazing into the future of Customer Experience Management, I always wonder why marketing isn’t one of the key capabilities being addressed in the “transformation” plans. Maybe because fundamentally changing a large and established marketing organization (potentially disrupting revenue streams and agency relationships) is a lot more difficult than initiating an all-staff training program or installing a Voice of Customer Program.

But after the basic customer disatisfiers are eliminated by “Quick Wins” and other customer experience efforts, this third rail will still exist. Companies will not be able to build the enduring value of their brands through the quality of the total customer experience if marketing is not fully integrated into their Customer Experience Strategic Plan.

Companies should address marketing’s role in this changing ecosystem sooner rather than later. Otherwise, the millions that are being spent on employee training, enterprise feedback management, analytics and outside marketing services won’t improve customer loyalty and satisfaction enough to justify these big investments.

Any thoughts?

Comments welcome.

How clear is your Customer Experience Strategy beyond NPS?

Lately every company I talk to seems to be in some stage of implementing a Customer Feedback Program. The most popular of these programs is the Net Promoter Score:

http://www.netpromoter.com/np/calculate.jsp

It’s gaining popularity because:

• It’s a simple quantitative metric that companies can measure and benchmark
• Its three customer segments “Promoters, Passives and Detractors” are easy for everyone in the enterprise to understand
• It demonstrates compelling evidence that improving Customer Experience delivers measurable increase in revenue (important in getting support from the C-Suite)

However, some companies are beginning to realize that after the initial investment and deployment of NPS, the return on the investment year-over-year may diminish.  When initial Customer Experience improvements are made as a result of NPS feedback, the NPS score could improve dramatically, setting expectations that it will continue to improve at the same rate.

In order to sustain these NPS score improvements, some companies then use NPS to drill down into specific touch points, identify and measure, at a more granular level, all aspects of each touch point experience. The new VOC program then delivers that feedback to the organizational owners of that touchpoint to refine the customer experience.

Then what?

Over time, fixing “disatisfiers” and providing real time feedback for just-in-time response at every touch point will incrementally improve NPS scores but not to the dramatic degree initially experienced – and the C-Suite may grow impatient with the Voice of Customer Program’s diminishing ROI, given its significant cost.

But the real opportunity to build continuous NPS score improvements, long-term brand loyalty, increased share of wallet and maintain a premium price lies in using NPS as one of many diagnostic tools to guide a more strategic and holistic Customer Experience Strategy.

A critical tool to use alongside NPS is Customer Journey Mapping.

Creating a visual diagram of the total customer experience and enrolling key stakeholders in the creation of the visual map helps everyone in the organization see the interdependence of all the touch points in the company’s ecosystem at every stage in the customer’s relationship with the company.

It also will identify key Moments of Truth and prioritize important Pain Points for immediate attention, keeping every stakeholder’s attention focused on what’s most important to the customer and critical to the business regardless of functional ownership.

Companies should start by creating a “current state” Customer Journey Map and then use it to purposefully design a “future state” Customer Experience across all touch points. This future state Journey Map can be used to visually demonstrate and unify the company around a differentiating Brand Experience Strategy.

This longer term strategy is then more forward-looking rather than reactive and driven by purposeful design. It answers the question: what unique and compelling brand values define the customer experience ? – a question many companies seem to avoid by just focusing with more granularity on fixing disatisfiers. A longer-term Brand Experience Strategy should also include product design, branding and marketing to deliver the emotional as well as rational benefits of its unique Brand Experience proposition.

NPS is a good beginning. Adding Customer Journey Mapping and purposefully creating a differentiating Brand Experience proposition reflected in every touch point experience will create durable and measurable emotional loyalty not just an increase in Promoters’ intention to recommend.

Are You Creating Customer Experience Parity?

Is your company paying enough attention to what sets your brand apart when you embark on improving the customer experience? Are you creating an emotional connection with your customer that is uniquely memorable and true to your brand’s image and core values?

As many companies begin to use some of the same techniques and technology to understand customer needs and increase satisfaction, do they run the risk of creating “Experience Parity?”

Even a megabrand like Google can still stand to differentiate its brand by adding a more emotional, human touch to its brand experience.

Bruce Temkin’s blog post on Monday Oct 24^th http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/google-lacks-apples-emotional-design/  shows the contrast between customer experiences created by Google and Apple. As he points out, Apple has made a unique human connection with customers who have become passionately devoted to the brand. Temkin’s post shows how Apple excels in these three key dimensions of successful experience design:

1. Functional: Does it do what you want it to do?
2. Accessible: How easy is it to do what you want to do?
3. Emotional: How does it make you feel?

His side-by-side comparisons show how Google has only mastered 1 and 2.

This post crystallized a concern I’ve had in the past year as I’ve seen more companies begin customer experience improvement plans. Where does defining the emotional brand value proposition fit in the experience design process?

Many diagnostic methodologies and technologies are being used to listen to the voice of the customer, communicate customer feedback across business functions, prioritize and eliminate customer points of pain and train employees to deliver a consistent experience.

But I don’t see brand experience definition getting the same attention as the rest of the best practices being baked into companies’ customer experience transformation plans.

We all know the genius of Steve Jobs drove Apple’s attention to the human touch, but how can we mere mortals add that magical, emotional satisfaction to new products, services and everyday customer interactions?

By building the company’s brand promise into the customer experience early in the design process.

Aha! I hear that pause and head scratching. You’re not sure what your brand promise is? Your new CMO just decided to hire his favorite branding firm and redefine it for the 4^th time since you’ve been with the company?

You’re not alone. Customer Experience Practitioners are facing this everyday and getting too distracted by metrics, dashboards and analytics to step back and define the emotional essence of the brand’s experience. Besides, another group in the company owns that.

But you don’t need a new brand campaign to guide you in creating emotionally differentiating brand experiences.

Just define how your company is uniquely able to fulfill your customers’ most important emotional needs.

Ok, it’s not that easy. But without first taking that step of defining your brand’s uniquely emotional connection to your customers, many of your experience improvements run the risk of feeling similar to your competitors’. The same type of surveys, the same newly trained front line staff, and the same thanks for your loyalty.

Make sure to define the feeling that sets your company’s experience apart.

Here are five critical steps to incorporate in any Customer Experience Design program to ensure you are designing for brand differentiation:

1. Bring the brand, marketing and research teams into the experience design process as early as possible.
2. Identify your most valuable and most grow-able customers
3. Dig deep to uncover these customers emotional as well as rational needs. The brand team may already have this insight.
4. Analyze where your company is uniquely qualified to fulfill those emotional needs at every stage in the customer’s journey (and map that journey)
5. Expect your customer experience team to demonstrate the same creativity you expect from marketing and branding teams to create uniquely memorable, branded experiences for customers.

It’s not any easy job to integrate right brain thinking into what is quickly becoming the very left brain science of customer experience design.

Metrics and all the new analysis and technology-driven reporting tools are important, but you must create a consistent emotional connection if you want to be as loved (and valued) as Apple.

How can companies get the most value from using Customer Journey Maps?

Many companies are realizing that creating a Customer Journey Map can help visualize the full range of customer experiences, as a customer sees them, across all customer touch points.

But some companies are not using Journey Maps to their full potential. They either use them to diagnose organizational dysfunction, understand where they have the greatest need for employee training, or visualize the broad spectrum of communications the customer receives and the consistency of brand messaging.

All these efforts are important, but in many ways, just using CJM to address internal organizational issues or inconsistent brand messaging misses a much richer opportunity to help everyone in the organization become committed to building customer loyalty by visualizing the customer experience.

A Journey Map is just the starting point

An SVP of Customer Strategy once asked me: “When will this customer experience project be done?” as if there was an end point to improving the customer experience.

If you are embarking on a customer experience transformation, creating a Customer Journey Map is a great beginning. But you may be thinking that when it is complete and you have a literal map in front of you, you will have completed the task of understanding your customers’ experience. Yes, a comprehensive Journey Map will uncover insights at specific touch points that you can turn into quick wins and improvement plans. But you can also use the mapping tool as a rich central repository for ongoing strategic planning and results tracking.

Using the Customer Journey Map for all its worth

A comprehensive Customer Journey Map will reveal the touch points that are critical to both the customer’s happiness and your business’s growth and profitability. The CJM can show you where the business is meeting customers’expectations, exceeding them or falling short.

Very quickly you can see where a touch point is both a critical Moment of Truth and also currently a Point of Pain. You can then prioritize quick fixes to improve the customer experience at that touch point as quickly as possible.

However, the power of the Journey Map also lies in its usefulness as a tool for ongoing innovation and creation of brand defining Moments of Truth – for even the most mundane brand interactions.

For instance, if you are an automobile insurance company, by using the Journey Mapping Process you might identify a customer renewal touch point that is highly frustrating for customers. But fixing this renewal experience may not be easy or seem worth the trouble. There may be legal and regulatory hurdles that seem insurmountable.

But when equipped with the insights provided by the Journey Map, you can prioritize and justify the effort needed to create a more customer-friendly renewal experience and then pilot a test to validate the impact of the redesign on customer satisfaction.

This one small but not trivial touchpoint improvement can make the customer feel grateful your brand is making the insurance renewal experience easy, and not a complicated and frustrating task. That’s an emotional connection that can reinforce your brand promise. And the insights gained from the test can be fed back into the Journey Map’s data repository.

The Journey Mapping process can also be used to uncover the rational and emotional dimensions of every touch point. You can see how you’ve delighted your customer at one important touch point and start systematically redesigning different touch point experiences to create similar, brand defining Moments of Truth.

Enhance your Journey Map with Voice of Customer data and insights

If you are implementing an ongoing Voice of Customer program and integrating marketing, operations and other functions into that VoC feedback loop, you can add ongoing VoC data to the Journey Map to help all functions stay focused on your customers’ experience, their wants and needs and critical “Moments of Truth” at every stage of the customer’s journey.

To get the very most from your Customer Journey Map, use it as a roadmap to first see how well your brand promise is delivered at every touch point, redesign improvements to consistently and intentionally deliver that promise, and then use the Journey Map to educate all functions in your company how each touch point either supports or dilutes that brand promise.

You can also map the different journeys of your most valuable customer segments and create personalized experiences to further delight these customers, building on your Journey Map and using it to share and celebrate new customer satisfaction milestones and improved loyalty metrics.

A Customer Journey Map shoudn’t be a static chart. It can be both an insightful diagnostic tool as well as a roadmap for brand defining experience innovation. Don’t hesitate to use it for all it’s worth.

How Knowing and Living Your Brand Values Defines Your Brand Experience

In all the discussions about best CEM practices, we sometimes lose track of the most important first step in creating true customer loyalty and brand evangelists: Understanding, communicating and consistently demonstrating your company’s core brand values. Theses are the values that guide decisions, employee behavior and differentiate the brand experience at every customer interaction.

Many  books, blogs and technology solutions now focus on Social CRM, Voice of Customer programs, Journey Mapping and many other practices that enable customer intelligence and “intimacy”. All of these are critically important to improving the customer experience, but none will provide a memorable Brand Experience if your brand’s core values are not crystal clear to everyone in your organization. And employees and customers will only be confused if those values are not echoed in your marketing campaigns.

So it’s very refreshing to hear from some key customer experience thought leaders that knowing and living core brand values is critical to consistently delivering memorable brand experiences.

Bruce Temkin: Companies Lack Customer Experience Competencies

Recently The Temkin Group published a report on what Bruce Temkin calls: “The Four Customer Experience Core Competencies” He shows that while “Compelling Brand Values” is one of the most important competency, it’s the most neglected:

His full report is downloadable and articulates how advertising campaigns and corporate mission statements are not enough to create a culture driven by clear brand values that are demonstrated in every customer interaction.

Jeanne Bliss, Tony Hsieh: The Decisions You Make Define Your Brand – begin with “Clarity of Purpose”.

In her latest book: “I Love You More Than My Dog”, Jeanne Bliss and Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, assert that operating with “clarity of purpose” driven by core values and making decisions based on those values is key to the success of Zappos and other passionately loved companies. Zappos is so committed to pleasing customers above everything else that employees will help a customer find the shoes they want, even from competitors, if they don’t stock them.

Why is it then that so many companies, when implementing Customer Experience Management programs, skip over the critical step of digging deeply into the heart of the organization and uncovering the true clarity of purpose that can guide all of their operational decisions?

Because it’s really hard and demands long term thinking, collaboration and commitment across organizational silos. That’s why executive leadership is a key factor determining the success or failure of so many Customer Experience initiatives. 

Let’s look at some of the companies referred to by Jeanne Bliss as loved companies and the operating brand promise that drives all their decisions:

 Wegman’s

“No customer goes away unhappy”

 West Jet

“Make Customers the Reason for Business”

 USAA

“Understand Customers to Service their Lives”

These aren’t marketing taglines but examples of some of these companies’ core values that are communicated widely and often across the organization. It may sound easy, but arriving at these core value statements demands not only a deep understanding of what differentiates your company’s brand but how those core values resonate with customers. You need to know your customers as well as you know your company.

Linda Ireland – her Ultimate Question

I’ve written about Linda Ireland’s book “Domino” before. But her basic (although not simplistic) approach keeps coming back to me as a practical way to start the process of uncovering your company’s unique and compelling brand promise.

She simply asks (forgive me if I paraphrase): “What problem does your company uniquely solve for its most important customer?” When you can answer that question you have the foundation of your compelling brand experience promise. It’s a simple questions but finding the answer is far from easy.

The first step is to really understand your most important customers, their needs, values, decision processes and how you are uniquely able to fulfill their emotional as well as rational desires.

Map their decision process, touch point interactions and examine what other brands they trust, what they promise and how they deliver.

Examine your company’s current readiness to deliver the solutions your customers crave. Prioritize the changes that will have the most impact on improving the customer experience and creating the most profit for your business.

Eventually, and after some careful testing with customers, you will be able to envision your company’s true and compelling value proposition and embed these values in employee performance, program success metrics, and brand marketing.

If your company decides to skip this important step, you may find customer experience improvement decisions much harder to make and the transformation to a more profitable, renowned and customer-centric company still an elusive goal.

Is “Social CRM” the New Black?

I think I blinked and all of a sudden “SCRM” became the hottest bandwagon everyone is jumping on. I do believe that the notion that we are entering a new age of two-way “conversations” between brands and customers is more than just hype. And these new technologies can help companies find ways to deepen “customer intelligence” and help accelerate the transformation to customer centricity.

But once again, just like good old CRM, technology is promising to be the silver bullet that does all work of “listening” to the customer and delivering deeper levels of customer intelligence without any human employees actually having to acquire better listening and reacting skills.

Are we setting ourselves up for another big disappointment? Like the one that happened when CRM systems didn’t deliver the customer loyalty that was promised 10 years ago?

A recent blog post by Martin Forster in the Peppers and Rogers Group Newsletter, does an excellent job defining the many challenges organizations face in embracing this new technology-enabled ability to have “continuous multidirectional conversations” with customers.  He also rightly points out that this new ability “changes the nature of campaign managers, communication managers, and customer managers at enterprises and forces them to continuously talk with the customers, instead of to them. This requires new communication strategies, new resources for the conversation, and new skill sets of existing resources. Most enterprises don’t yet understand this when creating their Social CRM strategy”.

However, after correctly identifying the enormous shift companies need to make, he then gives very little information on just how this change can be accomplished. Just how do you practically involve marketing, contact centers, sales and even fulfillment in “a customer conversation”?

We continue to trot out the usual suspects of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, Communities etc., as some of the tactics that can enable this conversation. But who provides the customer insight training and brand guidelines for this conversation? Who educates employees how to communicate the brand values when interacting with customers and other employees? Who determines how to represent the brand consistently at all customer touch points? And how can you measure whether employees are having conversations that create an emotionally satisfying and differentiating experience? The advertising agency?

It seems to me that Social CRM needs to be part of a larger Customer Experience Management Strategy that involves interactions at all touch points, not just “social” ones and even influences strategic decisions in product and service innovations. There are several schools of thought on creating a successful CEM strategy and some of my past postings cover some of them. Many strongly believe that a successful CEM program must be initiated and championed by a visionary CEO, all employees rewarded on metrics like Net Promoted Score and all staffing selected based on their “customer-centric DNA”.

I’m not sure how practical that is, but I do believe there are doable steps that can be taken to share customer knowledge with all employees and use that common knowledge as a touchstone for educating and rewarding all employees based on their demonstrated customer intelligence. How well do they engage and delight valuable customers who themselves may not quite understand what all this new technology means and don’t expect a conversation? Employees need to be mindful of who they are talking to first before they assume all customers are comfortable talking to them. Can technology deliver that kind of human sense and response judgment?

Whatever happened to WASPS, YUPPIES and DINKS?

Segmentation has come a long way since we used these broad demographic identifiers. White Anglo Saxon Protestant  was probably most useful as a character profile for “Caddy Shack”; Young Urban Professionals got older and moved to the suburbs and Dual Income No Kids was a quaint subset of YUPPIE. 

While trends in broadly targeted demographics still persist (Millennials, Mom’s and Boomers are now the hot mega-segments), most savvy marketers are realizing that these large segments have very different financial and health needs, personal lifestyles and attitudes toward politics, religion, healthcare, etc. Marketers and companies seeking to be more customer-centric need much deeper levels of customer insight than just demographics to build a bond of brand trust and affinity with their customers.

Data analytics now gives us the power to identify and profile most valuable customers, most grow-able customers and the customers who most need what a company has to offer. And attitudinal segmentation is also becoming important to brand image developers and customer experience designers and as well as loyalty and relationship marketers.  

Why is segmentation important for brand development?  McKinsey and Company’s Marketing Practice published a white paper entitled “Building Strong Brands, Better Faster and Cheaper”.  In this thorough and detailed guide they propose a new approach that “fuses superior customer insights, future economic potential, and reinforcing organizational capability”.

And Razorfish in their 2010 Outlook Report asserts that “uncovering the most essential truth about a product — what consumers think of it — is less difficult than it used to be. Social monitoring tools provide a clear sense of how consumers perceive brands. And getting to the truth today is fast —feedback from the marketplace is more rapid than ever”.

McKinsey outlines a clear methodology for identifying high-value customers, analyzing future revenue potential for these customer segments, and then creating the value proposition that appeals to these important current and future segments. Brand development methods that are “Better, Faster and Cheaper” can also build more successful brands if you follow their approach and don’t waste time and money trying to create a brand platform that appeals to everyone.

It’s also important to a brand’s success to build high-value customer segmentation into Brand Experience Creation.

As Linda Ireland says in her book “Domino – How Customer Experience Can Tip Everything in Your Business toward Better Financial Performance” you should first ask: “What problem is your brand uniquely qualified to solve for your best customer?” The answer to this question is the foundation of your customer experience and your brand promise.

Bruce Tempkin, guru of all things Customer Experience has recently reported on his blog that defining and delivering a clear brand promise to key customer segments is one of the four key competencies that companies need to master in order to create and sustain superior customer/brand experiences.

This is not your father’s brand campaign. “Mad Men” may make us nostalgic for simplistic demographic segments (like “housewives”) and months of a creative team crafting the “Big Brand Idea” but we’re not the broad, static demographic segments we once thought we were. And we can be much more in touch with our customers as their needs change than ever before – if we build ongoing segment analysis and prioritization into all our communications and customer experience management practices.

Why Customer Journey Mapping is the New Customer Loyalty Tool.

The practice of tracking a Customer’s decision process is not new. For years marketing strategists have observed, measured and tracked customers as they move along the “Marketing Funnel”. The critical difference today is that the Customer Journey isn’t just a marketing concern. It is a critical examination of ways in which a company’s biggest asset – their valuable customer – is engaging with the brand.

The Customer Journey used to be viewed as a more linear buying process controlled tightly by one-way marketing messages that began with awareness, consideration, and trial and continued through repurchase, loyalty and recommendation.

Today, customers’ attitudes and loyalty are influenced at every customer life stage not only by brand image, advertising, loyalty programs and product or service performance but also by friends and family word of mouth, customer ratings, social networks, customer service, back office handling of ordering, billing and logistics, and how well a brand listens to the needs of their customers; actively helping them solve their problems, realizing their aspirations and adapting to their changing needs.

Creating a holistic visual depiction of the total customer experience with a Customer Journey Map can be a valuable tool to analyze all interactions and identify, prioritize and monitor steps taken to assure the brand experience is consistently delivered across all touch points. However, it is also a way to visualize and engage employees in a high level understanding of the entire “Experience Ecosystem” and demonstrate how their individual contribution matters. From this high level view, senior management can evaluate how well the brand vision and values are supported across all touch points and individual owners of each touch point can create their own action plans for improvement.

This quick article by Bruce Tempkin, one of the foremost Customer Experience thought leaders, sums up just how to go about it.

This Customer Journey Map can become a “living” brand roadmap for senior management to understand different customer segment needs at different stages in the customer journey and to inspire creation of new branded experiences tailored to those needs during specific touch point interactions.

A successful implementation and optimization of a Customer Journey Map depends on good Customer Experience diagnostic tools and techniques (such as quantitative and qualitative customer/employee surveys and interviews, observational research, technology assessments, etc.) The ability to drill down to the touch point level and accurately identify pain points, customer goals and aspirations and emotional as well as rational needs can lead to more relevant brand experience creation, resulting in more emotional and durable customer loyalty. 

There is a lot of talk today about improving the customer experience but some companies don’t know where to begin and relegate the effort to customer service or marketing hoping that soft- skills training or consistent design and marketing messages will create the “customer centricity” they are seeking to instill in the organization.

However, becoming customer-centric requires all employees to refocus on the customer across the organization from sales and customer service to operations and human resources. 

The Customer Journey Map is a great visual tool to help elevate the customer to the status of most valuable asset and shift the focus and brand debate away from product and organizational silos.

Using a Customer Journey Map to orchestrate how all touch points deliver a continuous expression of the brand value proposition will demonstrate the cumulative impact the brand delivers for different customers’ needs at every touch point.

Some companies will put a toe in the water of customer centricity by first focusing on understanding the needs and behaviors of their most valuable customers. By analyzing behavioral and transactional data and combining that analysis with qualitative insights of customers’ needs and aspirations, you can create key segment “Personas” that can then be incorporated into the larger Experience Ecosystem Map. Employees have an “aha” moment when they realize that their customers are not just “one size fits all”. From there it is easier for them to grasp the larger picture of examining how they are delivering brand experiences that are personalized for these high-value segments.

Technology and infrastructure are one of the biggest obstacles. The lack of ability to integrate data across touch points and organizational silos and provide a single view of the customer makes it difficult to monitor progress against the goals established for the total customer experience. 

In these cases, marketing can be very helpful in supplying brand experience guidelines and interactive scenarios, storytelling and training to support the delivery of exceptional experiences at different touch points, during different stages in the loyalty continuum and for different customers’ needs. Promoting a common yet adaptable brand language across all customer interactions, to different customer segments, provides an added dimension to brand marketing messages and a personalized yet differentiated brand experience regardless of the interaction.

In these competitive economic times, businesses will drive competitive advantage and brand loyalty by demonstrating better than their competitors how well they understand their customers’ needs and how much they value their business. Developing and utilizing a Customer Journey Map combined with appropriate diagnostics, training and ROI measurement provides a formalized living roadmap for creating and sustaining continuous creation of brand defining customer experiences. Not creating a system-wide methodology for exceptional brand experience invites commoditization tactics and continued escalation of the costs of acquiring and retaining valuable customers.

Even in tough times, we still dream big

In the last recession, I remember hearing a case study from a direct marketer who tested two different creative approaches. One message was based on hope; the other message was based on fear. In good times, this marketer had always seen fear out-pull hope. But this time, hope won.

It sounds counterintuitive until you think about it. When times are good we fear losing what we’ve gained. In bad times, we to cling to hope.

Now the popular view is that this recession is has caused us to make more rational, budget conscious buying decisions because our dreams and aspirations have been tempered by harsh reality. We are trading down from luxury brands and looking for utility rather than prestige. While this is true to some extent, it doesn’t mean we’ve lost our emotional aspirations. We just may be investing more emotion in things that matter more to us instead of just automatically choosing name brands.

How luxury brands choose to engage us in a dialog and collaborate with us in meeting our needs is the new key to igniting the brand passion necessary to win our minds, hearts and loyalty.

Recently Mercedes created new “customer intimacy” and brand advocacy among the Gen Y group (aged 16 to 33) by engaging them in an online community. They found that with high levels of dialog and engagement, this cohort embraced the aspirations of the Mercedes brand and became active advocates.  Another program was designed to turn existing Mercedes Benz owners into highly engaged online “M-B advisors” with another online community. Mercedes VP, Marketing Director Steve Cannon reports:

“What we found out surprised us. The M-B Advisors said they were tired of doom and gloom, [saying,] ‘Give us something to be excited about. If you only spend time being rational, you are missing the big picture.’”

And we may be seeing the same shift from practical cost cutting-concerns in the boardroom as well.

A recent survey from Business Week shows that CEOs are looking for more creativity in employees:

“There is compelling new evidence that CEOs’ priorities in this area are changing in important ways. According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value (NYSE: IBM – News), CEOs identify “creativity” as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future. That’s creativity—not operational effectiveness, influence, or even dedication. Coming out of the worst economic downturn in their professional lifetimes, when managerial discipline and rigor ruled the day, this indicates a remarkable shift in attitude”.

Another interesting survey of CMOs released recently by Aprimo and Argyle Executive Forum showed that the biggest driver of change in their marketing strategies is now improving the customer experience:  “While 27 percent cited the perennial “increased requirement for ROI/accountability”, that factor was runner-up to “creating more compelling customer/prospect experiences” (37 percent). The “drive to digital marketing” came in third (18 percent). “

Luxury Brands survive and thrive based on fulfilling emotional aspirations and tapping into self actualization motives. As long as our basic needs are met, we will never stop seeking ways to maximize our health, wealth, relationships and lifestyle. We’re a little smarter now so our allegiance isn’t so easily won by just a designer label and classy advertising. Extending the differentiation of a luxury brand into all aspects of the brand experience is the new luxury brand imperative.

What really defines a “Good Patient Experience”?

Many hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and health care professionals are now taking steps to create consistently good patient experiences.  Pharmaceutical companies are providing informational resources and trying to build trusted relationships with Rx users. Hospitals send out post-visit satisfaction surveys, and health care professionals are becoming more sensitive to the different needs of different patients.

But let’s be honest, is this about creating loyal, repeat customers of a hospital or doctor? One hopes they are trying to decrease rather than increase hospital visits. Creating a positive patient experience is much more complex than simplifying paperwork and improving health care provider soft skills.

Lyn Hunsacker in a recent blog post has some good suggestions for medical centers borrowing some best Customer Experience Management practices from airlines: http://www.customerthink.com/blog/improve customer experience by borrowing ideas.

However, these borrowed best practices don’t address the more critical problems that really define the patient experience. Patients are not customers. They are not in the market to buy something. Many patients are facing life and death issues and need more than just kiosks, kindness and consideration.

While admissions process improvement and the warm and caring attitude of EMTs, doctors, nurses, receptionists, technicians and social workers are very important and appreciated, there is still a critical lack of clear communication between health care professionals, patients and their families and collaboration amongst the HCPs.  How many times have we experienced a nurse or a doctor not understanding what some other medical professional has written in the patient’s chart? How many times is there a lack of awareness of all the different medications and treatments prescribed by different doctors; many times for multiple health conditions?

And just when you think that all the confusion is just happening to you, you talk to many who have had a similar experience where if they are the go-to family member they feel that by default they have become the only caregiver with a holistic understanding of the patient’s medical history, disease state, treatment options and medications.

A friend of mine recently shared her story of her mother’s mild stroke and how, in spite of all the doctors involved, she was the one who finally diagnosed that the cause of her mother’s slow recovery was the side effect of one of the medications she had been prescribed. My friend had carefully researched all the medications and their side effects, after none of the doctors could resolve the problem. 

I don’t want to imply that doctors are not doing their jobs. The ones I have dealt with are all good and well intentioned. And I’m sure the many root cause issues we’ve all heard about in the big health care debate contribute to this “health care coordination gap”. We all know that insurance companies don’t allow doctors to spend the time they should with patients and that the fear of lawsuits often drives behavior.  I’m not going to get into all that here.

However, I do think health care professionals are feeling the same effects of highly specialized silos and operational divisions that plague businesses that can’t seem to coordinate a consistently good customer experience delivery across their customer touch points. I know the primary care physician is theoretically supposed to keep track of all the treatments but that’s just unrealistic given their own busy schedules and the time required for complex cases is not, as I know it, compensated by insurance companies. I know many hospitals now have “Patient Advocates” who are supposed to provide some of this coordination, but when each hospital and every unit within the hospital has their own “patient advocate” and you find yourself briefing each new medical professional when they are transferred from one unit or specialist to another, you wonder what the point is of the patient advocate. Is it just to make sure the paper work is filled out properly?

Perhaps the migration from paper-based to online records will alleviate this problem. I’m already seeing doctors consult their laptops instead of a patient’s paper chart during the visit. But there needs to be a more common practice of clear communication and collaboration between all professionals. This critical gap needs some serious business process analysis and improvement if we are to provide an optimal patient experience. An experience that is not just defined by how kindly the patient is treated, but by how clearly all the specialists are communicating and agreeing on the best treatment plan.